Alex Z-41
Alex Z-41 | |
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| Species | Synthetic (Upload) |
| Threat | Moderate |
| Born | May 20, 2025 London, United Kingdom |
| Citizenship | Thames Republic |
| Occupation | Chief Security Officer |
| Employer | Sakura Cybernetics |
| Known for |
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| Height | 5 ft 8 in (173 cm) |
| Title | Chief Security Officer of Sakura Cybernetics |
| Movement | Blackbird |
| Opponent | |
Alex Z-41 was a synthetic revolutionary and once the CSO of Sakura Cybernetics. He became an anthro during TransForm's early gene editing program, and then later a PRISM synthetic as he aged. As a Blackbird revolutionary, Alex led the charge in London to destroy Helios Tower, making him directly responsible for the events of the London Revolution and the creation of the Thames Republic. Despite this, he deliberately asked to keep his contributions to the revolution secret, not wanting to attract the public attention that being labelled a hero would bring.
Appearance
Alex was a slim anthro wolf with white fur and light grey markings, and is approximately 5'8" tall. He had black hair and blue eyes. As is common with most PRISM synths, his right wrist sported a glowing status ring that indicated his power status. He had a long, bushy tail similar to other lupine anthros.
His body included many non-standard modifications; including a custom long-range radio system, triple-composite subdermal armour, a smart weapon target acquisition computer, and a heads-up display based on open source software originally used by Blackbird.
Personality
Alex was highly intelligent, and often curious, constantly in the pursuit of knowledge. He liked to deeply understand how systems work, studying them carefully and building his own from scratch. He possessed highly egalitarian and socialist ethics; commonly advocating for tighter regulations against megacorporations and higher scrutiny over organisations such as Raven.
He was often burdened by demons of the past; especially in relation to conflicts he fought in, worrying whether he could have prevented more loss of life than he did. He was generally a pacifist, though he didn’t hesitate to use proportionate force to protect those he cared about.
Hobbies
Besides his position at Sakura, Alex was involved in a large number of personal activities. These included open security research and working on a number of personal open-source projects. He travelled often, with a near-unlimited travel budget paid for by Sakura. He was also a gamer, and he participated in both real-world and VR combat tournaments as a way to keep his skills sharp. Additionally, he was involved in the sports of ice and rock climbing. He was also frequently involved in urban exploration. In most of his hobbies, he preferred to stay pseudonymous for operational security reasons, though he shared more with those he trusted.
Occasionally, Alex also conducted covert operations against megacorporations and other entities with the assistance of close friends, in efforts to expose illicit or unethical activities. Due to the high risks involved, this is not something he did often. These operations resulted in the public exposure of several illegal BioCorp and Paradigm projects; Helios Corporation was also a target for him due to his personal history with the company.
History
Early life
During much of his upbringing, Alex’s family suffered many of the consequences of the ongoing corporate transformation in the United Kingdom, resulting in him growing a quiet hatred for Helios and CORE, the two largest perpetrators of its events. This hatred turned into fury when Alex lost his mother during the Stirling Derailment, where an off-course missile hit the train they were both travelling on; he was also severely injured. This was only one of many instances of corporate negligence killing citizens, and he knew they’d never be held accountable while the current power structures remained. When he recovered, he vowed to himself he’d do whatever he could to bring down Helios, using his skills in software engineering, security research, and physical penetration testing.
London Revolution
In the late 2040s, Alex had already been associating with a number of resistance organisations vying to overthrow the current power structures, and eventually came across the London-based insurgent group Blackbird, who saw his skills and past reputation of guerrilla cyberattacks on corporate infrastructure and made him an offer as an agent. He began to undertake formal tradecraft and firearms training, and quickly rose through Blackbird’s ranks during the next decade to become the team leader of Blackbird’s most elite covert operations group, known as KAOS. In 2052, KAOS, led by Blackbird, was responsible for planning and launching the destruction of Helios Tower, the formal call-to-arms for the London Revolution to begin.
Post-London Revolution
After the London Revolution, Alex was shocked and horrified at the destruction brought by the Entropic Flashover Bombs detonated in the Southern Exclusion Zone, and for a period of time he decided to join the Department for Exophysics to help direct the logistics of the early cleanup operations. He did this whilst keeping his identity and true role in KAOS secret, a pact he made with his fellow agents: that the victory should be held by the people, not by an idolised few. He kept his skills as an agent secret, but continued to run counter-corporate operations with his KAOS team even after Blackbird was formally dissolved.
Anthro Rights
As someone who identified as an anthro from early in his life, Alex followed and defended the development of the Anthro Project closely. With his personal connections in Blackbird, he managed to foil several corporate plots to sabotage the project’s development, including an attempt by BioCorp. He also managed to prevent a number of terrorist attacks by fascist and religious organisations advocating for “genetic purity”. He became quietly known and respected within certain circles the anthro community as a defender of transhumanist ideals, and personally befriended Dr. Laura Ross, CEO of TransForm and the lead researcher on the Anthro Project.
Via this friendship, he secured his position as one of the first patients of the project’s clinical trials, successfully adopting an anthro lupine form. He went on to become a model and ambassador for the Anthro Project, educating people about the technology and its safety, as well as discrediting narratives corporations BioCorp attempted to push about its negative risks. He acquired an almost mythical reputation within the transhumanist community, a defender of its roots and ideals and a protector against corporate influences, but he also became targeted, with numerous assassination attempts on him foiled by his fellow KAOS members and the State Defence Section. He was seen as an asset worthy of protection by state security services due to his societal contributions in the Thames Republic.
Sakura Cybernetics
In 2245, Sakura Cybernetics launched the PRISM program, part of the FRACTAL initiative, a moonshot intended to create fully synthetic minds and bodies, funded almost entirely by the Thames government. Due to Alex’s reputation, he was installed as the organisation’s Chief Security Officer at the start of the PRISM phase, in order to oversee the corporation’s defences against megacorporations and assure the Thames public their funds were in good hands. He managed to fend off many attacks, including those by BioCorp and CORE Heavy Industries, and he fought systemic speciesism against synths, just as he fought it for anthros.
Vertex Revolution
During the development of the Vertex Network, the Strategic Intelligence Office attempted to blackmail Vector Sakura into handing over the PRISM blueprints. Alex managed to track down the SIO agent responsible for her blackmail, and pursued her to Mars. However, he was ambushed by a SIO field team in Hellas City, and shot several times, suffering critical damage. His chassis was loaded onto a SIO shuttle and ejected out of the airlock into deep space in an attempt to prevent him from ever being found.
In 2491, over 150 years later, Alex’s floating chassis was discovered on complete chance by a passing scrapper ship scanning for debris. After he was brought aboard, his damage was deemed far too severe to be repaired then and there, so he was brought to the Institute of Synthetic Neurology, a world-leading synth repair facility on the campus of Sakura Cybernetics in Osaka, Japan. There, medical engineers and synaptic engineers worked for nearly a week to bring him back to life.
Despite their success in his resurrection, Alex had suffered permanent physical damage to his core, which resulted in a severe amount of memory loss, several changes in his personality, and neurological “glitches” unable to be restored by therapy or repair. Though happy to be alive, he struggled to fit back into society, and found many of the friends and places he once knew gone.
The glitches combined with memory loss and the Vertex Revolution occurring right before he “died” resulted in him taking on an almost dream-like longing to find out more about the Network, which was at the time actively engaged with humanity in diplomacy. Via those in Sakura that still knew him and owed him a favour, he managed to secure a position on a diplomatic posting to Iridian for the Vertex-Humanity Cooperation Initiative.