Marker 3A

Marker 3A was a Red Marker grown by the Sovereign Colonies at the end of the 23rd century and placed on Aegis VII for experimentation. Abandoned after the first Necromorph outbreak it caused, the artifact lay buried for two hundred years until an illegal mining colony uncovered it and the USG Ishimura recovered it in 2508, setting off the disaster that drew in Isaac Clarke.

Origin and the Red Markers#

In the decades after the Black Marker was exhumed on Earth in 2214, the Sovereign Colonies government studied the artifact in the hope of using it to solve humanity's resource crisis. About eighty years later they succeeded in reverse-engineering it, producing at least three copies that were sent to the remote planets Kreemar, Aspera and Aegis VII. The copy bound for Aegis VII was designated Marker 3A.

The Red Markers were not so much built as grown, assembled from the replication data held in the Black Marker, and they remained as mysterious as the alien original. The science teams who studied them determined that the Markers did not generate their signal but received it from somewhere in deep space and re-broadcast it. The artifacts on Aegis VII, Aspera and Kreemar showed accurate triangulation and could communicate with one another as a single mind across light-years of distance.

The First Aegis VII Incident#

In time the Red Markers triggered Necromorph outbreaks on their respective worlds in unison. On Aegis VII the outbreak produced the Hive Mind, a Nexus form that acted as a conduit between the Marker and the smaller creatures. The Marker held this connection through a signal-amplifying pedestal, relaying its orders to the Hive Mind and through it to the rest of the Necromorphs.

Marker 3A could not kill and absorb the bodies of its makers, who were either absent from Aegis VII or had escaped, and the outbreak eventually subsided. Aware of the danger, the Sovereign Colonies prohibited all travel to the Aegis system and buried the records of the experiment along with those of Aspera and Kreemar. Even so, the EarthGov Colonial Alliance later recovered information that pointed to the Marker's presence in the system.

The Second Aegis VII Incident#

In 2508 an illegal CEC mining colony on Aegis VII accidentally uncovered Marker 3A. Some colonists hailed it as proof of Unitology, and the Church was swiftly notified. Almost at once cases of insomnia, depression and dementia spread through the colony as the Marker began the first phase of a new outbreak, and within weeks paranoid and homicidal behavior was widespread. As the extraction team prepared to lift the artifact from its pedestal, it emitted a burst of red light; interpreting it as the voice of God, a group of Unitologists committed mass suicide, and a deranged engineer slaughtered his own team.

The Ishimura arrived soon afterward, its key positions filled with high-ranking believers placed by the Church to secure the artifact. On the orders of the Unitologist captain Benjamin Mathius the Marker was brought up to the ship under a no-fly order. As the planet crack began, a blackout swept the colony, the dead rose as Necromorphs, and the outbreak spread to the Ishimura. The Hive Mind woke and began commanding its hordes, but without the Marker on its pedestal the two could not properly coordinate.

Isaac Clarke and the blueprints#

Convinced by Dr. Terrence Kyne that returning the artifact to its pedestal would silence the Hive Mind, Isaac Clarke took Marker 3A down to Aegis VII. When he set it back in place it released a pulse that imprinted its self-replicating signal and the knowledge to build more Markers into his mind, while the tectonic load extracted by the Ishimura destabilized the cracked planet. The Marker itself was destroyed as the debris crashed into Aegis VII, though shards of it survived the incident.

The blueprints Marker 3A left in Isaac's head made him a target for the rest of the saga. On Titan Station, EarthGov's Project Telomere extracted that knowledge under Director Hans Tiedemann to construct the gigantic Site 12 Marker, infecting other scientists' minds in the process and confining Isaac alongside Nolan Stross. The same knowledge made Isaac a prize for the Unitologists under Daina Le Guin, who sought to use him to build Markers for the Church and spread Convergence across the galaxy.