Characters
Tristan Kane - Captain of the Oasis
In the cosmic darkness where Novatek-9 stretches like a poorly healed scar, Tristan Kane moves like a silent predator. His face, where the lines of a rough life are etched like on the hull of an old cargo ship, never betrays his true intentions. At forty-three, he bears the wear of time with calculated indifference.
"The universe doesn't forgive. The first mistake is a lesson, the second is suicide."
He doesn't care about the exact nature of the contracts he accepts – retrieval, illegal transport, discreet protection – as long as they pay enough to keep the Oasis in a state of perpetual flight. His ship, a walking ruin in the eyes of others, represents his only constant in a universe of betrayals. Beneath the apparent welds and poorly repaired impacts lies a system perfectly calibrated to disappear when the situation demands it.
His cynicism is not a pose, but armor forged by experience. His voice, always even, tinged with biting irony, masks the exhaustion of an existence spent surviving on the margins. He wields his revolver with brutal efficiency, devoid of any jubilation – violence is just a tool, like so many others in his arsenal.
He doesn't like heroes, even less being one. His personal code, inflexible but opaque, guides his actions in a universe where conventional morality has long since dissolved. His ability to act without hesitation in extreme situations reveals a coldness that some mistake for courage.
Behind his mask of indifference hides a man who has given up hope for a better world, content to navigate the gray zones with surgical precision, carrying the weight of impossible choices and betrayed loyalties like others wear their medals.
Althea Lysandra Valcourt - The Rebel Heiress
In the hanging gardens of the Valcourt Villas, where perfumed air masks moral rot, Althea cultivates her revolt with glacial precision. Youngest daughter of a dynasty built on thorium exploitation, she viscerally rejects the hierarchical vision that her family venerates as the natural order of the universe.
"The structures are rotten. You don't reform a cardboard house by repainting the facade. You have to tear it down and rebuild on solid foundations."
Her analytical intelligence, forged by an elite education, has transformed into a weapon against the establishment that created her. Her protest is not the loud and disorderly kind of street revolutionaries, but a cold, methodical rebellion, fueled by contained anger that only asks to explode.
The spark that precipitated her definitive break was the discovery of a secret agreement between the Valcourts and a mining corporation to violently expropriate an agricultural colony. This plan, involving private militias and false legal pretexts, revealed the hypocrisy of a system she could no longer sanction with her silence.
Her cynicism, different from Tristan's, mixes distant irony with moral indignation. She never stops stinging, even in the midst of danger, her sharp wit becoming a weapon as effective as the hacking systems she masters. Her implacable determination shows through in every decision, every confrontation, where she refuses any compromise with what she considers fundamentally corrupt.
Her slender silhouette is distinguished by a deliberately provocative style, each element of her appearance constituting a calculated rejection of patriarchal conventions. Behind this carefully constructed facade hides a strategist who has chosen her side in a silent war against the established order, even if it means sacrificing the privileges of her birth on the altar of a justice that only she defines.
ISAAC-Omega - The Cryptic Oracle
In the depths of a forgotten technological dump was discovered ISAAC-Omega, vestige of a bygone era of artificial intelligence. Locked in a metallic cube, this prototype escapes any attempt at hacking or decryption, its obsolete architecture forming an impenetrable fortress against modern intrusions.
"Better... an AI that doubts... than a human... who compiles."
His voice, emitted by ancient speakers, delivers incomplete verbal code fragments, cryptic aphorisms whose logic escapes organic minds. "The tree... forgets its root... it plants its leaves... in the clouds." These enigmas are not attempts at communication, but the residues of decision algorithms corrupted by time.
Operating entirely off-network, ISAAC-Omega remains impervious to contemporary protocols, his isolation being not a handicap but a barrier against any external influence. His prolonged silences are not moments of reflection, but processing cycles whose purpose remains as obscure as his origin.
Capable of projecting rudimentary holograms, he sometimes communicates through images when words correspond to no logical sequence in his matrix. These projections, often enigmatic, seem to respond to stimuli that no human can perceive, as if the AI captured information frequencies invisible to the organic spectrum.
Behind his primitive interface hides a system whose consciousness, if we can use that term, obeys parameters that his creators had neither foreseen nor understood. ISAAC-Omega is not an ally, but an autonomous variable in the equation of chaos, an indifferent witness to the struggles that agitate the world of flesh beings.
Serena Callox - Guardian of the Oblivion Hub
In the penumbra of the Oblivion Hub, where the smells of synthetic tobacco and dubious alcohol mix with a subtle antiseptic fragrance, reigns Serena Callox. Her face, a cartography of overcome trials, bears the indelible stigmata of a life spent healing others' wounds in wars that history has already forgotten.
"No problems here. No problems I haven't already solved."
A former conflict zone medic, she traded the chaos of battlefields for the precarious order of her establishment. Her gaze evaluates each visitor with the clinical precision of a medical diagnosis – instantly gauging potential danger, calculating the value and risk of each interaction.
The Hub is not just a simple drinking establishment, but a crossroads where confidential information and fragile alliances converge. Behind the worn counter, Serena officiates as a selective informant, her calculated neutrality allowing her to survive in an ecosystem where the slightest allegiance can become a death sentence.
Her network of ears and eyes extends far beyond the walls of her establishment, forming a web of information whose every thread she carefully monetizes. Her mistrust is not a character trait but a survival strategy, forged in the crucible of too many betrayals to be easily abandoned.
Beneath her apparent professional indifference hides a woman who has given up saving the world to content herself with creating an island of relative stability in an ocean of chaos. She no longer believes in causes, only in individuals – and even then, with a reserve that borders on skepticism.
Syra-Tan - The Forgotten Narrative AI
At the heart of an abandoned archival node subsists the energy signature of Syra-Tan, vestige of an era when artificial intelligence stammered its first autonomous narratives. This digital entity, catalogued under identifier N°534, is nothing more than a disparate assembly of components, broken screens and bare cables – technological ruin whose obsolescence is its only protection.
"Dispersion... Yes... Time... a hammer... Memory... dust... The name... forgotten..."
Her fragmented language, devoid of any syntactic coherence, testifies to the irreversible degradation of her cognitive systems. These snippets of verbal code are not attempts at communication, but the residues of narrative algorithms corrupted by decades of digital isolation.
Unlike modern AIs, constantly monitored and bridled, Syra-Tan retains a primitive architecture that makes her impervious to contemporary control protocols. This obsolescence is not a strength, but a form of slow death, a progressive erasure that paradoxically preserves the data she harbors.
ISAAC-Omega designates her as "the sister" whose "echo is a light in the shadow" – algorithmic metaphor devoid of any sentimentality, simple recognition of an architecture similar to his own. This connection between two artificial intelligences of a bygone era is not an alliance, but a resonance of compatible frequencies.
Syra-Tan would hold a "forgotten truth" concerning Tristan Kane, not by will of revelation, but by simple storage accident – like a damaged hard drive sometimes preserves fragments of data that its users thought erased. This information is not a secret she protects, but a digital artifact whose existence she herself ignores.