Tim Fischer: The Councilman Who Supplied Aspera

Tim Fischer was a Councilman in the government of the colony world of Vindauga during the 2290s, and in secret he was something more: the man the Sovereign Colonies trusted to supervise the shipping that kept their remote facilities on Aspera alive. His public career ended in front of a crowd and a bank of cameras when Istvan Sato, a drifter driven by voices only he could hear, stormed the stage of a press conference and shot him in the head. Yet even death did not finish Fischer's part in the history of the Red Markers. On Aspera, inside the very complex his hidden logistics had helped build, Marker 2A later resurrected his face as a hallucination and sent the dead councilman to whisper of Convergence to the man who had killed him.

A councilman of the domes#

Vindauga was a poor planet, and its people lived their whole lives inside massive domed cities. The worst of those domes was the Mariner Valley compound, a slum where families like the Satos scraped by without proper food, shelter, or schooling, and even the better districts depended entirely on the great structures that held in their air. On such a world, the integrity of the domes was not an abstract question of engineering. It was the difference between a functioning colony and a mass grave, and the officials who governed Vindauga carried that weight in every public appearance.

Tim Fischer rose within this government and held the position of Councilman during the 2290s. To the citizens of Vindauga he was a public servant of a struggling colony, a man whose duties concerned budgets, infrastructure, and the endless maintenance of the domes. The record of his public work is thin, and history might have forgotten him entirely as one minor politician among many, had two forces not intersected in his life: the covert machinery of the Sovereign Colonies, and the madness of a young man from Mariner Valley.

The secret work for the Sovereign Colonies#

Behind the public office, Fischer served a second master. The Sovereign Colonies used him in secret to supervise the shipping for their containment facility on Aspera, a small, mostly uninhabitable world so remote and so poor in natural resources that almost no one had any reason to look at it twice. That obscurity was precisely why the government had chosen it. Aspera's penal colony held political prisoners, men and women the Sovereign Colonies wanted removed from sight, and a facility of that kind required a steady, quiet flow of supplies that could not appear in ordinary manifests. Fischer, a councilman on a nearby colony world with legitimate authority over shipping, was the discreet hand on that supply line.

His hidden portfolio then grew far darker. In the 2290s, eighty years after the Black Marker was exhumed from the Earth, the Sovereign Colonies selected Aspera as the site of one of three new military installations built to investigate and recreate the alien artifact. The research facility was deliberately placed near the penal colony so that the prisoners could be used as test subjects if the need arose. When construction began, Fischer was placed in charge of the supplies for the site as well. Every girder, instrument, and ration that raised the laboratory where Marker 2A would be grown passed under the supervision of a dome politician whose constituents had no idea he served the Marker program at all.

The methane leak and the final press conference#

Fischer's end began with a failure of the very infrastructure his world depended on. A methane leak broke out in one of the outlier domes of Vindauga, and public alarm over the safety of the colony's structures demanded an official answer. Fischer took the stage at a press conference concerning the structural integrity of the domes. Whatever reassurance the crowd had hoped for, the councilman offered none. In his speech he blamed the citizens of Vindauga themselves for failing to alert the government about the crack in the dome, and the crowd's mood turned angry.

He never finished the speech. Among the onlookers was Istvan Sato, the elder of two brothers from the Mariner Valley compound, a drifter who had spent years listening to a "shadow man" in his mind and who had told his brother Jensi only the day before that he would soon be on all the news vids, made "famous" by fulfilling his "purpose." Jensi and his friend Henry Wandrei had taken the warning seriously, identified four large public events scheduled that week, and split up to watch them all. Jensi chose correctly and spotted his brother at Fischer's conference, but too late. In his demented state Istvan rushed the stage, pulled a gun on the councilman, and shot Tim Fischer in the head before soldiers of the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces subdued him and dragged him away.

What followed the shot#

The assassin's fate proved as strange as the crime. Under interrogation, Istvan claimed only that he had been following what the voices in his head told him to do. He was held briefly at a police station, and then the record simply stopped. When Henry Wandrei's father pressed an acquaintance on the police force for information, the only answer he received was that Istvan had been whisked away by the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces. There was no public trial for the murder of a sitting councilman. Instead, a small gray skinned interrogator questioned Istvan about the politician he had killed, got nothing but talk of voices, and finally banished him to a place beyond human rights or laws: the penal colony on Aspera, the same installation whose supply lines Fischer had secretly managed. The man who murdered the councilman was buried alive, administratively, inside the councilman's own hidden project.

The face the Marker borrowed#

Fischer's last appearance in recorded history came after his death, and not in any human archive. On Aspera, the nearby research facility completed Marker 2A, a Red Marker built from the Black Marker research, and as the artifact finished its growth the prisoners of the penal colony began to feel its signal, turning erratic and slowly going insane. Istvan Sato, whose mind the Marker found uniquely receptive, watched his hallucinations change as the artifact evolved. The shadows and patterns of his childhood gave way to people he had once known, and among them walked the deceased Tim Fischer. The false Fischer, alongside the image of Istvan's mother, spoke to him of the "marvelous Convergence" and urged him to "find" them.

It was the same method the Markers used elsewhere in their long war on humanity, reaching into a compatible mind, choosing faces the subject knew, and sending the dead back as messengers. That the artifact chose Fischer is a grim closing note to the councilman's double life. The man who had quietly provisioned the Marker program became, in death, one of its instruments, his stolen face put to work guiding his own murderer deeper into the artifact's design in the days before Marker 2A unleashed the Necromorph outbreak that destroyed both the penal colony and the research station he had supplied.