When Solomon made his first appearance online, a splash was caused that reverberated around the world. On the 23rd of July 1997, a hacker broke into the computer systems of MI6, the British governments top national security agency, and rooted through top secret files in the system for five hours before being discovered and shut out. Days later, over 4000 pages of logs of the files that were accessed and explored were mailed to the offices of the BBC from the sender I AM SOLOMON. After the story broke, the vulnerability of the world's most sensitive information that Solomon had revealed made him a celebrity sensation in the burgeoning hacking community and public enemy number one to the national security complex. In the days after the story broke, current and former national security officials made hourly appearances on all major news networks to condemn the leak and castigate Solomon for the danger that he had exposed the world to by treating information that was used to protect people as if it was a toy to be played with. The coordinated messaging campaign against Solomon, orchestrated and carried out by government insiders, served only to enhance Solomon's notoriety and his celebrity as a fearless crusader for truth.

Following the release of the MI6 logs, Solomon disappeared from the cyber sphere for an extended period of time, a smart move, his supporters thought, given the bull's-eye that the world's governments had put on his back. He surfaced again in 1999, after an earthquake in Bogotá, Colombia killed 450 people and injured thousands more. A website appeared shortly after the tragedy, Solomon.com, where he posted e-mails from the national meteorological center warning the mayor of Bogota about troubling seismic activity that had been detected, e-mails that the mayor chose not to act on out of fear that investment in the city would be curtailed if the prospect of an imminent earthquake was out there in the public domain. The mayor's particular concern was in regard to an investment by The Kleinmann Group, a US capital consortium, to build a hotel and leisure complex that would be the flagship project of the city's economic boom that he'd promised to bring about during his election campaign. The e-mails published on Solomon.com revealed not only the mayor's dangerous cover up of the possibility of an earthquake but also the bribes and kickbacks that the mayor and members of his cabinet had taken from The Kleinmann Group in exchange for fast tracking the project. And it wasn't only The Kleinmann Group; Solomon exposed a vast network of the corruption at the center of which was the mayor. The revelations, which were verified and widely covered by the news media, produced mass protests in the city which forced the mayor to resign and flee to Venezuela to avoid prosecution.

Unlike the release of the MI6 logs, the release of the Bogota e-mails didn't cause any consternation, in fact international governments that praised the protests and the resulting political change were placed in the uncomfortable position of having to grudgingly admit that none of it would have been possible without Solomon shining a light on the corruption in the city. In the wake of the positive response to the Bogota leaks, Solomon started regularly posting stolen information on his website that exposed untoward behavior on the part of the rich and powerful without getting the political blowback that he'd gotten from leaking the MI6 logs. This strategic shift in Solomon's approach to leaking was the result of the rooster advising the owl that if Solomon wanted the information that he disseminated to have the desired effect then he needed to avoid leaking irresponsibly so as not to have what he was trying to accomplish being undermined by smear campaigns against him. Following the Bogota leak, there was a leak about a Belgian pharmaceutical company using a clinic in Congo to test drugs on poor people, that was followed by a leak about an oil company using pipes made from substandard steel to construct an underwater pipeline which subsequently burst, and that was followed by the leaking of texts from a prominent CEO's cell phone that led to the breaking up of an underage sex trafficking ring. At this point public opinion about Solomon was universally positive, and the owl, which had been so disgusted by the sight of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, was delighting in seeing some of the worst of humanity having a spotlight shone on them.

The owl's knowledge was absolute, there was nothing that happened in the world that it did not know about and the ever growing litany of sins that humanity committed against the planet and against each other made it more sick every day. As disgusted as it had become by humanity the owl really should have been on the Raven's side, but the Raven was an extremist whose methods troubled the owl, which had too often seen the results of extremism, everything from the inquisition to the death camps to the gulag. In many cases, the root cause of these human tragedies could be traced back to the idea that the Raven had first planted into the mind of the pharaoh Akhenaton that uniformity of belief and culture was the key to order, which was the key to sustained prosperity. The Raven had gravely miscalculated. It's consolidation of belief theory had given rise to dangerous absolutism which people always found very easy to use as justification for their actions, whether that be religious persecution in the name of Christianity, political persecution in the name of communism or economic and environmental exploitation in the name of capitalism. The owl was disgusted by all of this and wanted to expose everything that was rotten about the world as a way of getting people to see the dangers involved in blindingly putting their faith in an idea or an individual who's seen as the embodiment of that idea but was biding its time on the advice of the rooster which had warned it about poking the hornet's nest too aggressively. There were two individuals in particular who were of interest to the owl, one was David Huntsman, the CEO of Prism Capital, , and the other was Jim Balmer, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Both were working for the Raven, the owl knew that much, but the precise details of the Raven's plan were a mystery to it as the owl's omniscience didn't extend beyond the mortal world. The owl could guess at what the Raven was up to based on the actions of its disciples and what it looked like was that the Raven was deploying dual strategies: one strategy was to sow as much discord as it could in as many societies as it could to create favorable environments for authoritarians to ascend to power, and the other strategy was to make the Goose's job harder by using environmental disasters to anger the Guardians of nature which were always on the Goose's side. With respect to the Raven's strategy of angering the Guardians it had thus far failed, the goat and the Wolf were both supporting the Goose, leaving only the water Guardian, the Leviathan, for the Goose to find and awaken. The Leviathan's anger, as evidenced by the storms of unprecedented strength that it was unleashing, was the greatest of all the Guardians, so great that the owl wasn't sure if the Goose was going to be able to get through to it, that's assuming they were able to make their way to it through the storms. There was every possibility, given how angry the Leviathan was, that it would refuse to cooperate with the Goose, and if the Raven was able to get the lion, and possibly the Leviathan, then the Goose was going to have an impossible task on its hands in trying to stop the Raven. There were things that the owl could do to help the Goose with its vast repositories of information it had about the Raven's disciples, a great deal of which was seriously incriminating, none of which, if released, would make the slightest bit of difference if the Raven was able to use the incredible amount of strength it had amassed to exert total control over everything, in the event of which the owl would have certain concerns to consider, chief among them being the wellbeing of Solomon.

Since it had first started to pay attention to Solomon as a teenage Canadian hacker who was biting off more than he could chew by breaking into government security systems, the owl had worried about him. The boy wasn't the crusading digital anarchist that people made him out to be. His father was an oil worker who had gone missing in Iraq, most likely kidnapped. After his mother had exhausted all of the avenues available to her for obtaining information about her husband's whereabouts, the boy who would come to be known as Solomon decided to look for answers himself, in his own way. He had been playing around with hacking since he was twelve years old and had rapidly gotten better at it over the years. When he was fifteen, he was contacted online by a group of hackers who called themselves The Torchbearers, who wanted him to join them. At that time, when the internet was still a nascent technology and hacking wasn't fully understood and thus not recognized as a serious crime, hackers all over the world were competing with each other to see who could get their hands on the most valuable information. The whole thing was a game that was played purely for bragging rights, with points being awarded based on the difficulty involved in obtaining information and the winners being determined by tallying up the points earned by the individual team members. The boy agreed to become a member of The Torchbearers and introduced himself to the hacking world as Solomon. At first Solomon took his membership in The Torchbearers seriously. The competitions that they participated in always took place over a defined period of time, usually twelve hours. When a contest was announced, the various team members would discuss which targets they were going to go after and strategize about their approach to breaking into those targets. Once they had agreed on their targets and their strategy, Solomon did an extensive amount of homework of his own and when the time came for the contest to begin he was the most prepared participant in them. With Solomon on their team, The Torchbearers became the dominant force in these games with Solomon breaking into the highest value targets in the shortest amount of time and scoring the most points for his team. The highest value targets in all of these games were military intelligence systems, the only targets that Solomon was interested in. He would sit for hours at his computer until well into the night with a pot of coffee next to him testing his skill against security systems in the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, MI6 and even The White House, security systems that were supposed to be impenetrable but which he always managed to find entryways into. Once he'd found his way in he would retreat, upload the log file of his success and claim victory. After four months with The Torchbearers, Solomon got bored and disappeared from the net, but his fame as the greatest hacker in the world lived on, so that when the story about Solomon breaking into MI6 and rooting around inside for four hours was reported on the news, the internet was sent into a dizzying frenzy, with members of the hacking community claiming online that Solomon was back and he was out to expose all of the world's dirty secrets. In truth, Solomon hadn't managed to find what he was looking for and had released the logs to the press in the hope that somebody would keep looking into the information he released and find something that could be useful in ascertaining the whereabouts of his father. Nobody did follow up on the leak, and Solomon was forced to continue looking for details about his father's disappearance on his own. By this time hacking had come to be recognized as a serious crime. Laws had been passed that imposed strict criminal penalties for hacking and governments and businesses had significantly beefed up their cyber security. Solomon wasn't deterred by any of this. He changed tactics and started breaking into military and intelligence systems for just long enough to install an unobtrusive piece of spyware that he could use to sift through any data that passed through the network that contained keywords such as 'Iraq', 'Kidnapped', 'Foreign Oil Workers', 'Canadian National', 'Hostage Negotiation', 'Captured Spy' etc.

For eighteen months he sat at his computer for hours every day poring over data for information about his father, finding nothing. The owl, having taken an interest in Solomon months earlier, watched over him for the duration of his fruitless search and had come to feel tremendous sympathy for him. The owl recognized that Solomon, with his hacking abilities, could be very useful to it in exposing the worst of humanity. Unlike the other Guardians, the owl didn't need to be awakened to gain the capacity for speech. It appeared before Solomon on one of the nights that he was sitting in front of his computer analyzing the data that his spyware had gathered and told him the truth about his father, that he had been killed and buried in the desert. The shock of being spoken to by an irregularly colored owl (it was yellow, blue and green), together with the fact that it was the news that he was expecting, did a lot to mitigate his grief upon learning of his father's death. Solomon (real name Ryan Keely) was at this point nineteen years old and living at home with his mother in a house in a Toronto suburb. Ryan told his mother the news about his father without mentioning the owl, telling her that he had obtained the information online. His mother had, like him, been prepared for this news for a while and wasn't overly grief stricken upon hearing it. Having at last learned the truth about his father, Ryan had to decide what he would now devote his time to. His mother knew what he had been doing with all of his time and encouraged him to go out into the world having spent his whole life in his room in front of his computer. In addition to mining data for news about his father Ryan had spent the last three years doing freelance coding and had amassed a decent amount of money in his savings account, enough for him to use to travel which he could do while continuing to be a freelance coder.

Together with the owl he went to Europe, starting his journey in London. The owl and Ryan had had a discussion about what the owl envisioned their relationship being and Ryan was on board with it. During the time that he had spent spying on western intelligence agencies he had come across a lot of disturbing information that he wanted to release publicly but chose not to because he didn't want to draw attention to himself and jeopardize his search for his father. Ryan was no longer restricted by his need to be careful for the sake of being able to continue searching for his father and so felt no reservations about taking the owl up on its offer, which was for him to use his hacking skills to obtain proof of what the owl informed him of so that, when released to the public, the information would be indisputable. They were all ready to go with their first leak: a story about the US military executing captured enemy combatants in Afghanistan because of their inability to adequately incarcerate them, which Ryan had obtained proof of by hacking into the Defense Secretary's MILNET messages, when they were stopped by the intervention of the rooster. The rooster often had to intervene to warn the owl about indiscriminately disseminating information. It's advice to Ryan and the owl was that they should begin by leaking stories that would enjoy maximum public support and wouldn't result in Solomon becoming mired in controversy like he had been in the aftermath of the MI6 leak. The rooster also advised them to create a website that took advantage of the fame of Solomon and publish their leaks on the website rather than relying on the press; this would establish Solomon as the place to go to first for news that you wouldn't be able to find anywhere else, which would make Solomon as powerful as any news organization. Ryan liked what the rooster had to say and decided to accept all of its advice. The website Solomon.com was launched to great online fanfare, with the Bogota releases and the ensuing political upheaval serving as merely a taste of what was to come.

Ryan spent a week in London before moving on to Paris. His plan was to do a city a week and publish a leak right before he left so he couldn't be tracked. To make his savings last as long as possible he lived as frugally as possible, only carrying with him a backpack that contained two changes of clothes and his laptop. He stayed at cheap hotels or at youth hostels, and if he managed to get a good sleep on the train between destinations then he didn't bother with finding a place to stay. Sometimes when he arrived in a new town he would meet someone and they would invite him to stay with them. It surprised Ryan how easy he was finding it to meet people and socialize with them given what a shut-in he'd been his whole life. Of course, were it not for the unusual owl perched on his shoulder, people would have been a lot less curious about him and he would have been experiencing far fewer social interactions. During his discussions with those he met, Ryan would often bring up Solomon and ask the people he was speaking with if they were familiar with the website and the leaks published there. Dispiritingly, only a few of the people he met were familiar with Solomon, which, when he thought about it, made sense; after all, why should someone in Düsseldorf care about what was going on in Bogotá? The owl reminded him that they needed to be patient; building trust and an audience takes time. They continued on their travels and they continued publishing leaks. The owl was right, the more they leaked the more Solomon's fame grew. Through his website he received messages from activists, journalists and opposition politicians thanking him for exposing dirty secrets that the beholden and compromised establishment had been keeping covered up. Every leak, as soon as it was published, became the #1 trending topic on social media, which forced news channels to cover it as their headline news story lest they be accused of refusing to cover the story because they were part of the beholden establishment. After leaking at a consistent rate of twice a week for six months, Solomon's popularity had skyrocketed to the point that Solomon.com was one of the top ten most visited websites on the net. They had achieved the fame that they were aiming for. Millions of people worldwide were making Solomon.com the first place they visited to get their news and all of them accepted that because it was from Solomon it was true. Ryan and the owl visited Italy two weeks after posting a story on the website about an Italian politician who was stealing money from funds that the EU had given to Italy to help them deal with the African migrant crisis while at the same time taking money from people smugglers in exchange for tipping them off about the timing and routes of naval patrols. Outside of the politician's house in Naples, hundreds of people gathered to protest and demand her arrest. Ryan was in the crowd of protestors with the owl and for the first time got to see firsthand the power that he had as Solomon. Some of the protestors wore Guy Fawkes masks, others wore cheap crowns and robes and carried cheap scepters. They carried signs that read "NO ONE HIDES FROM SOLOMON" or "SOLOMON HAS SPOKEN" or "BY SOLOMON BE JUDGED". It occurred to Ryan that he could post whatever he wanted about whomever he wanted and people would believe it and mobilize against whomever he had targeted.

"Get that thought out of your head," the owl said to him after they had left the protest.

"What are you talking about?"

"Are you forgetting that I am omniscient? You're thinking about abusing your power and taking shortcuts, many of my adoptees have succumbed to this temptation in the past, it never ends well, and if you decide to go down the same road I won't do anything to help you when you get yourself into trouble."

"Okay."

They were too close to achieving their goal for the owl to allow the same old problem of excessive hubris to derail everything. The time had now come for them to move on to the next phase: actively targeting the Raven's disciples. This was when things were going to get dangerous; as soon as unflattering details about David Huntsman, Jim Balmer, Fyodor Milichenko and the Raven's other disciples began appearing in the public domain courtesy of Solomon the Raven was going to know that the owl was behind it and given how much trouble the owl had given the Raven in the past the Raven was going to respond swiftly and without remorse. To prepare Ryan for what was going to be coming their way the owl told him all about the Goose, the Raven and the Guardians and asked him if, knowing everything that he now knows and the stakes involved, he wished to continue. Ryan's answer was an unequivocal yes, which committed them to this path but did nothing to ease the owl's worries about the danger that it was exposing Ryan to.