Octavia Clarke

Octavia B. Clarke was the mother of the Concordance Extraction Corporation engineer Isaac Clarke and the wife of the ship architect Poul Clarke. Her conversion to the Church of Unitology during her husband''s long absences cost the family its fortune and shaped much of her son''s later hostility toward the Church.

Depression and Unitology#

While her husband Poul served extended missions with the Galactic Union Merchant Marine Corp, Octavia suffered from depression. Her psychiatrists encouraged her to find something meaningful to occupy herself, and she eventually found solace in the Church of Unitology. She became highly devout, going so far as to sell all of her assets to the Church. The decision had a lasting effect on her son Isaac, who was forced to give up admission to a prominent engineering college for lack of funds and attend a lesser one. The loss left him with a deep distrust and hatred of Unitology and Unitologists.

Deprogramming and death#

In the account preserved in the later record, by 2505 Octavia had been convinced to leave Unitology and was being held in a medical facility devoted to deprogramming former members from the conditioning the Church had imposed on them. There she was placed under the care of Dr. Nicole Brennan, and it was through visiting his mother that Isaac met Nicole and began a long relationship with her.

In 2508, Nicole judged that Octavia had overcome the worst of her conditioning and no longer needed to remain in the facility, reasoning that she would recover better at home with Poul, who had returned from his tour. Octavia''s conditioning, however, ran deeper than Nicole believed. She signed her last will and testament, bequeathing her body and all her possessions to the Church of Unitology, then killed Poul and herself in a murder-suicide. Immediately afterward the Church moved in and took both bodies. The event devastated Isaac and led him to blame Nicole for what had happened.

The Marker hallucination#

During the Necromorph outbreak aboard the USG Ishimura, Nicole attempted to communicate with Marker 3A, and the artifact answered her using a hallucination of the dead Octavia. Through that vision the Marker told Nicole that Octavia had understood what was necessary and had sacrificed everything in her life for Convergence, and that if Nicole brought the Marker''s makers to it, it would make them both whole again.