Profile

SIRONA is a female hacktivist from Germany involved with others in an underground attempt to prove that all computers can be manipulated, even voting computers. For that, they are working on a large and spectacular project that will make any Pirate Party look like a playschool outing.

Sirona is a very exentric young woman prone to wearing tulle tutus and fairy wings, or black latex with long leather coats, with tons of make-up, whenever she wants to, and get away with looking half-Trinity, half-Sailor Moon, or like her own WoW avatar. The only constant is a large silver bracelet of a coiling snake that she will wear with any of those outfits. She is capricious, secretive, and has always another agenda hidden behind her overt intentions.

Silke Roswitha Nahle is a young woman working for a succession of high tech firms, both eletronics and biotech, in and around Wiesbaden/Germany, on several high-end IT jobs. She is reasonably pretty and cleans up well in the usual smart pinstriped business suit. Nobody suspects her of anything except wanting a good career and relatively easy money -- but weren't there rumours of an affair with one of the execs a few jobs ago?

Sirona is an ancient Celtic goddess of hot springs and healing, connected to several spa towns known in Roman and pre-Roman times around France, Germany and Eastern Europe, reaching as far as Budapest. She is also connected to stars, wolves, and children, and depicted holding snakes in her hands or around her arms. She was something of the local patroness of the Mattiaci, the Celtic tribe that inhabited a valley near the Rhine river which boasted several hot springs, one of them quite sulphurous and used for curative purposes from pre-Roman times to today. Aquis Mattiacorum, in modern times called Wiesbaden, enjoyed a rich history as a place to 'take the waters', from Roman times through its heyday in the decades before WW I. until modern times, with unique facilities that still attract, say, medical tourists from the Arab world. A Roman inscription from Sirona's temple still takes pride of place in the local museum, or rather, used to until the Modern Arts curator started downsizing all other departments as not really interesting. Like any classical goddess, she can be very capricious and will be randomly generous to those that do her bidding.

Sirona the goddess is of course in the public domain; but in this specific incarnation, she is from the novel 'Ein König für Deutschland' ('A King For Germany'), and is the property of Andreas Eschbach. She appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made. The player behind the sockpuppet is yakalskovich. The PB is Emilie Autumn.

A few notes about the canon: The book is, unfortunately, only published in German, and is a political/IT thriller about voting computers, which is MUCH less boring than it sounds. The author, Andreas Eschbach, is actually the one I got to interview a year ago, which happened quietly by email; him pulling the goddess card at the end to a) round off his story neatly and b) destroy the suspension of disbelief at the end of what is essentially a warning parable about the challenges democracy faces in the 21st century is one of those strokes of genius I like about his storytelling. Eschbach's most successful book so far (even adapted into a TV movie here!) was a time-travelling thriller, and while we slowly accept that time-travelling has happened at all and deal with the implications, we keep asking ourselves how it was done, only to learn in the end that the time-traveller happened to crawl into some caves, got a bit dizzy, and crawled out two thousand years in the past: - there is no technical and/or metaphysical explanation, we need no explanation at all, because the book is about the implications of the time travel and the object the time traveller cached to be found in the future. Eschbach uses the same gambit again with Sirona in his newest book -- she neatly holds the fabric of his narrative together like a fibula because he doesn't want to invent some random reason for it all happening: - things ultimately happen because Sirona is a goddess, and pissed off because her people's votes have been stolen, which is the only motivation I can see for her acting the way she does. She is a goddess, so she can set things into motion even in the past, and in the end, walks sideways, back into the Otherworld. What's really interesting is not why or how she does it all, but the very real implications for modern democracy. The book is full of footnotes, especially in the earlier parts of exposition. Oh, and the title is a pun: actually, the group of hacktivists around Sirona uses an elderly history teacher named Simon König (= King, a last name in English just as well!) as a figurehead for the bogus party they found to prove their point. Nobody seriously wants to reintroduce monarchy...