Born and raised on Caprica, just outside of Caprica city in one of the many prosperous satellite suburbs, Benecia is the daughter of a pediatricians and real estate agents with one elder and one younger brother. She attended Apollo University then did her engineering and computer sciences degrees in Delphi. With one brother already blazing a trail along scientific frontiers and her younger brother a star player for the Delphi Legion, Pearson was securely in the middle ground between awesome and super star, as far as familial achievements were concerned. With both, and complimentary, degrees in hand, and on a relatively short list for recruitment into several big name companies, Benecia flipped the projected 'future' for her career on edge and went in a radically different direction.
What, on the outside, had appeared to be a minor hobby, a lark for someone with the means to indulge in a fondness for extreme sports, she instead pursued her pilots license and went to work as both pilot and air crew for a charter company operating on both Caprica and Picon. As an amateur computer programmer, more of a hobbyist than anything else, and tinkerer in her down time, she'd filled her free time with the same sort of pursuits that many working professionals did. She had a mortgage on a nice condo, enough space to have a room set aside for her computers and the wild sampling of technological gadgets and gizmo's in various stages of dissection and repair. She'd enjoyed several years of cooking classes, dance classes, had a group of friends to enjoy movies and short vacations with, evenings out, a casual series of relationships that were never, to her, particularly serious. Her friends knew her as a solid pilot who interacted well with their client base, a steady hand in an emergency, able to fix things on the fly, the person they bugged when something was buggy, and always that middle of the night call when someone needed a ride home after to many drinks. In recent years, she'd been living more on Picon than Caprica.
The onset of the war meant many things, even setting aside somehow the mass genocide, the nuclear wastelands, the sheer brutal impact of such devastation to their collective psyche… it still is personal, it still is each individual life, each individual reaction and response to what the new reality meant after the start of the war. Not a soldier, she had never wanted to be a soldier, and only a 'fighter' in the same sort of manner that she'd spent her childhood with two brothers who taught her the basics of rough and tumble, keep up with the boys, sort of sportsmanship, she'd never so much as held a weapon of any real kind until the war started. The charter company she worked for had called for a meeting of the survivors of their personnel and crew, options were discussed, etc. As the war began to grind slowly forward, eventually the surviving company personnel made their way, en masse, to join the resistance. Pilots being of particular use, along with damned nearly EVERY able bodied adult or youngster of approximate age, she'd enlisted in the resistance and eventually trained up to piloting the Viper's that make up part of the fighting force of what's left of the colonial military and the air wing itself.