Athena Liu - Bio and Contacts

Athena Liu was created by Dr Benjamin Richardson, reclusive scientist of reasonable brilliance. She is the sixth and only successful attempt at an android who could pass for human. Dr Richardson lived and worked on Hephaestus, a small Core-ward moon housing an enormous Alliance research complex. For almost his entire tenure, he had been skimming funds from other projects and working on his androids in an abandoned and mislabeled lab. Since the only neural pathways available for study were his own, Athena ended up being patterned after her father, extrapolating his thirst for understanding to all facets of her life. Learning that curiosity about people was better served by tact then bulldogged interrogation took a while. Because he did have official projects and could not spend very much time in the secret lab, Athena spent most of her time studying anything that struck her fancy; history, poetry, the various scientific arts so that she could understand the project reports of the other scientists, philosophy, all sorts of random trivia. Sneaking around the complex and hacking the Cortex were the only things available to entertain herself with, and there was only so much complex to crawl through.

Unfortunately, Dr Richardson wasn't quite as brilliant as he thought he was. Eager to push forward with his research, he skimmed money from his new projects for the Military as well as his usual ones, never thinking that their accountants might look closer at the little irregularities his activities had been leaving behind. He got wind of the military police just before they arrived and, arrogantly assuming that they just wanted to steal the research, ran to the supposedly abandoned lab to destroy or hide the evidence of his research. Reluctant to destroy the proof of his genius, he made Athena run while he destroyed the shells of her siblings. She hid in the ventilation and watched as, much to her father's surprise, he was arrested. Emptying out what little caches of emergency money she could before the accounts were seized, Athena stowed aboard a supply transport and escaped.

Correctly divining that she would be quickly caught if she stayed in the Core, Athena slipped from ship to ship with the help of her hacker friends. She ended up at Beaumonde, where she got a job as the tech support department for a start-up shipping company that didn't care to look too close so long as people were qualified. She spent the rest of the war trying to keep tabs on her father and perfecting the records for her new identity. She and her Cortex terrorist comrades figured that there would be so many people looking for a new start once the war finished that no one would look twice at one more.

Armed with a handful of degrees to match her level of knowledge, Athena applied to several companies with strong R&D departments and ended up accepting the job at Fenghuang Star Designs. The brilliance and quirkiness of their ships appealed to her. Since she revealed during the interview process that she had been working on a new design for neurological interfaces, she got in on the ground floor of the Deliverance project. Working closely with Luk Mei Xui led to a deep friendship with the older woman and an unexpected friendship with Wei Han. Her intimate knowledge of biological/technological neural connections and her habit of devoting herself to a project came in handy, helping to keep them ahead of schedule more often then not, resulting in Deliverance being ready for her first comprehensive long test almost five years after pencils first hit the drafting board.

Athena would have much preferred the week-long exercises to fleeing for her life again, but at least the lessons learned from her last experience served her well for Round Two. She had gotten into the habit of keeping her essentials on her person and a bug-out bag nearby at all times, and not even five years of the best job in the 'Verse could eradicate that paranoia. Panicking like crazy, Mei Xui and Athena burned stardust to the Colony in search of adequate medical care for Wei Han. Where they go from there is a dilemma that she's been taxing the synapses over ever since.

Athena's Contacts

The Three Musketeers - Athos, Porthos, and Aramis
The Three Musketeers were a trio of reasonably brilliant hackers who were among Athena's first and best Cortex friends. Their actual names were Robert Clearwater, Oliver Smithson, and Wren Williams. The three met in the daycare provided for employees of Iskellian Technology Solutions and were inseparable from that point on. They followed their parents into the ship-building side of the corporation, though Oliver left when the war broke out to join the Alliance and never came back. Mutual mourning brought Athos and Aramis closer together and recently resulted in an engagement.

While the remaining two are loath to meet anyone face-to-face or reveal any details that would jeopardize their actual lives, they have no problem with helping out their digital friends in other ways. They're the ones who helped most in creating Athena's new identity, and delight in pulling the wool over the eyes of The Man through the discovery, distribution, and alteration of information.

The Burninator
Known on the Cortex for being an Earth-that-Was obsessive braggart with almost enough skill to back it up, he and Athena have a friendly rivalry consisting of good natured trash talk and one-up-man-ship. Every so often, they'll get annoyed to the point where they have to Prove which one of them is better and will have a contest (refereed by mutual friends) in which they select a foe and make their life a living hell with non-life-threatening annoyances. The Burninator won the last round by altering the records of a certain official in Interpol's Cortex division to say that he was deceased.