With how stories in West Marches-style games come out from players' organic interactions as opposed to a predefined plot, and with it being still so early (literally pre-session 0), it's definitely fine to not have all the details of your character's backstory or motivations figured out yet.
Hmm... From the little bit of fluff in the first post I got more "loosely organized teams being payed per-job/find by the government" and less "government organized teams of professionals on a salary". In other words, I'm guessing the PCs are a mercenary band operating in an area where the government is subsidizing work.
I could be totally wrong though...
If it is work directly for the government under government control, my character may have a slight issue being an escaped AI and all... Nothing a slight rewrite of my backstory can't fix. None of the fluff is set in stone until more setting details are revealed, for example if it is direct government teams I'll probably just be a FURRy assigned directly to the team that was given a few "interesting" off-book modifications by a bored tech or some such. Go legit basically
It is more of the former. The organization is (interstellar) government-funded, and there might be more 'regularly' paid workers in there among the NPCs, but you as the players are more of a mercenary/work-for-hire variety (regardless of background).
Indeed, you are not the only such team working in that manner - which means you might encounter other teams on your missions, and either ally or compete with them, for that much extra Fun(TM).
On an unrelated note, a friend of mine (and a few others possibly) is willing to partake in this, however I'm not sure how to resolve the issue of them not being on Bay12 (and not wanting to) and thus not being able to partake in the IC thread for downtime stuff.
Then again I'm still figuring out the specifics of
how the downtime IC thread is going to work, and what you will be able to do there...