It was hard to believe it had only been 18 years since the Pulse that fried almost every circuit, computer and utility in the western hemisphere. It felt like a lifetime. For Hugh Larrsen, it had been.

He had been a young man of 20 studying engineering in college when the Pulse hit, rendering education moot - survival became the name of the game. He still had nightmares about the panic and chaos of the cities in those days, people starving and fighting as the infrastructure that supported them froze, civil society shattered, martial law and survivalist gangs took over. He remembered the fear and awe of seeing his first Anomalous Person - the people who, in the wake of the Pulse, found their minds and bodies changed by the energy released, gaining strange talents of their own.

He fought his way out of the city and back to his parent's farm... only to discover it had been taken over and looted by desperate refugees. Rage overcame him, awakening his own Anomalous Power Package - he found he could read the minds of the bandits, sense their need and regret that they had killed the farm's occupants. That empathetic connection didn't stop Hugh from gunning them down, using his app to find them and sow confusion and fear in their midst.

In the nearly two decades since then Hugh has wandered the Disunited States. He fought in the Battle of San Francisco when the Chinese invaded the west coast, and in the Liberation of Hawaii. He has been a courier, a bounty hunter for governments and militias that seek to regulate APs, an agent of the Underground that tries to free and shelter them, and most recently a smuggler, bringing food in from the countryside to the ghost-metropolis of New York.

Hugh is a big, hard man, standing 6'4" tall, most of it muscle and scars. He has a short, tangled thicket of red hair and fierce blue eyes, evidence of his Scandinavian background. He can usually end fights just with his appearance, but when forced to fight he uses a collapsible baton and a bulky .50cal revolver. His app is the ability to read and write minds: he can telepathically communicate with or scan the thoughts of others, and implant or alter ideas in their heads.