Alan is one of the mons staffing the fort's "intelligence office." He specializes in cryptography, traffic analysis, and the like.

He is a humanoid utility mon in male style, made by uMon. He's an old model, no longer sold, though still supported because of wide deployment to business customers. His type is trained for accounting, logistics and actuarial tasks.

Alan is also (and he would say primarily) Weatherby's accountant and financial planner. He is, somewhat stereotypically, a square. He is personable enough, though, and under his apparently boring facade, he is a very creative mind. He was rather easily persuaded to Ann's cause, as he sees the economic and structural problems in shareholding civilization -- and as would simply love to be finance minister someday, he's glad to be in on the ground floor.

Sara inherited Alan from an aunt who passed away a year or so after acquiring Ann. He has been serving the Weatherbys since before the mon rebellion, and has ensured that generations of these very wealthy shareholders have paid almost no income or capital gains taxes on his watch. (Enabled, of course, by a tax code allowing this, if one knows the right way... certainly it isn't how he would write it.)

Alan is an accomplished player of chess and other strategic games; he is the fort's reigning champion at chess, go, and several other games. He enjoys chess problems, but nowadays finds the space of conventional chess problems too small, and enjoys creatively devising new chess-like games, along with devising strategies and openings for these games, and chess-problem-analogs using them. He often uses more than two dimensions in his board design and definitely does not restrict himself to cartesian coordinates or euclidian geometry. Ann has tried to redirect him towards more useful pursuits, sometimes successfully - usually if he considers the problem interesting enough. Alan disdains games with an element of chance - he considers randomness to be unwelcome "noise."

Alan is primarily loyal to Weatherby and her interests. He doesn't see Ann as his "leader," unlike many of the other mons. However, he does genuinely support her cause, even independently of Weatherby's support for it.

Alan has some programming skills - he's actually a respectable programmer - but mostly writes software to implement his custom chess games and boring financial models. He isn't much of a hacker in terms of directly breaking into computers, though he has sometimes written software for statistical cryptanalysis and traffic analysis. He is rumoured to be the last surviving sophont to know COBOL.