A. Human

[Politus]

Daylight had very little meaning for Human. He lived in a remote corner of the omegas... or was it the Taus? Maybe Bretonia. He didn't care. He had been at his job for so long that location didn't matter. He knew, of course. But he never paid it much thought. All that mattered to him is that he lived on a tiny slip of a station, in a big slip of a nebula cloud, in some dreary patch of space. As long as the comm buoys that connected him to the universe kept him in the net, he was satisfied with his location.

He chose it because there was no living soul for many a lonely mile aside from him. He chose it because in his line of work, people were a liability. He liked people, but had one hypocrisy. Despite all of his devotion to freedom of information for all, the one piece of information he could not, would not let escape, was his location.

You see, A. Human was a hacker. He worked for, so he said, humanity. All of his money came from siphoned accounts, the credits moved not to his accounts but into solid cash, to be moved by proxy to dead drop locations where one of his few drones would pick it up. Millions, billions of credits siphoned from governments, pirates, cults and the like. Supplies followed much the same route, with money being delivered through proxy accounts, drones doing all of the cash transfers in dead drops and taking supplies back the same way.

He reinvested that money, those supplies, into his plan for society. He was a crusader, the last of a breed of men devoted to the ultimate liberty; that of the mind. "Freedom of information is the right of every man, woman, beast and child!" he would say. A lot of this was because of regret over his former occupation. He used to be one of the freelance hackers that would work for corporations; Stealing information like a corporate whore, selling himself to entities which employed him to guard against the work of people like him. Some times he would do a protection job only to be hired the next day to crack his own work.

If you've been reading the story, you can probably tell, he had a change of heart. He stopped stealing information for profit, started spreading it around. Releasing it as rumors here, an article in the news that shouldn't have existed. He became bolder, yet also paranoid. He released communiques, piggy-backing on standard comm frequencies; he wore a mask, always following the hacker tendency to preserve one's identity.

Eventually, he moved to this dreary patch of space, where he prepared his manifesto. Why? Simple: To him, information didn't belong to anyone. To try and control the flow of information was, in his eyes, horrific. His crusade required that he be able to conduct it whenever, so he found a place that would let him.

So there he was. He woke up in his utilitarian bed; despite his wealth, he did not allow himself luxuries. He took the minimum amount of time possible to freshen up and eat before scanning his computer/comm console. All information in the 'verse filtered through him. He had taps in most of the comm buoys, hard lines and other methods. Frequency siphons, you named it, he had it in operation somewhere out there.

He checked the news, checked for frequencies. He broke through censorship on all fronts, and if he felt the messages were worth the effort, re-routed them through censor screens. Around him, his few decorations dimly reflected the light coming from his console. A copy of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights which he had printed out and framed; Some document called the Bill of Rights, an addendum to the constitution of one of the ancient nations of Earth; relics of a bygone age which he had gone to great lengths to find. A painting or two from more contemporary artists, a modern sword that supposedly replicated ancient metallurgic techniques; His first computer. The rest was a drab, gray wall.

From this lair, for his various reasons, he did his work. He championed freedom of information. He fought tyranny, not with hot plasma and roaring engines, but with subtle coding and careful wording. Here was his castle, and his battleground was anywhere that the signal reached.

He found a channel that interested him, and donned his white, blank mask to start a communication.

---

"Things will not calm down, Daniel Jackson. They will, in fact, calm up."