Jacob Temple: the Ishimura's acting chief engineer

Jacob Temple was an engineer employed by the Concordance Extraction Corporation aboard the USG Ishimura, assigned to the ship's Engineering Deck. When the planet crack of Aegis VII put Marker 3A inside the hull and the Necromorph infestation followed, Temple took over as Acting Chief Engineer after the death of the ship's chief, and he kept the dying vessel running long enough for other survivors to shelter in it. He left a chain of audio logs that Isaac Clarke later recovered across the ship, marking the path of a second man moving through the same catastrophe a little way ahead. Both paths ended in the same room on the Crew Deck, where the Unitologist Dr. Challus Mercer killed him.

Engineering Deck#

Temple was hired by the Concordance Extraction Corporation to work the Engineering Deck of the USG Ishimura, the planet cracker at the centre of the company's mining programme. His post put him among the ship's most senior technical staff, and quarters in the Executive Block on the Crew Deck were set aside for the ship's First Engineer alongside those of Captain Benjamin Mathius, First Officer D. White and Chief Science Officer Terrence Kyne.

His personal life on the ship was better documented than most of the crew's, because he recorded so much of it himself. He had been with a man named David, another Concordance employee, for a long stretch before the Aegis VII cycle. David died of causes that were never recorded, and Temple was left grieving and convinced he would not find anyone again. He was wrong. By the time the Ishimura made orbit over Aegis VII he was with Dr. Elizabeth Cross, a horticulturist working the Hydroponics Deck, and almost every log he left afterwards was addressed to her.

Acting Chief Engineer#

The colony on Aegis VII pulled a Red Marker out of the ground during the planet crack, and the artefact's arrival brought the Necromorph infestation down on both the settlement and the ship. Temple's deck was among the first to feel it. Growths appeared in the engineering spaces at a speed nobody could account for, and members of his crew began behaving strangely long before anything visibly attacked them.

What followed cost him more than the job. Leading his team out of the affected sections meant dismembering friends and coworkers who had already turned, and he did it, because nothing else stopped them. Somewhere in the same span of hours the Ishimura's Chief Engineer, Ariel Rousseau, died. Rousseau had spent the early stages of the outbreak talking at length to a comms relay crew that nobody else could confirm existed, and colleagues had decided to leave the habit alone as a way of coping. With Rousseau gone, Temple became Acting Chief Engineer of a ship that was already losing systems faster than his surviving staff could restore them.

The ship turned against him#

Temple's engineering problem was not only the Necromorphs. Dr. Terrence Kyne, the ship's Chief Science Officer, was working through the vessel disabling it on purpose, and Temple spent much of the outbreak chasing the results without knowing the cause. The engines were shut down. The gravity centrifuge was stopped. Each failure was one that Temple's teams then had to attempt to reverse under attack, in sections that were no longer safe to enter, with a crew that shrank every shift.

His logs from this period read as a running technical account of a ship being killed from inside. They also record the ordinary business of a man trying to find one person in a hull kilometres long. He knew Elizabeth had been in Hydroponics. He knew the tram system was compromised. Between repairs he kept moving toward her.

The Mining Deck sanctuary#

When holding Engineering became impossible, Temple took what remained of his team down to the Mining Deck. The plan there was twofold. The first part was defensive: turn the deck into a sanctuary that surviving crew members could reach and hold, since the Ishimura's own security had already collapsed. The second was an appeal outward, an SOS beacon assembled from ship components and launched in the hope that somebody in the Aegis system would answer it.

Elizabeth eventually left Hydroponics to look for him and reached the Mining Deck herself, carrying his access codes. She used them to open a workshop for Isaac Clarke, who was hunting the same beacon Temple's people had stored there. By then Temple was already gone from the deck.

Mercer's hostage#

The thing that took him off his post was a call for help. Dr. Challus Mercer, a Unitologist who had become the leader of the surviving believers aboard, broadcast a distress signal that Temple heard and answered. It was bait. Mercer captured him and put him to work.

Marker 3A had been moved to the Crew Deck, and Mercer had convinced himself that its demand that the makers must be absorbed pointed toward a Convergence Event he could personally trigger. He needed an engineer. He ordered Temple to build something that would start the process, and Temple, with no way out of the room, argued his way into keeping his Handheld Graviton Accelerator on the grounds that the work required it. Mercer agreed and then made him strip out several modifications that would have turned the tool into a weapon capable of killing its holder.

In a log recorded under guard and addressed to Elizabeth, Temple set out what had happened: that he had been lured off the Mining Deck to build something for Mercer, that he did not fully understand what convergence meant, and that if she ever found the recording she should not touch the Marker and should run from Mercer on sight. It was the last message he left.

Execution on the Crew Deck#

The device did not work. Whatever Temple had assembled under Mercer's direction failed to produce anything, and with the pretence over he stopped complying and attacked. He fired the Force Gun at Mercer directly, injuring him, telling him that he had built what was asked and that it had not worked and that the doctor was not going to hurt anyone else.

Mercer, hurt but standing, answered with a stasis shot that froze Temple in place. Isaac Clarke arrived at the scene and could do nothing but listen while Mercer spoke briefly to him. Then Mercer shot the immobilised engineer in the head. The stasis field slowed everything inside it, including Temple's death, which is precisely why Mercer chose that order of operations.

Elizabeth Cross never learned any of it in time. She went on searching for him through the ship's upper decks, hallucinating him under the Marker's influence, and died on the Executive Shuttle USG-09 at Kendra Daniels' hand after a RIG link confirmed that Temple had been dead the whole time. What survived of him was the log trail: a full account of the Ishimura's collapse recorded by the last engineer who tried to stop it.