Rhys was born into an old, old money family, living a pretty lavish lifestyle since a young age. Hailing from DC, most of his family's money was invested into two things: politics and robotics. Rhys went to private schools as a kid and was the youngest in his family so fairly indulged by his parents, given free reign towards what he wanted to pursue. On the fencing team throughout middle school and high school, he eventually went on to study at CIT and focus on cybernetics, general robotics, and AI. While attending CIT, he met who would become his best friend, a guy named Vaughn and the two of them took advantage of their surroundings to go to party after party and hackathon after hackathon. It's, uh, pretty easy when you're the hot rich robot guy to get invited to any party you want.

It's at one of these hackathons that he met John "Jack" Marten, a former CIT student who only came back to visit the hackathons once in a while to keep his title of reigning hackathon champ. After a pretty snippy first meeting and Rhys losing horrendously at a hack-off against Jack, they became friends. Pretty close friends, in fact, and soon after started dating. It was around this time Rhys started working on the tech that would eventually become his cybernetic eye and arm, spending hours fine-tuning the project until a working prototype could be built. This is, of course how he met his second best friend -- Fiona.

In his last year at CIT, during his graduate studies in fact, his cybernetic arm prototype went missing and it took a long time to track down exactly where it went -- which ended up it being taken by a con artist to be sold on the black market. Certain events ended up distracting the both of them from taking revenge on each other until they settled into an uneasy partnership and later, friendship. In the end, Rhys had his prototype returned and graduated from CIT just in time to be offered a position at Vault-Tec.

Vault-Tec who was pretty impressed by his work as a student and so they helped him refine his cybernetic arm and eye technology, eventually even helping Rhys install it on himself in exchange for ownership of the blueprints. Somewhere during the course of this, Jack and Rhys decided to get married and move to Langley together to be closer to their work (Jack's at RoboCo and Rhys at Vault-Tec). Rhys' work with Vault-Tec was always a bit more... gritter and less moral than Jack would've liked but Rhys kept quiet and did what he was told because well, he enjoyed the ethical line they were toeing at Vault-Tec.

That's, of course, how he eventually ended up on the Vault 62 project. Vault-Tec knew that while Rhys would agree to any moral grey areas, he wouldn't so readily give up Jack and Jack wasn't quite as willing. Rhys' only stipulation to joining the project was that Jack would be kept safe there with them as one of the participants. Rhys, of course, fully well knew what this meant for Jack's memories but Rhys was too good a fit for the project so, they invited him on and saved a spot for Jack in the process. Just another lie for Rhys to tell, after all!

Back home in Langley they leave behind a Mister Handy bot named Loader Bot (or LB), another smaller robot of one of Rhys' designs named Gortys, and a German Shepherd named Helios. Another robot of Rhys' creation, Dumpy, joins him in the Vault but was damaged in travel so it's current voice modulator only allows it to let out piercing screams.