Registry of the Evolved Database
File #22 Jun 2010 04:50
|
 Ray Wise |
There was always something a little wrong with Claudius Kellar.
His mother knew it, though she could never put her finger on it. He never caused trouble though, as the middle child of five, he would have had to have tried to stand out. Still, his style of quiet obligingness, his 'just so' way of ordering his possessions, and his ability to never, ever be at the scene of unfortunate sibling injury, to always be somewhere else entirely, always struck Gloria Kellar as unsettling. There was something groomed, something planned, about Claudius.
At school, he excelled, particularly in mathematics. Seeing the patterns between numbers, the logic within formulas, it was all quite natural to him. He was a teacher's pet to the less bright of his instructors, though the smarter ones always felt something false behind his all-to-cheerful compliance. Still, things seemed hard on the boy - he was always complaining that other children were getting ready to gang up on him. But full sympathy was hard to come by since it was his classmates that seemed to fall upon misfortune, not the presumably persecuted Claudius.
These were all signs, of course, to the man that this child would become.
Claudius carved his way through college, a continued success at mathematics. He gained accolades for his continued high performance, though never got close to the faculty, whom he seemed to view with a distant, partly veiled suspicion, culminating in a case in which Claudius brought charges of academic dishonesty and personal grievance against his advisor, one that quickly spread to include the entire mathematics department. The case came to nothing, the charges dismissed, but bridges were so thoroughly burned that Claudius was forced into another branch of the school: economics. And it is here that he truly found his calling. Claudius took to macroeconomics like a shark to dark waters, and was quickly placed in the fast lane for a BA and then a MBA. By the age of twenty four, he was already advancing through the ranks of an older predecessor of the hedge funds that would rend the world economy apart in the last decade of the 20th century.
But Claudius could never play well with others, and constantly found himself the target of what he perceived to be scheming on the part of jealous co-workers and threatened superiors. In a Pyrrhic stroke, Claudius revealed large amounts of evidence that the company had been behaving unscrupulously and in defiance of government restrictions. Samson-like, he tore down the very structure he was within, and effectively blacklisted himself - one can imagine how he perceived the interview after interview he was declined during, every door closing in his face.
So he did what he should have done all along - gone solo. In 1974, in Houston, Texas he founded the Lucid Consulting, a an operation specializing in the specialized analysis of macroeconomics, up to and including currency values, international trade trends and even actuarial predictions. As could be expected, the tenure of any given employee of Lucid was generally quite short, particularly for anyone who showed particular promise. The chance of being fired rose exponentially as one rose up the chain of command, and thus came closer to Claudius himself, who, as the majority stock holder, retained total control. Yet, despite this, the success of the company's results were undeniable, and the risk that came with working in such an unpredictable environment appealed to many young adrenaline junkies who couldn't quite keep the pace of the stock market. Though its body of employees rarely got higher than a certain number, Lucid's stocks rose steadily, and Claudius Kellar (referred to by his employees, deferentially, as Mr. K), made himself an indispensable part of a world that had tried so thoroughly to reject him.
As a man whose entirely professional life has been spent predicting bulls and bears, and navigating fiscal seas whether rough or smooth, Lucid has remained a quiet but ever present fixture in the often unstable and uncertain world of economics. In the eighties he even expanded the company's purview into political and sociological analysis, increasing his employee pool but never himself leaving the absolute center.
In his personal life, Claudius has no close friends. He trusts no one but himself, a lesson learned over years of seeing smiling faces on backstabbers and conspirators. For companionship he exclusively seeks out prostitutes, almost always of low standing - he can't afford to have a high class call girl blabbing about him to competitors, who would, he is sure, love to see him removed from the picture once and for all. And while he has nothing resembling a close family - he placed himself in exile from his parents, brothers and sisters- he has a particularly twisted practice that began in the mid eighties and continued until the mid nineties. Claudius views himself and his gifts as remarkable, worthy of propagation, and while he would never trust a wife or even a long term girl friend, he considers procreation to be a genetic imperative. To this end, he purposefully inseminated the prostitutes he acquired, often by force and against consent, then used bribery and coercion to see the pregnancies come to term, after which he would simply walk away, and allow the rigors of natural selection to do their work. The number of Claudius' living children can only be guessed at, but they may well number over a dozen. He does not know, nor does he care, though he carries some deep fear in his heart that, if one ever finds out about him, they will seek some sort of revenge, or seek to replace him.
In 1993, with the publishing of Activating Evolution, Claudius finally understood that his gift was one of many, and that he was one of a few chosen - a notion that appealed to him. Since then he has had a cause beyond increasing his own wealth and security - forwarding the rights of Evolved, interfering with registration legislation and funding pro-Evolved initiatives, the good with the bad in equal measure. If the world should change, he must remain in command of himself, and God knows how little he himself wishes to be registered.
The bomb changed little about Claudius's perspective - in fact, it pleased him to know so many of the treacherous people who locked him out of Wall Street had been incinerated. He never could have seen that coming, he must admit, but it did drastically reduce the cost of real estate in New York and, as such values usually go up, he acquired a fair bit of it, including a branch office, right where his old hedge fund used to be. At the age of 58, he finally was satisfied in avenging his 24 year old self.
Claudius Kellar is, above all else, paranoid. A condition that prefigured and later was exacerbated by his Evolved ability, paranoia has shaped his entirely life, keeping him free of close attachments and making it impossible for him to really work with or for anyone. He sees the world as full of patterns, connections, rules and alliances, all of which reject his brilliance out of jealousy and fear. He thus approaches all social situations like a game, keeping a smiling face and playing his cards very close to the vest. Information is his raw material, analysis his foundry and wealth his weapon - he makes himself indispensable, since he can only rely on the selfishness and self interest of others. A hardliner Randian Objectivist, he considers altruism to be phony at best, dangerous at worst, and imagines all the weak are always gathering together to take down the strong. He is an evil man, a crazy man, but an intelligent and capable man who has found a way of life that makes his paranoia no longer as self-destructive as it was in earlier days.
Claudius's ability is visual/neural - when activated, he can locate and identify patterns of all kinds. If placed in front of raw data, he can distill the unifying trends and principles guiding that data. This does not mean, however, that he can always determine the significance of those trends. That requires actual analysis. Also, the sheer number of possible patterns makes his ability unwieldy, so it helps if he has an understanding of what he is trying to discern, has some preliminary context or conscious filter.
The ability is on/off, and when activated, his eyes change pigmentation, turning a bright yellow. While active, the ability's reception is partially passive - it will latch on to any pattern he sees, unless he guides it. This is exhausting, so he rarely uses his ability for any long period unless he is working on a specific project and has isolated himself from all intrusive patterns - he'll lock himself in his office with the data he must process, and not emerge until he is done, allowing no one to enter and nothing to disturb him.
The applications of his ability are various, though rarely of any significant value unless he has trained them. Seeing patterns without focus leads one to total cognitive chaos, so he uses learned knowledge and concentration to focus on useful patterns. He is able to process massive amounts information, but on an intuitive 'blink' level that never makes its way into long term memory in detail (only the pattern sinks in that way), so he can only use his ability on material he can either return to later, or recall in short term memory. E.g. if assigned to examine currency future trends within Balkan countries to determine which ones should be hedged against each other, he would need a.) knowledge of how to perform arbitrage and b.) files detailing the currency trends of the various countries. That way he could examine all the information at leisure, going back to 'refresh' himself, and he would be able to look for the trends relevant to predicting profitable arbitrage investments.
Within his life, he has studied patterns and puzzles, to hone his ability, so he's a mean shake at a lot of pattern based games, is a fairly skillful amateur code breaker, and can often improvise techniques that lead to educated pattern 'guessing' - he could give a solid crack, having learned just a bit about generational genetics (particularly after reading Activating Evolution), at noticing patterns of shared characteristics and thus theorize whether or not certain people are related just by looking at them with his ability active.
Note, his ability can make him draw the wrong conclusions if he's a.) using the wrong information (e.g. if he misremembered a fact about generational genetics) b.) is misled somehow (the people are disguised to appear like family, with contact lenses and wigs), c.) he is forced to fill in an interpretation because he can't interpret it otherwise (all of them are wearing glasses so he 'fills in' the conclusion where they are all hereditary myopics, even if that's not the actual condition they have) or d.) forgets to filter a pattern that is irrelevant (they all are wearing the same color somewhere in their clothing). This last kind of wrong conclusion is precisely what aggravates and his paranoia.
His ability also has side effects, due to prolonged use. Headaches and eye strain are to be expected, and most definitely occur. However, much more dangerous is the paranoia that emerges, an augmentation of his already present personality style. For lack of a pattern to see, his brain will force a pattern onto what he sees, making cognitive leaps and linking things that have no actual link. This process, definitionally paranoid, latches onto his already present fears of persecution and fill him with a nameless dread.