Individual Character Introductions

Terry

The first thing you remember as you return to consciousness is that you really had no choice...

•••

In the end it was an easy decision - to desert and take your shuttle AWOL. It was either that or live with the knowledge that by following orders you condemned thousands to death. Because you are a good man it was never really a choice.

With the first launch you still thought it could be an orderly evacuation with plenty of time to clear the shuttleport. By the second launch you knew things were going south, and by the third you had heard enough chatter on other frequencies to know that the TITANs had broken through the city’s defensive perimeter. When, after only your fourth lift, the order came to secure your ship aboard the Direct Action orbital carrier, you’d decided.

While the bots finished refueling the hauler you disabled the copilot AI. You then broke formation and blasted back towards the planet. Despite orders then threats from traffic control demanding you return to the carrier, you plunged back into the atmosphere - again and again. You landed in a park, then on a beach, and then on the city streets. You estimate you picked up more than 4500 evacuees fleeing the TITAN advance, delivering them to any ship, habitat or orbital that would give you docking clearance - and even a couple that did not.

It was on the ninth boost when your fuel finally ran out, leaving the shuttle on an escape trajectory with only cold boosters for maneuvering. You sent out a mayday and remember an automated response from an unidentified freighter. You remember the profound relief when it matched vectors and allowed you to dock. You remember a long delay and then the passengers finally beginning to disembark. You remember confused shouts, then panicked yelling. Then someone screaming. Then you screaming. Then nothing…

Brother Piv

The first thing you remember as you return to consciousness is how your team murdered 317 people. The second thing you remember is how you then murdered your team...

 

•••

You were a true believer once. You were recruited from the streets where you had nothing and every day might have been your last. You were indoctrinated into a life where there was plenty to eat, the rules were clear and there were men with guns who had your back. It had been a question of survival for so long that questions of morality were the last you asked yourself.

You were trained and you learned. You learned about weapons and tactics and how to blow things up - you were particularly good at that. But, perhaps most importantly, you learned how to follow orders. And you learned that following orders meant not asking questions.

You showed a natural talent for deliberate action and quick thinking, and you had a natural penchant for things that went boom. It was not long before you were attached to a special operations team and the missions were bloody and frequent. Eventually you went so black-ops your squad didn’t even have a designation - just orders and objectives. Everything had begun to spiral out of control and it seemed like there was fighting everywhere. All you could do was follow orders and run the next operation.

Then your team wired up the church. Well, it was actually a monastery, but you didn’t know that at the time. All you knew was that the higher-ups said it was a “target of strategic importance” - that they were hiding weapons for the insurgency. It wasn’t until the charges were in place and the orders came to blow them that you saw the monks leading the refugees out the back.

In that moment, realizing it was the only thing to do, you disabled the transmitter. By then the team leader was shouting at you to blow the charges. You crouched there, just staring at him. He shouted and pulled a gun. You pulled a grenade. There were shots and explosions, but all you remember is the color red.

They next thing you clearly recall is helping the monks load the few survivors and the many wounded into a pair of old trucks. Snow was falling and the mountain air was growing colder. As they prepared to drive off into the gathering night one of the monks held out his hand to help you aboard. You didn’t even think about it. You dropped your weapon in the slowly freezing mud and climbed into the truck.

•••

Six months passed in the sprawling ghetto. The most peaceful of your life. You were on a new path, a child of god, a brother in robes, a man of peace. You helped others. You served others. You gave of yourself and, in asking for nothing in return, you gained everything. It was all the harder then when the extraction team came for you.

They promised not to hurt anyone else if you came quietly, so you did. The brothers could do nothing - peaceful resistance is little use against guns wielded by men willing to use them. You were surprised when the shuttle went into space and docked with an orbiting ship rather than to a secure base in the south. You knew things on the TITAN front were bad, but this meant things were even worse than you’d guessed.

As it turned out, the Project seemed more interested in your “aberrant conditioning failure” than in that fact that you disobeyed your orders and killed most of your squad. The techs poked and prodded and ran all kinds of cognitive tests and you heard lots of stuff you didn’t understand about “regressive programming” and “psychosurgical conditioning.”

You were locked in your ad hoc cell when the alarms went off and you heard gunfire and screaming. Days seemed to pass and then the lights went off as life support shut down. As the emergency power failed the locks on your door disengaged and you were free. Creeping about the corridors was difficult in the darkness and you were soon lost in the maze of the ship.

After what seemed like hours you remember hearing a skittering noise. Then there was a blinding flash of light and a mechanical screech as a shape lunged from a side passage. You remember the searing pain as something stabbed through your body. Then everything went black…

Captain  Kruger

The first thing you remember as you return to consciousness is that you killed the Director’s son.  

•••

Transhumanity was losing the war with the TITANs and you knew it. As an officer in the cyber-surveillance section of the intelligence division you had a front row seat to the rapid decay of defensive positions across the globe. You were privy to the constant retreat orders and watched through the eyes of your bots as attempts to regroup and dig in failed. The TITANs were winning and there seemed to be nothing anyone could to do about it.

So, when the evacuation order finally came, you were ready. You had previously spoofed the manifest and gotten your family assigned to one of the first ships bound for Luna. Since you sometimes served as the Director’s comms officer it was actually child’s play. You simply used his authorization to bump a few passengers - including his deadbeat son - to a later flight.

How could you have known the TITANs would break through a week ahead of projections? How could you have known the defense of the city and the shuttleport would collapse in hours instead of days? How could you have known your parents would be on the last shuttle out and that the Director’s son would be left behind to die with millions of others? You might as well have put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger yourself. But how could you have known?

Your original intent had been to evac on a later ship yourself, but that plan went to shit as TITAN machines stormed the shuttleport and began slaughtering the refugees desperately trying to board anything that could fly. The base egocasters were also being mobbed, but for a technical wizard like yourself it was possible to use the empty med bay’s ego scanner as a surrogate uploader, hijack the caster signal and put yourself in the transmission queue.

The panic only set in when you realized most of the receiving stations were offline or hopelessly backed up. In desperation, as you could hear the building being blown apart around you, you hacked the Director’s files and found a cache of unregistered receiver codes in his private archive - and one was still operational. You locked on without clearance or even verifying the signal, and cast your mind into space…

John 117

The first thing you remember as you return to consciousness is how you died.

•••

Your client said she didn’t think it could be done, but you assured her you would find a way. Getting aboard the freighter couldn’t be any harder than some of the other jobs you’d pulled. Either way, you were always up for a challenge, so you made assurances and took her advance money. And there was a lot of it.

It took some time, but you managed to find someone willing to trade you the freighter’s traffic control plots for the last year. You’d owe him a favor, but the data gave you the information you needed - you knew where the ship refueled. Getting a job on the tanker station was relatively easy, especially with the forged credentials. Since the situation on Earth was getting worse every day, those who could were getting deeper into space, so there weren’t a lot of questions when you were willing to stay and work on the low orbit fuel dump.

The “Song Cai Flower” was a C-class freighter, big and slow but with huge cargo bays and engines capable of long-haul trips to the Rim and back. Strange therefore, that she’d spent most of the last year repeating a short orbit between the Earth and the Moon. It would be several months before she needed to renew her fabber stock, but you’d waited longer for windows of opportunity in the past.

By the time she finally came in to resupply the situation on Earth had deteriorated and mass evacuations had begun. Your own station was already overcrowded and most people were looking to get to Luna or maybe Mars before shit got worse. Your patience had paid off however, and you saw no reason to panic. You’d complete the job and then farcast to Mars where you had a back up morph and an escape plan already in place. So, when the “Flower” finally docked, you were ready.

The stolen space suit made it easy to cross from the maintenance bot bay to the freighter's hull without being detected. You always loved the way the stars looked face-to-face anyway. The sensors on the lifepods external hatch were simple to spoof, and who looks in a lifeboat when there’s no emergency anyway? You watched the fuel depot shrink in the distance as the ship pulled away. You stripped off your vac-suit, released a swarm of recon nano-bots into the corridor outside and settled in for a few days of observation.

The screaming jerked you awake and the spasm sent a couple nutri-bar wrappers and an empty water bulb drifting across the pod. It took a few beats to realize the screams were coming through your surveillance gear - that people were dying somewhere in the ship. The lights flickered as the power cycled and then went out. Deciding to use whatever was going on as the distraction you’d been waiting for, you slipped from the lifepod and began working your way deeper into the ship.

You soon heard the screams directly. Screams, shouts and then gunfire - lots of it. This wasn’t good. You passed one body, then another, both missing their heads - sliced jaggedly off their necks. And then more - a cloud of headless corpses drifting in the weightlessness, little balls of blood floating everywhere. Without warning, something loomed out of the darkness. Something mechanical and screeching like a bone saw. You lunged backward in the zero-g and tried to flee but it clawed at you from behind. There was an instant of unbearable pain and everything went black.   

Nikolas

The first thing you remember as you return to consciousness is how much Angel loved you. The second thing you recall is how she betrayed you.

•••

Going AWOL wasn’t as hard as you thought it would be. Shit, by that time in the fighting things were so confused and the command structure so fragmented it wasn’t really even desertion - it was just survival. No one really knew who was in charge or even who you were fighting. The enemy seemed to change every week and the supply lines were so fucked up you stole just to keep food in your belly and bullets in your gun. Might as well go all in.

Angel knew a guy - she was always working some angle - and he vouched for you both and just like that you were in. Those days things in the organization changed fast - territories, alliances, personnel - and you moved up the ranks just as quickly. A high mortality rate is always a quick route to promotion. Angel was always one step ahead but you were happy to follow. It was so easy to trust her, to love her, and life was nothing if not exciting. Even in the end you never suspected that she had been playing everyone - playing you - from the very beginning.

When the TITANs appeared on the scene it was like she was ready - like she had been expecting them for a while. The pattern of all her dealing, bribing, and intel gathering took form, though the intent remained blurry, like objects in the fog. You worked your way across Europe, supposedly following orders, but even then you suspected something else was going on. Every time you tried to talk to her about it she would smile that smile and deftly change the subject, and suddenly you would be talking about something else.

The job in Milan went without a hitch, but you decided - no, she decided - that it was too dangerous to risk the mountains, that you should hide out in Rome and try to cross the Med when things cooled down. The next day she was gone.

She was good, but so were you. It took you two weeks to track her to Algiers where you cornered her in some kind of safe house masquerading as a Hypercorp server farm. You found her in a well-hidden back room, sitting at an emergency egocaster. As you stood there, relief and fury fighting for control of your face, she said, “I really do love you…,” and activated the caster.

In that instant the perimeter sensors you’d deployed alerted you to incoming vectors, and railgun fire began shredding the room around you, blowing off your right arm and punching through your left lung. With more instinct than intention, you shoved aside Angel’s empty morph, collapsed onto the bench, yanked the scanner down around your head and slapped the send button.   

Your last sight as the machine stripped the consciousness out of your dying body and sent it into space was a Hoplite soldier bursting through the shattered wall and bringing his weapon to bear. Your last thought as everything went black was of the look of pity on Angel’s face as she cast away…

Rentlov

As you slowly become aware, you realize that your memories are jumbled - that there are gaps and some are missing. It’s as if someone pulled the long thread of recall out of your skull, chopped it into pieces and reassembled them into a random sequence.

•••

You remember parts of your youth in the orbital habitat, and what seems to have been a life of privilege. You remember lots of friends, but you can’t recall their names or your mother’s face. You remember your father however. Almost everything - including that you hate him.  

You remember the training, the advanced logic puzzles and elaborate social engineering simulations run by AI tutors. You recall the stranger, harder, often painful mental exercises your father insisted on overseeing himself. You remember there was a period on Earth when you were on your own for the first time and that was exciting - but you are unable to recall details.

You remember the advent of the fighting and the beginning of the evacuations. You remember the rise of the TITANs and people calling it the “End Times,” but you also remember being insulated from the worst of it on the orbital. Until something happened. Until something made it past the quarantine. Until something got in, or maybe got out, and infected the habitat’s systems. That’s when your nightmare began.

If you had any context to understand you would know it was a miracle you survived at all, let alone intact. Mercifully you don’t recall the mind shattering specifics, but the human consciousness is not meant to suffer the brutal manipulations and mental dissection you endured - over and over and over. You know that personalities can’t be fragmented - forked and merged again and again - without massive trauma, psychosis and eventual, irreparable insanity. At least you thought so...

•••

All of You
As your thoughts coalesce into consciousness you slowly realize several things. First, you are in some kind of synthmorph and its systems have just completed a hard reboot. Second, you are in a large, dark equipment bay, and there is no gravity or atmosphere. Third, you realize the object drifting slowly past is a severed human head...