#translit

For a little over four years, as far as anyone could deduce, Jakan had been working out of Port Nisair. E was an elusive civilian coder, who started small. Small, but brilliant. The first design that really made a splash was a tricky bit of work that reprogrammed a regulation hairband into a woven ring of flowers so realistic they wilted and bruised in response to their environment.

Jakan dealt in fashion materials with properties no one else had managed to coax out of the base matter -- and in custom encryptions to protect their copyrights. Novel encryptions and keys had their own market, as well, and Jakan took full advantage of that opportunity as the demand presented itself.

All of Jakan’s dealings were done anonymously. Er designs came through one fence, and then another, but eventually solely through one of the Admiralty Canteen’s waitress robots.

Many a fashion house both inside and outside the star system tried to coax Jakan to code exclusively for their company, but e refused every offer. E never favored any one designer over another, and did not produce on any consistent schedule, but nearly every new material e designed caused a rabid bidding war.

Among er encryption fans, the speculation on who Jakan was became, if possible, even more intense. No one had been able to link Jakan to any individual person. It was widely concluded that Jakan was an anonymous collective, and as there were well-hidden signs that they might be involved with the treasonous and mysterious Soj organization in some way, no one dared dig too deep.

Best take what was given, thank the stars for the quality of Jakan’s work, and stay out of er way.

.

.

The first incarnation of Soj was quiet, and intelligent, easily surpassing er coding and sci-tech lessons but clever enough to conceal by how far. Code was the key to everything in the galaxy, tech the doorway in, and Soj pieced it all together into a depth of understanding many an adult would envy.

Simple, then. With the keys to the castle in a stolen and jailbroken portable, Soj could always know where the caretakers were -- to run to the trustworthy ones for help, or elude the bad ones to stay safe and keep out of trouble. Soj could enter or leave any room, at any time, undetected.

That Soj’s most famous triumph was making the Readyfood machines dispense more than the allotted amount of snacks and deserts by causing them to all tally individually instead of sharing information. The most useful was discovering the true limits of the Automedic cocoons, in healing and body modification, and the ability to erase all history of that use.

Soj had the skills to pass the official aptitude tests with scores enough to enter the Junior Academy in the Honors track, and disappeared. In the end, all Soj was in that incarnation was children’s stories and a series of unlikely technical glitches, soon forgotten

.

Soj the infamous rose years later, in code that propagated information into darknets via self-destructing worms that randomly hatched in the drives of ships between one and five jumps after they landed at the Military Academy proper, and then disappeared without a trace.

There were exhaustive deconstructions of Automedic technology, and pre-made programs to let anyone adjust their physical or hormonal attributes. There were skeleton keys into official Admiralty systems, of all shapes and sizes. There were information leaks, exposing corruption. Most subtle, and most beloved, were the methods of obfuscation, the ways to make one’s self or one’s work disappear from the Admiralty’s sight. Soj did not publish more than once or twice a year, but each new burst of information was revolutionary.

Soj’s work was brilliant, and subversive, and utterly impossible to create by anyone limited to the technology available to Academy students. It was accepted knowledge that no one person could have mastery in everything Soj published, that e was the front of an organization. The Admiralty wanted to find them out, but no weak link was ever discovered to bring the entire structure crumbling down.

The worms Soj produced became ever-more sophisticated. Before they were definitively tracked down to the Academy, they changed behavior entirely. They split, changed vessels, and it was impossible to tell that they originated between six and twelve jumps, and two to five ships, from Port Nisair.

Soj, beloved of anarchists and those pushed to the fringes of Admiralty society. Soj, smeared as the invention of the enemies the Admiralty never stopped fighting. Soj, the name claimed in honor by a dozen information criminals, and yet no matter how many were executed, the internal assault continued unabated.

.

.

Soj. Jakan. Sojia.

Nobody.

Nobody slunk through the shadows of Port Nisair, unnoticed by any person or any sensor. Nobody found a squat in an unoccupied housing unit, set alarms, and collapsed onto the bed in exhaustion.

Nobody lay, eyes open in the dark, unmoored, untethered, unowned, and with no idea how to proceed next.

.

.