Editing Jonah Spectre (section)

=Background=
Jonah Spectre, Subject 318TI241A
Produced by a clandestine Jovian weaponization project, Jonah Spectre is the name taken by a man who can no longer remember his birth name. Acquired at a young age by unscrupulous Jovian agents, Jonah was infected with the Watts-MacLeod Exsurgent strain and spent more than a decade and six lives under constant scrutiny and testing in solitary and group experiments. Ego and morph deaths were a fact of life, as subject's psyche's self-destructed under the stress and isolation, while mutations in the Exsurgent strain claimed other lives, including several of the research staff.

With a powerful and growing Psi talent, Jonah was transferred from a pure research station to an isolated weapons testing habitat, deep within an isolated military asteroid. Implanted with the latest bio and cyberware and put through a training regime to shame most professional militaries, Jonah and the other candidates of the Jovian Exsurgent Project were molded into inhuman psychic killing machines. Each candidate was assigned a ghost-riding military AI, advisor, political commissar, and potential executioner rolled into one; the AI was equipped with kill codes and lethal nanovirii to terminate rebellious subjects.

Somehow, in spite of the frequent mind-wipes, psychosurgical conditioning, and ability of the watchful AI read his mind in all but name, Jonah managed to resist his conditioning. Through some fluke of the Watts-MacLeod strain, or quirk of biogenetic engineering, or even the primal desire for freedom, his subconscious mind was able to retain a core of resistance, conceal its true abilities, and slowly worm its way into the cracks in his conditioning. Working beneath the level of active thought, his ego studied the guardian AI, opened channels of communication, and subverted it over a matter of weeks.

With the guardian AI firmly under his thumb, the infallible Jovian conditioning quickly broke down. Able to backup his memories and psyche with the AI's assistance, Jonah became resistant to the control techniques the Project used and made his plans to escape...or die trying.

With all the careful precision and foresight drilled into him by his training, Subject 318TI241A executed his escape. With the same intuitive skill that he used to subvert his own AI, he infiltrated the other trainee's overseers during a live-fire exercise and scorched them down to bare circuits. With the voice of compulsion suddenly gone, the limiting agents on their psychosis' removed, and weapons in their hands, what happened next was a foregone conclusion. With the chaos covering his escape, Jonah calmly sabotaged the reactors and generators powering the habitat, planted explosives in the life-support systems, and flew the Director's personal shuttlecraft to Locus. Waking up in the Locus flophouse and realizing it wasn't all a nightmare was the best day of his life.

Since then, the self-christened Jonah Spectre has lived under the radar, taking security and mercenary work as necessary and concealing all hints of his origin and Async abilities, obfuscating where possible and killing where necessary. Somewhere along the way he disposed of his AI, a topic he refuses to discuss.

Contacted several years after his escape from the Jovian Exsurgent Project by Firewall, Jonah has accepted membership under partial coercion, he is unable to believe that anyone with such a hold over him would be unwilling to use it if provoked, and while he can see the need for Sentinels, he rationalizes his membership to himself as a necessary deed to prevent them from exposing him.

Heavily augmented, Jonah Spectre is a lethal assassin, master hacker, and lethal infiltrator. His upbringing, on the other hand, leaves him without social skills worth mentioning. And his past is catching up to him; if Firewall can find him, so can the Jovians he left for dead...