Nolan Stross

Nolan Stross was a senior scientist working for EarthGov who served aboard the USG O'Bannon and was secretly tasked with recovering and studying surviving fragments of Marker 3A after the loss of the USG Ishimura. His work with a Marker shard drove him into madness, and like Isaac Clarke he was taken to Titan Station for study, where the two crossed paths during the outbreak on the Sprawl. (Dead Space: Aftermath; Dead Space 2)

The mission over Aegis VII#

Stross had served for a little over a year as the chief research scientist aboard the First Responder ship USG O'Bannon, and during that time he was also a clandestine part of EarthGov's secret investigation into the Markers. Because he was already among the O'Bannon's crew, the government arranged for the First Responder to be sent in after the loss of the USG Ishimura. There Stross was quietly tasked with recovering pieces of Marker 3A from Aegis VII, working with a team of engineers to retrieve and study the fragments. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

After a Marker shard was brought aboard, Stross began a slow slide into madness under its influence. The artifact showed him a blueprint of Necromorph DNA in telepathic visions, and he grew obsessed with what he took to be its role in human evolution, telling Captain Campbell that he believed "God" stood behind the Marker. Under its hallucinations he was tricked into exposing a corpse to the shard's signal during his experiments, unleashing the Necromorph infection on the O'Bannon. As the creature he had made slaughtered his assistant and the engineers, Stross fled to his quarters in terror, where his delusions cast his wife Alexis and infant son as Necromorphs, and he savagely killed them both. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Convergence and capture#

Stross was found by Isabel Cho, a crew member he had been having an affair with, and brought to the other survivors. He told them, ominously, that the Necromorphs were what humanity had always been meant to become. When the group reached his lab, where the shard was held, he repeated that the creatures were their destiny and that they would all soon become one. Pressed for a solution, Stross proposed that the fragment be thrown into the O'Bannon's reactor core to stop its carrier wave and destroy the creatures. As the survivors moved to the engines, Stross seized the shard and, seemingly possessed by it, could not bring himself to destroy it; Isabel took the fragment from him and threw it into the core herself. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

A Marine rescue team apprehended the survivors, and Stross was interrogated aboard the USM Abraxis, where he insisted that "Convergence is coming" and that he had to be with his family when the change arrived. Because he had come into direct contact with the fragment and resonated with it, Stross was placed in cryogenic stasis alongside another deranged man, Isaac Clarke, and both were taken to Titan Station for research. His slide into madness on the O'Bannon is the centre of the animated film Dead Space: Aftermath. (Dead Space: Aftermath; Dead Space 2)

The outbreak on the Sprawl#

During the Necromorph outbreak unleashed on Titan Station, Stross briefly encountered Isaac from a separate balcony and spotted a Leaper climbing toward the engineer in time to warn him. Vanishing into the chaos, he continued to reach Isaac through video feeds, struggling to explain the situation with the newly built Marker on the station and the steps needed to destroy it. Stross found Ellie Langford, another survivor, and Isaac convinced her to keep him alive as the three made their way toward the Government Sector. His strongest moment came when he proposed that he and Isaac could destroy the Site 12 Marker together, warning that the dementia would only worsen for them both. (Dead Space 2)

Along the way Stross grew steadily worse, haunted by hallucinations of his dead wife and son and obsessed with what he called Step 3, the piercing of the eye that he believed would let others see Alexis. He turned hostile, biting Ellie and threatening her with a screwdriver before finally gouging out her right eye with it. He then tried to kill Isaac with the same tool, but Isaac disarmed him and drove the screwdriver into his head, killing him. In his last moment Stross seemed to recover his senses, whispering an apology, and an audio log addressed to Alexis was found on his body. As Isaac later told Ellie, Stross had been running from his guilt the whole time. (Dead Space 2)

A mind made for the Marker#

Stross believed his mind was unusually suited to carrying Marker knowledge, and he said as much, once telling a colleague that the man could not see what Stross saw because he was not a true vessel. For a time after the O'Bannon he held himself together by insisting his wife and son were safe, refusing to recollect their deaths and speaking to his hallucinations as though they were still alive. That denial finally broke him: terrified of facing Alexis, he tried instead to make Isaac and Ellie face her in his place, and his guilt destroyed what was left of his mind. (Dead Space: Aftermath; Dead Space 2)