Sally Hennen: Unitologist of the Cassini Towers

Sally Hennen was a devout follower of Unitology who lived in the Cassini Towers, the residential complex on Titan Station reserved for the Church's favored members, at the time of the Necromorph outbreak that destroyed the Sprawl. Notified by the Church that her "rebirth" was coming, she embraced the news with total joy, wrote a final log begging her younger sister Marion to join the rituals that preceded a mass suicide, and vanished into the collective frenzy that consumed the towers in the hours before the outbreak. The lone female body that Isaac Clarke later found in the bathroom of her apartment did not stay still when he approached. It tore itself apart from the inside, and dozens of Swarmers poured out of it.

A believer in the Cassini Towers#

Little was recorded of Sally Hennen's life before the final days of Titan Station, the sprawling civilian settlement built around the shattered remains of Saturn's moon Titan. What survived of her came from where she lived and what she left behind. Her apartment stood in the Cassini Towers, one of the station's residential districts and the seat of the Titan Station Church of Unitology, a complex advertised under the tagline "Cosmic Views, Terrestrial Living" and decorated with the elaborate statuary the Church favored. Residence there was itself a mark of standing. Only the higher ranks of the Church were permitted to live in the towers, which made it probable that Sally had attained the level of a Vested member rather than remaining an ordinary initiate.

She did not live there alone in spirit. Her logs were addressed to a younger sister, Marion, who shared in her faith closely enough that Sally spoke of "our stuff" when the time came to prepare for the end. Whatever else their lives on the Sprawl had held, by 2511 the sisters' world had narrowed to the teachings of Unitology and the promise those teachings held out: that death was not an ending but a step toward Convergence, the reunion of all flesh promised by the Church since the days of Michael Altman.

The promise of rebirth#

That promise stopped being abstract when the Church notified Sally that her "rebirth" was coming. On a station secretly built around the Site 12 Marker, the government's largest attempt to replicate the Marker signal, the announcement was not an empty ritual phrase. The signal that the faithful took for the voice of their god was real, it was strengthening, and the Church on Titan Station began moving its members toward the collective death that Unitologist doctrine taught would feed the Convergence.

Sally received the news with unguarded rapture. In the log she recorded for her sister, preserved as the text known as Sally 3, she could barely contain herself. "This is a very special time, like, once in a lifetime. Actually once in a million lifetimes! They say we've been preparing for this since before we were human! Do you know how special that makes us? We're the ones who get to see it! I'm so excited my skin is tingling. I've got chills!" There was no fear anywhere in the message. To Sally, the coming annihilation of everyone she knew was a privilege of cosmic rarity, and her only concern was that Marion not miss it.

The log asked Marion to bring the rest of their "stuff" for the ritual and to join the observances that preceded a mass suicide, so that the Convergence could happen. That request placed Sally among the numerous Unitologists who spent the hours before the outbreak transforming the Cassini Towers into a shrine, lighting candles in the corridors and scrawling graffiti in Marker symbols across the walls of the complex. When Daina Le Guin later led Isaac Clarke from the Titan Memorial Medical Center into the towers, he walked through the remains of that vigil, the candles and painted symbols left behind by believers like Sally who had gone willingly to meet what was coming.

The body in the bathroom#

The rebirth the Church had promised arrived as a Necromorph outbreak that overran the Sprawl within hours. When Isaac Clarke passed through the Cassini Towers during the disaster, he entered Sally's apartment and found her log for Marion resting on a balcony, its cheerful anticipation preserved amid the wreckage of the station. In the bathroom he found a lone female body.

The record allowed no certainty about who the woman was. The presence of a single corpse in the apartment suggested that either Sally or Marion had returned from the collective ritual and taken her own life there, alone, away from the congregation she had been so eager to join. Whether it was Sally herself, dying in the home she had prepared as a shrine, or Marion, following her older sister's last instruction, the apartment held only one of the Hennen sisters at the end.

The body did not remain a body. When it was approached, the corpse ruptured from the inside, and numerous Swarmers crawled out of the torn remains, the tiny Necromorphs formed from reanimated scraps of flesh that hunted in crawling masses and stripped their victims to the bone.

What her death revealed#

The manner of the transformation gave Sally Hennen's death a significance out of proportion to her small place in the history of the Sprawl. Nearly every Necromorph observed during the outbreaks was created through direct contact with an Infector, the bat like form whose function was to convert the dead into new killers. The corpse in Sally's bathroom had never been touched by one. It changed on its own, dead tissue answering the Marker signal that saturated the station, and it confirmed that Swarmers originated from dead flesh exposed to that signal rather than from an Infector's work.

It was one of the very few times such a transformation was ever witnessed, a rare direct demonstration that the signal alone could remake the dead. In that sense the faith that carried Sally Hennen to her death was answered, though not as the Church had promised. She had been told she would be reborn, and something did rise from the body in her apartment. What crawled out of it was not Sally, and it did not carry her toward Convergence. It scattered across the floor of her home in search of the living, one more fragment of the catastrophe that her devotion had helped to welcome aboard.