Isaac Clarke

Isaac Clarke was a ship systems engineer for the Concordance Extraction Corporation whose name became bound to the history of the Markers in the 26th century. What began as a routine maintenance call to the mining vessel USG Ishimura drew him into the Necromorph outbreaks, the schemes of EarthGov, and the long campaign of the Church of Unitology to spread the artifacts. Across the events that followed, Isaac changed from an ordinary engineer into one of the few people whose minds the Markers could use, and one of the few willing to turn that knowledge against them.

Early life and the CEC#

Isaac Clarke was born on June 5, 2461 in the eastern seaboard region of the American Republic on Earth, the son of the ship architect Poul Clarke and his wife Octavia. He grew up largely without his father, who left on an extended mission early in Isaac's life. Octavia, lonely in Poul's absence, joined the Church of Unitology and spent the family's funds on a vested-level title in the Church, leaving Isaac unable to afford the engineering college he had been selected to attend. That loss left him with a deep distrust and hatred of Unitology.

Isaac followed his father's path into engineering, graduating with high honors from a lesser-known college on scholarships, then enlisting in the Galactic Union Merchant Marine Corp. He built a career as a ship systems engineer with the Concordance Extraction Corporation, the mining concern that operated the planet-cracking fleet. By the time of the Aegis VII incident he had spent close to two decades in the trade.

The USG Ishimura#

In 2508, following the planet crack of Aegis VII, Isaac's girlfriend Nicole Brennan sent him a transmission. Believing she still needed rescue, Isaac volunteered to join the emergency response unit aboard the USG Kellion, dispatched to investigate the Ishimura's distress signal and total communications blackout. The Kellion crash-landed in the ship's docking bay, and the team was attacked almost at once by reanimated crew members. Only Isaac, Computer Specialist Kendra Daniels, and Chief Security Officer Zach Hammond survived.

Separated from the others but in contact through his RIG, Isaac worked across the ship to keep it functioning while the creatures, called Necromorphs, hunted him. He learned that the infection had spread from Marker 3A, an artifact the CEC had illegally recovered from Aegis VII. After the destruction of the military vessel USM Valor and the death of Hammond, only Isaac and Kendra remained. Dr. Terrence Kyne convinced Isaac that returning the Marker to its pedestal on the planet would silence the Necromorph Hive Mind, but Kendra killed Kyne and revealed herself as an EarthGov agent, taking the Marker for the government.

Aegis VII and the Marker#

Guided by visions of Nicole, Isaac took the Marker down to Aegis VII and returned it to its pedestal. The artifact released a massive pulse that imprinted its construction blueprints into his mind and destabilized the asteroid field holding the cracked planet together. Kendra reappeared, removed the Marker, and forced Isaac to watch the end of Nicole's transmission, which revealed that Nicole had taken her own life during the outbreak. The figure he had followed was a hallucination; the living person he had worked alongside was a deluded scientist named Elizabeth Cross.

Isaac watched the Hive Mind kill Kendra, then destroyed the creature and escaped the collapsing colony by shuttle. His mind already breaking under the Marker's influence, he reviewed Nicole's video a final time and was overtaken by a hallucination of her, the visions now driving him toward building more Markers rather than toward madness alone.

Titan Station and Project Telomere#

Isaac's shuttle was recovered by an EarthGov patrol, and he was taken to Titan Station, known as the Sprawl. For three years he was confined to the Psych Ward of the Titan Memorial Medical Center, diagnosed with a unique form of dementia and subjected to Project Telomere. EarthGov used the blueprints in his mind to assemble the enormous Site 12 Marker, dosing him with memory-erasing drugs between sessions to keep both Isaac and the Marker's influence in check.

When a Necromorph outbreak tore through the Sprawl in 2511, Isaac woke in a straitjacket with no memory of the lost years. Hunted by Necromorphs, by EarthGov troops under Director Hans Tiedemann, and by Unitologists who wanted the Marker knowledge in his head, he allied with the survivor Ellie Langford and the fellow test subject Nolan Stross. After Stross succumbed to the Marker and had to be killed, Isaac confronted the apparition of Nicole and finally admitted that he could not accept her death. Reaching the Site 12 Marker, he refused the convergence the artifact demanded, destroyed it, and escaped with Ellie.

Tau Volantis and the Brethren Moons#

Isaac and Ellie went into hiding on the New Horizons Lunar Colony, but their relationship ended, and Isaac was tracked down by Sergeant John Carver and Captain Robert Norton of the Earth Defense Force. Told that Ellie had gone missing near Tau Volantis, he agreed to help. The militant Unitologist sect known as the Circle, led by Jacob Danik, was working to destroy EarthGov and free the Markers, and Isaac was caught between them as he traveled to the frozen world that the records called the Marker homeworld.

On Tau Volantis, Isaac, Carver, and Ellie discovered that an ancient alien civilization had built a planet-sized Machine to halt a convergence and freeze the world, holding a Brethren Moon in check. Danik stole the Codex needed to control the Machine and shut it down, resuming the convergence. Isaac and Carver fought their way to the Machine's core, reactivated it, and brought the incomplete Brother Moon crashing down into the planet. Having destroyed one Moon, the two escaped underground, only to reach Earth aboard the CMS Terra Nova and find that the other Brethren Moons had already arrived. As one of the Moons rose over Earth, both men were struck again by the effects of the Marker signal, and their fate remained unknown.

Mind and method#

As a CEC engineer, Isaac was resourceful and skilled at hacking, repairing, and improvising with the mining tools and equipment around him, turning industrial gear into the means of his own survival. He had no combat training before the Ishimura and learned to fight the Necromorphs from the logs of those who had died before him. His engineer's mind also made him unusually compatible with the Marker signal, which is why the artifacts spoke to him through visions of Nicole rather than driving him to simple madness. That same compatibility made him, in the words of those who studied the Markers, a kind of herald, and it was against that role that he spent the rest of his life fighting.