Sham

Sham promotional art

### Observed abilities

Color-change skin; 360-degree vision, under-plated skin; genius IQ; wall-crawling; powerful, lashing tongue

## Appearances

### Debut

GK Delta: Deploy

Throughout a Alter Nation stories, Sham has shown to be intelligent, experienced, and sophisticated. In spite of these positive traits, he's occasionally portrayed as aloof, such as when he was momentarily insensitive to soldiers' deaths during an escape of a shadow person. Neither clearly a hero nor a villain, Sham exhibits dual loyalty, torn between Dr. Mera, his creator, and GK Delta, his quasi-family.

Unlike GK Delta, Sham is fully aware of his origin in a lab. The full extent of why he's willing to keep this secret from them is yet to be revealed, although he's privately cited both military protocol and personal reasons in past stories.

## History

At some point after the creation of GK Alpha, the CIA approached Dr. Mera to provide a team of operatives that would remain 100% secret and complete missions impossible for a human. GK Gamma was that team. Made up of counter intelligence and espionage specialists, they can hack and sneak into any place and get to anyone. Sham, originally part of that team, served as a spy and used his chameleonic powers to infiltrate target locations and retrieve anything he was asked. With the commencement of GK Delta, Sham was eventually tasked by Mera with keeping tabs on the new batch of hybrid-human soldiers, who, unlike Sham, don't know of their origin in a lab. He also provides mission intelligence and occasionally battles alongside GK Delta.

### Spy for Mera

At some point in the past, Mera tasked Sham with spying on GK Delta in order to keep them in line and subvert them if they interfered with her plans. Sham also appears to feed her intelligence he doesn't share with CMD Stone.

Sham was the first to discover Bomber was communicating with Alpha, via numbers stations, albeit too late.

Sham was instrumental in covertly releasing Sabotage from Naval Base San Nicolas Island's brig without any Navy personnel knowing. This was done under Mera's orders to create a distraction and move a secret project, code-named "Garbage," to Lab 4. Before leaving the island, Sabotage nearly destroys the nearby city of Los Angeles. Sham is confused by feelings of regret for having been the cause of the crisis, but doesn't reveal his part to anyone.

In the graphic novel, *They Hide Hybrids,* Mera refers to Sham as "son." Whether this means Sham is biologically related to Mera, considered an adoptive family member, or that this is simply a term of endearment has yet to be revealed.

### Operation: 52-Pickup

Main article: *Beneath the Bermuda Triangle*

While Quillroy and Albert VII were exploring an underwater temple in Atlantis, Sham remotely and covertly hacked their mini-submarines to covertly kidnap an Atlantean, thus stranding Quillroy and Albert VII with a limited air supply. Daart, interrupting this process, suspected Sham of wrongdoing, but was eventually dissuaded in his suspicions by Col. Stone.

### Operation: Slippery Cyborg

Main article: *Naiki A Go-Go*

Sham discovered Sabotage's escape in the Alter Nation short story, *Naiki A Go-Go,* in spite of Sabotage's clever efforts to avoid detection. Sabotage used his cybernetic body to hack base security via wifi and edit surveillance video to loop random, past footage of Sabotage under a current timestamp. Sham realized that the loop wasn't random, but a sophisticated algorithm whose pattern he recognized.

### Operation: Shadow Intruder

Main article: *The Shadowman*

Sham, with GK Delta's help in brainstorming, is the first to posit the notion that the Shadowman is composed of micro black holes. Aided by a language interpretation app secretly created by Lynx, he's is the primary point of communication with the Shadowman. The Shadowman attempts to reveal to Daart that Daart's DNA was engineered, but Sham purposefully misinterprets the message to keep Daart from discovering this classified information.

### Operation: Kid Gloves

Main article: *Black Ops*

It's Sham's disappearance that sets off the events of the short story, *Black Ops*. GK Delta are tasked with finding him and all they're told is that he was investigating missing children in Portland, Oregon. He, the missing children, and other GK Delta members, fell victim to V.Y.R.U.S.' mind control transmissions.

## Relationship with GK Delta Members

Sham reveals his experience to the Deltas on a number of occasions. Presumably, they don't question this since he was in the program prior to any of their recollection. Still, the Deltas know that there's an aura of mystery surrounding Sham, even if Quillroy considers him a "dork." Conversely, in *Beneath the Bermuda Triangle,* Daart imagines him to be a deadly, Bond-like, gentlemen super-spy who killed Hitler.

One occasion showcasing his superior experience is in *The Mystery of Whining Winnie,* when Sham is able to identify training robots the rest of the team mistook as a monster. Sham has also shown prior familiarity with both Area 51 and The Philadelphia Experiment.

In the short story, *It's Garbage!*, Sham convinces El Ray to keep Garbage a secret for fear of deadly reprisal from Dr. Mera. El Ray agrees on the condition Sham act as an informant for El Ray. Mera, upon finding this out, arranged to have Sham sent away, and his whereabouts are yet to be revealed. In this absence, Hopper replaced him as Mera's spy on the inside of GK Delta.

## Relationship with Other GK Gamma Members

In short stories, Hopper is shown to be spying on both GK Delta and Sham.

Aside from a cliffhanger in *They Hide Hybrids,* Lynx has never been directly featured in an Alter Nation story. Instead, she's been referred to in discussions between Mera and Sham as the source of advanced computer technology used in Delta missions. Nevertheless, in Sham's reports featured in *The Shadowman,* he reveals jealousy of her, apparently for her skill in computer programming and mathematics, by denigrating her use of emojis in high-tech military equipment.