An elderly former CMTU scientist who recognizes Mei's abductor from the broadcast and reveals his true name and Protogen-bound past.
Dr. Moynahan is an aged biosciences scientist, eighty or ninety, with a fringe of white hair and a slushy grandfatherly accent, who once worked alongside Mei's abductor at the Ceres Mining and Tech University biosciences lab. Seeing Prax's public broadcast, he messages to say he knows the man in the security video — but his name isn't Strickland, it's Carlos Merrian. Answering Holden's follow-ups across a fifteen-minute lag, he explains that Merrian worked on biological development constraint systems, made few allies, and crossed ethical gray areas; that he quit the day before his ethics review, ranting through the lab that the small-minded pencil-pushers couldn't push him around anymore because he'd landed a corporate job with unlimited funding and no "petty ethical constraints." His plain-spoken recollections hand Holden the thread that ties Strickland to Protogen.
A craggy-faced old man of eighty or ninety with a thin fringe of white hair clinging to the back of his skull and gray chin stubble; a slushy, old-fashioned accent.
Retired CMTU scientist whose testimony reveals Strickland's real identity as Carlos Merrian and his corporate defection.