Stubby bin Harold al Hebrin'/meta
Stubby bin Harold al Hebrin, Station Chief of the Hale’n’Hearty caravanserie
UPP: 545DE8, 38 years
Skills: Sophontology-3, Trader-3, Perform-3, Recruting-2, Persuasion-2, Instruction-2, Language (Modern Vilani)-1, Imperial Anglic (Transform dialect)-1, Arabic (Hebrin dialect)-0, Admin-0, Streetwise-0, Vacc Suit-0. Handgun-0.
Native tongue: Rim Anglic (never spoken)
Attire: the Chief is rarely seen. When he does go on a walkabout, he is fully-suited up in a vacc suit with a tinted visor. (Astute observers can tell that he knows the basics of operating a vacc suit, but is not a true space dog. They can also guess he’s more of a ’99-pound weakling’ than a muscular soldier type.)
Within his Apartment of Solitude, he wears one of his chosen sets of worn work overalls - built for utility and resistance to wear and tear, not style. He prefers to wear magnetic boots, just in case the gravity cuts out. Once every three months he wears a heavy metallic ‘crown’ for several hours: it contains various TL E-F devices, programs, interfaces, and microbots that keeps his cybernetic brain in tune and in compliance with his wetware brain. Spares are kept in various secure locations. Should his dual-brain organ go two months without a tune-up, organic deterioration begins, with insanity and death inevitable after an additional month without maintenance.
[Referee: Information technology professionals can use the client-server computing model as a pretty good analogy for the anima/persona relationship.
Note that the major intelligence services consider using such an expensive resource as an AP team for near-trivial jobs like assassinations or entrapment - something that can be handled by cut-outs, or even a specialized mercenary - to be a true waste. However, there are certain valuable assets, such as high-placed moles and sleeper agents, whose protection or destruction could be worth the loss of an AP team.]
The most feared AP teams work for the Zhodani Consulate: the discovery of their existence within the Domain of Deneb during the late 9th Imperial century was one of several predecessor issues that solidified elite Imperial Noble opinion against the continued tolerance of Psionic organizations and individuals within the Imperium.2 In Zhodani AP teams, the agent does not only use the identities of the personas, but also uses various Psionic and technological techniques to re-calibrate memories, electronic traces, genetic alterations, and shift thru new information.
This particular team is tied to the Solomani Party, an illegal association within the Third Imperium, and a major player behind the currently raging Rim War. The AP team is rather different than most: there are several agents, tied to a single persona. They come and go from the station in various guises, posing as clone-brothers of Chief Harold (a genetic test would confirm this - or not, depending on the needs of the agent and how much forewarning they have regarding a genetic test.) As they are not true psions, they use TL E-F brain-tapping equipment to directly exchange information and impressions, using Chief Harold’s organic/cybernetic brain as a server.