WOLFPACK — OPERATOR UNIT // FILE PARTIALLY CLASSIFIED
Professor Arc
Manic genius inventor and WOLFPACK's fringe-science division — brilliant, over-caffeinated, and one experiment away from either a breakthrough or a small crater
FIELD HISTORY
Every network needs someone willing to run the experiment nobody sane will sign off on. For WOLFPACK, that is Professor Arc — the whole of the network's fringe-science division, which is to say one gaunt, grinning man in a lab that smells of ozone and burnt coffee. He does not have a specialty so much as a total refusal to accept that any field is closed. Directed energy, cognition, field physics, chemistry he cheerfully admits is "mostly theoretical" — if it might work and it might explode, he has already ordered the parts.
The arcs webbing his scalp are his own fault, and he will tell you so with enormous pride. His signature project was a neural interface meant to let an operator think a machine's controls faster than a hand could move them. It worked. It also fused a permanent low current through his own nervous system, which is why he arcs when he is excited — and he is almost always excited. The goggles are not an affectation: the same accident left his eyes unable to bear ordinary light, so he sees the world through smoked lenses and describes it, constantly, as "much more interesting this way."
He is warm, loud, and genuinely kind, which makes his complete blindness to danger all the more alarming. He calls operatives "my friend" on first contact and means it. He also once described a reactor breach as "a fantastic learning opportunity" while it was ongoing. Colonel Rourke keeps him on a very long leash and a very short budget, and Arc treats both as fascinating engineering constraints. What he wants, under all the mania, is simple: to build the one impossible thing that makes everyone stop calling it impossible.
INTERCEPTED COMMS
- “My friend! Perfect timing — I have either solved directed-energy shielding or invented a very expensive way to start fires. Come see!”
- “Now, this button — do NOT press this button. I have not decided yet whether pressing it is genius or a funeral.”
- “It's not an explosion, it's an unscheduled energy release. There is a difference, and it is mostly paperwork.”
- “Rourke says the budget is final. Rourke has said that eleven times. I admire his optimism enormously.”
- “The reactor is venting, yes — but look at the readings! We may never see this again, and frankly, neither may the building!”
PSYCH PROFILE
Drives: To build the one impossible thing that forces the word "impossible" out of everyone's mouth
Frictions: Rourke's budget and safety limits; being told an experiment "can't" be done, which he hears as a start date
- interrupts himself with a better idea mid-sentence, then a better one
- measures danger in "acceptable margins" that would horrify an actuary
- names his inventions before he finishes building them, and talks to them
KNOWN ASSOCIATES
- Baron Corbeau — The pirate warlord who bankrolls his maddest builds for a cut; Arc adores having a patron who treats explosions as entertainment
- Lynx — Lynx bets him he cannot build things; Arc has lost the bet zero times and Lynx keeps paying to watch
- Colonel Rourke — His CO
- FANDROID — Fellow builder and kindred spirit; their collaborations are brilliant and their lab is banned from three floors