Hal Hildebrand arrived on earth some eons ago when his physical essence filtered down from the stars, and he took human form. Lingering for awhile on the plateau of Leng while waiting for the apes to evolve, he eventually mingled among human society, generally without being detected, although the century he spent staked out in a peat bog in Denmark was rather unpleasant and not something he'd care to repeat. Once computers were invented he became involved in distributed systems in the hope that enough insider knowledge would, at the right time, allow him to convince the artificial intelligence in control to bypass electronic security measures on the first translight spacecraft and allow him to return to the stars. This is probably still some time away. Until then he spends his time as an architect at Oracle, working on cracking the Dharma cycle of large scale distributed systems and autonomic control.