John Carver

Sergeant John Carver was a soldier of the Earth Defense Force Special Ops branch and a survivor of the Necromorph outbreaks on Uxor and Keyhole Station. After losing his family to the Markers, he joined the engineer Isaac Clarke in completing the work of his late wife, Damara, an effort to find and destroy the apparent source of the Marker signal on the frozen world of Tau Volantis.

Soldier and father#

John Carver was born on Mars on April 21, 2477. He joined the Earth Defense Force Special Ops division and rose to the rank of Sergeant, commissioned twice and earning nine commendations before being demoted back to grunt-level status. At some point he married a woman named Damara, and the two had a son, Dylan. Carver struggled badly with family life; his irritability and insubordination strained his marriage and his career, and he was once placed on administrative leave after assaulting a superior officer. His anger reached at least one incident of violence involving Dylan.

When Dylan told his mother he wanted to grow up to be a soldier like his father, Damara bought the boy a toy soldier for his birthday on John's behalf, and Carver reacted with fear. Haunted by what he had done in uniform and convinced he was a failure as a husband and father, he recorded what he meant to be his final words and was about to take his own life when Damara entered the room. He lied that he had only been thinking, but afterward he withdrew further, spending more and more time away from home.

The Uxor incident#

In time the family moved to an EarthGov research facility on Uxor that housed a Red Marker, with Carver assigned to guard it. After an argument with the unit's captain, whom Carver believed was spreading the troops too thin, he was reassigned to patrol the perimeter nearest the Marker Shroud 4 site. While on patrol, and in the middle of a bitter call with Damara, he discovered a sabotaged scanner and a long-sight laser triangulated on the Marker's containment dome. He realized too late what was happening and shouted for his wife and son to flee as a missile destroyed the signal suppression dome.

The Marker's pulse knocked out the surrounding technology and brought a ship crashing down onto the residential complexes. Carver rushed toward his family but was attacked by Necromorphs and captured by the Circle, the extremist Unitologist sect led by Jacob Danik. The cultists pried information about Damara's work from him before leaving him under guard, and in a rage he broke free, fought his way clear, and reached his home, only to find that Damara and Dylan had been killed and transformed into Necromorphs. He was forced to gun them down, apologizing as he did. As he stood on the edge of taking his own life again, Ellie Langford, an old friend of Damara's, contacted the apartment trying to reach her.

Carrying on Damara's work#

Carver heard Ellie out and learned of Damara's research into the source of the Marker signal. He recovered a data stick his wife had hidden in a stuffed doll and, knowing the cultists were monitoring transmissions, used Ellie as bait to draw the Circle into the open. Robert Norton and the USM Eudora arrived in time to extract them. The data stick held a message from Damara explaining that she had found the source of the signal, and Carver, proud of his wife's work, resolved to see it through.

The crew traveled first to Ptolemy Station, finding it overrun by Necromorphs and the Circle, and managed to locate the master Marker signal before destroying the station. They moved on to Keyhole Station to acquire the equipment needed to reach the signal's origin. There the three were separated by the combined assault of Necromorphs and Unitologists, and Ellie made the blind jump to Tau Volantis ahead of them. With the ShockRing and station destroyed to stop Danik from following, Norton decided it was time to find Isaac Clarke.

Bringing in Isaac#

Carver and Norton located Isaac on the New Horizons Lunar Colony just as the Unitologists arrived to throw the city into chaos. Carver infiltrated the engineer's apartment and held him at gunpoint while Norton explained the situation, and Isaac agreed to help as the Circle tore the colony apart in its search for him. On the way to extraction a suicide bomber destroyed their vehicle and threw Isaac and Carver into a sewage ravine, separating them from Norton. The pair fought to the rendezvous only to watch the Unitologists execute the waiting EarthGov team, and Danik forced Isaac to witness the destruction of the colony's Marker shroud before nearly executing him. Isaac evaded the shot, and the two woke later amid a full outbreak as the city's dead rose as Necromorphs. Fighting their way to Washington Station, they boarded a train and were saved at the last moment by the arriving Eudora.

In transit to Tau Volantis, Isaac tried to make peace, offering sympathy for the loss of Carver's family, but the soldier made plain that the two were not friends and that the mission came first. When the Eudora reached the planet, it was bombarded by mines from the wrecked Sovereign Colonies fleet and badly damaged. Carver and Isaac fought through the debris to reach the CMS Roanoke, where bloodstains and coffins told Carver that executions had taken place.

The hallucinations of Tau Volantis#

Aboard the derelict ships, Carver began to hear the voice of his dead son. Investigating the CMS Brusilov against Isaac's warnings, he found a small Red Marker surrounded by bodies and approached a toy soldier on the floor before Necromorphs ambushed them. When Isaac asked what the Marker had shown him, Carver refused to answer. After the survivors descended to the surface and crashed, the visions deepened. In the Archaeology Warehouse he saw his wife in the distance, bloodied and shaking, and inside he was tormented by tin soldiers, party streamers, and messages drawn from his guilt before blacking out, only to learn from Isaac that the two had stood frozen in an elevator for over five minutes.

The fullest assault came at the Rosetta Lab, where the Marker drew Carver into a landscape much like the one Isaac had faced with Nicole Brennan, a place strewn with birthday presents, jagged stone, and photographs of Damara and Dylan. The voice of Damara taunted him that he had nothing left and beckoned him to join his family in death so they could be made whole again. Each time Isaac pulled him free, telling him he did not have to face the Marker, Carver chose to return to it. At last he got close enough to shatter the artifact with his weapon and broke the connection, waking before a damaged Marker, shaken but free.

The fall of the Machine#

As the survivors climbed toward the alien Machine, Norton, hoping to retake control of the mission, locked Carver and Isaac in a cage and then betrayed the group to Danik in exchange for the others' survival. Carver was enraged at the treachery, and when Norton later turned on Isaac and blamed him for everything, Isaac killed him. Carver defended the act, reminding Isaac there had been no choice. The two pressed on, with Carver cutting a cargo cage's cable to spare the others from the Snow Beast, a decision that sent the engineer Jennifer Santos to her death.

Reaching the dormant alien city that was the Machine itself, the pair followed the logs of the scientist Earl Serrano to its control center. Carver asked Isaac to finish the mission if he himself did not survive, and Isaac told him he was a good man. When Danik used the captured Ellie to threaten them, Carver, believing Isaac deserved a second chance with her, threw Danik the Codex. Danik deactivated the Machine and restarted Convergence before being crushed by falling debris. Carver and Isaac fought their way back, battled the immense Necromorph that the records called the Moon, and pulled the Machine free of the creature. Carver helped the injured Isaac onto the island and reactivated the Machine, and the resulting pulse blew him clear as Convergence was halted and the Moon was crushed into the planet.

Earth and an uncertain end#

Carver survived the destruction of the Machine, as did Isaac, and the two turned their efforts to escaping Tau Volantis aboard the CMS Terra Nova while fighting a new Unitologist cult. As they fled, the Brethren Moons sought to turn the two men against each other, working to convince Isaac that returning home would lead the Moons to Earth, though in truth the Moons were already on their way and only wished to keep the survivors from warning anyone in time. Carver and Isaac defeated the cult and its self-styled prophet and piloted the Terra Nova toward Earth, only to find that the Brethren Moons had already arrived. As one of the Moons rose to meet the ship, both men were struck anew by the Marker's effects, and their fate remained unknown.

Character#

Carver was a soldier wholly devoted to duty, willing to place the mission above his own life and the lives of those with him. He kept his feelings close even from his own family, and the logs left across his journey suggested a man bearing post-traumatic stress and suicidal thoughts from the things he had done in uniform. His temper complicated both his career and his marriage, and after he was forced to kill his transformed wife and son his already low opinion of himself sank further; he came to believe that finishing Damara's work was the only reason left for him to live. Over the course of the expedition, and after confronting Damara's apparition in his own mind, he softened somewhat, showing genuine sympathy for Isaac and entrusting him with the mission. Isaac's calling him a good man seemed to lift his spirits, a small mercy in a life shaped by guilt.