Black Marker

The Black Marker was the alien artifact discovered in the Chicxulub crater on Earth in 2214, the original from which every human-made Red Marker was copied. As one of the two forms of Marker, it was believed to have guided human evolution itself, and its exposure to the public by the researcher Michael Altman gave rise to the Church of Unitology. The Sovereign Colonies hid the artifact and used it to seed a galaxy-wide Marker replication program before burying it during the purge that followed.

Discovery#

In 2214 the Black Marker was discovered by researchers, among them the geophysicist Michael Altman, in the asteroid impact crater off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. An operation to unearth it was undertaken by the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces and the mining company DredgerCorp. It was later concluded that the artifact was the object that had landed on Earth roughly 65 million years earlier, causing the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, paving the way for mammals, and eventually leading to humanity as the dominant species.

Upon its discovery the Black Marker's signal appeared to be a source of unlimited energy, and harnessing that power became a priority for the researchers. Its symbols were believed to represent DNA instructions, the double-helical structure of the artifact alluding to the same thing. In truth those symbols were the genetic instructions for the creation of the Necromorphs, which the Black Marker also transmitted through its signal.

The death of Altman and the birth of a faith#

During the initial project Michael Altman went public with his research, revealing the Marker's existence to the world against the government's wishes. Following a Necromorph outbreak that devastated the research facility above the Chicxulub crater, Altman was killed by two former members of the project, Stevens and Markoff, who used his death to found the Church of Unitology. The Church came to believe that Altman had been assassinated by the government to silence the truth, and he became its martyr.

Unitology grew faster than any religion before it. Its followers revered the Black Marker as an immensely powerful holy object, sent by God to show that death was not the end and that all humanity would be reborn in everlasting unity through Convergence. Unitologists believed that the Marker had guided the development of human life itself, shaping an intelligent species capable of building more Markers, a theory the recorded history of the Markers appears to bear out.

Research and replication#

The details of the original disaster were buried in government cover-ups while the Sovereign Colonies kept and studied the artifact in secret. Later in the century the danger of the research prompted the decision to move all Marker experiments off Earth to avoid a larger outbreak, and the Black Marker itself was likely taken from the planet, though its replication data had already been secured.

Space exploration brought no reprieve from humanity's resource crisis, and by the late 23rd century it had deepened. After decades of research the Sovereign Colonies' Science Division reverse-engineered the artifact in the 2290s, producing Red Marker copies such as Marker 3A on Aegis VII in an effort to understand the technology and harness its power.

Scenario Five and legacy#

At the start of the 24th century, following outbreaks at the Marker test sites and Dr. Earl Serrano's discovery of the Brethren Moons during his research on Tau Volantis, the Sovereign Colonies Council invoked Scenario Five, an emergency directive reserved for an extinction-level outbreak arising from a first-contact scenario. All related equipment was to be disabled and all involved personnel sought out for termination, severing every trace of the Marker technology. The directive aimed to erase the Black Marker's copies and data and the original artifact itself, leaving its status unclear thereafter.

Though the Church revered the Black Marker, it held only pictures, drawings and fragments of knowledge, since most of the data had been classified and the artifact disappeared. By the 26th century the Church had secretly financed studies of the biodiversity around Chicxulub, despite interference from EarthGov, and confirmed genetic variations in local specimens that it took as further proof of the signal's power over living matter. In 2511, during the outbreak on Titan Station, Isaac Clarke found logs from the scientist Kinner Phelps, who had concluded that humans were merely puppets of an alien influence, used by the Markers, beginning with the Black Marker, as tools to copy themselves on the road to Convergence.