Elisabeth Harrison evacuated her clan from the NYSZ to Detroit in June 2021 during the fires and joined them in Detroit in September 2021 when fighting broke out nationwide. Just prior to the first solar flare in October 2021, she and her family joined the RayTech crews inside Agartha to help defend and protect the Complex from what she was forewarned was to come. Karina Michelle Cardinal Harrison (Mikey) was born somewhat prematurely in the Agartha complex on February 1, 2022. Despite her early arrival and the deprivations and hardships of the first months of her life, she survived and even thrived. At least as much as anyone does in this insane world that she was born into.
Following her mother’s death in July 2023 amid the continued attacks on the reactor and President Harding, Mikey was first cared for by Harmony, Carina, and Jared along with the rest of the Cardinal/Roberts/Harrison kids. In the intervening years, however, the rolling waves of illness and starvation killed off most of her immediate family. She and her older brother Ricky survived. Aunt Valerie became their guardian. She and Ricky are raised as many of the young inside the complex are raised – with a great many adults as caregivers, including the Grandfather of All, Grampy Brennan. But the bond with Ricky is strong. He lost his twin, and Mikey lost everyone but him by the time she was three. He has been her protector, her best friend, her big brother… he was her only link to the hope that their mothers held until the very end. The hope that someday their father would make it back. When Ricky died in the Down Below five years ago, Mikey lost all of that.
By the time she reaches her mid-teens, Mikey is a young greasemonkey. She knows mechanical parts inside and out, and she’s a dab hand at Macgyvering together pieces and parts to replace broken bits. She reads as Expressive. As she matures into her 20s, she requests augmentations for a variety of uses — HUD eyes and comms ears for ease of contact with higher executives like her Aunt Val, augmented vision and fine motor control to assist in micro-repairs, enhanced metabolic processes for more nutrition out of scarce supplies. She volunteers for explorations with Horizon out to the surface as well as for the burgeoning chrononaut program that so far has been a bust.
Mikey is just one of many orphans who grew up in the Gateway complex. She has almost no memory of her mothers, she never knew her father, although she knows that he was one of the first Travelers in the prototype of the chrononaut program. And now her brother is dead. She has major abandonment issues after losing almost her entire family to the waves of disease and famine and she has a deep conflicted rage at her father for leaving the family behind. As an adult, she understands the choices that were made, but… And now with her brother gone, she doesn't honestly feel like she has anything left to lose. She harbors a tiny, secret dream that her mother's faith in their father, which is written about her diaries and which Ricky held strong to, will pan out and someday he will come and rescue them but it's balanced out by a deep, abiding rage that he never came and that Ricky is gone. Even if her father did come home, Ricky is gone. It’s a crazy dream, unrealistic as all hell and she KNOWS IT. This will never happen. But it’s also the only dream the lonely little girl buried inside her really has ever had.
There are not many things that Mikey treasures, but she has the belongings that her mother packed in an evac bag for safekeeping all those years ago. These include pictures, some recordings of songs, and several small diaries of things that Elisabeth wrote down for her children in case she didn’t make it. Memories of times before the solar flares, stories about family life together. They are Mikey’s precious possessions and she hoards and hides them carefully. They are all she has of her mom – that and the feeling that she was loved and the vaguest of ‘memories’ of Liz’s singing, which could just as easily be false and based on the recordings of songs and her imagination that her mother sang them to her. Ricky used to tell her all those songs on the recordings are, in fact, songs that Mama Liz sang for them a lot. Those recordings of her mother’s voice are priceless to her. She is *fiercely* devoted to her Aunt Val and she adores Grampy Brennan and Uncle Joe, but there is a part of her that is broken now that her big brother is gone.
Mikey has been a holdout regarding the whole species continuation drive – she has refused to choose anyone to mix her genes with either in a synthetic womb or otherwise. She won’t be another person who leaves a child behind alone in this hellhole of a life.
