Born to Boris Pillman and Guta Shuchart on LHS 3447, Arkady was always intrigued by the family lore how a graduate student of his distant ancestor, Dr Valentine Pilman, determined the origin of an alien visit to earth as coming from the Deneb system.
He took up Xenogeology as a major subject to eventually get the chance to to fly out into space for exploration, himself.
During his studies, he got frustrated with the situation of fundamental science in the Federation, how scientific success was more and more determined by economic priorities, and how corporate interests gained more and more influence in politics, while everyday life became less and less free, turning a democracy of working people into a militarist police state of end consumers.
Not being an apt advertiser or otherwise proficient in acquiring third party funding, he soon found himself in a series of precarious, underfunded, boring academic niche projects, with not much of an academic career neither behind nor in front of him, his name mainly in the middle part of the authors list of a few obscure publications, and hardly any ambition left.
He´d taken up odd jobs for years to help him survive while he still hoped to finally get some permanent position at an academic institution, and when his former Institute of Applied Space Geology sold surplus hardware, he managed to get his hands on a slightly battered Sidewinder that had been used as a personnel carrier in a student´s expedition a couple of decades left. As the gear was sold at a symbolic price, really (the main motive of the institute being to free up storage space), he instantly seized his opportunity to take to the stars all by himself.
Only to find out quickly that a battered stock Sidewinder probably wouldn´t take him to Deneb, either.
It was a quick and easy decision to finally say goodbye to the meatgrinder that academia is for "junior" scientist. He didn´t even leave a note on his desk, packed a few sandwiches and a bottle of cold tea, jumped first into the cockpit and then into the nearest star system to look for jobs that would pay for the necessary upgrades to his ride.
So he worked for month, sometimes happily, sometimes avoiding his mirror image by the thought of who he worked for.

When he finally read the news of the attempted coup by the president of the Alliance together with a former admiral, and more specifically how the Parliament dealt with it by doing away with the office of president altogether, saying it was an unwarranted concentration of power in one individual, and therefore an unneccessary danger to the rights and duties of the parliament of representatives of the independent systems, he thought " Now, THAT is how I imagine galactic politics!", and started plotting a course of intersecting trade routes that would finally lead him into Alliance space, where he found a comfortable home mining, exploring and trading for Helix out of Hale  Port, G 180-18, for some time.
But his unrest grew as he witnessed, that the former independent systems that formed the Allience, too, became gradually encroached by greedy megacorporations and their traditional sidekicks, autocratic systems and organized crime.
He decided his apolitical days were over, and engaged in governmental administration courier transport for Edmund Mahon, using what little influence he had to carefully choose which systems to support and strengthen, picking democracies and cooperatives wherever possible.
Slightly desillusioned after realizing that even Gateway, the main hub of the Alliance, was more or less ruled by corporate politics, he quickly bonded with the only democratic force left in the system, the "Workers of Gateway for Equality", a name that sounded like a job description to him. So New Chernobyl became his new homestead, partly because it was convenient, partly because the name reminded him of the "Zone" that once had made his ancestor famous.

There he found a couple of likeminded spirits, and knowing the toils of a working life under corporate rule fully well from first-hand experience, they founded "Your friendly Neighborhood Union", to support worker´s rights and democratic institutions, encourage fellow employees to utilise their political weight, and show the corporations and syndicates that the common consumer doesn´t have to be all docile, after all.

He still dreams of going to Deneb some day, though.