Weaver: Franco Delille's superior on the Sprawl

Weaver was the superior of the engineer Franco Delille aboard Titan Station, the orbital city known as the Sprawl. He never appeared in person in any surviving account of the station's fall. He existed only as a voice on the radio, assigning repair jobs, relaying fragments of news, and passing down orders from authorities he did not name. When the Necromorph outbreak of 2511 tore through the station, Weaver's dispatches steered Franco and the CPD officer Sarah Andarsyn from one failing system to the next, and his refusals at the worst possible moments made him, in Franco's eyes, a man who deserved to answer for her death.

The voice on the radio#

In the recorded history of the Sprawl's last days, Weaver appeared only as a name and a voice. He was Franco Delille's superior in the station's engineering hierarchy, and his function was dispatch: he identified system failures across Titan Station and sent Franco out to repair them, job after job, throughout the hours in which the station died. Whatever office he worked from, whatever he saw on his monitors, and whoever gave him his own instructions were never set down in any surviving account.

His first recorded order came before the outbreak began. Weaver directed Franco to the CEC Facility to repair a malfunctioning door, a routine assignment on the face of it, and Sarah Andarsyn, a CPD officer and Franco's girlfriend, volunteered to accompany him. The job proved less routine than it looked. On arrival Franco noted that the door appeared to have been deliberately tampered with rather than simply broken, and a computer problem the pair handled soon afterward showed signs of the same interference, its systems corrupted as if by a virus. Whether Weaver knew that the failures he was dispatching his engineer to fix had been sabotaged was never established.

The assignments continued. Weaver announced a damaged solar panel on the station's exterior that needed tending, sending Franco and Andarsyn out on a spacewalk during which Franco panicked and drifted free of the hull before Andarsyn pulled him back. After the pair repaired a manufacturing sky panel outside the station, Weaver advised them to remain on active duty. His reasoning was the trouble arising from news of an unspecified "outbreak," an incident he could not describe but which, he warned, might soon require their skills.

An outbreak without a name#

Weaver's warning hardened into fact within hours. He contacted Franco and Andarsyn with word that an outbreak was spreading across the station, and told them, without waiting to be asked, that he needed them in the field even though he could not specify the exact nature of the incident. The vagueness was not evasion so far as the record showed; the information reaching him was simply incomplete, and he passed along what he had.

By the time Franco and Andarsyn escaped a stampede at a tram station, driven by the first of the creatures they would come to know too well, Weaver had learned more. He called Franco back to warn him that he now understood the danger, that the creatures were appearing all over the Sprawl, and that the station's defenders needed help. He ordered Franco to a public sector to repair a lighting failure, reasoning that restored light would help the security forces fight the creatures off. In the accounts that followed Franco to Sector 45, the engineer crossed a pitch black district and the vents beneath it to reach the sector's power hub, restoring the lighting as ordered while the Church of Unitology's local chapter sheltered him along the way.

Hard orders#

The surviving accounts of Franco's route through the dying station diverged, but Weaver's voice ran through all of them, and as the disaster deepened his orders grew harder. In the Inverted City, Franco and Andarsyn found a school littered with the mutilated bodies of civilians, and inside its panic room, where Andarsyn hoped to find children waiting for rescue, only a trapped Necromorph among a group of dead children. Weaver ordered the school sealed, so that the fate of its occupants would not become public and cause a panic.

His most consequential instruction came above the lower levels of Sector 27. Weaver called Franco and told him to quarantine the sectors below, an order that shocked both the engineer and the officer beside him. Franco did not want to carry it out; there were people down there. It was Andarsyn who reluctantly persuaded him, arguing that the order came from a higher power and that losing ten percent of the station's population was better than losing everyone. The sectors were sealed. The measure proved imperfect regardless, for the creatures were soon found using the ventilation shafts to bypass the quarantine protocols entirely.

The airlock and the vow#

Weaver's final recorded orders sent Franco and Andarsyn back into vacuum, out onto the station's hull to repair the failing life support systems. The creatures, it turned out, could survive in the void, and in the brief fight that followed Andarsyn's suit was ruptured. Franco rigged a temporary patch to hold what oxygen she had left and radioed Weaver, asking him to open the airlock. Weaver apologized and refused. He was not authorized, he said. Franco set about hacking the airlock himself, but the work took too long. Andarsyn's air ran out before he finished, and though he dragged her inside and tried to revive her, she was gone.

As Franco knelt over her body, a message arrived on his personal device from an unknown sender, reading "HE AWAITED." Then Weaver's voice returned, unchanged, telling Franco to head back to the Public Sector and repair the fire extinguisher systems. Franco refused. He vowed revenge on Weaver, destroyed his radio, and went on alone toward the Titan Memorial Medical Center, where his own death waited in the cell of Isaac Clarke. Whether Franco's vow could ever have been kept went unanswered. Weaver was never heard from again in any surviving record, and whether the dispatcher outlived the station he had spent its final hours trying to hold together was never known.