Malvik Graye was born in the underdecks of Habitat-7, a sprawling orbital colony orbiting Jupiter during the height of the Pre-Collapse era. The habitats were miracles of engineering—self-sustaining bubbles of life amid the gas giant's storms—but to young Malvik, they felt like cages. His parents were low-tier technicians, maintainers of the drone swarms that repaired hull breaches and harvested helium-3 from the atmosphere below. From an early age, Malvik showed an uncanny aptitude for drones: not just programming them, but intuiting their paths, predicting failures before diagnostics could. They called him "Tether" because he could link minds with the machines, guiding them through neural interfaces as if they were extensions of his own body.
But the void was unforgiving. During a massive solar flare event, a swarm malfunctioned, venting Habitat-7's outer rings. Malvik's parents were among the lost, their bodies ejected into Jupiter's crushing embrace. Orphaned at 14, he survived by scavenging in the drone bays, honing his skills until the Jovian Technocratic Assembly recruited him as a drone operator. In the Fringe Expansion War's early skirmishes, Tether became a legend: his swarms disrupted enemy supply lines, mapped hidden asteroid bases, and turned battles with precision strikes. Yet, each victory hollowed him. The war's carnage—shattered ships, frozen corpses drifting—whispered questions: Why this endless collapse? Was there purpose in the chaos?
Grief led Tether to the Collapse Reconciliation Cult, a fringe sect born from the Exodus Phase's despair. The cult preached that humanity's fall—Earth's ruin, the arks' launches—was not tragedy but divine trial. "The void tests us," their sermons intoned, "to forge resilience from folly." Tether, seeking meaning, joined as an acolyte, rising quickly to priesthood. He interpreted drone telemetry as omens, seeing patterns in grav-trails as godly scripts. Mercy's Folly, the lost ark, became his fixation. To the cult, her disappearance wasn't accident; it was a crucible. "Mercy weeps to awaken us," he preached, "a test of faith in the drift."
But doubt crept in. During a cult ritual—a neural dive into archived ark logs—Tether experienced a vision: Idyll's echoes, fragmented lullabies from the void. Was it divine? Or merely corrupted data? The cult's leaders deemed his questions heresy, excommunicating him. Cast out, Tether wandered the war-torn fringes, a former priest haunted by signals he couldn't ignore.
The Dagger of Aelion found him—or perhaps he found her. Adrift in Asteroid Sector A7X, scavenging war debris, Tether intercepted a faint broadcast: Vireth's voice, the hybrid AI's dual tones echoing Idyll's harmonics. It spoke of ark ghosts, of seeking Mercy's truth. To Tether, it was revelation—the divine resilience manifest in silicon and flesh.
He signaled the Dagger, offering his skills. Captain Mira Rauth-Helix, wary but desperate for a reliable XO, vetted him. Tether's drone expertise proved invaluable: he optimized the frigate's sensor swarms, turning them into ethereal hunters for spectral signals. His cult background? A quirk, she thought, until Vireth's obsession mirrored his own. "The Folly is our test," he argued in briefings, binding the crew with prophetic fervor.
Why XO? In the Dagger's rogue drift, loyalty was scarce. Tether's unyielding faith in Vireth—treating the AI as prophet—ensured discipline. He tethered the fractured souls aboard, turning doubt into devotion. But whispers persist: Is he loyal to the mission, or to the echoes that promise divine mercy in revenge's blade?
In the void, Tether drifts, recording the signs, forever seeking the godly weave in humanity's unraveling thread.