Parnas Harn

CONNECTION: PDA + Roaming AI

AI ASSISTANT: Strong AI “MELVILLE”

DIGITAL APPEARANCE: An enhanced version of himself Director of CivSec, Union City’s security division, Harn is the father of scores of klatch kids he calls “Fitzharns” (via artificial insemination). His offspring include Rebel (“Rebecca,” who runs off to become a Scrumblie) and Dea (a high-ranking executive for IS).

Harn has convinced or blackmailed a number of highly-ranked officials within the corporate government to transfer "black funds" to a private account, in order to finance the purchase and transfer of military-grade weaponry from a false front called "SECARM 753607" which (if investigated) turns out to be "Security Sergeant Lee Chambers." The real Lee Chambers was killed several years ago, his body mixed into separate packages with other organic materials and sold to eight different food recyclers. Harn is in possession of Chambers' PIDkit, and has been implanted with an embedded dock into which he can insert different PIDkits (duplicated on small SIMs).

Using another cutout (fictional persona) called SLOTHROP, Harn is behind the formation of a faux-rebel organization which he arms via a series of encrypted messages left in digital drop-boxes. These drop-boxes are honeypots of (a) lightly-sensitive classified material, (b) conspiracy theories, and (c) secret messages comprised of words, phrases, and embedded tags hidden within the literal representations of fonts.

Slothrop attracts anti-corporate rebels by hanging out in radical haunts online and releasing "leaks" on the DarkNet. As various unrelated radicals are attracted to the Slothrop persona (often played not by Harn but by his AI Melville), he gains their trust and then begins releasing drops to them: standard propaganda at first, then the special classified packages, and finally, the locations of weapons caches. Slowly, over time, this strategy has caused the "organic" emergence of a loosely-affiliated but violently radical underground movement. The recipients of this data are not linked to each other in any direct way, and thus even Harn doesn't know where all of the weapons end up.

Spurred on by Slothrop's rhetoric and excited to play with toys that go boom, many useful idiots and radicals have formed their own anticorp cells, and recruitment in these underground groups has grown at a steady rate over the last five years. Once or twice a year, one of the cells in this decentralized network - which now has a name and calls itself "3V3" - attacks high-profile targets within the city, using weapons provided by Slothrop. A tiny, mostly toothless sliver of the radical population has thus been turned into a legitimate anti-corporate terrorist organization, against which the corporate powers can rally.

The resulting demand for increased security funding pays back in great dividends for both Harn and his covert associates, all of whom have much to gain by anything involving warfare or hardware, but that's not why he did it. He did it because he was tired of fighting cyber-enemies and tracking crackers through cyberspace.

He wanted to fight real, physical enemies, like in the "old days" of the 20th century.

Harn is a collector of antique memorabilia and media, including classic war movies from "Patton" to "American Sniper".

Book 1: “Feed the Hand that Bites You” (Tod Foley), “Rebel, Rebel” (Tod Davies)

Book 2: “I, Witness” (Irene Bassett)