Tom Sciarello

Dr. Thomas Oliver Sciarello was the Chief Medical Officer of the Aegis VII Colony, a confirmed atheist who, as the discovery of Marker 3A drove the colony toward madness, became one of the first to suspect the artifact itself was to blame. He died when Slashers ambushed the colony's doctors in the medical labs during the Necromorph outbreak.

Early life and career#

Tom Sciarello was born into a comfortable family in the North Carolina Hubs of the United States sector of Earth. His father was a surgeon and his mother a general practitioner, and the burden of carrying on their work fell to Tom after his older brother Carlos drifted into a life of petty crime and jail. Feeling the weight of that responsibility, Tom plunged into a comfortable career and family life, marrying young, raising two children, and running a successful surgery on Earth for years.

His life collapsed when his parents died within a month of each other, a loss that struck far harder than anyone expected. Within six months he divorced his wife, closed his surgery, and joined a small extraterrestrial mining company as its fleet doctor, only to find that life in space unsettled him badly. Casting around for a position on Mars, he instead found an opening with the Concordance Extraction Corporation, which was seeking good doctors to head its colony surgeries, and he took the job gratefully because it demanded only a bare minimum of space travel. Ten years on, having presided over three successful planetcrack colonies and been promoted to Chief Medical Officer, he had never remarried.

The Aegis VII incident#

A firm atheist, Sciarello was deeply confused by the events that followed the discovery of Marker 3A on the Aegis VII Colony, as more and more colonists came to his clinic with symptoms of depression and insomnia. He began to see visions of his dead nurse, Katie Evans, who had been murdered by the paranoid miner Brant Harris. Coming to suspect that the Marker was behind the spreading wave of paranoia and violence, he went so far as to secretly test it for radiation, and he was repeatedly attacked by patients the artifact had affected. On the orbiting USG Ishimura, in a message to Captain Benjamin Mathius, Dr. Terrence Kyne expressed interest in going planetside to discuss the Marker's effects with Sciarello and the psychiatrist Jonn Welland.

Together with P-Sec Sergeant Abraham Neumann, Sciarello tried several times to convince the colony manager Hanford Carthusia to abandon the mining project given the number of violent incidents, but their requests were ignored.

Death#

Following the planet crack and the near total blackout of the colony, Sciarello set out to find the backup generators, only to be stopped by a vision of Katie, who told him it was too late. He soon discovered that the entire colony was under attack. He and several other doctors went to the colony's medical labs, expecting the wounded to seek help there. In the morgue he noticed that the bodies of the Unitologists who had taken their own lives in Union Square were gone. The group was then ambushed by Slashers clinging to the ceiling, and one of them impaled Sciarello through the forehead.