Challus Mercer

Doctor Challus Mercer was the Second Science Officer aboard the USG Ishimura and a Unitologist devout to the point of zealotry. After the ship was compromised in 2508, he became fanatically obsessed with Marker 3A and the Necromorphs, convinced that the Convergence the artifact promised was the gateway to life after death, and he turned his medical skill to grotesque experiments meant to bring it about.

A doctor of zealous faith#

Challus Mercer was one of the many Unitologists aboard the USG Ishimura, brought on through the crew turnover that gave Captain Benjamin Mathius a majority of believers. Logs left by Mercer, along with remarks from Terrence Kyne, suggested that he had come to the faith out of a fear of death and a desperate desire to transcend it through Convergence. Described before the outbreak as a charming and talented crew member, he was nonetheless regarded by Kyne and Nicole Brennan as a man whose methods were dangerous and whose judgment could not be trusted.

When news of the dementia afflicting the Aegis VII colonists reached the ship, Mercer clashed with Kyne over how to study it. Where Kyne came to see the madness as evidence that the Church's teachings were wrong, Mercer took the Marker's effects on the colonists' minds as proof of its divinity.

Experiments and the Hunter#

Mercer was among the medical officers assigned to study the demented colonists, and he became fixated on the miner Brant Harris, whose ramblings he considered religiously significant. Claiming to have received not replication blueprints but new surgical techniques and technical designs from the Marker's signal, he interrogated Harris for what he called the deeper nuances of the artifact. When Harris explained that the knowledge slipped away whenever he tried to share it, Mercer injected Necromorph biomatter into the man's brain in an attempt to unlock the Marker-affected regions of his mind and learn to speak with the artifact.

Communicating at last with the Marker, Mercer was told that its makers must be absorbed for Convergence to begin, and he took this to mean he must create new forms of Necromorph. He devised an advanced stasis technology that left victims conscious through their agony and performed surgery after surgery on Harris until the man died and rose again as a regenerating creature Mercer named the Hunter. He kept the Hunter caged on the Medical Deck and continued studying the other Necromorph forms in search of what he saw as the missing factor for Convergence.

Confrontations and death#

Mercer caught Nicole Brennan after she slipped into his quarters to steal his Marker research, intimidating her and telling her to leave the artifact alone, though she escaped with notes she would later use in her own attempt to plead with the Marker. He then set a false transmission using a fabricated recording of Nicole to lure survivors to the Medical Deck, drawing in Isaac Clarke, whom he recognized as her partner. After accusing Isaac of being responsible, through Nicole, for the delay of Convergence, Mercer unleashed the Hunter on him, saying he meant to learn whether death by dismemberment was the missing factor.

Having brought the Marker to the Crew Deck with other Unitologists, Mercer became the leader of the ship's surviving believers, delivering sermons as they awaited Convergence and even releasing poisonous gas to kill those who could not give themselves up to the Necromorphs. He captured the engineer Jacob Temple and tried in vain to make him a maker for the Marker. After Isaac finally destroyed the Hunter, Mercer raged at the loss of his work and turned to the Marker, begging it to take Isaac and begin Convergence at once. The artifact gave no answer. Instead a tentacle wrapped around the Marker and dragged it down toward the cargo hold, taking Mercer with it, and as he screamed that he had been promised Convergence, he was crushed to death against the artifact he had worshipped.

Character#

Mercer believed greatness could never be achieved by conventional means, and he held an arrogant, self-serving view of his faith, convinced he had personally been promised Convergence. He revered the Necromorphs as holy yet refused to become one himself, viewing his role as the architect of their creation rather than another sacrifice. According to Kyne, the only thing Mercer ever truly feared was death, and it was that fear that drove his desperate, predatory work. Ruthless to the point of inhumanity, he lured victims to experiment upon, performed surgery on conscious subjects, and showed no interest in the survival of anyone aboard, certain that all attempts to live were pointless against the Convergence he believed was coming.