Johannus Clarke
AGE: 33
SPACE AGENCY EMPLOYING: ESA
MISSION ROLE: Commander/Mechanical Engineer
APPEARANCE: Johannus is a lithe build, despite comfortably passing the required physical exams months before the deadline that had whittled so many others out of the program. His hair is a greying black and tumultuously gelled such that it sticks and catches in the nooks of his glove-like space-helm, pressed, choking, against his over sized scalp. Beneath a receding fringe-line, Johannus sports tired grey eyes, tinged with just a hint of watered cataract, belying an exhaustion out of step with his youth. Nonetheless, his mouth curls, at default, into a complacent, inviting half-smile, giving him the look of an battered, enduring optimist.
PERSONALITY: Johannus has long since learned to keep his opinions cloistered, for they have proven divisive in the past. Instead, he alternates between a brisk and efficient discourse with his contemporaries , and a more self-serving, egotistical attempt at humour. Whilst he has no problems socializing, and quite celebrates the emotional intricacies of relationships, he generally dislikes "soppiness", and is not likely to expect nor dispense excessive complements, and does not generally give a great deal of thought to his relationships with others. He just expects them to be there.
BACKSTORY: Johannus was more overjoyed than most on the day the nations of Europe amalgamated themselves into the European Commonwealth, a greater whole than the sum of its storied and often combatant parts. Aged just seventeen at the time, the joyous clamor and enthused inquiry that sprung from the dissolution of those old, arbitrary borders, seemed in turn the invigorating tonic to drive away a plague that had long haunted his life.
Raised in the British homeland of his mother with his Dutch father, Johannus found himself longing to flee to the continent at a young age. In the wake of the globalist pressures of the early 21st century, Britain had become replete with an almost unbearable, passive nationalistic rhetoric. In school, when learning the "glorious" history of the British isles, Johannus' classmates were conditioned fully into the cult of "we", or more aptly, in Johannus' case, "us", a vague sense of pride in the achievements of the past to which many believed Johannus, with his foreign blood, was not entitled. The exclusivity of Britain gave Johannus chagrin in the face of the interests of his youth, science and nature, which, by necessity, drew him to curiosity about a world his contemporaries in increasing numbers didn't seem to care for.
The frustration over the occasional lack-of-acceptance lead him to have an overly defensive outlook to others, and gave him a disjointed, though not completely unfulfilled, high-school social life, which drove him deeper into his studies. Johannus' scientific experience and its fiction generated an almost religious reverence for the natural world, and, perhaps in a desperate search for purpose, desired to pursue a scientific career to find a way to preserve it. The UK, having long left the EU and its increasingly federalist outlooked, seemed far too combatant to be of any aid, and at 18, having completed high-school, Johannus moved to his father's home of the Netherlands, to study Engineering the shadow of ESA.
It was around this time that ESA began to formulate it's Martian project, and in this pursuit, ear-wigged prospective students, who's generation would one day fly on that noble pursuit. Johannus, after fervent and repeated application and badgering, was among those listed for funding. It was at the interviews that he met a fellow hopeful, another Briton, a woman, who had similarly fled the UK in a hope for a more worldy future. In the competition for a place, they bonded, and eventually began seeing one another, and by the time they had both been give scholarships (for expertise in engineering), they had resolved to marry.
Johannus and his wife lived happily together for three years, having a daughter together, but it was far-from-fortuitously timed. In 2050, the preparations for a manned mission to Mars were almost complete - and it was a chance for purposefulness Johannus could not bear to pass up. The strain of Johannus' ambition and dedication to the design of the mission strained and finally broke his relationship with his wife, who had long since resolved to live a more insular life providing for her child, and when it came to be announced that Johannus was to command the first expedition to Mars, he was signing his divorce papers.
Now, bitter and isolated, Johannus wants nothing more than to throw himself into the task at hand.
