User:Disembodied
Blaze O'Glory
Commander "Blaze O'Glory" is the current pseudonym of an individual with a, to say the least, murky past. More than twenty years ago, it appears he was a starship pilot who suffered some form of mishap and was forced to eject. A series of failures in the escape pod systems -- possibly damaged in the attack or accident -- put the pod into a highly eccentric elliptical orbit around the star. By sheer chance the pod, now pitted by micrometeorites and scoured by solar radiation, was picked up a few months ago. The pod was turned over to the Moray Medicals, who, to their surprise and growing horror, discovered that the occupant was still alive.
The internal life-support mechanisms had been radically altered. Resyk units had been patched, recircuited and reprioritised, mated in desperate ways with the onboard autodoc, and stretched far beyond their design limits. The pilot was, indeed, alive: but no closed system is 100% efficient. Over the years the machinery had been forced to cannibalise all available resources to maintain core brain activity. "All available resources" ... you don't need legs to live, or arms; or skin; or flesh; or bones. Then one major organ system after another had been consumed, their functions taken over by mechanical processes. By the time rescue came, the pilot had been stripped down, piece by piece, reduced -- simplified -- to a nervous system and nothing else, held suspended in a soupy fluid within a pressure suit.
The motto of the Moray Medicals is "Never Say Die". This case tested it to its fullest. Eventually, however, with infinite patience, they excised this bundle of nerves from its warped cocoon and placed it in a specially-designed suspensor tank, meshed into sensor webs and a set of basic manipulators. Then they handed it over to the Psychs -- and hit the local bars, hard.
The pilot's original personality and memories were almost wholly gone. But radical egosurgery and experimental wetware did manage to coax a functioning, and to all intents and purposes sane, individual from the remains.
A long-running legal battle ensued between the Medicals, the disembodied brain (now referring to itself as "Blaze O'Glory", which caused the Psychs some concern) and EV-Away!, the manufacturers of his escape pod. The pod's black-box recorder had been cooked, and there was no record of who the pilot actually was, how much his insurance policy should pay out, or if it was even still valid. Eventually, suffering from increasing bad publicity, the manufacturers caved in and agreed to settle out of court. The medical bills were paid, and Blaze O'Glory was given a basic ship and 100 creds. EV-Away! had at first suggested a Worm, but O'Glory stuck to his guns and held out for a minimum-spec Cobra Mk III, which he named the Potage Electrique. His pilot's skills, although perhaps -- who can say? -- not what they used to be, seem at least adequate: he's now knocking on the door of Deadly with over 2,000 kills, and has fought and traded his way up to a cherry-red Wolf Mark II SE, the Radio Maru, too. Clamped into the fabric of the ship, and wired directly to the controls, he's carving out a new life for himself across the quadrant.
