Summary
- Full Name: Isiah van Dyck
- Age: 24
- Height: 6'1"
- Weight: 168 lbs.
- Hair Color: blonde/brown
- Eye Color: green
- Ethnicity: American, Dutch ancestry
- Affiliation: New Nevada Rangers
- Home: New Nevada Ranger Center
Appearance
A slim-built guy, approximately 6'1" (186cm), light tan complexion, mixed-shade brown/blonde hair, narrow face, big green eyes with large bags underneath, a somewhat beakish nose, pointy chin and elbows, long thin fingers, and faintly visible scarring on all his skin-as though he has scraped over miles of pavement and busted through dozens of windows. Typically he tends to dress in clothing with as many pockets as possible, and since coming to the wastelands has favoured a duster with a kevlar vest under it and a pair of pistols in the field.
Background
Isiah was born in Lawrence, Kansas as the only son of a couple of the academics in the fortress there. According to the caste rules he got top notch education and in his case he was actually worth it; he completed paper-level studies in mechanical and IT engineering there, got lots of other general knowledge along the way to qualifications they declared PEng and PhD.
The reasons for his academic success are obvious to anyone who meets him: Complete focus bordering on obsession, a decent memory and imagination, total research tenacity and a talent for requesting and acquiring help. Unfortunately, two of his obsessions got him into trouble; the first is a fascination with explosives and explosions that others have described as a deathwish, and the second is a desire to rebuild society through a number of outlandish plans.
His current fixation for a plan to rebuild the world was described in an article in Discover magazine in the 90s, a self-replicating robot system called auxons which would build a massive solar farm and robots to maintain and expand it via resource extraction from the groundsoil where they operate. When he brought proposals about this to the university oligarchy they put him off, waffled and committed nothing where they didn’t outright say no. The reason was that they were already engaged in a project to back up, stash and nukeproof everything of intellectual value they had or could get their hands on. They simply weren’t going to indulge his obsession because they were too busy with their own.
After losing patience with their attitude he decided he had to try elsewhere. First he grabbed copies of the original chemistry from the academic papers and put it in a binder along with all he could find on small-scale fabrication technologies, a number of variants of solar power systems and an encrypted distributed control system he worked out himself. When he was done that and still certain he wouldn’t get help with it any time soon from the university staff he built himself an electric scooter and headed out west to track down rumours about the robot plague to help him with the main detail he wasn’t sure about, how to design and build the robots.
His travel was mostly pretty uneventful aside from forced citizenship in the Republic of Texas in order to cross it until he reached the western side of Texas and his scooter broke down. When he tried to get help his scooter was confiscated and he was conscripted into the Deadlands Union forces. Due to his extensive knowledge of explosives he got sent out on a deep-penetration sabotage mission against the Legion with some plastique, but a patrol of theirs massacred most of his unit and he deserted in the field and joined up with a caravan heading west to the Desert Rangers center.
When he got there he signed on in part due to their still having an active library computer that he used to help him restore his binder notes from the solid-state storage archive of it he kept in his watch.
A link to a text copy of an article describing Auxons in Discover Magazine (Oct 1995) is available here: http://discovermagazine.com/1995/oct/robotbuildthysel569