vernon koetter began his professorship in philosophy at the university of nevada in 2091, not long after the state presidency approved implementation of a utah-style affinity nudge scheme.  in keeping with the public presentation of the program as a nonintrusive alternative to the outright mind control of the orient, it was legal to use commonly available materials to insulate one's own home and, if one was in public, one's own body from radio nudge waves.  veko, as his students called him, was a man of considerable grit and resourcefulness after his childhood on a subsistence farm in the troubled years which followed the restoration.  vehemently opposed to the affinity nudge regime, he was able to engineer faraday cages into his own home and apparel, and was successful in blocking out external mental influence, which left him particularly bitter at his neighbors, friends, family, and students, all of whom were quickly made into enthusiastic cogs in a million-man social machine.  because he had avoided ever having his mind scanned, the modelling of his emotional response functions was very poor, and the welfare square's best face and body monitoring technology was useless at identifying the subversive motives which palpitated through his mind over decades.

once administration was centralized in the charismatic thought leader position and it became clear that evading the system would soon fall under the ban, veko quit his position and went into hiding on his parents' old farm.  ruminating on the works of ralph waldo emerson, he yearned for a return to past centuries when it was even possible to conceive of a society in which each man was encouraged to form his own conception of god, morality, and the universe.  but today it was impossible to believe such a thing.

the dominant theology in mormon-controlled territory in the early 22nd century was called point-deterministic open theism, which held that god possessed no foreknowledge of the future, but possessed sufficient power to shape the present to fit his intended designs at every moment.  veko was never permitted to point out in public that if such a thing was true, and all matter is eternal (a well-established axiom in mormon theology), then even god doesn't have free will.

through (some event which may or may not need elaboration) veko was able to find likeminded individuals well-placed within the charismatic administration to form the secret combination known as Lacuna.  at first sworn only to recover for themselves their own wills through database hacks, they soon realized that they were in a singular position to influence state politics for the better.  not only could they make well-targeted nudges of individuals, but they could use nudge waves to perform illegal nootropic mind modifications on themselves.  four were able to confer the thought leader's loosing power upon themselves, among them philip dezeng and veko himself.

when exercising such power over others, veko would refer to himself as master mahan, a mocking nod to cain's self-title after he formed a pact with lucifer (who had wanted a universe full of automatons incapable of defying god) in joseph smith's translation of genesis.

the accession of dezeng's young daughter, prudence, to the position of thought leader in january 2030 caused a rift within lacuna, with dezeng believing the group had achieved its goals by placing a benevolent thought leader into power who would reform the charismatic branch in accord with lacuna's ideals.  veko and the majority of the conspiracy, on the other hand, thought prudence was too popular for them to maintain leverage over her and set about to kill her before she further cemented the legitimacy of the system in the public mind.