James Hawken

James Hawken is a scientist who immigrated to Illal to work for a multi-planetary corporation's research and development department. His extremely high aptitudes for engineering and mathematics as well as his creativity made him Prosk's top scientist and led to many breakthroughs that became vital to everyday life on the planet. The Hawken Virus is named after him, to commemorate the fact he was its first confirmed victim.

Beginnings
Hawken was originally granted Illan citizenship to work for Sentium's R&D department as a research assistant. After several years he had still received no promotion despite his outstanding work. He believed this was because he was a new immigrant to Illal, as opposed to his superiors who had been there for several generations and used their connections to keep him in place.

A visit by an acquaintance and Prosk corporate security man Rion Lazlo led to him breaking his contract and secretly leaving Titan City to relocate in Andromeda to work for Prosk.

Prosk Career
His weak social skills and tendency to pursue theoretical research instead of producing applicable concepts initially put him at odds with his Prosk employers, and as months went by his strange behaviour and lack of interest in the optimization tasks given to him alienated him from the rest of his research team. All this changed after Rion Lazlo took part in a raid on Sentium HQ and gathered top secret data from their servers, which Hawken went to work decoding.

After cracking the encryption, he discovered the existence of Cavorite, an anti-grativational material that Sentium had been using to lighten its products and vehicles to give them an edge over Prosk's. With Lazlo's help, he build a prototype mech whose hull was infused with an enhanced and processed version of cavorite which he called nanocavorite, and which demonstrated unprecedented agility, speed, and the ability to fly for brief periods of time thanks to dorsal thrusters.

This discovery and its subsequent applications put him at the head of Prosk's scientific division, with privileged access to funding and resources for all his projects.

Hawken later married another Prosk researcher, Oliphia Aubrey, while continuing to develop new technologies. His main projects were Project Ohmu (a nanobot based process where nanobots would constantly monitor a mech's hull, and at any sign of damage would swarm over the gap to form a metallic bandage under which they replicate and assemble until the hull is back to its former strength) and the production of synthetic cavorite, an undertaking of necessity as cavorite was very finite resource on Illal which caused many small scale armed conflicts between Sentium and Prosk.

The death of his wife after childbirth left him a broken man, as he was left to care alone for a daughter named Jayd.

Defection to Crion & the Hawken Virus
As work on the artificial cavorite project neared completion, Hawken suddenly left Prosk. This was due to the discovery that his wife had been assassinated on orders of Prosk's CEO Lazlo Rion on charges of industrial espionage. Despite the MPC employing all the means it could to find and detain Hawken, he eluded them for months until he was discovered working in a small Crion medical laboratory in Typhus, near Praxis Valley.

A commando of Prosk corporate security men was sent to retrieve him from the lab and bring him back, dead or alive. Unknown events transpired during the attack which led to a massive detonation that razed all of Typhus and most of Praxis Valley, releasing clouds of nanobots which started clinging to the surrounding environment. Hawken and everyone in the facility was presumed dead.

These nanobots proliferated into what is now known as the Hawken Virus, and caused the creation of the Giga-Structure.