Zachery Miller and his identical twin brother Damian were born in Surrey, England. The two attended separate private schools. Despite this, both the boys both grew up with an increasing interest in their father's line of work. He was a surgeon in the local hospital, his parenting style was extremely strict, and his stories were the best. Slowly but surely the two boys became set on having a career in the same area of expertise, but even though both the brothers spent an equal amount of time and effort on studying and trying to make this dream come true, only Zachery eventually succeeded in finishing his studies with anything to show for it. For reasons he wasn't fully cognizant of at the time, thanks to some amount of denial on his part — refusing to acknowledge that the ability to read bodies in the way that only he could was, in many ways, cheating.
And so, he decided to keep it quiet, even from close relatives. From everyone.
By the time he was 29, he'd found a new goal to work toward. After moving to study abroad, he'd scored himself a law degree, which allowed him to work as a Deputy Coroner in New York. Unfortunately, the surgeon's son ended up biting off more than he could chew. A lack of social skills was made up for by sheer determination and perseverance, but this in itself resulted in Zachery working day and night to keep his job. The lack of sleep and general seclusion from the rest of the world caught up with him eventually, and his conscience even more of a hit after spending some time working together with a serial killer by the name of Sylar, becoming complicit in the man's crimes and collection.
Zachery, stuck in a situation he could find no sane way out of, fell back on an old and decidedly bad habit — alcohol took the edge off of his issues for a little while, but fixing one problem with another did him few favors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was ultimately fired from his cozy government-funded job after accusations of negligence. While he found a new job to tide him over fairly quickly (temping at a bookstore of all things) he was also roped into being a pawn for an entirely new killer in Diogenes. The months that followed only saw him sink deeper into a more chaotic state of mind, his state of mind suffering dramatically while he was under what was essentially constant threat of abuse.
Then, just when Diogenes had left him alone long enough to think he might be able to build something up for himself again, two different attempts at recruitment came at the very strangest of times. Members of The Company approached him first, but it was Warren's Los Locos who managed to close the deal and snatched him up for reasonably steady work. Becoming increasingly rare to find in public places, Zachery started focusing on finding purpose somewhere other than the regular 9-to-5. Though his new position allowed him to further hone his medical skills, he also started learning about prosthetics and, to a much lesser extent, cybernetics. Unfortunately, his studies of the latter were short-lived due to a… forced merger that landed Zachery with The Institute.
After two years in Cambridge, largely made up of odd jobs which left him feeling underutilized and underappreciated, he took as many of the Institute-provided medical supplies with him as he could carry and left not two weeks before the organization fell along with some of Cambridge itself. With no home to flee to, he stayed around the area and traded medical services for food and shelter in an attempt to stay independent for the first time in years. But with the world turned on its head, in the midst of riots, it wasn't long before he ran into more trouble — this time in the form of him getting caught in the literal crossfire between a group of Mitchell's soldiers and a Ferrymen patrol. He caught a bullet in the shoulder and was taken in by what was left of the patrol after the dust settled.
He stayed with the Ferrymen for months, kept safe while he provided them with medical aid. Eventually, when knowledge of the Albany trials hit the public consciousness, he stepped forward with several years worth of notes about his time at the Institute. The readiness with which he was willing to give them correlating information concerning his immediate superiors and the operations he found himself involved in was more than welcomed. In the end, he was offered a plea bargain of just over two years in prison in exchange for months of testimony against his superiors.
His law studies and a lack of loyalty rendered the testimony months in court a breeze, but being locked up was less his territory. Still, there are much worse places to be than a minimum security prison, and after some conversations with previous colleagues, he was able to negotiate a job as an orderly at Elmhurst hospital almost immediately after his release in 2018.
