Jerry: Technician of the Aegis VII Colony

Jerry was a member of the technical staff of the Aegis VII Colony, a Concordance Extraction Corporation settlement, and the working partner of the engineer Natalia Deshyanov. An ordinary maintenance man with no ties to Unitology, he was pulled into the history of Marker 3A by way of punishment detail, first building the tram line out to the artifact's excavation site and then standing guard over the Marker itself. From that unwanted post he witnessed the early symptoms of the colony's unraveling at close range, in the person of the partner working beside him, and his own trail ended somewhere in the disaster that followed.

The oxygen filter accident#

Jerry served on the technical staff of the Aegis VII Colony, the Concordance Extraction Corporation settlement established for the illegal planetcrack of Aegis VII. His regular partner in that work was Natalia Deshyanov, a career engineer who had come up through the trade on Mars before earning a supervisor's post with the company.

In 2508, the two were carrying out a repair job on an oxygen filter when their communications failed. Unable to coordinate with his partner, Jerry activated the system prematurely while Natalia was still inside, and the mistake nearly killed her. She escaped only by jamming the closing door with her toolbox, a desperate improvisation that saved her life at the cost of wrecking the door itself.

The colony's management took a dim view of the damage. Hanford Carthusia, the colony manager, punished the pair for the ruined door by assigning them to the construction of a tram line running between the settlement and the excavation site of Marker 3A, the strange artifact a survey team had uncovered in the Aegis soil. Jerry took the reassignment as exactly what it was, a penalty detail, and grumbled about the "shitty job" they had been handed. Natalia's reaction was altogether different, and it surprised him. Where he saw drudgery at the edge of the dig, she quickly became infatuated with the Marker, taken with the artifact in a way that struck her partner as a bizarre change in the woman he knew.

Guarding the Marker#

The punishment did not end with the tram line. Carthusia ordered that protection of the Marker be assigned to Jerry and Natalia rather than to P-Sec, the colony's security force, and the next day Jerry was complaining about that decision too. It was a soldier's duty handed to a pair of technicians, and he wanted no part of it. His partner, by contrast, had begun to slip from infatuation into something closer to obsession, and Jerry noticed the change even if he could not account for it.

Guard duty at the excavation site put the two technicians between the Marker and everyone on the colony who wanted a piece of it. When Deakin Abbott arrived at the site with a group of Unitologists seeking to touch the artifact they held sacred, it fell to Jerry to remind them that no one was permitted to do so. A few minutes later Doctor Tom Sciarello and P-Sec Sergeant Abraham Neumann arrived at the dig, and trouble followed close behind. Neumann found his own colleague, Vera Cortez, standing among Abbott's faithful, and the discovery set the officers against the Unitologists on the spot. Jerry, a maintenance man holding a post he had never asked for, asked both parties to leave before the confrontation could turn into something worse.

The arrest#

Some time later, a video of the Marker circulated throughout the colony in defiance of Carthusia's orders. Suspicion for the recording fell on the two guards who had spent their days closest to the artifact, and a group of men was sent out to arrest Jerry and Natalia at their post.

The arrest went wrong almost at once. Natalia leveled her Plasma Cutter at one of the men and shot him without warning, an act that left Jerry as stunned as anyone present. Surrounded by several drawn Plasma Cutters, Natalia began to break down entirely, ranting that she had to protect the Marker from "them." It was Jerry who reached her. He calmed his partner down by telling her that the men had only come to protect the Marker, the same duty the two of them had been carrying out all along. The words found whatever remained of the engineer inside the obsession, and the standoff ended without further bloodshed. Natalia was knocked out, and both technicians were taken back to the colony.

Disappearance#

The arrest at the excavation site was the last recorded trace of Jerry. His partner's decline continued in confinement, where she was held under observation as her mind gave way by stages, but no account followed the man who had talked her down from the brink.

What is known is what happened to the colony around him. Marker madness of the kind that had claimed Natalia spread through the settlement's population, breeding the crazed colonists who turned on their neighbors, and after the planet crack the Necromorph outbreak overran Aegis VII entirely. Jerry's fate was never set down, but between the deranged and the dead that filled the colony's final hours, he was most likely killed by a maddened colonist or by one of the creatures. He was remembered, where he was remembered at all, as a complaining workman who never wanted the post history gave him, and who nonetheless stood it well enough to turn a massacre at the Marker into a single shooting on the day his partner broke.