Backstory

Publicly, Beth Zylar is a moderately successful and highly eccentric antiquarian, a former Trade Constellation bureaucrat who cheerfully claims he "fled the Grey Chasm of paperwork for the Crimson Joy of history." He is a familiar and welcome sight in high-end establishments like The Starstruck Parlor on The Luminary Bastion, where his whimsy and laughter make him a popular, if enigmatic, figure. He deals in pre-Sundering artifacts, rare star charts, and forgotten lore, a profession that provides him with a comfortable living and a plausible reason to traverse the Solo system and beyond. He presents the perfect image of an aspiring bourgeois academic who has found his niche and wants for nothing more.\n\nThis entire persona is a meticulously crafted lie. 'Beth' is a survivor of the clone colony on Fat, a world annihilated by the Red Sun Dominion for the 'crime' of pursuing forbidden technology. He was a senior academic there, not just a clerk, and his field of study was the most forbidden of all: the GH-23 AI Core. He and his colleagues were using a fragment of the Core's predictive technology to guide their colony's development and safeguard it from discovery. When the Dominion fleet arrived, having somehow bypassed their precognitive warnings, he barely escaped with his life and a heavily encrypted data-slate containing fragmented cloning research and, more importantly, a data-key he believes is part of the locator for the Core itself. He hates his current life, a gilded cage of his own making, and is consumed by the fear that the Red Sun Dominion will discover a clone is still alive.