Characters

E7 · The Fractured

Joel Kirby

2009 · Bristol, UK

Builder

Seventeen at displacement. Built the device in a Bristol basement from commercially available components and a design he has not shown anyone. Understands the device better than anyone. Will not say this is his fault, because he is seventeen and it is.

Fragment

None — precursor era; the device is the instrument

E7 · The Fractured

Martin Calloway

1980 · UK

Joel's stepfather

Forty-six at displacement. The adult in the room who keeps finding out that "adult" was preparation for a different room than the one they're in. Has learned that "right" — the word he uses for facts that cannot be argued with — covers a much wider category of fact than he previously understood.

Fragment

None

E7 · The Fractured

Priya Okafor

2009 · Bristol, UK

Field scientist

Seventeen at displacement. Takes measurements. Fills notebooks. Is the only one who will write down the worst-case hypothesis. Four notebooks in by The Long Recharge. Her Day 19 analysis — "we have been making it worse since Day 1" — is the most important sentence in Book Two.

Fragment

None — but keeps the notebooks

E7 · The Fractured

Callum Osei

2009 · Bristol, UK

Navigator

Seventeen at displacement. Draws maps. Finds the ways out. Is better at reading people than any of them have needed him to be, until Ceres, and then considerably more. His map of the Ali Vertas settlement is the most complete record they have of the 2312 Aegean coast.

Fragment

None

S1 · The Silence Between Stars

Dr. Maren Solberg

1 Feb 2003 · Bergen, Norway

Radio astronomer

Forty-four at series open. Svalbard Deep-Field Array. Received the signal. Submitted a paper. Was not believed. Spent the next twenty-eight years being right about the wrong thing until she understood there was no right version — only the signal, and what to do with it.

Fragment

S1 — signal in noise; anomaly-pattern recognition

S2 · The Pale Arithmetic

Yuki Harada

2089 · Kyoto, Japan

AI constitutional lawyer

Her grandmother absorbed the S2 fragment while encoding the Ara-5 cognitive substrate. Yuki will spend her career writing the law that governs minds unlike her own — and living with what that law does when she is no longer there to protect it.

Fragment

S2 (via grandmother Sari Harada) — architectural legal thinking; building systems that account for conditions that do not yet exist

S3 · The Weight of Water

Kwame Asante-Nkrumah

2094

Climate systems engineer

His ancestor absorbed the S3 fragment at the Accra Institute in 2047. Kwame can model complex interdependencies intuitively. His thermohaline correction report — classified in 2124 — describes a problem he has already solved and a solution that will take 200 years to understand.

Fragment

S3 — river-system thinking at civilisational scale; reads slow-moving systems the way others read faces

S4 · The Deep Grammar

Commander Ysolde Pryce

~2215

DSIA — Deep Space Incursion Authority

The only person in her field who has never explained an anomaly away. When the entity is detected at the heliopause in 2256, Ysolde is the first person to understand that what they are looking at is not a misreading. Her fragment will, through the Protocols she publishes in 2271, cause the Severance.

Fragment

S4 — anomaly detection; has never filed an anomaly as equipment failure

S5 · The Long Burn

Ambassador Cassia Wren

~2755

Accord diplomat

In 2780, when Cassia takes up her diplomatic post, multiple Accord member civilisations have been expecting a fragment-carrier for 200 years. They recognised her luminescence the first time they met her. They did not tell her.

Fragment

S5 — visible to non-human senses as faint luminescence; recognised by Accord species before she knows why

S6 · The Remnant Shore

Tamar Haidari

~2480

Archivist — Shore Repository

Five generations after the Severance. Tamar begins the Shore Repository — a civilisational archive — with the fragment-driven certainty that what she preserves will matter. In S6B5, she opens Maren Solberg's sealed letter. The franchise's penultimate beat.

Fragment

S6 (via ancestor Fatima Haidari, Cape Verde, 2047) — preservation instinct; chooses what to keep with accuracy that seems impossible