Post by Ezekiel Macauley on Jan 10, 2010 18:25:11 GMT -5
images.buddytv.com/articles/movies/profiles/paul-giamatti.jpg
Name: Ezekiel (Zeke) Macauley
Age: 52 (including 6 years o’ cryo)
Secret Word: incoming!
Gender: Male
Sexuality: Homosexual (so deeply closeted, he’s in Narnia)
Race: Human
Occupation: Medical biotechnologist
Human Physical Description: Standing at 5’10” with a dense carpet of all-over body fur, thick black glasses, a small but noticeable paunch, and the most hangdog, bloodshot eyes this side of the Milky Way, Zeke neatly embodies the concept of the Middle-Aged White Male. Male-pattern baldness has set in with a vengeance, with patches of pale bare skin stretching nearly to the middle of his scalp and remaining hair so wispy that it’s utterly useless for combover jobs. On Pandora, though, Zeke seems to forget what his own face looks like for days at a time. Nowadays he often leaves his beard to grow however it will, resulting in a dense cloud of wiry black hair spotted with gray that has an unfortunate tendency to preserve the smell of whatever liquor he's consumed last. His facial hair thankfully lacks the genetic ability to grow to absurd lengths, but left untreated, his chin thickens with hair until split ends become noticeable from conversational distance.
Yet, the wardrobe Zeke has brought to Pandora speaks to a far different aesthetic sensibility: rows of crisply starched dress shirts, neatly rolled silk neckties in tasteful patterns and colors, three pairs of identical black leather shoes with identically immaculate shines, and dress pants in various shades of neutral with carefully maintained pleats. Casual clothes can be spotted amidst his belongings, with a smattering of more utilitarian outerwear, but whenever possible his taste tends toward the hyperprofessional or at least luxurious. He also shows a fondness for cologne. Though he’s careful not to offend anyone’s sensibilities in the claustrophobic space of the compound, the faint scent of mahogany and cloves precedes him whenever he enters a room and lingers after he’s gone. On hot days, this still cannot cover his body’s natural smell: with all the hair on his body, the odor of his sweat clings and amplifies.
The only item on his person that breaks his consistent upscale trend is his tattered necklace of red wool decorated with two rectangular patches opposite each other, one hanging down his chest and one down his back: a red Scapular of the Passion. He never seems to take it off, even in the shower.
Personality: Zeke is a chronic over-thinker, especially in social situations, and he is too aware of himself to act in the social world without analyzing his own reactions and motivations. So he has two standard personality scripts to which he resorts, depending on the situation. When among scientists, his vocabulary unconsciously skips a few grades up, his sentence structure becomes more complex, and he will allow himself to ramble at great length, often losing track of his audience if he’s particularly absorbed in expressing a convoluted concept. Literary quotes and examples slip into his speech, and he tries his best to maintain perceptible emotional vulnerability; this appears to set intellectual-types at ease, even when they don’t practice it themselves.
Around the security team and maintenance crew, though, traces of his blue-collar background fight their way to the surface. His sentences shorten and his speech and attitude sharpen, making him more direct, brusquer, and less apt to talk about art in approving tones. This also makes him more difficult to get along with, though, as his tolerance of weakness in himself and others drops. The tough show is an act, of course, but it has kept him safe before, and he can’t seem to find an alternate script to use around masculine types. Old habits die very, very hard.
In private, Zeke is a man at war with himself: a staunch member of the United Orthodox Catholic Church of Ireland, one of the most conservative branches of Christianity in 22nd century Europe, and homosexual. His faith is all he knows, and it is so deeply ingrained in his psyche that he can barely comprehend a universe that excludes the existence of God. His faith also tells him that he and his kind are abominations, enactors of the most depraved sin in the eyes of the UOCCI. So while his true personality may be that of a writer or aesthete, he has spent decades trying to brainwash himself and transform his personality by force of will— to be stronger, less emotional, more of what Jesus wants men to be. His efforts have produced minimal success, and the truce between what he is and what he wants to become is treacherous at the best times. Zeke’s resolution of this conflict best follows the words of a classic 20th century writer: “I’m Catholic and I can’t commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.”
Any talk of sexuality makes Zeke distinctly uncomfortable: it reminds him of his own satanic desires and his continued failure to achieve amorous feelings for females. He is content to avoid the subject and let everyone assume he is preserving his virginity for (an increasingly unlikely) marriage.
Talents: Social analysis— Zeke spent his adolescence studying heterosexual men, watching their tics, gestures, and mode of speech to learn how they thought and better imitate them. While the game plan of ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ didn’t work quite as well as he’d hoped, the practice gave him valuable insight into the workings of the human mind and the performance of gender roles. He has learned to apply this skill in a broader sense to analyze what people say, their word choice, and what this signifies about who they are and who they hope others will think they are. Usually he can calculate a response that plays to an individual’s true thoughts as well. The alien culture of the Na’vi is much more difficult to comprehend, but Zeke is slowly beginning to figure out their common psychological ground.
Emergency First Aid— A few years- okay, maybe more than a few- have passed since Zeke was a volunteer EMT, but he hasn’t forgotten everything he learned. While he can’t perform surgery or more advanced medical procedures, Zeke can provide basic emergency care for most injuries, even improvising splints and instruments should the need arise, until a trained medical doctor can be found.
Mr. Fix-it— From his time working in factories when he was younger, Zeke has developed a level of comfort with technological design. The way he figures, nothing mechanical can exist without some poor schmuck planning it out on a sketchpad first. The trick is getting into the schmuck’s mind and imagining what a machine with this function would look like, and then applying the mind’s picture to the real-life machine. He still needs to read a manual sometimes, but minor repairs and maintenance are well within his reach if the site supervisor is napping.
Spirituality- Both a blessing and a curse, Zeke’s staunch Catholicism so thoroughly governs his thoughts that his scientific mind does not even consider the existence of God a question. Obviously, God exists and Jesus died for everyone’s sins, possibly even the Na’vi’s. Though his religious upbringing has left severe scars in his psyche, it has also given him emotional fortitude and the ability to endure uncomfortable circumstances for however long it takes; after all, an eternal reward will wait in heaven if he acts according to God’s will. He tries his best to live with charity and love in his heart for all beings, forcing forgiveness and tolerance when his patience would ordinarily reach its end.
History: Zeke was born the sixth child of Bridget and Nathaniel Macauley in Kilkenny, Ireland on May 5, 2133. Three years later, the shockwave of Vatican III swept through the remaining Catholic countries of the world in a furor of uproar. To more conservative followers, the decisions made by the Ecumenical Council showed a clear absence of God's guidance: women were allowed to become priests, priests were granted the right to marry and even bear children, and most outrageous of all, Hell was no longer considered a part of the Catholic cosmology. Voices of protest rose almost immediately and only grew louder, eventually leading to the sedition of several prominent bishops and the subsequent creation of the international United Orthodox Catholic Church, a conservative split-off that returned to pre-Vatican II Catholic dogma for its catechism. Most of Ireland converted to the newly created sect, including the fervently spiritual Macauleys.
Zeke’s early life wasn’t exactly easy: the Macauleys often struggled to make ends meet, even with Nathaniel working in RDA’s factories for over 70 hours a week sometimes. But their large family was close-knit, everyone else in Kilkenny was more or less in the same position, and their faith gave them solace and hope for better times… if not in this world, then in the next. As for Zeke, he instinctively knew that his private thoughts made him different from the other boys, and he kept his abnormality secret. Secret, that is, until he met others like him, men and boys whose eyes he met in class or on the street and simply knew that he had located a kindred soul. Covert meetings followed in hidden places, sometimes without even the exchange of names.
That came to an end for Zeke when he took a needless risk at 17 and his mother caught him naked with his best friend Peter in his bedroom. Peter’s parents were informed of the incident and that family promptly moved to Dublin a month later. As for the Macauleys, an icy silence fell over the incident— it was impossible to bring up or discuss, especially as the entire family distanced itself from Zeke at home and around others. After weeks of this icy distance, Zeke was awakened late one night by his mother and father screaming at him to get out of the house. He barely had time to grab some clothes before his father bodily threw him out the front door. He spent the next few days living in his car and calling home without getting an answer. Finally his parents picked up the phone. In the brief conversation that followed, his parents stated simply that as far as they were concerned, he had never been born. Zeke has not spoken with his family- or celebrated his birthday- since.
With no home and no possessions except a pile of clothing he had grabbed in a panic and a car he had bought with money from his part-time job at a pizza place, Zeke fell into what he considers now the dark time of his life. He dropped out of school, worked, ate at the pizza place, spent what cash he did earn on booze and every drug imaginable in search of his one true Drug Charming, and had sex with any man he could find. One December night, he decided in another drunken haze that the best way to get into God's graces was to eliminate the trouble of wiping his stain from the earth. After downing half a bottle of whiskey in Sacred Heart Cemetery, he took off his clothes and lay naked in the snow, waiting to freeze to death.
When he woke up, he was in a hospital bed, not hell. The nurse said that someone had placed an anonymous call to the hospital, saying only that an ambulance was needed at the northeast corner of Sacred Heart Cemetery. Zeke knew the truth of what happened: God had saved his life, and that meant there was a way for him to redeem himself after all. If his worthless, sinful life had been saved, he would repay God by saving a thousand more. He recovered quickly and immediately went back to school, working at an RDA factory helping to manufacture Scorpions, and volunteering as an EMT whenever he had spare time. His Leaving Cert exam results came back with near-perfect marks, and he went on to earn a Science degree at the National University of Ireland in Galway, followed by a Master's of Biotechnology.
Immediately after graduation, Zeke landed an assistant research position at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Sweden, where he was to spend the next decade researching the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. In 2165, when Zeke was a mere 32, he and his research team formulated a second-generation vaccine for herpes II with a live-culture treatment that prevented subsequent infection in 95% of test cases, all with minimal side effects. With the vaccine project on his resume, Zeke had no trouble landing a research position at the British branch of Hecker, Inc., one of the largest R&D pharmaceutical companies in the world. He spent nine years there researching treatment options for immunodeficiency and lymphoproliferative disorders.
In 2174, the CEO of Hecker announced that the corporation would co-sponsor the second Pandora mission. As a representative of Big Pharmaceuticals with astoundingly deep pockets, Hecker initially planned to place 20% of the crew aboard the Green Mother, though that percentage was later talked down by competing interests. Zeke immediately volunteered his candidacy and after six months of a grueling application process involving endless interviews, background checks and psychological reviews, he was selected as one of the chosen representatives of Hecker to conduct research on Pandora's surface.
Officially, Zeke's task is to research the interactions of Pandoran plant substances and processes with human biology for potential medical applications. Diseases of particular interest to his supervisors include firstly the so-called Israeli horse flu, a supervirulent strain originally engineered as bioweapony according to all evidence (though every side of the Middle East conflict denies its part in doing so), and HIV secondly: a mutating, centuries-old virus that eludes treatment with every transformation. Zeke's own interests lie primarily in the latter. God may have allowed him to live all those years ago, but Zeke's encounters during the dark days still incurred His curse: he carries a strain of HIV. He has the resources to continue synthesizing the drug that prevents the virus from inducing full-blown AIDS, but treatment merely keeps the infection in check without curing it. Earth long ago lost whatever antibody might have had the ability to mutate alongside the virus-- perhaps he can find it on Pandora. Zeke can't help but wonder if the application team at Hecker selected him because of, not in spite of, his condition-- certainly, he has a more urgent need to research treatment than anyone else selected by the corporation.
RP Sample: About thirty seconds later, tears finally stopped streaming down Zeke’s face inside the Exopack and his throat stopped feeling as if a few feathers and a bee’s stinger were lodged next to his uvula. He stood alone, thank God, at the very edge of the plain, close enough to throw a rock and hit one of the glowing purple ferns that marked the beginning of the bioluminescent forest. No one else was around to see his slightly embarrassing lesson about the toxicity of Pandora’s atmosphere. Chlorine and hydrogen sulfide: fuck you and damn you, respectively. He wondered how this or a future team would ever manage marine exploration, where the sloughed-off liquid forms of the atmospheric poison would feel like so much rubbing alcohol poured over a thousand papercuts against Earth-born skin.
Taking a deep breath of lovely, non-irritating oxygen, Zeke looked down at the bottle of Blue Rooster Single Barrel Bourbon in his hand. Sure, this was his first night on Pandora and damn if he was going to spend it locked in the same gray compound where he would spend most of the next fifteen years. Toasting their arrival, even if alone, was a great idea. But clearly, if he was going to do a lot of this drinking outdoors thing, he would have to devise some kind of specialized drinking device that would only admit whiskey, without requiring he lift his mask and expose his mucous membranes to the atmosphere. It would have to be airtight, lest the ambient chlorine gas interact with the whiskey to produce hydrochloric acid. What a waste of precious Earth-made bourbon, not to mention the esophageal damage. Perhaps he could modify one of the Exopacks such that the breathing tube connected to a bottle of whiskey… though of course, that meant one’s oxygen and whiskey supplies would necessarily come from the same vessel, but if one were to install a bivalve mechanism much like the body’s own breathing / eating throat apparatus…
Five minutes later, after sketching the rough outlines of the whiskey-modified Exopack in his head, Zeke’s mind wandered back to the task at hand. Ah, yes: thanking God for a safe arrival and saying hello to the new world.
Zeke raised the bourbon to the three-mooned sky, and the golden-brown liquid inside sloshed most deliciously. A disembodied line of an old nursery rhyme sang through his head: “The cat played the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon…” He wondered how a theoretical mother would modify the nursery rhyme for her children on Pandora. The Na’vi were rather catlike—did they play any string instruments? ‘The Na’vi played the viperwolf-catgut lyre’? And which moon would the cow (hammerhead titanothere?) jump over?
Task at hand, you drunken fool. He wondered if the low gravity retarded the absorption of alcohol.
Zeke poured a shot’s worth of the Blue Rooster on the ground, where a few blades of the alien flora burst into phosphorescent green light. He capped the bottle quickly, silently hoping no chlorine had had a chance to induce any significant chemical reactions.
“Thank you, oh merciful and loving God, for your deliverance of our ship to safety on this new world.” He remembered that his Irish accent, largely dulled after living everywhere else in Europe and then space for the past thirty years, returned with enough liquor. Zeke paused, gazing toward the giant cyclonic storm in Polyphemus’ atmosphere. It was like the eye of God staring back at him, a gentle benevolent giant shining above the darkness of the alien planet. He reached up to the band of red wool scratching reassuringly at his neck. “Holy Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, save us. Sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary, protect us.”
Somewhere in the neon-lit shadows of the forest, a large creature roared. The sound came from such a distance that it failed to register as real—its echoes lingered, ghostly, like aural ectoplasm.
He cleared his throat, taking one last reassuring look at the Great Blue Spot on Polyphemus before turning to go. As early as tomorrow, the work would begin. Tonight, though—tonight, he was simply glad they were here on Pandora, alive, under the gaze of God.
Name: Ezekiel (Zeke) Macauley
Age: 52 (including 6 years o’ cryo)
Secret Word: incoming!
Gender: Male
Sexuality: Homosexual (so deeply closeted, he’s in Narnia)
Race: Human
Occupation: Medical biotechnologist
Human Physical Description: Standing at 5’10” with a dense carpet of all-over body fur, thick black glasses, a small but noticeable paunch, and the most hangdog, bloodshot eyes this side of the Milky Way, Zeke neatly embodies the concept of the Middle-Aged White Male. Male-pattern baldness has set in with a vengeance, with patches of pale bare skin stretching nearly to the middle of his scalp and remaining hair so wispy that it’s utterly useless for combover jobs. On Pandora, though, Zeke seems to forget what his own face looks like for days at a time. Nowadays he often leaves his beard to grow however it will, resulting in a dense cloud of wiry black hair spotted with gray that has an unfortunate tendency to preserve the smell of whatever liquor he's consumed last. His facial hair thankfully lacks the genetic ability to grow to absurd lengths, but left untreated, his chin thickens with hair until split ends become noticeable from conversational distance.
Yet, the wardrobe Zeke has brought to Pandora speaks to a far different aesthetic sensibility: rows of crisply starched dress shirts, neatly rolled silk neckties in tasteful patterns and colors, three pairs of identical black leather shoes with identically immaculate shines, and dress pants in various shades of neutral with carefully maintained pleats. Casual clothes can be spotted amidst his belongings, with a smattering of more utilitarian outerwear, but whenever possible his taste tends toward the hyperprofessional or at least luxurious. He also shows a fondness for cologne. Though he’s careful not to offend anyone’s sensibilities in the claustrophobic space of the compound, the faint scent of mahogany and cloves precedes him whenever he enters a room and lingers after he’s gone. On hot days, this still cannot cover his body’s natural smell: with all the hair on his body, the odor of his sweat clings and amplifies.
The only item on his person that breaks his consistent upscale trend is his tattered necklace of red wool decorated with two rectangular patches opposite each other, one hanging down his chest and one down his back: a red Scapular of the Passion. He never seems to take it off, even in the shower.
Personality: Zeke is a chronic over-thinker, especially in social situations, and he is too aware of himself to act in the social world without analyzing his own reactions and motivations. So he has two standard personality scripts to which he resorts, depending on the situation. When among scientists, his vocabulary unconsciously skips a few grades up, his sentence structure becomes more complex, and he will allow himself to ramble at great length, often losing track of his audience if he’s particularly absorbed in expressing a convoluted concept. Literary quotes and examples slip into his speech, and he tries his best to maintain perceptible emotional vulnerability; this appears to set intellectual-types at ease, even when they don’t practice it themselves.
Around the security team and maintenance crew, though, traces of his blue-collar background fight their way to the surface. His sentences shorten and his speech and attitude sharpen, making him more direct, brusquer, and less apt to talk about art in approving tones. This also makes him more difficult to get along with, though, as his tolerance of weakness in himself and others drops. The tough show is an act, of course, but it has kept him safe before, and he can’t seem to find an alternate script to use around masculine types. Old habits die very, very hard.
In private, Zeke is a man at war with himself: a staunch member of the United Orthodox Catholic Church of Ireland, one of the most conservative branches of Christianity in 22nd century Europe, and homosexual. His faith is all he knows, and it is so deeply ingrained in his psyche that he can barely comprehend a universe that excludes the existence of God. His faith also tells him that he and his kind are abominations, enactors of the most depraved sin in the eyes of the UOCCI. So while his true personality may be that of a writer or aesthete, he has spent decades trying to brainwash himself and transform his personality by force of will— to be stronger, less emotional, more of what Jesus wants men to be. His efforts have produced minimal success, and the truce between what he is and what he wants to become is treacherous at the best times. Zeke’s resolution of this conflict best follows the words of a classic 20th century writer: “I’m Catholic and I can’t commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.”
Any talk of sexuality makes Zeke distinctly uncomfortable: it reminds him of his own satanic desires and his continued failure to achieve amorous feelings for females. He is content to avoid the subject and let everyone assume he is preserving his virginity for (an increasingly unlikely) marriage.
Talents: Social analysis— Zeke spent his adolescence studying heterosexual men, watching their tics, gestures, and mode of speech to learn how they thought and better imitate them. While the game plan of ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ didn’t work quite as well as he’d hoped, the practice gave him valuable insight into the workings of the human mind and the performance of gender roles. He has learned to apply this skill in a broader sense to analyze what people say, their word choice, and what this signifies about who they are and who they hope others will think they are. Usually he can calculate a response that plays to an individual’s true thoughts as well. The alien culture of the Na’vi is much more difficult to comprehend, but Zeke is slowly beginning to figure out their common psychological ground.
Emergency First Aid— A few years- okay, maybe more than a few- have passed since Zeke was a volunteer EMT, but he hasn’t forgotten everything he learned. While he can’t perform surgery or more advanced medical procedures, Zeke can provide basic emergency care for most injuries, even improvising splints and instruments should the need arise, until a trained medical doctor can be found.
Mr. Fix-it— From his time working in factories when he was younger, Zeke has developed a level of comfort with technological design. The way he figures, nothing mechanical can exist without some poor schmuck planning it out on a sketchpad first. The trick is getting into the schmuck’s mind and imagining what a machine with this function would look like, and then applying the mind’s picture to the real-life machine. He still needs to read a manual sometimes, but minor repairs and maintenance are well within his reach if the site supervisor is napping.
Spirituality- Both a blessing and a curse, Zeke’s staunch Catholicism so thoroughly governs his thoughts that his scientific mind does not even consider the existence of God a question. Obviously, God exists and Jesus died for everyone’s sins, possibly even the Na’vi’s. Though his religious upbringing has left severe scars in his psyche, it has also given him emotional fortitude and the ability to endure uncomfortable circumstances for however long it takes; after all, an eternal reward will wait in heaven if he acts according to God’s will. He tries his best to live with charity and love in his heart for all beings, forcing forgiveness and tolerance when his patience would ordinarily reach its end.
History: Zeke was born the sixth child of Bridget and Nathaniel Macauley in Kilkenny, Ireland on May 5, 2133. Three years later, the shockwave of Vatican III swept through the remaining Catholic countries of the world in a furor of uproar. To more conservative followers, the decisions made by the Ecumenical Council showed a clear absence of God's guidance: women were allowed to become priests, priests were granted the right to marry and even bear children, and most outrageous of all, Hell was no longer considered a part of the Catholic cosmology. Voices of protest rose almost immediately and only grew louder, eventually leading to the sedition of several prominent bishops and the subsequent creation of the international United Orthodox Catholic Church, a conservative split-off that returned to pre-Vatican II Catholic dogma for its catechism. Most of Ireland converted to the newly created sect, including the fervently spiritual Macauleys.
Zeke’s early life wasn’t exactly easy: the Macauleys often struggled to make ends meet, even with Nathaniel working in RDA’s factories for over 70 hours a week sometimes. But their large family was close-knit, everyone else in Kilkenny was more or less in the same position, and their faith gave them solace and hope for better times… if not in this world, then in the next. As for Zeke, he instinctively knew that his private thoughts made him different from the other boys, and he kept his abnormality secret. Secret, that is, until he met others like him, men and boys whose eyes he met in class or on the street and simply knew that he had located a kindred soul. Covert meetings followed in hidden places, sometimes without even the exchange of names.
That came to an end for Zeke when he took a needless risk at 17 and his mother caught him naked with his best friend Peter in his bedroom. Peter’s parents were informed of the incident and that family promptly moved to Dublin a month later. As for the Macauleys, an icy silence fell over the incident— it was impossible to bring up or discuss, especially as the entire family distanced itself from Zeke at home and around others. After weeks of this icy distance, Zeke was awakened late one night by his mother and father screaming at him to get out of the house. He barely had time to grab some clothes before his father bodily threw him out the front door. He spent the next few days living in his car and calling home without getting an answer. Finally his parents picked up the phone. In the brief conversation that followed, his parents stated simply that as far as they were concerned, he had never been born. Zeke has not spoken with his family- or celebrated his birthday- since.
With no home and no possessions except a pile of clothing he had grabbed in a panic and a car he had bought with money from his part-time job at a pizza place, Zeke fell into what he considers now the dark time of his life. He dropped out of school, worked, ate at the pizza place, spent what cash he did earn on booze and every drug imaginable in search of his one true Drug Charming, and had sex with any man he could find. One December night, he decided in another drunken haze that the best way to get into God's graces was to eliminate the trouble of wiping his stain from the earth. After downing half a bottle of whiskey in Sacred Heart Cemetery, he took off his clothes and lay naked in the snow, waiting to freeze to death.
When he woke up, he was in a hospital bed, not hell. The nurse said that someone had placed an anonymous call to the hospital, saying only that an ambulance was needed at the northeast corner of Sacred Heart Cemetery. Zeke knew the truth of what happened: God had saved his life, and that meant there was a way for him to redeem himself after all. If his worthless, sinful life had been saved, he would repay God by saving a thousand more. He recovered quickly and immediately went back to school, working at an RDA factory helping to manufacture Scorpions, and volunteering as an EMT whenever he had spare time. His Leaving Cert exam results came back with near-perfect marks, and he went on to earn a Science degree at the National University of Ireland in Galway, followed by a Master's of Biotechnology.
Immediately after graduation, Zeke landed an assistant research position at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Sweden, where he was to spend the next decade researching the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. In 2165, when Zeke was a mere 32, he and his research team formulated a second-generation vaccine for herpes II with a live-culture treatment that prevented subsequent infection in 95% of test cases, all with minimal side effects. With the vaccine project on his resume, Zeke had no trouble landing a research position at the British branch of Hecker, Inc., one of the largest R&D pharmaceutical companies in the world. He spent nine years there researching treatment options for immunodeficiency and lymphoproliferative disorders.
In 2174, the CEO of Hecker announced that the corporation would co-sponsor the second Pandora mission. As a representative of Big Pharmaceuticals with astoundingly deep pockets, Hecker initially planned to place 20% of the crew aboard the Green Mother, though that percentage was later talked down by competing interests. Zeke immediately volunteered his candidacy and after six months of a grueling application process involving endless interviews, background checks and psychological reviews, he was selected as one of the chosen representatives of Hecker to conduct research on Pandora's surface.
Officially, Zeke's task is to research the interactions of Pandoran plant substances and processes with human biology for potential medical applications. Diseases of particular interest to his supervisors include firstly the so-called Israeli horse flu, a supervirulent strain originally engineered as bioweapony according to all evidence (though every side of the Middle East conflict denies its part in doing so), and HIV secondly: a mutating, centuries-old virus that eludes treatment with every transformation. Zeke's own interests lie primarily in the latter. God may have allowed him to live all those years ago, but Zeke's encounters during the dark days still incurred His curse: he carries a strain of HIV. He has the resources to continue synthesizing the drug that prevents the virus from inducing full-blown AIDS, but treatment merely keeps the infection in check without curing it. Earth long ago lost whatever antibody might have had the ability to mutate alongside the virus-- perhaps he can find it on Pandora. Zeke can't help but wonder if the application team at Hecker selected him because of, not in spite of, his condition-- certainly, he has a more urgent need to research treatment than anyone else selected by the corporation.
RP Sample: About thirty seconds later, tears finally stopped streaming down Zeke’s face inside the Exopack and his throat stopped feeling as if a few feathers and a bee’s stinger were lodged next to his uvula. He stood alone, thank God, at the very edge of the plain, close enough to throw a rock and hit one of the glowing purple ferns that marked the beginning of the bioluminescent forest. No one else was around to see his slightly embarrassing lesson about the toxicity of Pandora’s atmosphere. Chlorine and hydrogen sulfide: fuck you and damn you, respectively. He wondered how this or a future team would ever manage marine exploration, where the sloughed-off liquid forms of the atmospheric poison would feel like so much rubbing alcohol poured over a thousand papercuts against Earth-born skin.
Taking a deep breath of lovely, non-irritating oxygen, Zeke looked down at the bottle of Blue Rooster Single Barrel Bourbon in his hand. Sure, this was his first night on Pandora and damn if he was going to spend it locked in the same gray compound where he would spend most of the next fifteen years. Toasting their arrival, even if alone, was a great idea. But clearly, if he was going to do a lot of this drinking outdoors thing, he would have to devise some kind of specialized drinking device that would only admit whiskey, without requiring he lift his mask and expose his mucous membranes to the atmosphere. It would have to be airtight, lest the ambient chlorine gas interact with the whiskey to produce hydrochloric acid. What a waste of precious Earth-made bourbon, not to mention the esophageal damage. Perhaps he could modify one of the Exopacks such that the breathing tube connected to a bottle of whiskey… though of course, that meant one’s oxygen and whiskey supplies would necessarily come from the same vessel, but if one were to install a bivalve mechanism much like the body’s own breathing / eating throat apparatus…
Five minutes later, after sketching the rough outlines of the whiskey-modified Exopack in his head, Zeke’s mind wandered back to the task at hand. Ah, yes: thanking God for a safe arrival and saying hello to the new world.
Zeke raised the bourbon to the three-mooned sky, and the golden-brown liquid inside sloshed most deliciously. A disembodied line of an old nursery rhyme sang through his head: “The cat played the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon…” He wondered how a theoretical mother would modify the nursery rhyme for her children on Pandora. The Na’vi were rather catlike—did they play any string instruments? ‘The Na’vi played the viperwolf-catgut lyre’? And which moon would the cow (hammerhead titanothere?) jump over?
Task at hand, you drunken fool. He wondered if the low gravity retarded the absorption of alcohol.
Zeke poured a shot’s worth of the Blue Rooster on the ground, where a few blades of the alien flora burst into phosphorescent green light. He capped the bottle quickly, silently hoping no chlorine had had a chance to induce any significant chemical reactions.
“Thank you, oh merciful and loving God, for your deliverance of our ship to safety on this new world.” He remembered that his Irish accent, largely dulled after living everywhere else in Europe and then space for the past thirty years, returned with enough liquor. Zeke paused, gazing toward the giant cyclonic storm in Polyphemus’ atmosphere. It was like the eye of God staring back at him, a gentle benevolent giant shining above the darkness of the alien planet. He reached up to the band of red wool scratching reassuringly at his neck. “Holy Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, save us. Sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary, protect us.”
Somewhere in the neon-lit shadows of the forest, a large creature roared. The sound came from such a distance that it failed to register as real—its echoes lingered, ghostly, like aural ectoplasm.
He cleared his throat, taking one last reassuring look at the Great Blue Spot on Polyphemus before turning to go. As early as tomorrow, the work would begin. Tonight, though—tonight, he was simply glad they were here on Pandora, alive, under the gaze of God.
