Registry of the Evolved Database
File #28 Jul 2010 05:14
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 Ali Larter |
Born on August 24, 1974. Barbara Zimmerman was one o three triplets born to Claudia Zimmerman, by means of successful in vitro fertilization – the earliest known occurrence of such practices, though not the earliest public record. Done through the Company, and kept under wraps due to the secretive nature of their work. Barbara, along with her sisters Niki and Tracy were all soon after injected with the Company’s “formula”, a mixture capable of granting regular people with Evolved abilities through synthetic means.
As part of this grander experiment orchestrated by The Company and its associates in an attempt to discover if there were any patterns to ability emergence, as well as the effects of upbringing as well as environment on such things , Barbara was handed over to Doctor Jonas Zimmerman, the man who was effectively her father. She would never get to know her sisters Niki and Tracy, as both sisters were handed off to families in remarkably different environments and situations, while Barbara remained with Zimmerman as a “control” group of sorts, growing up with Zimmerman, her mother Claudia, and her half-brother Nikkaus.
Throughout her childhood, Barbara remained unaware of the nature of her life and the nature of The Company, though she did meet many of the children of the Company founders, intermingling with and growing up around them. The schooling she received was top notch, and it was in her teens under the careful, never ending watch of Doctor Zimmerman that she first manifested her ability. Though unclear at first, it soon became evident what her ability was after it was revealed that she was drawing pictures of her family doing things out of her purview that had already happened. The discovery of this post-cognitive ability marked an interesting turn for Doctor Zimmerman’s research.
In 1991, when Barbara was 17, everything began to change for her. It began when her father somewhat abruptly began to sink into depression, grow worse and worse as time passed, and Barbara never new why this was happening. Steadily things grew worse and worse, until not even a year later, in 1992, everything finally gave away from underneath the Zimmerman family. In the early hours one morning, she was startled awake by Jonas, who insisted that she pack as much as she could fit into a suitcase and prepare to leave. Something was clearly wrong, and the fear that Jonas carried when he woke her told her the worst, left her worried and scared.
It was in this moment that Barbara was finally told the truth of many matters in her life. The truth of the research that Jonas had been doing all of these years, the truth of Barbara’s ability and her nature as an Evolved human, the truth of her sisters existence, the truth of what, exactly, the Company that she had been raised was… and the truth that her mother Claudia was dead, and the truth that if she didn’t leave now, Barbara would follow after her. Jonas pleaded with his daughter, begging her to get on a bus and disappear, to give him no knowledge of where she planned to go, and to take whatever steps she needed to in order to stay unfound by those who would come looking for her.
The last words she remembers from him, and the most powerful ones to stick in her mind were "I have made a terrible mistake, one that I endeavour to start changing." With reluctance, she fled a her father asked, disappeared from Manhattan. She boarded a bus bound for Canada, and never looked back. Never learned how her mother died. Never learned what became of father. Never learned if the fate fate befell her brother. Forced to leave everything behind, with only a single family picture left in her possession for her to remember them by. A simple photograph of her, her father, her mother, and her brother, her most treasured possession for years to come.
Her arrival in Canada was marked by hardship as she attempted to scrape together a life using what little money she had. It was far from easy, given her lack of credentials and identification. She took the name Barbara Simms, unwilling to lose her entire name among everything else. Living illegally in another country was something Barbara had never imagined, much less prepared for, and the first few years of her life were incredibly trying, marked with frustration and disappointment. Lacking any proper identification or citizenship meant severely limited options for housing and employment, and for these early years she was largely reduced to odd jobs paid in cash and a few short lived jobs with a few shady managers willing to pay as such as well.
She spent the next three years in and out of these odd jobs, living by the month in youth centres, hotel rooms, and at one point an extremely sketchy living tenement, attempting to stay off the grid as much as possible and do nothing that might attract attention to her, pulling together something resembling a quiet, if sombre existence. Making use of the money she had saved from her minimal work, she began taking occasional private art lessons when she could afford to, the subject being something she had grown fond of while doing drawings for Zimmerman’s tests. Eventually, she quietly and discreetly found more regular work as a waitress at a rather run down restaurant, paid largely in cash and in tips.
With the turn of the century, it seemed that Barbara had finally settled into something more closely resembling a passable life – as much so as she could manage, anyway. She had seemingly done a good job of keeping herself off grid and out of view - and more importantly out of the eyes of the Company, always remaining under the radar and low key in her activities. She was always unsure of how far the Company’s reach extended, how far they would go to find her. She found herself moving whenever money or circumstances forced her to, keeping what small work she could. It was best described as a time of constant transition, of rapid pace, and it seemed to go by almost too fast – and yet, never fast enough.
Such was life for Barbara, the one she came to know all too well – constant odd or low income work, semi frequently moving. It wasn’t until the latter half of the decade that things took a sudden turn. While the explosion of The Bomb did not directly affect Barbara and her life, it helped set the stage for the years to come. Inadvertently, she began to meet, on a rare few occasions, people she came to believe were not unlike her, using what she could remember of her Father’s brief revelations to her. But it was the public revelation of the existence of the Evolved that really marked a turning point for Barbara.
She had known she wasn’t along in her possession of an extraordinary ability for some time, thanks to her father, but with that secret now known to public, Barbara was filled with mixed emotions. At first, there was elation – a sense of liberation from this terrible past and this burden she held. This was quickly replaced, however, with worry and fear as the details of the Linderman act came to light, stories of Registration and anti-evolved rallies back in America left her scared that the same thing would come to Canada, and then she would know an entirely new fear.
It was in early 2008 that she first came into contact with the Ferrymen. It was an odd occurrence indeed, when the Company finally caught up in her while she was in Toronto. Barely escaping only with the aid of another Evolved she stumbled. She was quickly introduced to the Ferry as someone under their protection. Though it meant moving once more, Barbara was more than willing to join the Ferry – being surrounded by others like her, both in being Evolved and in being in her situation in life or something at least approximating it brought a strong sense of security and comfort to her.
Over the next year, Barbara would live with other Ferry refugees, before long seeking a way that she could help in a larger, more important way among the Ferry – having spent time with other around her, and taking a role of someone who helped them as she could had proven something she enjoyed greatly, and finally she was moved to Manitoba, and put to work as a receiver at the Thompson Safehouse Commune, where numerous Evolved had come seeking asylum from Registration, persecution, or any other number of circumstances. It was a high point in a difficult, but improving life, Barbara able to find reward in helping other find home and help in their new environments, away from what troubled them previously.
Everything ran smoothly for a year, with Barbara working to keep the Commune moving smoothly as possible, keeping everyone’s life as comfortable as possible in their off grid homes. And then, with no warning, it all came crashing down.
June, 2010. The Commune, like all Ferry safehouses, had been ready to defend itself at a moment’s notice, but nothing could have protected them for what was descending on them that night. No one could have predicted the sleek black military helicopters landing on the outskirts of Thompson, bringing forces ready to pounce. Like being hit with a blunt instrument, the force with which the Commune was hit wasn’t something they could have ever been ready for. Beset by a heavily armed military team, or something approximating such, the camp was stormed in a flash of sound, fury, and an unusual yellow gas that left those in commune unable to use their abilities to defend themselves against the onslaught.
Barbara herself saw numerous highly armoured individuals not unlike those she had seen from American news reports – FRONTLINE, though she didn’t connect the similarity until later, and interspersed among them were far more interesting people clad in biohazard suits, dispensing the yellow gas throughout the commune. Though many were left injured – Barbara herself left bruised and sore – the use of rubber bullets and the fact that numerous evolved within the settlement were declared missing afterwards made it quite clear to Barbara and the remaining denizens of Thompson that this was, if anything, a raid - a capture mission of some dreadful sort, and it was with horror that Barbara came to realise that many of the higher profile Evolved left under her care had now been captured – including Tyler Case and Delphine Kuhr, two whom she was sure there would be great repercussions for their capture. While there was no exact number when the smoked clear as to how many who had been captured, it was far too many to let stand by.
Barbara was left with little choice but to resume her life deep off grid, if only temporary, until a little bit of time had passed and she believed she could make her way safetly to New York, to tell the Ferry leadership of what had happened herself. If there was anything to come of this, she would rather it fall on her than everything else – and it was important that they hear from her mouth. And with that, she set off for New York for the first time in years, unsure of what the future would hold.
Barbara Zimmerman is a person marked by a driven, compassionate streak. Determined to make sure that anyone else who finds themselves in any sort of situation similar to what hers has been for nearly twenty years has an easier time than she has. It’s this ambition and determination that fuels her current work with the Ferry network, operating her safehouse in Canada and keeping watch over its occupants. She does her best to help keep them under the radar and largely off grid like she has been herself for years, while keeping things as “normal” and comfortable as possible.
As this might indicate, Barbara is a patient, caring woman, but gentle as she might be at times, she is not so much so that she comes off as fragile or coddling. She takes careful watch and aids those under her purview as she can and must, but doesn’t let such things cloud judgement, She is as stern as she needs to be in a given situation, and can appear rather taciturn at times because of it. She approaches things as calmly as she can, but when emotions run high, she can become headstrong and confrontational. While this state is not very easy to incite in her, it can be hard to bring her back down from once achieved.
While at many times it is nothing more than a façade, Barbara tries at all times to remain confident and collected, if only for the benefit of those that she protects. She has a deep seeded fear of being found by the Company or worse, and anything that brings this fear to the surface has the potential to leave her in a bad place for the duration. She is hesitant to talk about herself because of her past and how she came to be in the situation she’s in now, and will take any excuse to shy away from a conversation about such with someone whom she’s not ready to trust that much.
Due to having spent the last many years looking over her shoulder, and the nature of her safehouse work, trust isn’t something that always comes easily to Barbara. Even with those she lets close, she can seem guarded. Not to the point of seeming withdrawn or secretive, but just enough to betray her otherwise gentle, kind demeanor the moment conversation or the like may take a more personal turn.
Barbara’s ability is Postcognition – the ability to see events that have already happened. This ability has both a passive and an active form.
The passive form involves visions of past events simply coming to Barbara, much like visions of the future come to many precognitives. When this happens, Barbara has no control over what sort of vision she sees, though it is almost always tied to a “trigger” of sorts – a thought of a person, place, thing, time can suddenly induce one of these states, and often the vision will pertain to the trigger. This is not always true, and it is not uncommon for Barbara to have entirely random (or seemingly random) visions of past events.
The active form is one Barbara has been practicing for some time, and has had some success with. The active variation of this ability involves inciting an intentionally initiated vision. Barbara has acquired very, very limited control over what she views in an induced postcognitive state. With enough focus, she can pick on or two conditions, such as a specific person, or place, or time, and induce a vision related to one of them. This is not an exact science, and Barbara rarely receives exactly the vision she’s aiming for, but it is always something connected in some form to what she wishes to see. This process if made easier by having some kind of anchor to her condition – the presence, or less helpfully a picture of the person in question, or being iat the location she wishes to view a vision of are both good examples. Induced visions tend to be more vauge than the ones that simply come to her – Barbara describes them as “fuzzy, like watching a TV show through a bit of static”. This makes them less reliable, but can nonetheless contain important information
When Barbara has one of her postcognitive visions, she experiences the event as if she were a fly on the wall when it actually happened – hearing, seeing, experiencing every single thing that happened in that instance. The sheer amount of information that she takes in can be overwhelming, and makes it hard for her to relay what she sees through words and actions alone – not that she’s incapable, it is simply just very hard for her. Instead, she falls back on her skill at drawing to create accurate visual representations of what she sees, filling in the blanks on what she hears with words scrawled in the drawing, or verbally once she is finished. This drawing are often highly accurate to what Barbara actually has scene, and provide her with both an anchor and a frame for her ability.
Barbara’s visions are not without drawbacks. Primarily, they leave her very, very drained, both physically and emotionally. Induced visions in particular leave her extremely tired for several hours. This physical weakness is not crippling, nor does it tire her to the point of uselessness, but it is extremely strong. These visions also have a sort of time limit between them, the length of which varies by the duration of the vision, how clear it is, and if it is a passive or active vision. It’s a guessing game as to how long it will be before she can have another vision, as Barbara has never been able to pinpoint an exact timeframe to these factors.
Finally, Barbara is not able to transfer these visions to others. They remain wholly in her head, making her reliance on drawings to help express them that much more poignant. She’s heard of postcogs who can transfer their visions to other, and has attempted such herself, but has not found success and does not believe she will.