Ivan Petrovich Romanov

Ivan was born in Moscow before the Soviet Union fell. His father was an aerospace engineer. His mother danced ballet. They were comfortable, by the standards of the time.

Then 1991 happened. The ruble collapsed. The family relocated to Vladivostok, where his father lost his job, found vodka instead, and eventually put a gun in his mouth over a debt to people who didn't accept apologies. His mother worked three jobs. Ivan, who had always been quick with languages and quicker with people, survived by forging privatization vouchers and running small cons on anyone who looked like they could afford to lose something.

At fifteen, he lost a dockside bet to a drunk who cheated, watched the man wave an American boarding pass around while bragging about how rich everyone in the United States was, waited until the man passed out from the vodka Ivan had been generously supplying, and stole the ticket. He spent the crossing hidden in the cargo hold.

America did not immediately reward him. He drifted through several states as an undocumented immigrant before ending up at MIT, where he got a job as a janitor and started listening through classroom doors. When a lab server crashed and no one could fix it, Ivan walked in and fixed it. The professor was impressed enough to let him sit in on lectures. Ivan absorbed everything.

A few years later, he forged an MIT degree and used it to get a decent job. The FBI investigated the company for tax evasion, found his credentials in the process, and Ivan went to prison. After his release, unable to find work, he hacked the FBI's official website and posted a lengthy statement about his own innocence on the homepage. He was arrested again immediately. The GIA found him in holding and offered him a choice: work for them, or finish the sentence. He chose the former.

At the GIA, he was assigned to logistics and support — not operations. He was fine with this until he met Fleusha, a Ukrainian operative from the action division, and decided he wasn't fine with it at all. He forged an action division ID to ask her on a date. She saw through it in under a minute and asked him why he was a liar. The question bothered him more than the exposure did. He started training. He studied. He transferred into operations properly, and Fleusha became his partner, and then something more than that.

In 1999, the Narvik facility catastrophe pulled them both into an emergency response unit, tasked with intercepting escaped Seraphim Project subjects at the Russian border. Elina died in the snow. The radiation from her body spread outward. Fleusha was too close.

Ivan reached Fleusha in time to see what the radiation was doing to her. On the way, he looked directly into Elina's golden eyes and contracted severe psychic contamination. Fleusha was moved to an isolation ward. Her skin broke down. Her hair fell out. Ivan sat with her through the last week, and then she was gone. The psychic damage from the eyes put Ivan into a coma shortly after. GIA surgeons performed brain surgery, cleared the trauma, repaired what they could.

He was unconscious for seventeen years.

He woke up in 2016 with most of his memory gone. What remained was fragmentary — impressions, feelings, a face he couldn't fully reconstruct. Using what he had, he built an AI. He called it ICE. He put it on a USB drive and hung it around his neck, and he has not taken it off since.

After that, he stopped trying to be the person he had been before. He runs what he calls the News Department — a single-person intelligence operation built from secondhand hardware and an oil-stained laptop — because formal structures stopped making sense to him and never started again. His official GIA rank is intern. It has been intern for eight years. No one has pushed the paperwork through, and he has not asked anyone to.

When Moming joined the GIA, Ivan recognized something in him — something buried, something that felt familiar in a way he couldn't name. The memories haven't surfaced yet. But they're moving.

He still tells people he spent last summer in Cuba. There are no records to support this. There never are.