Crispin

You poor, messed up D-Per, you.

Re-appears in Scions' Flight

Appearance and Personality

Initially a tall Tam-illee male, sandy colored with dark gray-brown points and brown eyes. Unlike Arete, who had a very definite distinction between her codeform and her form when manifesting to other D-pers, Crispin initially chose to always manifest as a normal-looking individual to both flesh-and-blood colleagues and his peers.

A Tam-illee whose silhouetted uniform writhes like the surface of a horror viseo. Empty eyes. Unnatural voice, as if the data defining it isn't all there. Its timbre emphasizes its artificiality, and the prosody is also off.

Biography

The third D-per to be coded, Crispin's older "siblings" were Arete, the first D-per, and Samson. Like the first two, he was indentured to Fleet; unlike Samson and Arete, he wanted to explore, and interact with flesh-and-blood colleagues. He was assigned to the UAV Starlightning, a survey vessel with a crew of 20, under Captain Luke Acron. The events that culminated in Acron's death led Crispin to absent himself; he was presumed dead until he was rediscovered in Kamaney Foster's hands. By then, he had adopted his new, mangled projection.

“Crispin was the first D-per to be assigned to a Fleet ship. A survey vessel, small crew. Lots of long distance missions, few stops back at civilization. And the captain of that ship...” Maia paused, sighed. “The captain of that ship became obsessed with him, and died trying to convert himself into a digital person so he could ‘be with’ Crispin.”

Even Sediryl couldn’t find a flippant enough reply to divert the horror of that.

“The court that convicted him said Crispin should have stopped him,” Maia said heavily. “But the man was his commanding officer. He was trapped between following his captain’s orders—and allowing him to suicide—or stopping him, and then he would have been up on an entirely separate charge.”

“Mutiny?” Sediryl guessed.

“Right.”

“That’s insane!” Vasiht’h exclaimed. “How can that possibly have been this D-per’s fault? Did he do anything to encourage the behavior?”

“The records show nothing like that,” Maia said. “And we have them in full, every conversation. They’re still available if you dig in the right databases. But Crispin… we assumed he suicided too, because he vanished.”

Recent History

It's unclear what Crispin did after vanishing, but eventually he turned up in the pirate organization, where he acted as Kamaney's personal bodyguard as well as general security chief. Maia (and thus Sediryl) believed him to be constrained in some fashion, but when he discovered Maia's presence and kicked her out, it became clear that he was free the whole time.

After Sediryl killed Kamaney, Crispin transferred his bodyguard functions to her, but misled her about what was going on and who was in control.

Vasiht'h's lack of fearful reaction to him perturbed Crispin, leading to several midnight visits to Sediryl's quarters on the pirate flagship -- where Vasiht'h offered tea, cookies, and conversation. Crispin did not react well to the offer of help, but in the end, he did allow Sediryl and friends to escape the pirate flagship on the Visionary, above the Vault of the Twelveworld.

A bit more than a year after the war, Vasiht'h experienced a recurring glitch that followed him on any tablet he used. He concluded that it was Crispin, but got only silence/absence in response to his overtures.

About nine months after that, Amber mysteriously started getting oh-so-handy offers for technical upgrades (each one for a "small fee"), increasing his surveillance abilities on Bethsaida's behalf. Maia somehow failed to detect these activities; perhaps she just wasn't looking in the right places, but perhaps... not. Crispin directed Amber's escape to the Alliance after he killed Beth

Timeline

• Code-launch/birthdate: 395 BA (the third D-per to be coded).
• Acron affair in 414 BA (19 years later); at this point, Crispin "died" to all appearances, until his reappearance in 481.
• Re-appeared in Scions' Flight (Fiction)

Quotes

• "Oh no. I expect people to live down to their worst natures. They never disappoint me."

• "I’m not going to magically become a nice person because you made me tea."

• "Other people agree that I’m awful. I’m so bad, in fact, that Fleet put the D-per project on hold for over a decade after my trial, and even now they don’t let D-pers accompany ships on tour. All of us are assigned to static emplacements where there’s no temptation for anyone to develop an obsessive relationship."

Trivia

• The location of his control wand (and how it ended up with Kamaney) is still unknown.