Audrey Knight
Cairo
Character Age: 29
Character Gender: Female
Profession: Roboticist / AI Scientist
Nationality: Nagasaki Conglomerate
Strengths: Intelligent – Audrey has always been a bright girl. She’s a whiz with numbers and engineering, and her knowledge of robotics is second to almost none. She was always a bit hazier on the more advanced aspects of AI programming, but now that she’s the ship’s official ‘Robot Doctor’ she’s doing her best to learn.
Preparation – Keep five drives with your research on it. Check where the exits are. Keep a taser on you at all times. Always have a backup plan. Audrey maintains a level of preparation that borders on paranoia, and while it maybe hasn’t done wonders for her social life, it’s helpful in a crisis.
Drone Pilot – Audrey used to build and fly surveillance drones as a hobby; it was something to do that allowed her to see more of the world than would normally be possible with her condition. Her joy flying days may done, but she hasn’t lost any of the remote-flying talent.
Weaknesses:Sickly – Audrey was born with a slew of chronic health problems related to her respiratory and cardiovascular systems, the result of in utero exposure to pollutants; although augmentations to her chest and lower back have allowed her to live a mostly normal life, she is still very weak, unable to get up to much physical activity without exhaustion. In addition, she needs to wear a complex breathing apparatus for several hours a day to clear her lungs, though she tends to forget and leave it on longer than is necessary.
Recluse – Audrey is not exactly a social butterfly; her nervous tendencies combined with her mediocre manners and her habit of rambling endlessly about her personal projects have not made her popular with most of her fellow crewmates. She mostly stays confined to her cabin, doing her best to convince the other members of Project Prometheus to bring her meals to her (with limited success).
Personal Effects: Family Photo: A picture of Audrey with her parents and big brother that she keeps on her desk.
Diploma: Certificate of her degree in Robotic Engineering from Melbourne Technical Institute.
The ‘Black Box’: A large, rectangular device containing the nascent AI she’s spent the past five years developing.
Personal Tablet
Data Drive(s): Contain her research notes. She has ten copies, four of which are hidden in her room, two in the ship at large, and one which she made Dr. Philips promise to hide for her.
Pocket Taser
Respirator: A device that fits over her mouth like a mask. She needs it to breathe.
Zoomer: The wreck of the first drone she ever built. Heavily outdated, but she keeps it for sentimental reasons.
Project Prometheus Photo: Another photo, this one of the team that built Michael posing in front of the then-inactive android. She’s crouched in the corner, and her hair looks terrible. Very, very classified, but she leaves it on her desk.
Bio: Audrey was born in the Nagasaki Conglomerate, in what was then Australia. Her parents were strictly middle-class, employees of the same technology company that made everything from Smart Appliances to Smart Bombs. She was a member of what would later be known as the Conglomerate’s “Generation Sick”, children born in a five-year period with a high rate of deformity, illness, and infant mortality, due to in utero exposure to airborne pollutants that were later legislated against. Audrey was the second child, and while her parents may not have had trouble providing for two healthy children, the health complications she experienced from the beginning of her life proved to be a significant financial strain on the family. Most of her early life was spent indoors in the family apartment, a necessary confinement that gave her plenty of time to study; her interest in engineering was originally a way to broaden her horizons, building drones out of spare electrical parts her brother gave her and flying them around a world she had limited access to.
Audrey never knew a world before the Devastators; she was five years old when the Three Day War happened, and though life on Earth remained mostly the same, all those growing up in those days knew that they were living in a world in crisis. When people talked about needing ‘bold new ideas to solve the problems of tomorrow,’ everyone knew what they meant. On the bright side, though, it meant that there were infinite opportunities for a bright young mind to get government funded education; all she had to do was display the drones she’d taught herself to build and Audrey had a full ride to Melbourne Technical Institute. Well, sort of – she mostly attended classes from her bed and contributed to building projects through an apparatus she referred to as ‘The Hand-Bot’, but a diploma was a diploma.
After she graduated with honors, her dissertation, a fifty page essay entitled ‘A Defense of Mechanical Bipedalism’ drew the attention of a man named Dr. Phillips. After a few conversations, he invited her to join Project Prometheus, a top secret initiative to create the first advanced humanoid synthetic. He saw in the nervous, reclusive girl not just brilliance and aptitude, but something that he shared: a desire to create, to see humanity reflected in the eyes of its children. Insisting that he wouldn’t work with anyone whose hand he couldn’t shake, he used project funding to pay for advanced medical augmentations the likes of which she’d never dreamed of before; for the first time in her life, she could walk twenty paces without running out of breath, leave her life support machines behind without fear of her heart giving out.
She joined the team as a junior member, mainly advising and assisting in the construction of what would be the android’s body, though she always took great interest in the development of his programming. Audrey was among the first to tentatively suggest putting limits on the android’s programming, some failsafe, some method of controlling him, though she’s still a bit conflicted about if they went too far.
When the project was completed, Audrey was among those selected from the team to accompany Michael onto the Vitae. It was an easy call to make; she was talented, had a logical reason to be aboard the ship, her brother was a soldier serving on the Ark who had requested her as a ‘plus one’, and she was young enough to be of childbearing age for a while (though the team superiors were usually polite enough not to mention that as one of the reasons she was chosen). Along with Dr. Phillips and a few other members of the team, she moved onto the Ark a few weeks before it launched, leaving her parents and the world she had known to be annihilated.
In the five years since, she’s served as a maintenance worker for the ship’s various robots and droids, as well as helping Dr. Phillips give Michael the occasional ‘physical’. She’s made very little in the way of social connections in that time, in spite of her brother’s (and Dr. Phillips’) attempts to get her out of her cabin every now and then. Most of her free time is consumed by the slow-going personal project she calls the “Black Box” – a custom built AI intended to serve as a record of human culture and history to future alien races in the event of the destruction of the human race; the last backup plan for a species facing extinction. She’s mostly kept this pet project from the other crewmembers of the Vitae, though a few of the science team have heard about it (mostly due to a loud-mouthed sociologist she tried to drag into her quarters to help her solve ‘the language problem), and are as a rule understandably creeped out by it. Rumors that she spends whole days in her cabin working on it and even talks to it are unsubstantiated, but generally accepted as truth.
Relationships: Will Knight: Her brother, a soldier who works security on the Vitae.
Dr. Phillips: Her closest friend and confidant, the man who changed her life, gave her lungs, and made her a part of the most interesting work she’s ever done.
Michael: She helped make him. Future details TBA
Others also TBA
Code Word: Spaghetti
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