Gavin Becker

Gavin Becker was a scientist and a member of an observation team assigned to a station near the Aegis Cluster, presumably placed there by EarthGov as a safeguard against a second incident in the Aegis System. A Martian with a wife and a young daughter waiting for him at home, he spent his days calibrating instruments and staring into deep space, until the day in 2508 when the USG Ishimura's distress signal reached his post from orbit above Aegis VII. The orders that came back down the line turned a bored family man into a murderer, and then into a corpse.

A family man from Mars#

Little information survives about the early life of Gavin Becker beyond the fact that he was a Martian, one of the many residents of humanity's oldest and most crowded colony world. At some point he married a woman named Genie, and the couple had a daughter, Sally. Whatever else his work demanded of him, Becker remained a devoted father. In his messages home he joked about the tedium of his posting, telling his daughter that when her friends asked what her daddy did for a living, she could tell them that he stared into space.

He was also planning for a life beyond the observation post. Shortly before his death, Becker purchased two tickets to Shalanx III, a resort moon famed for its jungles, marshes, cliffs, and beaches of red sand, in all likelihood intending to take his daughter there. The tickets were never used.

The watch on the Aegis Cluster#

At some point in his career, Becker was placed aboard an observational craft stationed near the Aegis Cluster, presumably by EarthGov, as a safeguard against a second incident in the Aegis System. The posting itself was a quiet admission of what almost no one in the colonies knew: that something had happened in that system once before, and that the government considered it worth watching for the rest of time. The Red Marker buried on Aegis VII generations earlier was a secret the authorities had gone to great lengths to keep, and the men assigned to watch over its grave were told nothing of what they were actually guarding against.

Becker shared the station with two colleagues, Stefan and Dennis. Stefan was a spaceman who conducted space experiments and surveys alongside the other two, and the team's fateful proximity to the Aegis System was, from their own perspective, little more than a twist of fate. Their routine was numbing in its regularity. The crew woke, ate breakfast, ran the daily systems backup, calibrated the instruments, and then surveyed deep space for ten hours at a stretch. Becker described the work to his family as the same old thing, working hard with the guys and looking at the stars. None of the three men appear to have understood that their little craft was an alarm tripwire, or that the organization which placed them there had already decided what would happen to them if the alarm ever sounded.

The early bird report#

In 2508, the silence of the Aegis Cluster broke. The USG Ishimura, the flagship planet cracker of the Concordance Extraction Corporation, had come to Aegis VII on an illegal mining operation and had been overrun by a Necromorph outbreak in the events remembered as the Second Aegis VII Incident. When the observation post received the Ishimura's distress signal, Becker did exactly what a dutiful agent was supposed to do. He immediately notified his commanding officer, opening his transmission with the words, "This is early bird reporting sir. Aegis Seven has been breached."

The response was not a rescue order. To his horror, Becker was instructed to carry out "Eventuality 1-17": the immediate elimination of all of the witnesses. The protocol existed to prevent the amplification of the Ishimura's S.O.S., ensuring that no signal, and no person who had heard it, would carry news of the Aegis System's breach any further. Becker attempted to argue that such a drastic action was not necessary. His superior's answer carried an implied threat of danger to his family if he failed to "do his job." The government that had planted him in the deep dark as a safeguard now made plain that his wife and daughter were hostages to his obedience.

Eventuality 1-17#

Becker obeyed. To silence the witnesses aboard his own station, he murdered both of his colleagues with a knife. Stefan, his friend, tried desperately to reach him as the killing began, holding up a photograph of Becker's family and begging him to stop, naming his wife Genie and his daughter Sally as proof of the man Becker had been. The appeal failed, and Stefan was stabbed to death.

The horror of the killings lay partly in their clarity. Stefan had shown no sign of the influence that the Marker on Aegis VII exerted over so many others in the system, suffering none of the hallucinations that marked its victims. The bloodshed aboard the observation craft was not Marker madness. It was policy, executed by a frightened man following orders from a distant voice that had threatened his child.

Death#

Becker could not live with what he had done. Unable to face his actions, he exposed himself to the hard vacuum of space and perished, joining the colleagues he had killed within hours of the signal's arrival. He died in 2508, the same year as the incident he had been stationed to watch for, leaving behind a widow, a fatherless daughter, and two unused tickets to a resort moon.

His death also completed Eventuality 1-17 more thoroughly than his masters could have ordered. Every soul aboard the observation post was gone, and the Ishimura's cry for help died with them. Becker's final hours provided some of the clearest recorded evidence that the authorities overseeing the Aegis System knew what slept there, had planned in advance for its awakening, and valued that secret above the lives of their own agents.