Registry of the Evolved Database
File #30 Nov 2010 16:55
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 Justin Timberlake |
Memory is a fickle thing in most people. Like a road stretching through time from as far in the past as you can remember to as far in the future as you dare dream, memories are the exits and rest stops that allow you to re-experience things that you may never experience again. A first kiss, for example, or the nervousness of stepping into the limelight to give a speech at your high school graduation, holds a power that is not easily repurposed. There are bumps in the road, sure, and some exits are closed, only briefly glimpsed while driving by, giving snatches of odor or the sound of a laughing child - enough to convince you that yes, it did happen, but you can' remember it entirely well. Most people have a memory like this, but Dax is not like most people. Sadly, Dax's memory most resembles a hunk of worm-eaten swiss cheese that's been attacked with an angle grinder and other assorted pneumatic tools. The furthest back he can remember is just after the bomb went off in New York, and even that might have been changed at some point without his knowledge. More he really can't say. Just reading his dossier at the company leaves more questions than answers, and asking the person the dossier is actually about for more information leads to more dead ends than Daedalus' labyrinth.
Dax's first memory that he can recall with any sort of clarity was Thanksgiving day, 2006. Sitting in a small house in the northern part of Maine with a roasted chicken on the plate in front of him and a football game on the TV, he remembers thinking how lucky he was to not be in New York, how thankful he was to have a roof over his head, a plate of food in front of him, and a job to go to on Monday. Sure, it was just fixing computers, but compared to most, it was a lot better. But his past goes back far, far further, even if he doesn't remember it.
Dax, before ending up as a computer repair guy, had a long and busy life. His parents, Charles Arcenaux and Barbara Steel Thibodeaux, a pair of folk from the town of Lake Arthur, deep in the swampy heart of Louisiana. At least, that's where the post office was. His family lived on the edge of a bayou about 20 miles south of I-10 in the middle of nowhere. He was born in the middle of August, 1982 during a heat wave. They had electricity thanks to solar panels on the roof, and clean water thanks to a filter that had to be changed every couple of months, and as far as things went, this was a neat place to grow up. Except, he didn't grow up there. A bit after his fourth birthday his parents, who worked with odd sequences of genetics at the Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge, were given an offer by a government organization to come to work with them. It was a very, very generous offer, and they accepted, moving to Morningside Heights to start work at Biomere Research, Inc.
Moving to New York from the swamps of Louisiana was a bit of a shock - the accent never really fades, and being so far north people always asked if he was from the south, like it was a clever question that he'd NEVER heard before. He was put into one of the local schools where he did okay. He enjoyed soccer and football, tried basketball but failed pretty miserably, and had a decent amount of friends.
Originally the research his parents were undertaking was on a interesting subsection of DNA, but as the weeks and months passed their focus was shifted to other aspects, including synthesis of a retroviral packet that would encode that particular interesting subsection in an existing organism. Tests on lower primates and mice showed no problems, but there needed to be a test on a human to make sure nothing would go wrong. This could be a breakthrough in genetic treatments for any number of congenital defects. They just needed someone to test it on.
Strangely enough, their seven year old son was the perfect test case.
Tests were performed, and Dax, like the little trooper he was, underwent them without the slightest complaint. He was used to Mom or Dad needing a prick from his finger now and again to test some kind of strain or sequence back home, and this, in Dax's eyes, was no different. Sometimes there were cookies at the end! He was given an injection of some kind and sent back home to rest for the day before going back to public school the next, feeling absolutely fine. A week passed, then two, then three. All tests showed that the DNA had integrated with Dax's system seamlessly and was being replicated with no ill results. But since this is the Company, you must expect that 'no ill results' is only a precursor for something interesting or life-changing to occur.
The first major life change was the deaths of his parents. Cursed with knowing too much, the Company decided that a formula that would give normal people evolved abilities was just too dangerous to have around, so a car accident was arranged and Dax's parents were handily dispatched.
Watching the road rise up to cause your parents mini-van to skid into a telephone pole, and then watching his parents as they were pulled from the wreck by black-gloved hands, feebly struggling, before their lives were quickly snuffed out by some unknown means by a man dressed smartly in a suit….well, that sticks with a guy. He remembered screaming and running at the man before everything went black, the boy awakening in a hospital, badly bruised from the crash. Everything that happened after the crash and all memory of how his parents were killed, or even why, was handily deleted by the Haitian. He was placed with a man and a woman sympathetic to the company who would keep an eye on him and raise them like he was their own.
It was a little after two in the afternoon in September, 1994. Math class had just started after recess, and thoughts of schoolwork were the furthest thing from anyone's mind. Even more sop when 12 year old Jenny Perkins caught on fire. Emergency crews were called and tried to calm the hysteric little girl who was burning but wasn't burning, hosing down the room around her to keep the whole school from going up while 'some specialists' were called. At the first spark of trouble the kids retreated from Jenny, her body burning bright even if she wasn't harmed by the flames, hiding against the back wall as best they could, only to be ushered out by the firefighters when they arrived, one at a time, wrapped in fireproof blankets. The last one out of the room was Dax, and the funny thing was, once he left the room Jenny was able to be put out.
There was no way to test for SLC at that time, but it's not like they didn't try. Every test, from cat scans to phrenology was undertaken, all disguised as an increasingly complicated series of tests. Eventually, both Dax and Jenny were moved to the 'special school' for further observation; Jenny because she was an evolved, and Dax because of the fact that when he left the room, Jenny was able to be extinguished. Jenny manifested a power to set her body alight without any damage to the skin beneath, but Dax's evolved ability didn't seem to really do anything.
At first it was assumed that the kids had some kind of link together - the closer she was to him, some kind of binary switch was flicked and voila, flaming girl, but when she manifested outside of Dax's presence, the Company scientists were well and truly confused. He was put in various situations and had a gauntlet of tests performed. No psychic ability, no kinetic ability, no telepathy or flight, no super strength at all. It seemed that the coded gene sequence his parents put in was just there and had simply not an evolved manifestation. This made Dax a carrier for the Suresh sequence instead of someone that was actually affected by it.
Or should have been, at least.
The research on Dax was initially unsuccessful, but did show promise. With Dax's parents given a 'keep on the course you're on' and another grant, the doctors sent him back with his parents, where a chance meeting with another evolved 'client' of the Company in the halls on the way out of the building caused several tens of thousands of dollars in damage when a wall imploded due to a massive pressure imbalance, taking out a photocopier, the ladies restroom and injured a secretary. Further intensive testing, showed that Dax was unconsciously augmenting other evolved abilities by being in line-of-sight. If he was around and concentrated, he could increase the evolved ability of a viewed target. He was quickly pressed into testing with the rest of the evolved children of the Company where he learned how to control his ability in order to not cause random evolved to manifest uncontrollably or to cause the 'big guns' to cause even bigger explosions.
Dax's time with the company was long and varied. He had many adventures and experiences, had lots of fun, saw things that he never thought he would see and travelled the world. When he wasn't sent out to boost the abilities of other Evolved agents, usually by sticking with them and just in range of his powers, but out of range of theirs, he tinkered with computers, went to classes with the other evolved kids, and tried to be as normal as one possibly could. He worked with Elle in a few cases, who more than likely would remember him if she saw him, occasionally ran into Odessa in the halls, and saw Delia and Lucille Ryans at the Company Christmas parties and picnics. Ryans might even remember him, due to his knowledge of Company kids. The things he did and witnessed would have been enough to fill a book a thousand pages over, bring charges against the company for espionage, and castigate an entire presidential administration. Some research - a little poking around in some locked files had Dax discovering the cause of his parent's death. When he found out that the company was responsible, he threatened to go to the press with everything he knew. Of course, the company couldn't have that, so the Haitian was called in again to erase his memory. Since an Evolved Amplifier was something that the Company was too valuable to just throw away, they stored him, more or less, in a normal life. He knew his life before the crash, some glimpses of the past few years, and not much else. There were some memories that came, now and again, in dreams, but those were chalked up to an overactive imagination. Women shooting electricity from their hands couldn't happen really, could they?
Which brings us to Thanksgiving, 2006, Dax's first memory that he can actually say that, yes, I did this, this is mine really.
The destruction of New York and the subsequent announcement that people with evolved abilities came as a shock to the nation, but not to Dax. Being in regular contact with his parents after his relocation to the Maine area led him to understand a little about himself - the fact that he was evolved, mainly, and the reason he had to keep his true power under wraps, since he could be used, quite easily, by many evolved who would see him only as a step to true power. He kept his head down, worked on computers, and generally made a pretty nice living for himself, and after about a year of that, he moved to New York in order to open a small computer consulting firm since there was such an exodus of people from the irradiated zones. He knew it would be hard, and finding business would be difficult (not to mention finding an apartment!) but he persevered thanks to a nice savings account set up from his time at the Company, and thankfully not attached in any way _to_ the company, thanks to recent events. A small house and a storefront followed, and a few contracts keep the money rolling in.
The fall of the Company came and went, Dax reading the stories along with the rest of the world, blissfully unaware that he was a part of the whole shebang and hopefully able to live out a life of anonymity….
But that probably won't happen.
Dax is a computer geek, basically. Quiet and introverted. The best way he can be described is sitting on the periphery of everything, observing, and occasionally speaking up when the comment is required or, more often, humorous or biting, in order to take the person saying it down a few notches. He's also a private person, but very family-oriented, having telephone conversations with his family in Louisiana every now and again, even sending a care package of bagels and hard-to-get stuff to Mom and Dad in the middle of the swamp.
Dax enjoys reading, drawing, and playing guitar (badly) along with exercising regularly to keep in shape. He doesn't know why it does it, but the regularity of it comforts him. He also enjoys camping and hunting, since he was a boy who grew up in the swamps. Sometimes it's nice to have a taste of home.
Dax is not a natural evolved human. Rather, his power was granted to him due to some genetic manipulation by viruses his parents were working on for the Company. That said, his evolved ability allows him to amplify the abilities of others in an area of effect around him and via touch. This ability is naturally 'off,' but when concentrating, he can amplify the abilities of evolved people within 15 to 25 feet . The more there are, the less 'effect' the amplification has. For instance, if there were 5 people in range, his amplification could give each of them a small bump, but if there was a single person, it would bump their powers by a significant amount. The exact level of augmentation a person gets will depend a lot on the player and even, if the ability is going to harm them, other people present. Since some abilities are rather dangerous, everyone would need to agree on a level of effect. With some abilities (potential city destroyers for instance) the staff would also need to give an okay if the ability is augmented in a way that would seriously damage the game. Sadly, the ability to amplify powers does not mean that he is immune to the results of the powers themselves. If he amped up a pyrokinetic, he could easily get burned if he didn't take adequate precautions or cover. Depending on the level of augmentation, Dax is able to maintain low-level augmentation for ten minutes before he is exhausted, but massive shows of power should drain him much more rapidly.
As network administrator I can take down the network with one keystroke. It's just like being a doctor but without getting gooky stuff on my paws. - Dogbert