Peter Vangelis is the face of selenite excellence.

There is an air of artificiality to the man. He is handsome. He is fluent in four Terran languages and three solar system dialects. His handshake his firm, his words always expertly chosen. He is a close friend of Ishaia Akanni. He plays the theremin. He won silver at the 2522 zero-g shooting solar championship. His daughter is a renowned scientist and his son a famous dancer. He is one of the rare Selenite leaders to have the ear of Alazar Abraham. And, of course, he helms the largest trade fleet in human space. As far as Selenites are concerned, he won at life.

I find him insufferable.

I have spent years looking for a crack in the syndicalist icon -- first as a private investigator working for Terran parties, then as a journalist. I have uncovered confidential documents, dug through his past, hired surveillance cooperatives to track his every moves, got into trouble with Selenite counter-intelligence, and what for?

Groundbreaking discoveries. Peter Vangelis' favourite colour is blue. He sleeps on the right side of the bed. His ice cream flavour of choice is vanilla. He is allergic to peanuts. He phones his kids every week and writes cards for their birthdays when they aren't on the Moon. He is a fan of the Shackleton Axolotls, the most popular low-g Ullamaliztli team in cislunar space. He bikes every day - twenty kilometers with his trusty Aquamarine 600 racing bicycle, fifty on the weekends. He likes his fish well-made and with tomato sauce. He always sets the timer of his rice cooker on eight minutes even when the recipe says nine. The mysterious lady he visits every Saturday is his one-hundred-and-twenty year old grandmother, who calls him Pete. Ten years ago, he got fined in Tranquillity City for parking his Aquamarine 600 on an emergency drone emplacement. The municipality cancelled the ticket a month later. The emplacement hadn't been correctly indicated and he was exonerated of all charges.

What about his politics? He's an avowed syndicalist, which on the Moon means a centrist. He began as an orbital worker, then went through the ideal cursus honorum of Selenite politics -- was elected syndicate representative at his local shipyard in Faustini, then became a regional delegate, served two terms in the Selene Council, then transitioned to a full-time job in the civil service and was recently appointed head of the Bureau of the Trade Fleet. Everything in his career is public, well-referenced and makes a lot of sense.

More recently, Smyrnian recyclers -- with whom the Selenite Trade Fleet has a longstanding grudge due to minor instances of piracy -- tried to smear him by crafting fake documents incriminating him in a shipbuilding corruption case. Interviewed by Fathoms, he candidly answered that the accusation was bogus because if a remote cislunar station needed a custom-made Mansa Musa hull, they could just ask and he'd happily oblige, for such was the generosity of public Selenite services. Guess who then became an instant subnet sensation for being a perfect incarnation of lunar civic values? Don't answer.

Believe it or not, the man actually has a notable secret. He's penned three Welkin books for Agit-Prop publishing under a pseudonym. And you know what? They're fine. Probably among the best outings in the series after the copyright went communal. His second acts tend to be a bit on the weaker side and he overuses weather-based superweapons as a plot device (perhaps because he's compensating for a whole life spent in a place where rain happens on-demand) but his books are perfectly readable. 

I hate him so much.

There's nothing there! Nothing! Peter Vangelis is a good man. The third or fourth most powerful state servant in the solar system is just an outstanding lunar citizen. I must assume that he is a function of a mature off-world society that, past a certain point, merely starts producing People Like That. 

Character illustration from a stock archive by PO-Art.