As a Sleeper, Sam was a (slightly above average) skilled programmer and computer science nerd when he was recruited during his senior year at UT by what he thought was a small tech company, working on a few minor but significant logistical issues and software projects for a major multinational corporation that was focused on designing and developing long-term habitats for hostile environments (deep sea, arctic, and deep space conditions). However, Sam had a tendency to snoop around in computer systems he had no business in, and learned more than his his superiors were entirely comfortable with. He soon realized the advancements and designs the company was working on were too far beyond anything he'd ever heard of from mainstream science, and discovered the entire company was under the control of a shadowy society known as the Technocracy.

Upon the realization that his employers were in fact utilizing Magic in their work (they called it Science, but what was that old sci-fi saying? Any sufficiently advanced science was indistinguishable from magic, or something like that?), Sam underwent his own Awakening and spent several months studying and growing his talents under the watchful tutelage of Sienna Hyatt, a member of the Void Engineers (and a coworker on whom he'd had a rather sizable crush ever since they'd begun working together). Sienna, however, did not reciprocate his feelings, but did attempt to use his emotions to draw him further into the Union and cement his loyalty to the Technocracy. The deeper he delved into the ways of the Conventions, however, the more he disagreed with their operations, their methods, their entire philosophy. He confronted Sienna over their conflicting beliefs one night, before leaking the company's files onto public domain websites and purging the corporate databases, ruining years of work and levelling what he saw as an atrociously uneven playing field among their competitors.

After spending nearly a year scratching out a living designing and maintaining cheap websites for local businesses and spending long, empty nights surfing the net looking for new guidance, Sam garnered the attention of the Virtual Adepts. They took notice of the skill he displayed in both sticking it to the Technocracy, and evading their retribution for it, and he was accepted into their ranks. Now he works
by day as a freelance 'security consultant', offering his services to corporations concerned with their network security. By night, Sam operates as a cyberterrorist, hunting down whatever Union secrets he can find and ripping them out from behind their cloistered firewalls for the world to see.