William Ackerson

William Ackerson is the father of Cameron Ackerson in A Trick of Light, having died in a freak storm on Lake Erie. His son sought to prove the suspicious nature of William's death.

Before A Trick of Light
William Ackerson founded a company called Whiz with Wesley Park, pioneering the early internet and quickly building a digital empire of it. He began construction of a massive network he called Oz, intending it as a digital paradise for everyone to join, but one day he found a rogue programming string in the network, a fragment of the Inventor's programming language.

He developed the snippet into a revolutionary new encryption technology, but he was never satisfied, and obsessed over tracking down the origins of the code he found even as Wesley stole the encryption technology and founded his own company. With Wesley gone and William obsessed, Whiz collapsed in the dot-com crash and William relocated with his wife and newborn son to a shabby townhouse on Walker Row.

He spent the rest of his life tracing the source of the snippet, studying the unnatural lightning storms on Lake Erie whose fractal patterns he thought were related to the programming language he had identified. Finally, William managed to track down the Inventor himself, but because he couldn't quite put everything together yet, he begged the Inventor for answers. When the Inventor denied him, William sailed out into Lake Erie in search for the source of the storms, the Inventor's ship and Nia, but vanished and was never seen again by the Inventor or anyone else.

A Trick of the Light
In 1989, William received a message on the internet forums that contained a complex puzzle. Even though a number of others tried to solve it, only William succeeded. Afterwards, he was contacted by a man named Wesley Park. They planned to meet up in East Berlin on the night the Berlin Wall fell. William managed to sneak across the border in the celebration. The two men headed to a secret Soviet facility that reported held something called the Cypher, which the Soviets planned to use against the West. Using William’s makeshift EMP device, they managed to infiltrate the building and the vault. However, the pulse also caused the Cypher, which turned out to be some kind of alien artifact, to begin overloading. Wesley tried to stop the overload, but when Soviet guards showed up, William pulled him away. The Cypher produced a blast of energy that knocked out the guards and transferred its ability to manipulate electromagnetic waves to William. Despite his envy of William, Wesley helped him escape. After making it to the United States, the two founded Whiz, with William being the tech brains and Wesley the face of the company and the one who brought in new investors. The company was a big success thanks to William’s genius and the use of the Cypher to encrypt the software. However, during a party held by Whiz, they were attacked by former Soviet agents seeking to obtain the Cypher locked inside William. Unbeknownst to William, Wesley had injected himself with prototype xenobots, nanoscale devices that enhanced his physical abilities and also healed injuries. Using their respective abilities, the partners managed to kill all the attackers, although the xenobots turned out to be flawed and nearly killed Wesley.

Afterward, they diverged in their opinion on the xenobots. William insisted that they were too dangerous, while Wesley wanted to continue improving them. After the dot-com crash, Whiz lost many investors. To keep the company afloat, Wesley stole William’s encryption algorithm and sold it. He intended to share the proceeds with William, but he refused and dissolved their partnership.

Years later, barely able to make ends meet, William could sense that the Cypher was slowly killing him, as a human body was never meant to contain something so powerful. He also began to pick up messages from somewhere off-world and see bizarre lightning strikes on Lake Erie. His marriage was on the rocks, as his wife resented him for losing his fortune, forcing her to work as a housemaid.

In 2004, William saw an interview with Wesley about his new company OPTIC. He caught Wesley in a lie and decided to investigate. He backed OPTIC’s servers, which were using his own encryption algorithm, and learned that Wesley planned to unleash xenobots on the city in order to steal people’s biological data. He went to Wesley’s home to confront him. Wesley didn’t care about the ethical concerns and attacked William, as his own body was enhanced by a new generation of xenobots. William managed to use his abilities to redirect and focus a lightning bolt to destroy the xenobots unleashed by Wesley. Then he commanded the xenobots inside Wesley to enter his body instead, leaving Wesley a cripple. Wesley begged him to return the xenobots, but William left him and went out to Lake Erie in search of something calling to the Cypher. He encountered an alien refugee calling himself the Inventor. The Inventor explained that he couldn’t help William. William realized that if he embraced the signal from the Inventor’s homeworld, he would survive. Despite the Inventor’s pleas, William boarded the escape pod aboard the Inventor’s ship and left Earth, realizing that the only way he could make a better world for his son was by not being in it anymore.