Jeremy Touze had shown up just three years ago in early 21HY, and had joined some struggling volunteers, and basically rebuild Haven’s dysfunctional network. That network had already been jerry-rigged barely-functional nonsense before Mab reinvigorated interest in the online, and that had made the situation ten times worse.
The network had fallen over constantly before he showed up. He not only had fixed it, but created all sorts of bridging between the Interlink and the Internet parts, to the point it was almost transparent.
Everyone was extremely glad he had managed this before ‘The Speech’, which had caused even more of an explosion in online traffic.
He had done so well as a volunteer that Elias Burke tried to hire him. And it was there that Jeremy’s politics became a real issue, in that he was apparently a bomb-throwing anarchist. He had been a gay Black man under President Gallo, so there was perhaps some understandable reluctance to work with a government, but…at times it seemed a little excessive, especially when Burke was just trying to give him some of Project Zero’s money.
Jeremy had eventually started accepting the money, but he repeatedly said Project Zero was not his boss, and neither was Burke, really, but he would work with Burke and take the money just because they were trying to do the same thing of providing necessary services to people. But that he was essentially agreeing just to get the money to do the things he was trying to do, and was absolutely not part of the government and would walk away if they tried to tell him what to do.
He was probably going to be a problem. The Haven Provisional Government, perhaps unwisely, saved him for last.
Which meant before they reached out to him, he had already started publicly speaking out against them.
Not on the grounds that the Provisional Government shouldn’t exist or that it was trying to overthrow Project Zero, which was a common enough if vague objection.
He opposed it on the exact opposite grounds, that the provisional government wasn’t going anywhere near far enough and they were really just puppets of Project Zero, which was mildly ironic as Project Zero had still failed to acknowledge the provisional government in any way whatsoever.
Remember those 4% who had voted for secession? Well, he managed to somehow end up the leader of them. This seem to pose a real threat to Project Zero’s approval of the provisional government. The group had very carefully never actually advance the idea of overthrowing Project Zero, had been very careful to talk about how they were trying to work with them to create a local government under them. A few of them had even argued they should remove that option from the polling they did on the Constitution, just in case.
If Project Zero actually thought they were trying to overthrow them, things could go bad quickly. And now there was someone openly pushing for it.
Jeremy also posed a fairly large threat in that he controlled the networking infrastructure of the entire island, excluding the Project Zero and MTP buildings themselves. Although he did appear to be a somewhat ethical network administrator there, and he never once threatened to cut off services, never attempted to actually use his access and passwords to do anything damaging. But, everyone knew that he could, at any moment.
And considering how much of that was unofficial, and the semi-official parts ran through Elias, who was on vague terms with the provisional government himself, it’s not like they could fire him or change the passwords, they didn’t even have anyone who could do the job instead.
There’s a joke in computer science about how the best job security is to build something so incomprehensible that no one else can never figure it out, but Jeremy hadn’t done that. He just truly was irreplaceable, and all you had to do to realize that was to consider the state of the network before he arrived.