Bios
Written by Jack, Vova, and Jamie; still under construction
Who, pray tell, is this assemblage of inquisitive, intelligent, slightly quirky people who share this life together? Here is a selection of bios, long enough to give you a good idea, but brief enough to read individually in a short sitting. (We hope so, anyway.)
Here are a few notes:
- Many of us are from, or live in, alternate versions of recognisable places on Earth: England, Russia, Ireland, Germany. But many of us live in lands found only in our mindscape or in published fiction, such as the country of Biaritza (capital: Eimeiseidele, referred to several times here) or The Dreaming. All these are part of our vast inner world.
- Although we’re an extremely diverse system, we tend to have ethnic, cultural, or religious backgrounds that match our outworld ones—most of us are either Black, Celtic, or both, and many of us are ethnically Jewish. We’re a convert to Judaism with possible Sephardic ancestry.
- Some listed skills correspond to ones we have out here (e.g., learning foreign languages), but others don’t, mostly because we haven’t had the time to study every discipline we’d like.
- Pronouns can be inferred by how we’re referred to in our bios (for example “Jamie has declared that her archnemeses are the New York Mets,” though people who use multiple sets (e.g., Fiona and Em) have theirs listed explicitly.
Main frontrunners
Vova Romanov
Vova (Вова), officially known as Vladimir Valerievich Romanov (Владимир Валерьевич Романов), is a forty-four-year-old Russian trans man who’s originally from Kiev (he prefers the traditional spelling for this historically Russian-speaking city), though he grew up in St Petersburg in the mid-1980s and 1990s. He’s round, with long black hair that’s partly shaved on the sides, with an asymmetric fringe (bangs) that’s purple down the middle. He’s primarily Russian, though his father is also of Ukrainian and Ashkenazi Jewish descent, and his mother is also Crimean Tatar. Since March 2024, Vova has been the sole head of the system, after serving as co-leader from June 2023. A self-styled “deeply traumatised mad Russian,” Vova has had his share of run-ins with the psychiatric system, thanks to his bipolar mania and depression. (He says, “Never go mad in Russia.”) Despite his struggles, however, he’s managed to succeed at work: after all, Vova’s mental health is best when he’s doing a lot of intellectually stimulating things at once and following his doctors’ instructions about his medications, so he can serve his country the best he can. He has a low tolerance for boredom, tedium, and stupidity.
Vova is in charge of the education and intelligence departments in his version of a de-Putinised Russia, since he’s a pro at juggling multiple responsibilities and seeing the underlying patterns in whatever he puts his mind to. Before becoming Russia’s spymaster and chief educationist, Vova worked with a cadre of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian leftists, liberals and socialists to overthrow their authoritarian governments and reestablish a democratic-socialist Kievan Rus, simply called Russia. The reunited Russia’s capital is, naturally, Kiev. He was also a science journalist for BBC Russia, asking physicists about the secrets of the known Universe. (Ask him about the time he had to work for a Russian propaganda organ after a psychiatric hospitalisation.) He speaks English fluently in his own life (though with the occasional dropped “the” or oddly phrased sentence), thanks to a language-specialised secondary school and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the London School of Economics.
Vova lives with Yavari and their son, Alexei/Алексей (best known as Alyosha/Алеша), dividing his time between Kiev and Eimeiseidele. When Zip isn’t in Queens, he lives with Yavari, Vova, and Alyosha. Vova married Yavari in March 2024.
Join date: January 2023, though he didn’t introduce himself until February 2023.
Musical tastes: Likes nearly everything except for country and hip-hop, the latter he despises with a passion, with very few exceptions.
Yavari Romanov
Yavari is thirty-six years old, of a medium build, with ear-length naturally blue hair that slightly covers his eyes. He’s multiracial—he’s of English, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Lebanese, West African (Yoruba and Igbo), German, and Welsh descent—though he typically calls himself Black for political reasons. Yavari grew up in a poor family in Teiribuze, Biaritza. Although his family’s poverty was relative, he was still acutely aware of the difference between his life and those of his richer peers’. He was often bullied for his cheap clothes and school supplies. He was able to get away from his bullies when he started attending school in London at the age of twelve, where he met the then-seventeen-year-old Hess, who was then in his last year. Yavari’s poverty, as well as the systemic discrimination he saw growing up in Biaritza, led him to civil rights activism in his late teens, which is how he met Jack, reconnected with Hess, and befriended both men. He studied artificial intelligence at university, with a focus on social policy and AI.
For the past year, Yavari has been the director of the oversight and transparency department at the University of Eimeiseidele’s Institute of Artificial Intelligence, where he advances legislation and regulations that make sure AI doesn’t get too out of hand. (His internal interests in AI policy are causing him to raise his eyebrows at current problems regarding algorithms, AI, and their uses against systemically marginalised people.) He also works with the Russian intelligence department and provides it with future technology.
Yavari is a hard worker, willing to go the extra mile to make sure things are all right. But even he gets frustrated when he’s met with tedious, thankless tasks where he isn’t getting to solve problems or figure out new ways to do things. (His tolerance for boredom is greater than Vova’s, though.) He’s not too good in the cooking department, either, though he’s still competent. Like the rest of us, he loves writing, and his focus is on explainers, policy briefs, and reports. He prefers a straightforward writing style, low on frills but high on clarity. He gets impatient, though, with punctuational quibbles and prefers to hand those responsibilities to Jamie, his most frequent coauthor on policy documents.
He is married to Vova, and the two live together with their son, Alyosha, and Zip, dividing their time between Eimeiseidele and Kiev. Before marriage, his surname was Caralize, which translates to “warm light” in Yeisto, one of the languages of Biaritza.
Yavari is the chief spokesman for the system in nonplural contexts. (Vova typically speaks for the system in his official capacity when we’re around people who know who we are.)
Join date: early 1994.
Musical tastes: likes electronic dance music, 80s pop music (whether it’s New Wave, teen pop, or top-40), some contemporary pop, some rock, trance, some R&B, some country. (He’s actually the only one here who likes any country music.) Dislikes most hip-hop.
Jack Dawkins
Thirty-six years old, Jack Dawkins cuts a striking figure: he’s willowy thin, with flowing hair that is either pink or brown, depending on his mood and fancy. He talks with a cut-glass Received Pronunciation accent, a product of a childhood in the Forties and an expensive education. (Even after moving well into the future, he’s held on to his accent as a trademark.) His mother is Irish, his father English—and he sees himself as a pleasing combination of both. Wordy and witty, Jack enjoys himself most when he sets himself to the task of writing literary essays, poems, or stories, though his self-consciousness makes him hesitate to submit them to publishers.
Throughout his career, Jack has worn a number of hats, often simultaneously: diplomat, philologist, translator, cultural critic, essayist, digital artist, graphic designer, subeditor, typographer, chef, poet, would-be novelist. He was head of the system for several years, but he’s since handed over the reins to Vova, who’s proved himself a capable leader in 2023, in which we were recovering from the worst mental health crisis we’d had since 1989.
Jack is a man of three times: he grew up in Second World War Britain, moved to the distant future at thirteen, and has been at our front for about thirty-four years. The diversity of his temporal experiences has given him a distinct style of writing, dress, politics and aesthetics, all of which are additive, rather than subtractive—how many people have you met who can tell you about living simultaneously in three times and deriving meaning from all those times?
Nowadays, Jack is Biaritza’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Jack lives in the official ministerial residence alongside his wife, Jamie, and their two children, Katie and Florian.
Join date: late 1990.
Musical tastes: contemporary pop (especially electro-pop and electroclash, though electroclash isn’t really contemporary anymore, is it?), 80s pop, folk, indie rock, dance, some electronic music. Dislikes a lot of hip-hop. Despises country.
Jamie Dawkins
Though she’s formally known as the rather grand Margaret Elizabeth Dawkins, this forty-four-year-old proud New Yorker is best known as Jamie. Jamie grew up in Greenwich Village before moving to Hampshire (the one in England, not to be confused with New Hampshire) in her early teens, after a few years trapped in a pocket universe. Married to Jack, she lives with him and their two children in Eimeiseidele’s city centre. Jamie is biracial; her mother is white English and Welsh with a number of aristocrats in her family, and her father is a working-class Black Brit of Jamaican background. Because she’s a shapeshifter, though, she can appear either white or Black, depending on her mood. (Being a shapeshifter has helped her in other ways—she’s a trans woman who came to terms with her gender identity very recently.)
Jamie’s been a member of Plures House since 1989, when we developed dissociative amnesia after a particularly traumatic incident.
Jamie is obsessed by typography, grammar, and usage, and is a skilled editor who’s memorised multiple style manuals and usage books off by heart. Notably, she will kick up a fuss if you strike the Oxford comma from her writing, since she’s more of a literary than journalistic editor. Her typographic tastes run from the vernacular to the tony; she loves tacky logos for video games, amusement parks, and breakfast-cereal boxes, but she also has an admiration for the tender attention paid to kerning, spacing, and typeface choice in well-designed books.
Consistent with Jamie’s wide-ranging interests, she has a number of jobs, including English teacher, copyeditor, and spy. (Her forensic knowledge of grammar, usage, and typography helps her catch out wrongdoers.)
None of us is particularly fascinated by sports, but Jamie actually has her favourite teams: the New York Yankees and the New York Knicks in particular. She has an especial loathing for the Yankees’ cross-town rivals, the Mets, and has a collection of anti-Mets swag in her closet. (She’s also known to tease Zip about his preference for “Bawston” teams like the Red Sox and Celtics.)
Join date: mid-1989.
Musical tastes: pop, R&B, some rock, and hip-hop, though she is very selective about the hip-hop she listens to (it doesn’t help that most of us hate it).
Hess Sakal
The first member of our system, the forty-one-year-old Hess is energetic, silly, and a bit chaotic—though he’s no match for one Zip T. Wexler. (His full name is Hesperus Vasilievich Sakal, or Гесперус Васильевич Сакал in Cyrillic, but nobody calls him Hesperus—unless Richard is joking around with him.) He is of Russian, German, Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese, Buryat (an indigenous Mongol ethnicity in Russia), and Japanese descent. He grew up in London with his parents—his father, Vasily, an entrepreneurial refugee from Russia who settled in England to flee the Russo–Chinese War, and his mother, Petra, a historian. Hess faced a lot of prejudice as a Russian living in London, since Russians were treated similarly to Mexicans in the United States, thought to be less intelligent, industrious, and competent. Nevertheless, he was able to overcome the difficulties many of his peers faced by dint of his intellect and work ethic, which could not be dismissed even by the most Russophobic. He won a scholarship to the exclusive Westminster School, where he met the then-twelve-year-old Yavari, even though they did not become friends for another six years. At eighteen, he studied temporal physics at the University of Eimeiseidele and continued to study it during his master’s and PhD programmes.
Nowadays, Hess is the head of the temporal-physics department at the University of Eimeiseidele, where he studies the mechanisms of time travel and how to go about it ethically, avoiding undue temporal paradoxes.
When he’s not working or hatching new schemes with Jack, Yavari, and Vova, Hess lives with his wife, Yumi, and their two children not far from Jack and Jamie’s family in Central Eimeiseidele.
Join date: mid-1986.
Musical tastes: dance pop (he really likes Dua Lipa), indie rock, classic rock, dumb novelty songs.
Zip T. Wexler
Zachary Thomas Wexler, best known as Zip, is a thirty-seven-year-old civil-rights lawyer, secret agent, and legal writer. He’s Black (Black American and Jamaican) and Ashkenazi (Russian origin). He was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, though he moved to Queens, New York, in his early adolescence. He has a hybrid accent to match. When he first announced himself in September 2022, we thought he was an alter who had split from Yavari, represented by a ball of chaos. It turned out, though, that he’s a walk-in with an independent background like the rest of us. (He still likes to be represented by a ball of chaos in portraits, though, possibly because Jack is still figuring out how to do him justice when he draws Zip.) He has three home bases: New York City, Eimeiseidele, and Kiev, though he probably spends more time in Eimeiseidele than Kiev or NYC—after all, it’s in the future! When he’s in Kiev and Eimeiseidele, he lives with his partners Yavari and Vova, as well as Yavari and Vova’s son, Alyosha.
Zip has had a meandering career: as a member of the US Army, he served in Iraq from 2005–2008; he delivered pizzas for a few years in Queens; and finally he studied law at Yale and became a partner at a civil-rights law firm. Since he’s a lawyer, he often contributes to our writing about law and policy. Similarly to the rest of us, he has a number of writing pet peeves, including the proliferation of phrases like “pursuant to” and “subsequent to” in legal writing. (There are multiple instances in our in-system chat logs in which he rants about “pursuant to.”) He and Jamie are fans of Bryan Garner’s oeuvre, in which he frequently castigates legal writers for using that damnable phrase all the time.
Zip frequently combines absurd echolalia with Borscht Belt humour and lines that wouldn’t sound out of place from a wisecracking Disney Renaissance sidekick. One of Zip’s pastimes is to drive Vova nuts by mispronouncing Cyrillic on purpose (e.g., reading Россия, Rossiya, as POCCNR).
Join date: mid-1998.
Musical tastes: rock, pop, and R&B, primarily.
Secondary frontrunners
Morpheus
One who is interested in stories. Ageless, naturally.
Join date: possibly in 1988?
Richard Ghia-Wilberforce
Richard Ghia-Wilberforce is a retired geneticist and neuroscientist (he blended the fields, often finding the genetic bases for neurological phenomena, while firmly rejecting reductionism or eugenics) based in Eimeiseidele.
One of his distant ancestors is William Wilberforce, the famous abolitionist.
He is married to Carmen and Posey, and they live with their five-year-old son George. Richard’s other children include Yavari, Lilly, Tua, and Albert.
Join date: mid-1986.
Lilly Ghia-Wilberforce
Lilly co-fronts with two of her relatives: her half-brother, Yavari, and her father, Richard.
Join date: mid-2004.
Noël Dawkins
Noël is Jack’s adoptive sibling.
He lives with his four cats, Bouguereau, Orion, Cassiopeia, and Herakles, in a cosy flat in Eimeiseidele’s city centre, not far from Jamie, Jack, and their children.
Join date: possibly in 1988?
Fiona Romanova
Thirty-eight years old, Fiona is Vova’s younger cousin by six years. Fiona responds to either “she” or “they.”
Fiona describes her aesthetic as being a weird mish-mash of ’60s hippie, Alphonse Mucha, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Engelbreit, and Arthur Rackham, as well as British and Irish illuminated manuscripts (the latter is a passion she shared with Richard). She’s a talented letterer, using a style that’s influenced by the 1960s and Insular Uncial lettering (think the kind of lettering you see on Irish pubs).
She lives with Em and Hutch in a quirky, somewhat run-down apartment in Eimeiseidele.
Join date: mid-1989.
Em Flynn
He uses both “he” and “they”; we use “he” here only for consistency’s sake.
Join date: mid-1989.
Owen/Oona “Hutch” Hutchinson
Bigender.
Hutch is a skilled artist (within our limits, that is), employing a sketchy, loose style using rough MS Paint–style brushes. They tend toward a macabre look, differing considerably from Jack and some of our other artists.
Join date: late 2004.