Gabriel von Morde

Born into the uppermost of the upper class, Gabriel von Morde's family has been among the topmost echelons of Hanover's management for so long that nobody seems to give the obvious nepotism that much thought anymore. Both he and his older brother are very high-up Hanover executives, with a great deal of authority over the Incorporate nation's dealings on Poseidon.

Gabriel's brainchild modification was an ill-considered move on his parents' part. Although it has gifted him with extraordinary intelligence and intuition (reached to positively clairvoyant levels by his later acquisition of the ESP biomod), it also left him deeply sociopathic, utterly without conscience, and posessed of a deep-seated megalomania that has shown itself since he gained high status within the corporation.

Part of his megalomania has manifested itself in the desire to create the perfect weapon. Believing that this weapon must be biological in nature, he began looking, illegally of course, into projects involving the creation of genetically designed supersoldiers. Setting up a secret organization called the Avalon Project in order to conduct this research, he convinced scientists from all over the planet to join him in his hunt, though very few of those involved in the Avalon Project know what their research is going toward.

Although the research of the Avalon Project is proceeding well, albeit slowly, von Morde's lack of patience has caused him to look to other peoples' research in the hopes of speeding up his own group's progress. When the Nighnoae brothers, Dr. Elwood von Mierhoff, and hacker Efan Orm Radashe unwittingly uncovered Lavender Organics' JNR project (and submitted information about it as evidence during the trumped-up trial that followed), Gabriel got word of the project. Resolved to get his hands on the surviving JNR speciment, JNR-13, he dispatched Gertrude Baum to keep an eye on the group, and seize any findings they might make regarding JNR-13's genetic structure, which she attempted to do on several occasions, but was thwarted at each.

After an unrelated firefight in Kingston harbor that resulted in the Nighnoae party's arrest, Gabriel pulled strings with the GEO commission in Fort Pacifica to have their trial conducted speedily, clandestinely, and without any possible hope of acquittal, and arranged for them to be sent to Hanover's maximum-security prison at Böse Strand, expecting that this would keep them out of his way long enough for the Avalon Project to analyze JNR-13. Unfortunately for him, Dr. von Mierhoff, Radashe, and Garret Nighnoae all managed to escape from the island prison and fetched up on Westcape. Gabriel immediately mobilized forces on Westscape to recapture them, but not before the uncovered and destroyed the kraken guarding a Creator cache in Hell's Basin.

After an attempt to capture Radashe to get ahold of Snow Crash and the kraken's autopsy recording, Gabriel was hospitalized due to a severe brain seizure resulting from his release of the modified Snow Crash virus into the Avalon Project's computers (intending it from there to be released into Haven's CommCore grid) without having first installed an antivirus. Eventually he may wake up from the coma he's in, and what he'll do then... no man can say.