Editing Eclipse Fate: Gravity's Rainbow: Edison (section)

== Background ==
Edison is an apparently apolitical, freelance tech fixer/troubleshooter, with secret links to the Extropian movement, under the pseudonym of “@keynes”. 

Appearance: they generally sleeve into ordinary looking, common morphs, intentionally aiming to be nondescript and easily forgotten. 

For a long time Edison has been a freelance tech troubleshooter and fixer with a steady line in contracts with different hypercorps.

Edison was on Mars at the time of the Fall, working on a hypercorp contract. Shocked by the lack of concern for most of humanity exhibited by the hypercorps, and convinced that the hypercorps at least knew more than they were willing to share which could help people, Edison became certain that things would be better if more information currently locked away in hypercorps systems was freely available. While continuing to work contracts for hypercorps, they began to use their access to corporate systems to carry out industrial espionage, with occasional systems sabotage to cover their tracks, dropping information on selected underground bulletin boards anonymously. They are involved with the "IWTBF" (Information Wants to be Free) movement under an assumed identity.

They came to Firewall’s notice despite taking great care to keep the freeing of information separate from their public persona and they were recruited by Firewall at that time for jobs involving surveillance, espionage, data or asset extraction, and sabotage.

Edison has worked with people in lots of the hypercorps, and a number of other organisations; and has stolen (or “freed”) information from most of those – there are many people from their past who may suspect this and it may come back to haunt Edison.

Edison continues to work as a freelance tech. fixer and troubleshooter, alongside Firewall jobs. Even on Firewall jobs Edison has difficulty in overcoming the temptation to extract confidential information from systems – information which later turns up released anonymously on underground information boards. So far they have managed not to cross the line and release information that Firewall wants supressed, but perhaps it’s just a matter of time…

When working on tech systems they have a tendency to get drawn in to a challenge - solving a puzzle, beating the system, fixing a problem - forgetting the ticking clock and the overall objective.

(((Edison may originally be an uplift or AGI or ….something else…, but that is information hidden deep, so deep that Edison doesn’t actively recall it and would have to work to dig out the facts; but incidents/circumstances may trigger “flashbacks” or false memories; information about this may leak at inopportune moments - some people must have a recollection of the original Edison, after all. Odd that someone committed to freeing information should have such a deeply hidden secret - there’s a deep contradiction in Edison’s own psyche.)))