Anto is a man from a now defunct Brinker habitat called ZY-986i (henceforth referred to as the locals did as 'Zed'). It was founded as an asteroid mining operation and when the owners abandoned it due to problems with extraction rates, the workers simply took it over and made it their home. Most people didn't pay the place any mind, but they gained a bit of notoriety as a fantastic place to exchange high-end goods without anyone snooping, due to the habitat's strict opinion on surveillance nets; anyone running them got kicked off.

Of course after people realized this, it almost became a game of chicken as the solar system's most clever operatives and information brokers descended on the place and tried to outsmart the locals. For a while they failed, but eventually they succeeded and the habitat closed off to all outsiders for several years following a nasty incident involving an outsider bringing a nanoplague onto the station in an effort to distract the local enforcers enough to get away with installing a bunch of meshed hardware before anyone noticed. The outsider got lynched and had their stack installed in a case morph with a fresh nuclear battery and a broken mesh insert before getting kicked out of an airlock. Logic dictates they're still floating around out there to this day; it's awful tough to find something that small in the vastness of space.

But Anto's relevance comes into play later. He really came up during the time of the isolation, which began a few years after the Fall. He started serving as Zed's gofer since they still needed supplies, but had traditionally relied on traders to do so. He ran a hauler between the habitat and other more open Brinker stations for a while and everything was okay. He felt important and the people at home relied on him. After a while the inhabitants of Zed realized they'd be in a lot of trouble if he failed to make a run one day, so they urged the station's leaders to invest the year's budget for station upgrades into acquiring a decent blueprint and enough fabber mass to have everyone on the station fitted with an internal reservoir. In case Anto got delayed or something happened to him they could have enough food stocked up to last them a while longer. So they did. Anto bought the blueprints and a large stockpile of the fabber mass required, as well as a copy of a high end surgeon's ego from a Nine Lives representative the station had done business with before they isolated themselves.

At first the surgeon, Nina Leone, was furious and indignant at the idea of having been fork-napped. The last thing she remembered was attending a conference on experimental ego manipulation and having gone through a showroom floor demo for a very trustworthy and high-end equipment supplier for her hospital. Perhaps the idea that evil lurks everywhere is what really got to her, but that doesn't matter for now. What matters is that eventually she settled into her role on this station, recognizing that she had a valuable skillset and that she probably wasn't going to get off the station without divine intervention. It makes it interesting that she ended up being one of the most ardent objectors to what happened next.

Anto being happy that he had enabled such a change for the better in the station had found something else he thought was valuable. While on a trip to Extropia he had run into Arthur Restal, at the time a rather unknown proponent of heavy body modification in order to survive the harshness of life on the Rim. Anto thought that this man had a lot of ideas that were right for Zed. They had embraced the reservoirs after all. He seemed to know a lot about which modifications and enhancements could make the average transhuman sturdier and healthier in order to survive what may come, be it TITANs, other transhumans or simply the uncaring embrace of vacuum when you least expect it.

So Anto took it upon himself to bring Arthur to Zed in order to show everyone what more could be done to improve their odds. At first his ideas were ridiculed as being too extreme. Why would they need all these things when all they had really wanted to avoid was starvation? But like all demagogues he knew how to twist their words back at them. "But we don't want to starve." eventually came back at them in the form of "What if you could eat sunlight instead of relying on crops? Be the crop." "We have enough weapons and trained people to defend ourselves should anyone attack. Don't be ridiculous." became an ever-pervasive assault on the rational. "What if you can't reach your weapon in time?" or "What if those who come have already modified themselves to be faster, stronger and better?". And while some of the leaders and Nina the relative newcomer surgeon argued against these arguments, the general population fell in line with it and started asking the leadership when they'd be getting further modifications.

A few years down the line, Nina was no longer with them in any shape you could recognize. They had brought a psychosurgeon in to trim her objections out. People had gotten sick of hearing her tell them she really didn't agree with what they wanted her to do to them, even if she begrudgingly performed the procedures. Now she manned the clinic without asking awkward questions and making people doubt the words of Arthur Restal, the one who had elevated them beyond what they thought they could be.

The only one somewhat spared from this constant cycle of augmentation and upgrades turned out to be Anto, who spent so much time off the station that he didn't fall victim to Arthur's constant nagging doubt that he wasn't good enough. He still thought of it as home, even as his transport routes became more and more frequent in search of increasingly exotic goods and wares to bring back. He found himself questioning where the money was coming from at one point, but assumed all the improvements had lead to increased productivity and thus more resources to go around. He just wished they'd set aside some money to improve his ship soon because he was starting to miss home and if they were going to have him fly around all the time they could at least make his trips a bit more comfortable.

One time when he returned, he found Zed's mesh strangely quiet and dormant. There were very few people still left on it. The only ones left were Arthur and Nina. First he checked the clinic and found her there, waiting for the next patient as always. Her eyes didn't even register his existence as he walked in and tried to talk to her without using the words they determined would get her attention. He didn't know the words because he hadn't been there for all of it. Then he found Arthur in his office, now a grand mockery of what the station once believed in, which was equality and fairness for all. He had all the luxury and wealth anyone could dream of. How he had gathered it, Anto had no idea. But clearly he had made the right choice bringing him here. Zed had thrived where all their neighboring stations and habitats had failed; gone quiet or depopulated.

When he found Arthur, Arthur looked like he was expecting him. He told him he had one last mission for him, and he deposited millions of credits into his bank account and gave him a directive; go to the inner system and find as many experts as you can. Gather them for Zed and then bring them through the gate to a specific address. It had all been arranged for him when he was ready, but he had to follow Arthur's instructions to the letter: "You have to find all the inner system's best and brightest. Collect them all. We need all the knowledge we can get and you're our hope Anto. We're too different to go there now, so it's on you. One day you'll have finished your task and you can come to us and be one with us again. Zed awaits you beyond the gate one day, my son. Take whatever you need from this place and understand that your friends and family are still out there among the stars waiting for you."