Dead Space Timeline - The Complete Story

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Next year, we return to the world of Dead Space, the classic sci-fi horror franchise. While the remake will take us back to the first title in the series, there's plenty of events that occur before, as well as after, so why don't we take a look at EVERYTHING that's happened in the Dead Space timeline (so far) in this giant-sized episode of What You Need to Know!

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Transcript

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With a remake of the 2008 survival horror classic “Dead Space” set to release early 2023, I, Suggestive Gaming, figured now would be a great time to take a look at the surprisingly expansive story of the entire Dead Space universe as it was left nearly a decade ago with the final released installment of the series, Dead Space 3, in 2013.

A few notes before we begin: 0:23

unfortunately I will not be covering “No Known Survivors”, the 2008 Alternate Reality Game website, as it was taken offline years ago and not much media remains from it. Also to note is that the third main installment, Dead Space 3, allows for a single player, and co-op multiplayer campaign. While these campaigns tell the same overall story, some things play out slightly differently, but for this video, I will be covering the single player iteration, because I have no friends. As always, I’m going to try to cover things as chronologically as possible, but some bits here and there might be a bit out of order to allow for certain twists and reveals to stay intact. There’s also a couple points in this timeline where multiple pieces of media portray events during the exact same timeframe, so I had to take some liberties to make it all fit together. Do note that I’m going to be starting off with a lot of supplemental material, including extensive coverage of two novels that won’t have much of a visual component right off the bat, so if you’re only here for the games, make sure you use those chapter markers or the timestamps in the description to get to what you’re interested in. Now, without further ado, this is What You Need to Know about the Dead Space franchise. Altman be praised! Our story begins in the year 2214 in the community of Chicxulub Puerto in the Yucatan state of Mexico. There, we find a boy named Chava, who awakens from a nightmare about a ghoulish creature before he takes a walk around his hometown. He makes his way down to the shore and spots something strange on the beach, which he investigates to find it to be a deformed, human-like creature making strange noises and emitting a strong, smelly gas. A terrified Chava runs off to retrieve his mother and several other locals back to the beach, and after they see the creature, Chava’s mother sends him to fetch the old “bruja”(Spanish for witch). Chava heads to her home and later returns with the woman, who explains that they’ve all been sharing the nightmares, which are a warning of the creature and further things to come. She then explains to Chava that “Chicxulub” means “tail of the devil”, and she reveals that it has begun to awaken. The bruja then leads the locals in a ritual where they encircle the creature before burning it to a crisp in a bonfire. Afterwards, Chava walks her home, but she mysteriously disappears from his side on the way. The boy goes to her home, and when he enters, he finds her inside, dead from a self-inflicted slice to the throat. Mysteriously, her body is already decomposing, as if she was dead for days. As he leaves, he notices strange symbols on her wall, and begins to hear whispers in his head. Meanwhile, a geophysicist named Michael Altman tells his colleague James Field about bad dreams he’s been having as of late. The pair are studying a crater left in Chicxulub 65 million years ago (from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs), where Field notices a troubling new gravitational anomaly. Field and Altman argue over how to handle the anomaly, with Altman preferring to press the issue while Field brushes it aside. Altman then contacts several other scientists studying the crater asking what they’re seeing before he receives a call from an unknown party who arranges a secret meeting at a nearby cantina that night. That evening, Altman returns home to his girlfriend, anthropologist Ada Chavez, who tells him about the locals referring to the “devils tail”, which they represent by crossing their index and middle fingers. After deciding to go to the meeting, Altman meets with a man named Charles Hammond. Hammond had been working as a communications installer for shady resource retrieval corporation DredgerCorp when he noticed an electromagnetic pulse coming from the center of the crater: the same spot as the gravitational anomaly. After it’s discovery, DredgerCorp tried to cover-up what was broadcasting the pulse: an apparently otherworldly object with two twisted strands; which Altman recognizes as the “devil’s tail”. Altman leaves, but Hammond stays at the bar, growing increasingly paranoid before heading home. On his way, he’s followed by three men working for DredgerCorp, who soon corner him. Hammond pulls a knife on them, and begins to hear voices in his head before he puts the knife to his own throat and slits it, killing him instantly. Later, the head of DredgerCorp’s Chicxulub division, William Tanner, is tasked by the president of DredgerCorp, Lenny Small, to work under a high-ranking military official named Craig Markoff in regards to examining the anomaly. Tanner then recruits two men, last names Dantec and Hennessy, to man an “F/7” bathyscaphe to dive down to the ocean floor at the center of the crater and find the source of the pulsing. The two men embark, but as they descend further and further, Hennessy begins to go delirious and hear voices, eventually seeing a vision of his dead half-brother, Shane inside the ship.

The pair soon find the source of the anomaly: 5:38

“The Black Marker” (as named by the vision of Shane), a three meter tall, twisting monolith covered in unknown, glowing symbols. As Dantec takes the ship to get a closer look,“Shane” tells Hennessy that he must kill the man. As they get near the Marker, however, the two men are hit with a debilitating pain in their heads, which causes Hennessy to pass out. When he awakens, he finds Dantec trying to take a sample of the Marker.“Shane” warns Hennessy that this action is dangerous, and will trigger a devastating event called “Convergence”. Hennessy tries to get Dantec to stop collecting the sample from the Marker, but he doesn’t, instead successfully breaking off a piece with the sub’s instruments and collecting it. This causes Hennessy to snap and attack the man, bludgeoning him to death.“Shane” then tells him to return to the surface and tell everyone to leave the Marker alone and ignore any “callings” it might make, before the vision disappears. Hennessy begins to see the symbols adorned on the Marker in his head, and he scrambles to write them on the walls of the F/7 with Dantec’s blood. When he runs out, he cuts himself for more blood to finish his scrawlings on his own body. Hennessy then records a video broadcast warning about “Convergence” and showing the symbols on his body, referring to them as a map. He then gives one final warning to not destroy the marker, before he cuts the feed, curls up on the floor, and dies from his self-inflicted wounds. On the surface, Tanner and Markoff piece together the bits of the broadcast they were able to receive from the F/7, making out Dantec’s mangled corpse, as well as some of Hennessy’s blood covered ramblings. Markoff then tasks Tanner with finding out how many people may have intercepted the transmission and saw this video. Meanwhile, Altman continues to monitor the signal, which has suddenly increased. After an extensive search, he finds three other scientists to help with his research: Showalter, Ramirez, and Skud and the trio discover the drilling operation. One night, Altman gets a strange call asking if he’s intercepted anything unusual lately, before the caller hangs up. The next day, the other scientists reveal that they received the same call, and determine the caller was trying to find out if they had seen a video broadcast that was intercepted by a scientist named Bennet, who they get a copy of the broadcast from, showing the final moments of Hennessy’s recording. Using a hotel computer, Altman posts the video online, directly tying it to DredgerCorp and their operation at the crater. That night, Ada reveals that in her studies, she’s finding everyone in the region is suffering from the headaches and nightmares, and they believe it is due to the “devil’s tail”. The next day, DredgerCorp holds a press conference claiming Hennessy simply went crazy during a mission testing the F/7. Altman watches this conference as the police question him about Hammond’s death. Later that night, Ada comes home with Chava, who tells Altman about the human-like creature that he found on the beach, before taking the couple there to examine its remains. Afterwards, Altman and Ada stop at a bar and meet a drunkard who tells them stories of other similar creatures that appeared on that same beach over the years, and he reveals that the creature they just examined had the same tattoo as a man he had seen around the town before. Elsewhere, William Tanner surprisingly gets a call from “Dantec” before the dead man appears before his very eyes. While Tanner knows this “Dantec” can’t be real, as he died in the F/7, the apparition nonetheless convinces Tanner to cut his “oxygen tank”, causing the man to slit his own throat, killing himself. Later, Altman hears the news of Tanner’s death inside his home. Lenny Small, President of DredgerCorp, then receives a call from Markoff, who informs him of Tanner’s suicide, as well as the news that the signal at the center of the crater has suddenly stopped pulsing. These events spur Showalter, Ramirez, Skud, and Altman to submit a proposal to the North American Sector Science Foundation to publicly investigate the crater with help from the government. That night, Altman is awakened in his home by Markoff and his men, who have kidnapped Ada. The men hold him down and interrogate him, learning of all he discovered before inviting him to join the DredgerCorp team, an offer he has no choice but to accept. Markoff’s men then take Altman to a helicopter along with Ada, Skud, and Showalter and they’re flown to a floating, domed compound. There, Altman meets a pilot named Jason Hendricks who is slated to take a bathyscaphe underwater with his partner, Robert Moresby, and Altman offers to accompany him on practice runs. On the day of a deepwater test, Moresby turns up drunk and falls from a lift, breaking his neck, causing Markoff to have Altman take over his duties. After a few weeks, the floating compound is pulled by submarines to rest directly over the center of the crater. Altman and Hendricks take the bathyscaphe down into the water, and notice the signal is starting to pulse again when they are called back up to the surface, where they inform Markoff. Afterwards, Stevens, another researcher, gives Hendricks a psych profile, and later tells Altman that he suspects something wrong with him, but Altman still agrees to go on the next dive with him. The next morning, the pair take the bathyscaphe down again. At 2,700 meters down, Hendricks begins to panic, but gets a hold of himself. As they move deeper, Hendricks sees his dead“father” outside the porthole, causing him to slam his head against it, trying to break it to allow his “father” into the craft. Altman tries to wrestle him away from the porthole, but Hendricks overpowers him. Altman then tricks Hendricks into allowing his father in through the hatch instead, and when the man turns around, Altman beats him with his shoes, knocking him out and hogtying him afterward. Before Altman ascends back to the compound, he notices a strange, flayed looking fish tearing apart another, as well as some kind of floating pink tissue that adheres to the side of the ship. Altman heads back to the surface, making a copy of the footage of the fish on the way. Once the bathyscaphe surfaces, the guards immediately take Hendricks, and in the distraction, Altman grabs the tissue off the side of the ship. Altman then meets with Markoff to debrief, and theorizes that Hendricks’ madness corresponded with the signal, but the pair are confused as to why Altman wasn’t affected by it as well. Markoff then decides to send Altman down again a few more times with a different person each time. Elsewhere, Hendricks wakes up in a medical facility with no memory of his outbursts. As a nurse comes in to check on him, he attacks her, biting her neck, consciously removed from the actions his body is taking. After he kills the nurse, Hendricks sees a vision of his dead father in the room with him again, who warns him about “Convergence” and instructs him to tell everyone about it. Later, Altman examines the footage of the fish and the tissue, but doesn’t get many answers. Speaking with Ada, Altman determines that all the headaches, nightmares, and suicides in the compound lately can’t all be coincidental. Markoff then arrives and gives Altman a tranquilizer gun in case his future partners attack him as well. After he leaves, Ada informs Altman about Hendricks killing the nurse, as well as how the guards were forced to shoot and kill him afterwards. Altman makes two more trips in the bathyscaphe, having to use the tranquilizer on his crewmate on one of them. On the next trip, Altman and his crewmate finally find the “tail of the devil”: the large, twisting Black Marker under the water. The pair then reach the original, blood-filled sub that had descended and found the artifact, firing a pulse at it to make it float back up. Back on the surface, Altman finds the chunk of the artifact that Dantec took on his ill-fated voyage and he stealthily takes it. Later, he secretly tests the material, finding that whatever it is, it couldn’t have been man made, and appears to be unnatural as well. Later, Altman learns that Markoff intends to lift the artifact to the surface, and Ada later agrees with him that the rising assaults, suicides, and paranoia in the ship are a combined issue. Altman goes on another descent with a man named Torquato, who brings along a strange meter that he examines as the bathyscaphe gets closer to the artifact. Torquato soon turns violent and attacks, stealing the tranquilizer gun before shooting Altman with it, who soon passes out. When he awakens, Altman finds the bathyscaphe sideways, with the oxygen system offline and Torquato attempting to open the hatch to flood the craft. Altman attacks Torquato and is forced to kill him in order to have enough oxygen to make it back to the surface. As the ship rises back up, Altman sees Torquato get back up and lunge at him before he blacks out. When he awakens again, Altman finds his hands around the neck of a long-dead corpse before he sees a vision of Ada’s dead mother. Ada’s mother tells Altman about the Marker, warning him that it is dangerous, and they must leave it alone, lest it will begin Convergence. Altman then passes out once again from lack of oxygen. The next time Altman wakes up, he’s in a medical facility with an oxygen mask where he is met by Markoff, Stevens, and an officer named Krax, who he informs of what happened. He then spends the next weeks recovering and returning to his research, but since the event, he starts to have more visions of dead people he once knew, who continue to warn him about not allowing Convergence. Troubled, Altman tells Stevens about his hallucinations, and the man reveals that others on the compound are also beginning to have them. As time goes on, a group of scientists in the compound begin to see the Marker as a divine figure, with Convergence being their means to salvation; something that terrifies Altman. Ada herself begins to believe this religious take after seeing her own visions of her mother, and this drives a wedge in their relationship due to Altman’s disagreement. One day, Altman’s former partner, James Field, comes to him on behalf of this new religion, asking him to lead them as its prophet; Altman very quickly rejects this offer, but they simply see him as a reluctant prophet. Altman pilots the bathyscaphe to raise the Marker from the depths with a net, and suddenly, his headaches and hallucinations stop. Near the end of the mission, Markoff calls and orders him to stop and return to the station, seeing his usefulness over, and his knowledge a liability. Once Altman arrives, he tries to get into the chamber the Marker will be stored in, but he is refused entrance. Later, Altman returns to Field to ask for the believers help in getting next to the Marker so he can return the removed piece to it. That night, Field brings a man named Henry Harmon, one of Markoff’s inner circle, who provides Altman with a uniform to disguise himself and get into the chamber. Altman and Harmon then get into the chamber, and instead of returning the piece, Altman records a video of the artifact before they leave. Days later, the believers, led by Field, start to protest over Markoff’s research of the Marker. Krax breaks up the protest by opening fire on the believers, before shooting at the Marker to force them to surrender. After the affair, the rioting believers are imprisoned. Altman is returned to the land compound, which has been repurposed as a detainment center for the scientists who have outgrown their usefulness but know too much. There, he and Skud determine that the Marker is again pulsing from the floating compound, confirmed by the strange behavior of the others in the land compound, who are also seeing ghosts pleading to “Make us whole”. When one of the guards starts to hallucinate from the Marker’s influence, Altman takes advantage of the opportunity and grabs his things before escaping with Ada. Altman immediately heads to Washington D.C. and holds a press conference showing the footage of the Marker, expressing his belief that it is an alien artifact, and finally revealing that the military and DredgerCorp are working an operation to cover it up. Krax, Stevens, and Markoff watch the conference, and Markoff demands his men make arrangements for the hotel room next to Altman’s in D.C. That night, Altman returns to his hotel room to find a hole in the wall, with Markoff on the other side. Krax and his men then hold him and Ada at gunpoint before Markoff offers to allow Altman to research the Marker if he goes back to the press and tell them it was all a hoax. Altman predictably refuses the offer, and Markoff’s men subsequently sedate him and Ada before taking them back with them to the floating compound. When Altman awakens, he is in Steven’s office, with Ada nowhere to be seen. Stevens reveals that they are keeping him to study his resistance to the Marker’s influence, also informing him that they found the chunk of rock from the Marker in his pocket while he was unconscious. Krax then arrives and begins to torture Altman. Sometime later, the believers on the compound somehow realize that Altman is back and demand to see him, forcing Markoff to release him to Stevens so he can speak to them and avoid another riot. Altman speaks with Field, who reveals the religion now has an informal name: Unitology, and he sees that the believers now hold recreations of the Marker as pendants. Altman soon theorizes what “Convergence” means: that somehow the Marker means to transform all of humanity into one individual being. He expresses this theory to Stevens, who reveals that he has, unbeknownst to Markoff, become a believer in Unitology, and believes the Marker to be benevolent. Altman then decides to pretend to be a believer in Unitology in front of the others in order to learn enough about the Marker to destroy it. Altman soon reunites with Showalter, who has determined that the symbols on the Marker are a representation of a DNA sequence. Shortly after, a radio astronomist named Grote Guthe discovers that the Marker’s signal is a transmission of a sequence of genetic code. The team uses this knowledge to conclude that the Marker is recording Human genetic code and transmitting the pulse to deliberately change the genetic structure in existing human organisms, leading Altman to wonder if the purpose of this pulse is to help, or hurt humanity. Guthe is able to synthesize a sample of the genetic code the Marker is transmitting, and it rapidly mutates into a pink, tissue-like organism. Guthe then sees a vision of his grandmother, who tells him to stop his research at once, and he tries to escape this vision by injecting himself with a sedative, but after he’s done, he realizes that the syringe wasn’t filled with a sedative, but instead the sample of the genetic code. His “grandmother” instructs him to go to the Marker, whose “dead space” will stop the organism. Guthe’s arm begins to mutate, and he rushes to the Marker’s chamber, where his mutation stops momentarily. Krax arrives shortly after, and promptly puts a bullet through the man’s forehead, much to Markoff’s dismay, who orders the body examined. The doctors examining Guthe’s body call Field to inform him, just as the corpse mutates into a fleshy, winged creature, completely unrecognizable from its former human form. One of the researchers, Professor Hideki Ishimura, flees from the creature immediately, leaving the other two behind. The creature then awakens and attaches to the researchers, transforming them into similar fleshy monsters. Altman gets a call from Field, who tries to tell him about the creatures, but is interrupted before he can do so. Altman then exits his room to find the compound in a state of mass panic, with researchers screaming about monsters that are rapidly multiplying. Altman finds Showalter, who tells him about the monsters, who used to be human, before handing him a gun and meeting with two other researchers. The group are attacked by one of the monsters, and they try to shoot at it, finding that their gunfire doesn’t seem to slow it down at all. It kills one of the other researchers, and in desperation, Showalter shoots off one of the creature’s scythe-like limbs, bringing it down and revealing the monsters’ weakness. The group then call Field and agree to meet with him in the upper level air-lock before they raid the janitorial closets to find tools to cut off the monsters’ limbs, including a handheld plasma cutter which Altman dons. Elsewhere, Markoff, Krax, and Stevens watch the carnage on the surveillance system before they prepare to evacuate. Altman, Showalter, and their companion come across a large mass of the pink tissue growing along the compound, with human skulls and faces within it. Altman uses a nearby torch to hold it at bay, but it still grows and kills the third man. Another creature then arrives, and during the ensuing battle, Showalter is also killed, but Altman is able to narrowly escape. Altman continues on, fighting through more creatures before he gets a video call from Ada, who is seemingly with Field in the airlock, but it is cut off shortly after it begins. Just before the airlock, Altman is stopped by a spider-like creature composed of multiple former humans, and after a grueling battle, Altman is able to defeat the creature and signal to Field to open the airlock door. Inside the airlock, Altman finds Field alone, with no Ada in sight, leading him to realize it was a hallucination, which must mean that Ada is dead. The pair then head up an access ladder, but Field is quickly grabbed by some kind of long appendage, which decapitates him. Altman hurries up the ladder and reaches the deck above, reaching a boat shortly after, which he leaves on. On the boat, Altman sees a vision of Ada, who tells him everyone is in grave danger, and he must go back to stop the Convergence. Altman reaches the docks in Chicxulub and finds Chava waiting for him along with the drunkard who told him and Ada about the Devil’s Tail. Chava tells him that the bruja told him to tell Altman to go back, offering to go with to help. Altman instead goes to the DredgerCorp land compound, and he is let in. Inside, he soon realizes he isn’t safe and won’t receive any help, and he maims the main guard out of self defense before he returns with Chava to a shanty town to retrieve a cache of weapons. Altman takes a chainsaw and goes back to the boat, but is called by Krax on the way, who chastises him for what he did to the guard and tries to get him to come back to the land compound, but Altman refuses. Instead, Altman takes the boat back to the floating facility, choosing to risk his life to try to return to the Marker to figure out how to contain the infection. Upon returning, Altman is immediately attacked by a creature that used to be Field and is forced to kill it. Fighting through more creatures, one more vicious than all the others, Altman realizes he must head to the submarine bay to swim to the Marker chamber. On the way, Altman gets a call from Henry Harmon, seemingly the last remaining human on the floating compound who tells Altman he’s safe due to his proximity to the Marker, as the dead space around it keeps the creatures away. Harmon opens the submarine bay doors, and Altman makes his way. Altman swims successfully to the submarine bay and fights his way through giant creatures to reach the final hallway before the Marker’s Chamber. At the end of the hallway, a paranoid Harmon lets him into the chamber. Harmon, now infatuated with the Marker, insists that Altman touch it to feel it’s “love”, but when he does so, he instead sees that the hallucinations everyone was seeing were not from the Marker, but instead from some kind of instinctual defense built into the human brain to try to get them to prevent Convergence; something they failed to do. Altman then examines data from the facility and records a basic blueprint for a new Marker, determining from his dreams that it wants to be replicated. Altman, hoping appeasing the Marker will stop its actions, then asks Harmon to transmit that blueprint back to the Marker, to which he responds: “Altman be praised”. After the transmission is complete, the Marker releases a burst of energy before falling silent. Altman tells Harmon that the Marker wants them to leave, and they head to the station’s control room. On the way, Altman is forced to protect Harmon from several creatures until they reach the control room, where Altman activates a mechanism to sink the facility to the ocean floor; lying to Harmon, telling him they must do this to protect the Marker. They go back to the submarine bay and flood the chamber, swimming outside and reaching the surface of the water. Altman finds Harmon at the surface and takes him to the boat, and after cutting the mooring rope and fighting against the current of the sinking facility, Altman is able to speed back toward Chicxulub. On the way, however, Harmon attacks Altman with the boat’s anchor, accusing him of lying about his love for the Marker. As Altman passes out, Harmon takes control of the boat. Later, Altman wakes up strapped to a hospital bed surrounded by Krax, Markoff, and Stevens, who reveal that they are now all believers in the Marker’s divinity, believing it to have created life millions of years ago and that its current actions are a glitch. Stevens then reveals that Harmon told them that Altman figured out the Marker wanted to be replicated, and they plan to use his blueprint to create a duplicate that will work better while they search other worlds for more Markers to study. They also tell him that they are using Guthe’s research to study the tissue that mutated him into the creature; an idea Altman denounces. After days of solitary confinement, Altman is met by Markoff and Stevens once again. Markoff tells him that in order to get the public to join in their belief, they must start a formal religion, with Altman being used as the public “founder” and figurehead of the Church of Unitology; but in order for this to work, Altman must be dead. Markoff then reveals that Krax killed Ada, before becoming expendable himself and getting killed by Markoff. Knowing that Altman can’t just die normally, and instead must become a martyr, they created a creature out of three human corpse’s DNA, one of them being Krax, and they plan for it to kill Altman. They then jokingly give Altman a spoon to defend himself, and throw him into a chamber. He hastily sharpens the spoon on the walls to create a makeshift knife before the creature

is unleashed: 29:13

a large, brutish beast with giant arms that can shoot projectiles at him. The beast charges at him and, despite his futile efforts, it rips his body in half, instantly killing Michael Altman, and setting in motion the formation of the Church of Unitology. Around eighty years later, we find Jensi Sato and his older brother Istvan growing up in the slums of the poorest dome, the Mariner Valley, on the planet of Vindauga. While Jensi is a bright young man, Istvan is a bit strange, obsessed with numbers and patterns that nobody else can see, and hearing voices nobody else hears, making his behavior extremely socially awkward. As they grow older, Istvan’s odd behavior causes the boys’ relationship with their mother to sour, and one day, they come home to find their mother on the floor after collapsing while carrying packages. Istvan, mesmerized by the pattern left from the packages on the floor, doesn’t help, instead seeing “the shadow man” choking her (instructing him that this is the way he can kill her), before Jensi convinces him to call for help. Their mother is taken by the emergency crew, who take her to the hospital, where she is transferred to a mental ward. The boys are then met by a social worker who takes them into governmental care. Before they leave with her, however, Istvan ducks out and runs away, but Jensi decides to separate from his brother and stays behind. Jensi moves in with his new guardian in a better area and starts to excel at school. He meets a classmate named Henry Wandrei, and the two become fast friends. Six months later, Jensi decides to show Henry his old apartment complex and they go to the slums where they find Istvan in the apartment, now dirty and deranged, and he attacks them, seeing them as the “Shadow Man”. Jensi and Henry fight with Istvan, who beats Jensi until he passes out. When Jensi awakens, he finds Istvan now recognizing him, and the pair make up. Henry is skeptical about Istvan, but over the weeks ultimately agrees to help Jensi return to the slums to take care of him. One day, Istvan sees a “pattern” that tells him he and Jensi should live together once again, but Jensi declines, knowing that the foster system wouldn’t allow it; angering the troubled brother. Jensi and Henry leave, and when Jensi returns home, he finds that Istvan had followed them, and he walks into the foster home uninvited. Jensi’s foster mother calls the police, prompting an attack from Istvan, who accuses Jensi of being “one of them” before he runs out the back door before the police arrive. Jensi tries to lie to the police to protect his brother, but Henry tells them the truth. Henry then helps Jensi smooth things over with his foster mother, and Jensi continues with his new life. One day, however, he decides to check on Istvan alone, but when he goes to the apartment, he finds it now abandoned and his brother gone. Elsewhere, a group of scientific, military, and government officials (most Unitologists), working on behalf of the world governing body, the Sovereign Colonies, discuss using the information they’ve recovered after the failed Black Marker testing to replicate the Marker to unlock its power. Luckily, the Black Marker event was contained and there was no outbreak from the facility. They all agree to not create the replicas on Earth, and instead find remote planets they can nuke if it goes awry again, and they choose the man for the job: Commander Grottor. The commander then leads a crew to locate a planet for a secret facility to continue the Marker project, eventually agreeing on one called “Aspera”, which holds a detainment facility for political prisoners that his employer, Blackwell, states can be used for“human subjects”. After graduating school, Jensi attends a technical college on Vindauga to study programming and hacking, but graduates with his associate’s degree in flight and cargo manipulation before the government cuts school funding. Jensi takes a job at the space hub transferring cargo from ship to ship, living a fairly menial life, until one day he returns to his apartment to find Istvan had broken inside, now missing two of his fingers. Istvan reveals he had been “watching over” Jensi over the years, and claims that he wanted to see his brother one last time before “fulfilling his purpose”; which he refuses to reveal, simply telling his brother to watch the vids the next day, as he’ll be famous before he leaves. Jensi calls Henry and tells him about the encounter, and his friend suggests they try to find any public events happening that Istvan might be attempting to sabotage. The next day, the pair try to figure it out, and land on 4 potential events, with each of them picking one to go to and look for Istvan. Jensi gets to the event he picked, but finds it delayed, and rushes off to another one: a press conference with Councilman Tim Fischer regarding a crack in the dome. Jensi pushes through the crowd looking for his brother and eventually spots him, but before he can reach him, Istvan storms the stage, attacks the security detail, and pulls a gun, shooting Councilman Fischer in the head with a disturbing grin. A suddenly confused Istvan makes eye contact with Jensi, stating “this is not my purpose” before asking his brother for help just before the police tackle him to the ground and detain him. The next day, Henry finds out that Istvan wasn’t taken to the police station, but to an unknown location, and additionally, there seems to be an effort to remove any vids of the event. Henry’s father uses his connections to find out that Istvan is now a political prisoner, and may even be off-world. Jensi then hires a lawyer and follows the chain of command, finally reaching a stonewalling military official named Granon who can only tell Jensi that his brother is alive, but gives no info on his whereabouts. With nothing else to go on, Jensi is forced to return to his menial life. Meanwhile, Istvan is transported to an unknown detainment facility, where he is interrogated by a small man with skin he perceives to be gray about why he killed Councilman Fischer. The man is unhappy with Istvan’s answer of “it wasn’t supposed to happen that way”, and leaves. Istvan then chokes one of the guards at the instruction of the “Shadow Man” in his head, smashing his skull and killing him. After days of rougher and rougher interrogation, the gray man returns and tells Istvan that he’ll be taken off-planet to a secure location; one without laws. Istvan is further tortured for months before he is taken through space to the facility on another planet where the gray man retrieves him and injects him with some kind of serum that fills him with pain. The gray man then speaks with Commander Grottor, and tells him about Istvan’s transfer to the prison compound on Aspera. Back on Vindauga, Jensi’s guilt over his brother continues to grow. After his mother passes away, Jensi realizes that he must do more to try to find his brother before it’s too late for him as well. Soon, Jensi receives a call from Henry, who is working off-world as security at a penal colony, telling him in secret that Istvan is alive in captivity there, leaving him with

only one word: 36:53

Aspera, which he frantically begins to investigate. On Aspera, the gray man continues to grotesquely torture Istvan, and after one particularly rough session, he passes out and later awakens inside of a new cell. Istvan stumbles to a mess hall and meets fellow political prisoners James Waldron, Bill Ambler, and Michael Stewart, who inform him that they’re imprisoned in a penal colony, but they’re not sure exactly where. Istvan then spots a strange, growing mold-like tissue substance before he is overcome with a debilitating headache that triggers visions of shadows darting back and forth before he passes out. He then dreams of his dead mother before he awakens back in the mess hall. Meanwhile, Commander Grottor’s crew orbit the research facility being built on Aspera, and begin to experience mass headaches. One of the crew, Jane Haley, absent-mindedly draws an image of a Marker, startling Grottor, who sits her down for a “serious talk”. In the research facility, Dr. Enoch Briden, devout Unitologist, has been working on constructing the “Red Marker”, a manufactured Marker replica based on the Black Marker research from Earth. Once finished, the Red Marker begins to shoot out pulses of energy, and Briden’s team tries to decipher its message. One of his team, Dr. Callie Dexter notices a signal coming from the planet of Kreemar as well the signals from the Red Marker becoming more concentrated for some reason. On Vindauga, Jensi has learned that Aspera is an unoccupied, uncolonized planet, and he tries to figure out a way to get there. Using his hacking skills, Jensi is able to access some military records which confirm a political prison exists on the planet, as well as a mysterious project referred to as“Operation Aspera”. Jensi then gets a bit more forward with his tactics, knocking out the nearby spaceport’s security manager to steal his keys and enter his office, where he learns about a ship called the “Eibon”, which seemingly travels to Aspera. Jensi inspects the crew logs and finds the names of their two freight specialists: Swanson and Talbot. Jensi makes a friendly introduction with Swanson at a bar called the Martyr, and the two become friends, with Jensi pressing Swanson to get him a job on the Eibon, which is unfortunately full. Jensi then devises a plan to free up a spot on the crew: knock out Talbot so he’ll be late to work and lose his job. Jensi breaks into Talbot’s apartment and waits for him to come home, and when he does, he hits him twice in the skull. The man falls to the ground, dead, much to Jensi’s surprise, and regret. Jensi does his best to cover up the accidental murder before quickly leaving the scene. The next morning, Talbot doesn’t show up, and Swanson recommends Jensi for the job. Once offered, Jensi takes it and boards the Eibon en route to Aspera, and his brother. In the penal colony, Istvan begins to notice that the other prisoners are having headaches and beginning to act erratically, as he himself continues to see visions of dead people he knew, but he is unable to understand what they’re trying to tell him. One day, one of Istvan’s fellow prisoners commits suicide by slicing his own throat with a fork. In the security control center, Henry Wandrei watches the event unfold on the cameras, shocked and horrified. The guards bring the corpse inside and Henry calls Commander Grottor to inform him of the suicide. Grottor, however, seems unshaken, and simply tells him to store the body in a fridge until it can be retrieved. In the orbiting ship, Jane Haley is relieved of her duties by Commander Grottor and now tasked with sitting at the bridge of their ship and drawing without thinking, much like she did when she drew the Marker. Just as the ship crosses over the research facility, Haley is hit with a headache and afterwards, her hand moves a stylus across a pad and writes out equations, models, plans, and structures for hours; all of which Grottor hands over to the gray man. Meanwhile, Istvan focuses his mind for six days and is able to finally communicate with his visions, who speak to him in his mother’s voice, asking for help and to “find me; come unto me”. Jensi, aboard the Eibon, learns that when they arrive on Aspera, he won’t have clearance to go down to the planet. Dr. Callie Dexter continues to study the vectors of the signals from the Marker, determining that it’s receiving and sending signals to the planets Kreemar and Aegis VII, both places where other Red Markers were being constructed, creating some kind of communication network of the three of them. Furthermore, she finds that the signals are converging in the middle of the penal colony, and she and Dr. Briden decide to go inside to investigate. Grottor calls Henry and informs him that the scientists will be coming into the prison compound, and Henry prepares for their arrival. They soon arrive in the prison compound with four other scientists, guided by Henry, and they set up their monitoring equipment before exploring the area. Nearby Istvan’s visions begin to beckon him to Convergence, as another prisoner kills himself. The scientists rush in to investigate, and after finding Istvan waiting there, they send him back to his cell. Briden and Callie go to the spot where the dead prisoner committed the act and begin to drill into the ground, initially finding nothing, much to Briden’s dismay. After another strong pulse from the marker, they’re led to another spot, and they again

find Istvan; Callie then realizes: 42:39

they’re not looking for something buried, they’re looking for him. Briden then takes Istvan back to the research facility and begins to ask him questions about the Marker and Convergence, things that the young man doesn’t recognize, but he ultimately shares what his “visions” have been telling him. Briden then shows Istvan to the Marker, and he is mysteriously drawn to it. Soon after, Callie arrives and is furious to find Briden broke protocol. As the scientists argue, Istvan walks up to the Marker and places his hand on it. He quickly feels its energy flowing through him just before a massive pulse blasts, knocking him unconscious as everyone around him screams. This pulse blast is so powerful, Commander Grottor and his crew feel it on the orbiting ship. His crew begins to lose it, including Ensign Jane Haley, now scribbling endlessly for hours on end, all of which Grottor then passes off to the gray man. The Eibon reaches Aspera, and the captain tries to call down to the surface, but receives no answer. The crew soon hear a distress signal stating that the sector has become quarantined and landing on Aspera is now forbidden. The captain enters high orbit to try to figure out what’s going on, but shortly after, a Sovereign Colonies gunship appears, laying mines to seal off the planet. The captain hails the ship and speaks to Commander Grottor on the other end just before a cluster of mines are sent towards the cargo ship. As the mines collide and begin to take out the ship, Jensi grabs an Astrosuit Resource Integration Gear, or RIG, and puts it on just before a giant hole is blasted in the hull of the ship. Jensi is forced to jump out into space, using the RIG’s zero-gravity boots to push off of some of the debris to navigate himself to the remaining life-pods; one of which he is able to enter and shoot down towards the planet below, spotting a dead Swanson on the way. In the Marker’s chamber, Istvan wakes up. Callie attempts to leave to call Grottor and inform him of Briden’s transgressions, but the doctor stops her and has his fellow Unitologists detain her. Istvan then sees the visions of the dead people he knew above the Marker, and they plead with him to “make us whole, make us new” Murders and suicides continue in the penal colony, and Henry notices one inmate drawing odd symbols on the wall with his own blood. Meanwhile, Istvan stays close to the Marker, refusing to leave its side. In her cell, Callie Dexter is able to get the guards to smuggle her notes and supplies in and out to her fellow non-believer researchers. One scientist working with Callie was able to examine Istvan’s brainwaves, which apparently are starting to affect the Marker’s pulses, as if it was adapting to him and strengthening it. Callie sends a guard to get Briden, and she plays him an audiolog the scientist recorded of Istvan mumbling that he’ll leave and replicate the Marker with the instructions it’s given him, which will only cause more madness and needless deaths elsewhere. She tries to convince Briden that the Marker is dangerous, and Istvan is only making it worse, but his faith clouds his judgment, and he leaves her in the cell. Istvan then receives the Marker’s instructions to replicate it, and when he lifts his arms, he then brings them down and triggers a massive pulse. The pulse is felt by everyone in the penal colony, and it somehow triggers the “corruption”(the mold-like tissue) to rapidly grow down the hole Briden dug, and as a few prisoners look down it, snapping sounds are heard before they begin to scream. Callie Dexter calls a guard over to her cell, only to watch him bash his own skull against the bars until his face is a mangled mess and he dies on the floor. Moments later, Callie watches the guard stand back up, his arms now replaced with long, fleshy scythes before the creature runs off. Meanwhile, in the interrogation room, a corpse that was left there is enveloped by the corruption, and begins to mutate into a deformed, fleshy flying creature. Henry watches the security cameras to see the bat-like creature emerge and wrap itself around a prisoner’s head before falling into the hole; moments later, something begins to stir inside. On the gunship, Ensign Jane Haley sees a vision of her dead mother, and when she snaps out of it, she finds herself at her desk, having scribbled pages of notes. Haley decides to keep her own copy of her writings to send to people she can trust just in case. Elsewhere, the gray man converses with Grottor about interrogating her to retrieve the key she now carries to the next stage of the project. Henry watches as more of these bat-like “Infectors” fly out of the hole, followed by more humanoid creatures. The Infectors attach themselves to more and more convicts, alive and dead, to transform them into the fleshy monsters, rapidly increasing their numbers. Istvan, meanwhile, remains calm next to the Marker, knowing it will keep him and Briden safe as long as they stay near it. Henry locks himself inside the control room and helplessly looks through the windows to see more and more of the guards overwhelmed and infected by the creatures. One of the prisoners picks up a dead guard’s gun and begins to shoot at one of the creatures’ legs, eventually destroying all of its limbs and bringing it to a stop, giving Henry the idea of how to fight off the monsters. Henry makes a distress call to Commander Grottor and explains the situation. Grottor replies that “things have gone wrong at the other sites as well, all at once,” and admits to Henry that he plans to soon destroy the planet to contain the infection, as well as prevent anyone from discovering their project. Outside, Jensi’s pod crashes through the dome of the penal colony as Henry watches, trapped in the control room. A confused Jensi takes a plasma pistol from one of the dead guards before he’s quickly attacked by one of the creatures. Jensi is able to fight free and gets a call from Henry (although he doesn’t know it’s him yet) telling him about the situation going on before instructing him to get to the doors so he can let him in. Jensi’s head then begins to hurt and he sees a vision of his dead mother before it quickly disappears. Jensi fights through more creatures and reaches the door to the hallway to the control room; Henry opens it, and Jensi finds a horde of creatures on the other side. After he fights through them, he gets through the other side of the door, which Henry immediately closes behind him. Jensi soon finds the Interrogation Room, where he retrieves a laser saw and discovers a hiding prisoner; Istvan’s friend James Waldron. Jensi takes Waldron with him and the pair make their way to the control room. Suddenly, Jensi sees a vision of his dead mother again, just as Waldron sees his own of his dead father, causing him to attack Jensi out of delirium. Out of desperation, Jensi fires at Waldron’s legs to incapacitate him, but accidentally shoots him in the torso, killing him. An Infector then finds Waldron’s body and mutates it into one of the creatures, and Jensi is forced to kill him once again using the laser saw. Jensi reaches the control room and sees the man who called him through the glass, shocked to find it to be his longtime friend, Henry. Henry opens the door and the pair reunite, and Henry tells Jensi about the Marker and how the scientists took Istvan away, before the pair decide to go to the research facility to find out what happened to him. After finding Henry a RIG, the pair commandeer an ATV and take it towards the research facility. As they draw near, however, the facility’s defense system activates and shoots them, destroying the ATV and knocking out Henry. Jensi wakes him up, and despite a broken arm, he is able to accompany Jensi as they run towards the facility, reaching an airlock just before they run out of oxygen and Jensi passes out. Henry manages to close the airlock doors to seal out the planet’s atmosphere and supply oxygen to Jensi’s RIG, and he awakens shortly after. Unfortunately, without the access codes to the research facility, the pair are then locked inside the airlock with nowhere to go. Callie is in her cell when another researcher working for Briden, Anna Tilton, enters the room and frees her, asking for her help in stopping him before it’s too late. As the pair run towards the research facility’s control room, Anna fills Callie in on Briden and Istvan’s behavior. When they’re forced to travel through the ventilation shafts, they hear some kind of pounding and investigate, finding it to be somebody outside in the airlock. Anna opens the airlock door and finds Jensi and Henry on the other side. Jensi introduces himself as Istvan’s brother, and Callie tells him about Istvan’s hand in the current outbreak as well as his plot to spread the Marker’s evil to other worlds. The group continue towards the control room, but Anna steps on a mine left by Briden, blowing off both of her legs, killing her instantly. The remaining trio then get a call from Briden, who both taunts and warns them. They then dodge the rest of the mines and reach a stasis field also planted by Briden, and Callie is able to kill the technician controlling it so they can move on. The pair find Briden behind a wall of glass and Jensi reveals that Istvan is his brother, to which Briden responds that “he belongs to the Marker now,” before he walks off. The group is then attacked by a monster, which breaks Henry’s neck and instantly kills him, leaving Jensi emotionally crushed. Callie gets a nearby door open, and she and Jensi are able to escape. The pair then reach the control room and Jensi holds a gun on Briden’s remaining scientists to allow him and Callie into the Marker room. There, Jensi finally reunites with his brother, Istvan, who simply assumes him to be a hallucination from the Marker. Callie tries to kill Istvan, but Jensi stops her, convinced he can talk his brother out of his current state; unable to stop her, Jensi is forced to knock her unconscious. Jensi tries to snap Istvan out of it, but his brother instead attacks him mercilessly, convinced he’s a hallucination, beating him unconscious. Istvan then realizes that his brother is real, and how much he cares for him, having made all the effort to find him. This shows Istvan how much Briden has been using and taking advantage of him. Istvan apologizes to his brother and stands up, leaping at Briden and snapping his neck with his bare hands. Jensi wakes up, and Istvan reveals that he killed Briden so they could use the Marker

together to do good: 53:40

an idea Jensi immediately rejects. The Marker begins to pulse, and Callie is overcome by its influence, bashing her own head into the wall and killing herself. Jensi, realizing the Marker’s influence has corrupted his brother beyond saving, has Istvan fetch his gun, and once he does, Jensi points the gun at his brother’s head and pulls the trigger. Jensi then gains the strength to stand up and walks out of the room, hoping to find a way to destroy the facility and the Marker, however, he is quickly met with opposition from the creatures. As he points his gun at them, he soon finds the Marker’s influence makes him put it in his own mouth instead; he then takes a deep breath before pulling the trigger. Twenty years later, on the frozen tundra of the planet of Tau Volantis, the Sovereign Colonies conduct a research expedition led by Dr. Earl Serrano to find something in the wreckage of a ship. A soldier named Tim Caufman examines the ship, finding it crawling with hostile, mutated, humanoid creatures. Tim fights through them and finds what Serrano is searching for: a cylindrical object called the “Codex” which Serrano believes holds the key to stopping the outbreak. Caufman survives an avalanche and comes across commanding officer Major General Spencer Mahad, who takes the Codex from him. Mahad, believing that the only way to stop the outbreak is to instead kill everyone on the planet, suddenly executes Caufman before erasing the Codex, saluting the Sovereign Colonies flag, and putting a bullet in his own head. Just under two-hundred years in the future, we find Planetside Security, or P-Sec, officer Vera Cortez and her partner Sergeant Abraham Neumann, stationed on the saleable resource mining colony of the planet Aegis VII. The mining operation, run by the Concordance Extraction Corporation, or CEC, is less than legal, but extremely profitable given Earth’s dwindling resources. Neumann and Cortez respond to a local disturbance call in an apartment complex, and there, they are shocked to find the walls covered in blood, providing another example to the extreme ramp in violent crime on the mining colony as of late. The pair then find the tenant’s corpse, which surprisingly begins to move and soon stabs Cortez in the shoulder. After Neumann wrestles with this creature, backup arrives, just as it jumps through the wall and escapes. Later, in the P-Sec Headquarters on Aegis VII, Cortez and Neumann observe Jennifer Barrow’s dig operation beneath the surface. Jen’s team discover seemingly man-made tracks from equipment dating back over 150 years

before they come across a surprising discovery: 56:38

the Red Marker, which unbeknownst to modern humans, was constructed there centuries prior. They then call back to the colony, which informs the Unitologists church and uploads the images back to Earth. The USG Ishimura, a CEC “Planet-Cracker” class ship used to literally crack open planets to mine their resources, is then sent to the planet to retrieve the artifact. On Earth, senior medical officer Dr. Nicole Brennan is sent to serve on the USG Ishimura during its mission, leaving her boyfriend, engineer Isaac Clarke behind. On Aegis VII, Vera Cortez, a Unitologist, argues with Bram Neumann over the origin and significance of the Marker before they are broken up by Commander James. In one of the oxygen filter bays of the colony, Supervisor Natalia Deyshanov replaces a compressor to repair one of the filters. As technician Jerry Cooper seals the doors, Natalia realizes she forgot her toolbag behind her, she attempts to grab it, but the doors begin to close, forcing her to make a daring escape, losing her tools in the process. Later, in one of the mess halls, two miners also argue about the Marker, and whether or not it’s an alien relic of massive importance, or some lost man-made artifact. Neumann tries to send both miners to the brig, but is unable to due to his inability to contact P-Sec analyst Marla Janssen via radio. Meanwhile, in the office of the colony’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tom Sciarello, one of the miners is complaining about insomnia. Dr. Sciarello theorizes that the miner can’t sleep because of depression, caused by the Ishimura, which used its ShockPoint Drive travel system to swoop in and will soon steal the miner’s “glory”. While the miner disagrees that this is the cause, the doctor nonetheless gives him some sedatives and sends him on his way. Elsewhere in the colony, in Union Square, Unitologist Deakin Abbott preaches to his fellow believers about their prophet, Michael Altman, and the group rejoice about the rumors that they’ve finally found a Marker, in the flesh (so to speak). Neumann heckles them from the crowd, pointing out that this Marker is Red, as opposed to the Black Marker described in the Unitology texts. The pair then argue about the faith, with Neumann remarking that he’s “seen what this [religion] does to people.” Later, at dig site GL-426 (the Marker’s location), Natalia leads a team, including Jerry, watching over the Marker and points out that the colony’s leader, Hanford Carthusia, wants a tram built between the colony and the dig site. Back in Dr. Sciarello’s office, Neumann and Cortez respond to a distress call and find the doctor being held hostage by the miner, brandishing a laser cutter, angered that the doctor “conned” him, since the sedatives did not work. Neumann tries to talk him down, but when he fires the laser cutter towards the officers, Cortez shoots his arm and lunges at him. Neumann then tends to the doctor, but as they look back over, they notice that the miner had shot the nurse, Katie, splitting her in half. In his office, Hanford Carthusia speaks over video conference with Captain Benjamin Mathius of the USG Ishimura, who is now receiving his instructions from the Church of Unitology, Mathius tells Carthusia to keep the Marker safe until the Ishimura arrives, to which the fellow Unitologist agrees, replying “Altman be praised”. Meanwhile, Deakin Abbott takes a group of his Unitologists to follow the newly constructed tram lines to find the Marker. Abbott approaches the Marker and touches it, but is stunned to see a vision of his dead mother, who tells him to protect the Marker. Sometime later, Dr. Sciarello gives a press conference in Union Square regarding Katie’s death. During his speech, however, he sees “Katie” in the crowd, telling him to “stop them”, which startles the doctor, cutting his speech short. Elsewhere, Neumann shows up at Cortez’s apartment after she doesn’t show up for work due to her insomnia. After he taunts her for her hallucinations, she kicks him out, taking a sick day. In Carthusia’s office, he speaks via video call with Deakin Abbott, telling him to stay away from the Marker, and threatening to arrest him if he touches it again. The call ends when Dr. Sciarello arrives to talk with Carthusia, informing him that productivity is down due to the widespread insomnia, and he believes it is somehow due to the Marker’s influence. Deakin Abbott returns to the Marker site with a group of Unitologists, but this time he is stopped by Natalia and Jerry. When he explains his visions to Natalia, a fellow believer, she agrees to let them in, but Jerry nonetheless puts a stop to it. Meanwhile, Neumann and Dr. Sciarello drive to the Marker’s location while conversing about Cortez’s beliefs and how it’s caused a falling out between the two. When they arrive, they find Abbott’s group outside praying, and Neumann spots Cortez among them. This causes another argument between the two about her religion affecting her work, and when Neumann tries to take her back to P-Sec for a psych eval, Abbott steps in to interrupt, and Neumann leaves with Sciarello. On their way back to the colony, Sciarello reveals he had been scanning the area for radiation, but found absolutely nothing in the area. Neumann refuses to believe, knowing that somehow the Marker is emitting something that’s causing Cortez and all of the others to act unlike themselves. Meanwhile, a guard named Carver calls Carthusia and informs him of the events that transpired between Neumann and Cortez as well as the other guards’ increased aggression. Back at P-Sec HQ, Marla shows Neumann a video that was posted online by one of the Unitologists of the Marker, and she tries to analyze the symbols on it to decipher its message. At the same time, Carver returns to the colony and speaks with Carthusia in his office, receiving orders to get Natalia’s team to leave the Marker and find out who took the video. When Carver returns to the Marker dig site, he tells Natalia and her team to leave, but she refuses. When he tries to place her under arrest, she pulls a laser cutter on him and slices his skull in half. Jerry is able to calm her down and get her to drop her weapons, and one of Carver’s team then punches her, knocking her unconscious. Later, Neumann and Commander James are on a call with Carthusia, pleading with him to leave the Marker alone and evacuate the colony, citing the two murders since the structure’s discovery. Their efforts are in vain, however, as Carthusia refuses to call off the operation this close to planetcrack, when they’ll be able to extract Aegis VII’s resources for sale. He does, however, pass on the news that the Marker will soon be brought to the colony where it will be transferred on board the Ishimura upon its arrival, something that strikes fear in both Commander James and Sergeant Neumann. At the Marker’s dig site, several engineers, including Jen Barrow’s husband Colin prepare the Marker for extraction as they discuss the mysterious origin of the Marker and its apparent influence on the colony’s population. Sometime later, Neumann and Sciarello walk around the colony, and the doctor explains his vision of Katie after her death, not quite agreeing with the Unitologists, but having a sense of understanding for their current state of excitement over the Marker. He then leaves Neumann as he goes to speak with the captive Natalia Deyshanov about her murderous outbreak. Meanwhile, in one of the vehicle maintenance bays, a large group of Unitologists gather before Deakin Abbott, who preaches that the Marker is preparing them to transcend to the“next life” while Cortez watches on. Later, Dr. Sciarello speaks with Natalia to assess her condition. Natalia tells the doctor that every night she dreams of murdering more people, before she frantically tells him that they all need to leave the planet before she grabs his throat and tackles him to the ground. A guard rushes in and knocks her off of him with a nightstick, and she begs him to kill her to end her suffering. Elsewhere, the tram shuttle prepares to move out to retrieve the Marker, as Neumann watches on. He then receives a call from Marla, who tells him to get down to Union Square. As the team of engineers reach the Marker, one of them, Sam Caldwell, gets a call from his girlfriend, Lexine Murdoch, expressing her excitement over the Marker’s discovery. The team reach the Marker and help to load it onto a cart, but as soon as they touch it, it begins to pulse a powerful energy, physically affecting all those close to it and knocking out one of the nearby “gravity tethers”. As a group of engineers runs off to fix the tether, the other workers in the mining site begin to act violently, forcing Sam to start killing them in self defense. Meanwhile, at Union Square, Abbott is holding another sermon where he expresses his joy that the Marker will soon be with them in the colony. Neumann spots Cortez and gives her another plea to go home and stop listening to Abbott’s rambling, but she just tells him that her fate is “coming”. Neumann then calls Marla, who tells him the team are just about to load the Marker, and the moment they do, the colony is hit with a pulse, and Neumann gets a sharp pain in his head. Just as suddenly, everyone in the crowd pulls out a gun, aims them on themselves, then squeezes the trigger, all in unison, including Cortez. Neumann rushes over and cradles his partner’s lifeless body, as Hanford Carthusia watches the events from a security monitor in his office with a smile. Sam Caldwell and his group of engineers continue towards the tether, and Sam starts to hallucinate his girlfriend, Lexine, warning him to turn around. The group then see the hostile workers start to turn their violence on themselves as they get a call that the Marker tram is halfway back to the colony. Sam’s own team starts to lose it as well, and when Sam is attacked by one, he is forced to kill him. Sam then reaches the tether and fixes it, getting the call that the Marker has nearly reached its destination. On his way to the colony, Sam gets a call from Lexine, who informs him about the mass suicide in Union Square, and he tells her about the miners attacking him. After repairing another crucial piece of equipment, Sam then snaps out of his hallucinations, finding that the people he was killing were not only figments of his imagination, but some of them were projected over his own team, which made him kill his whole crew. A squad of P-Sec officers led by detective Nathan McNeill then arrive and shoot Sam, and in his dying breath, he calls out for Lexine. The officers then leave, calling Commander James and Dr. Sciarello to inform them. Aboard the Ishimura, Nicole Brennan speaks with the ship’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Terrance Kyne, warning him that a crew member named Harris seems to be having a psychotic break, and the pair compare it to the stories coming from planetside about the suicides and other violent incidents. Meanwhile, the tram team gets the Marker to the inbound vehicle bay, and P-Sec officers Jones and McCabe speak with the tram’s foreman, Colin Barrow, who explains that since they removed the marker, his men have been feeling“rough”. The officers then inform Barrow about the incident at Union Square. In his office, Carthusia has another call with Captain Mathius aboard the Ishimura, who tells him to have the bodies in Union Square retrieved and frozen, so they can be in “top condition” when they arrive. Sometime later, in a “megavent” shaft below ground, a technician, Supervisor Cameron, leads Neumann to a vent in which a red, fungus-like substance (the corruption) is growing. Neumann tries to take a sample of it, but it moves out of the way, forcing him to burn it up instead. Neumann returns to P-Sec HQ, where he speaks with Jones and McCabe about the Marker’s arrival as well as the tram team’s symptoms. Neumann then realizes that since the mass suicides, there hasn’t been any crimes, which is unusual given the recent trend of increasing violence in the colony. Neumann then asks where Marla is, and they tell him she went home sick with a headache. The Marker is taken to a secure bay in the colony, and Carthusia goes to it, placing his hand on the structure and asking if it really holds the key to life after death. Elsewhere, Dr. Sciarello arrives at an apartment belonging to the Fanchers after the wife called him about her husband, one of the miners who originally found the Marker, who won’t leave his room, instead just scribbling notes and symbols on the wall. When the doctor tries to sedate Mr. Fancher, the man attacks and throttles him, forcing his wife to grab the syringe and inject it into his neck herself. After Sciarello recovers, he admits to the woman that whatever is going on in the colony is beyond his understanding. Neumann arrives at Marla’s apartment and finds her still obsessing over decoding the symbols on the Marker. The pair then argue about the significance of the Marker, with Neumann wanting to just get away from it, and Marla wanting to study what it could potentially reveal about alien life. Fearing losing more lives, Neumann storms out and enters Carthusia’s office, demanding he stop the operation, presenting all of the deaths since the colony’s foundation: the vast majority of which were since they found the Marker. Carthusia then reveals that even if he wanted to stop the operation, he couldn’t, as Captain Mathius now has full jurisdiction of the operation, and the Ishimura has arrived. After the Marker is moved into the Ishimura, Dr. Kyne inspects it and wonders just what secrets it holds before he’s called to the med lab. Meanwhile, security chief Alissa Vincent speaks with Captain Mathius, expressing her concerns with bringing the artifact aboard after the observable increase of violent incidents in the colony after its discovery. Dr. Kyne reaches the med lab, where he finds a man who had murdered two members of his dig team is somehow resisting a sedative. When he begins to bash his own head with his fist, Kyne restrains him and injects an even stronger sedative, finally putting him under. Afterwards, the doctor ponders what is causing this influx of violent behavior coming from the planet. Now with the Marker extracted from the colony, Neumann and Sciarello discuss the aftermath. While Neumann notes that crime is down, Sciarello states that the psych problems are somewhat worse, with 20 percent of staff now suffering. The pair visit Natalia in her cell, which is now covered with scrawlings of messages and symbols she etched into the walls. After they leave, Neumann asks about the markings on the walls, and Sciarello remarks that over half of the people who came into close contact with the Marker reacted in the same way. Neumann walks off and receives a call from Supervisor Cameron, who (along with his co-worker Lambert) found that the growth they discovered in the vents had gotten significantly larger overnight. Carthusia has another status update with Mathius, informing him that the shuttle with the Marker is on its way to the ship, with a second in tow carrying the homicide victims. Carthusia then states that a third shuttle containing the suicide victims is about to leave, but they’re waiting on him to board so he can fly up and join the Ishimura, but Mathius refuses to let him, stating that he“won’t risk the same madness infecting[his] ship.” He then states that he’s grounding Carthusia, and issuing a no-fly ordinance over the planet, leaving a very angered Carhusia to state that if he wants the suicide bodies, he’ll gave to break his own order and get them himself. Neumann brings Marla to Natalia’s cell to show her the symbols, while the deranged prisoner tells them that “death is the key”, and they “can never go back”. Later, Neumann shows images of the alien growth in the vents to Carthusia, who dejectedly states that it doesn’t matter now that Mathius has trapped them there. The next day, Neumann returns to Marla’s apartment to speak with her, and she reveals that using Natalia’s scribbling, she was able to determine that the Marker’s symbols are some kind of genetic code. Neumann tries to get her to come with him to the planetcrack, but, too focused on cracking the code, she refuses to leave. Sometime later, in the morgue, Carthusia tells the suicide bodies that “soon [they] will all ascend”, before one of the bodies sprouts scythe-like limbs and rises behind him, as he simply states “Altman be praised.” In P-Sec HQ, Detective Nathan McNeill is met by his old friend, Gabe Weller, who is now working on the Ishimura. Gabe came down to the colony to extract the suicide bodies from the morgue, and McNeill escorts him and his team there. When they arrive, however, they find the bodies mysteriously missing. The Ishimura gets into position and begins a countdown. Marla calls Neumann just before the planetcracking begins, and a massive flash occurs, taking out power and comms, causing a panic. Elsewhere, Natalia’s head begins to throb, and Sciarello sees Katie once again, who tells him that it is now too late. Aboard the Ishimura, Captain Mathius tries to call down to Colin Barrow to get a situation report, but the feed is too broken up for him to understand. As they return to the colony, Barrow finds the corruption growing all over the walls and sees the floors littered with dead bodies. He rushes off to check on his wife, and when he finds her, Jen says that “they want our bodies” before she slits her own throat with a rock saw, killing herself infront of her husband. Back in the colony’s morgue, the medical team go crazy and begin to attack McNeill and Weller, and the pair fight through the crazed colony citizens to make their way back to P-Sec HQ. In the megavents, Cameron loses Lambert in the darkness and looks for him, only finding his flashlight. When he turns it on, he instead sees some kind of creature, which attacks and kills him. In the Ishimura’s bridge, Dr. Kyne feels like something is wrong with the Marker. Captain Mathius and Alissa Vincent then watch as the security monitors begin to pick up feeds from the colony, displaying images of the ongoing massacre. Meanwhile, Colin Barrow carries his wife’s body to his shuttle so he can take her “home”, but unbeknownst to him, one of the flying Infector creatures follows him inside. In the bridge, Kyne tries to convince Mathius to call for help, but the captain refuses, knowing that calling any authority will lead to their arrest for conducting the illegal mining operation. Kyne recommends calling the church instead for guidance on how to deal with the Marker’s effects. Matthias concludes that they must abandon the colony quickly and take the Marker back to Earth. Vincent tries to make one trip down to the planet so she can get a grip with what they’re dealing with, but Mathius refuses in order to save the ship. As McNeill and Weller reach P-Sec, they find it overrun with the mutated creatures, and they quickly learn to stop them by severing their limbs. In the main office, they find Lexine Murdoch, who McNeill recognizes as Sam Caldwell’s emergency contact. Weller tries to call the Ishimura, but finds that the comms are down. The trio then decide to get to the shuttle bay so they can escape to the Ishimura. Neumann finds Marla, who states that she discovered something about the Marker, but he cuts her off and the pair make their way back to HQ. On their way, the generators kick in and the lights turn back on in the colony.

They reach P-Sec HQ and find a horrific site: 1:17:42

Jones, McCabe, and Commander James dead and mangled, with the growth from the vents now in the room. Elsewhere, Sciarello gets a distress call about multiple deaths, and when he leaves his office to look, he finds several bodies lining the hall similarly torn apart. As Neumann investigates the corpses in P-Sec HQ, Marla explains what she learned about

the Marker’s genetic instructions: 1:18:08

it seemingly infects necrotic flesh, mutating dead bodies’ genes at the cellular level. Marla then gets a distress call, but as she goes to answer it, one of the corpses mutates and attacks, forcing Neumann to jump out of the way. The creature then infects one of the dead bodies, mutating it and Neumann tries to open fire on the new monster. Back in the morgue, Carthusia offers himself to the creature, which instantly kills him before escaping out into the halls. Neumann continues to fire on the creature, but having no luck bringing it to a stop, Marla pins a desk up against it, but it easily escapes. Neumann grabs a fire axe and cuts off one of the creatures’ heads before the pair escape to look for a way off the colony. Meanwhile, Sciarello and a small group of others are trying to escape the Medlab when they reach the morgue and notice all of the bodies from the mass suicide now missing. The doctor then looks up and sees what became of them: fleshy, scythe-armed creatures which descend from the ceiling and kill him instantly. At Union Square, survivors are flooding to the shuttles, but the conductor states that at their current weight, it won’t even be able to move. Natalia, having escaped her cell during the blackout, walks away, with one of the others stating that it’s “her funeral”, which she agrees with. The monsters reach Union Square and start to massacre everyone boarding the shuttle. Neumann and Marla then lead the remaining survivors in a mad dash to the shuttle bay. Elsewhere, Natalia walks the halls alone, when a creature inside the vents emerges and follows her. Neumann and company reach a locked door, which Marla hacks the lock to open. When they emerge on the other side, they find it littered with corpses that the infector creatures are currently mutating. One survivor tries to rescue one of the bodies he recognizes, but it emerges and kills him. Marla then states that they’ve run out of time, and the group runs away once again. The group scramble through the halls and eventually reach the shuttle bay safely. Meanwhile, Natalia finds a vehicle of her own, entering it, drawing a symbol on the windshield with blood, before driving off onto the surface of the planet. Back in the shuttle bay, Marla notices that one of the shuttles must have already left, and soon, another takes off. Inside the shuttle, the pilot worries that because of the weight of all of the passengers, they likely won’t be able to break orbit and reach the Ishimura. The pilot tries to land the craft to offload some weight, prompting a fight with a hysterical passenger who knocks out the pilot, causing the shuttle to descend back down to the surface. McNeill, Weller, and Lexine arrive at the shuttle bay just in time to watch the shuttle crash into the shuttle port, causing a massive explosion. In the wreckage outside, they find and rescue Warren Eckhardt, the Executive Director of Colonial Mining Affairs for the CEC. While the group notices that the explosion destroyed all of the shuttles, Eckhardt reveals that his private, executive shuttle is currently in the maintenance bay, and they can use it to escape to the Ishimura. They then enter the megavents to make their way to the maintenance bay underground. When Marla and Neumann recover from the blast, they find the destroyed remaining shuttles, and they watch their hope for escape literally burn up in flames.

Marla then suggests one final idea: 1:21:48

heading to the main communications tower to make a distress call up to the Ishimura. Meanwhile, Natalia stands before a giant cliff and marvels at the view before she states“I’m ready, make me whole.” She then dives off into the depths below, likely killing her. Marla and Neumann make their way to the communication tower through the vents, which are now completely overrun with the growth. They enter a room swarming with the creatures, and Neumann notices the face of his former partner, Cortez, emerging from the growth on the wall. Marla snaps Neumann out of his shock and the pair try to run away, but Marla is caught by one of the creatures and impaled through her chest. With her dying breath, she closes a door behind Neumann, protecting him from the swarm of creatures. Neumann then finds a camera and records a vid-log, telling the story of what happened on Aegis VII, pleading for whoever finds his message to destroy the planet to prevent the infection’s spread, before walking off to meet whatever fate awaits him. Meanwhile, McNeill, Weller, Lexine, and Eckhardt travel through the megavents towards the maintenance bay, hearing a recording from a colonist describing the crazed actions of the others as some kind of dementia. The group reach the maintenance bay and find Eckhardt’s shuttle. Weller’s men meet them there, but a giant tendrill shoots up from the ground and kills them. McNeill and Weller then fight through the remaining monsters, and when Eckhardt’s access code no longer works, McNeill is forced to hack it while fighting off the creatures. The group board the shuttle and fly up, seeing that the tendril belongs to an enormous, wormlike creature sprouting from ground below. They fly the shuttle up to the Ishimura, but the ship denies their clearance, telling them to turn around. When they refuse, the Ishimura fires on their shuttle, but they are able to crash land onto the ship, knocking them unconcious in the process. Coincidentally, Barrow’s shuttle reaches the Ishimura, and he is similarly denied entry. He has better luck, however, and is able to reach the ship’s port before they are able to close the doors. Just as he crosses the threshold, Jen’s body awakens, mutated by the Infector, and kills him, causing the shuttle to crash land into the bay. Vincent rushes down to the shuttle with her crew to arrest the shuttle’s passengers, but when they enter it, they initially find it to be empty, with only blood trails leading out, which they follow. Meanwhile, the man who killed his dig crewmates wakes up from his sedatives and finds his door unlocked. He also spots a bloodtrail on the ground, leading to the ship’s morgue.

When he enters, he spots a grotesque sight: 1:24:42

multiple Infectors mutating the morgue’s corpses into the scythe-limbed creatures. As he tries to run, he is impaled by a larger,“Pregnant” creature. Mathius sends Kyne to make sure the Marker is secure, and when he gets there, he finds the Unitologist crew members protesting to be able to see their “holy relic”. One of them, engineer Samuel Irons, offers to try to calm down the crowd. Irons speaks before the group and is able to successfully dispel the crowd with his calm words before walking off. As Kyne investigates the Marker, he spots, out of the corner of his eye, the creature that used to be Jen in a nearby vent. Vincent and crew reach the morgue, but also find it empty, with multiple sets of bloody footprints in their wake. The group then find the mutating corpse of the murderous man, who springs up and kills one of them. The group are able to take the creature down, but are soon met by another. Vincent informs Mathius of the infection, just as Kyne arrives to do the same. An analyst in the bridge then pulls up footage of more and more crewmates being killed and infected by the creatures in a mess hall on the A deck, which the captain then instructs Vincent to get her team to. Nicole Brennan herself begins to notice that her patients have started to hallucinate and self-harm since the Marker arrived on the Ishimura. Furthermore, the reports of a shuttle crash-landing on the flight deck and an outbreak occurring have her worried. Meanwhile, McNeill, Weller, Lexine, and Eckhardt all come to and don astrosuit RIGs to make their way through the outside of the ship to find an entrance. They find a locked door, and McNeill hacks it open so the group can enter the Ishimura. After boarding the ship, the group look around to find it locked down and mostly barren. As they investigate, however, one of the creatures attacks. After fighting it off, the group tries to make it to the bridge, fighting several more creatures on the way. Eventually, they are discovered by Alissa Vincent, who knocks them out and takes them into custody. In her office, Nicole Brennan gets a call from Vincent, asking her to check on the new captives for infection, and she has them sent to her deck for quarantine. Later, Alissa Vincent’s team come across a giant mass of the congregating creatures, and they all open fire, finding their traditional weapons useless against the monster. In the ensuing battle, the creatures end up killing a member of the team before they are rescued by Samuel Irons weiling a plasma mining tool who makes quick work of the monsters by slicing them into pieces. Vincent then leads the team, with Irons, back to the bridge. Meanwhile, on the bridge, Mathius orders the ship locked down to contain the infection, while he plots a course for Earth to “get the artifact home”. Kyne tries to plead with Mathius to keep the danger of the Marker away from Earth, but Mathius, blinded by his faith in the church’s mission, has an outburst on Kyne. In the ensuing argument, Kyne tries to sedate Mathius, but the paranoid captain refuses. The crew hold him down as Kyne approaches with the sedative, but when he goes to inject it, Mathius breaks free, causing the doctor to accidentally inject the syringe into the captain’s eye, piercing his brain and killing him. The shocked crew are soon distracted when all of the ship’s escape pods jettison from the ship, each of them completely empty, leaving everyone stranded on the Ishimura. Vincent and company continue to run from the creatures to make their way to the bridge when one of her crew begins to show signs of a mental break. He soon snaps and pulls his gun on Vincent just before the “Pregnant” creature attacks. One of the crew slices it in half, but smaller, larvae-like creatures emerge from its open belly. Another, infantile looking creature with three protruding tendrils then attacks the maddened crew member, but he is able to break free to kill one of his partners. When he attacks Vincent, the last member of the original team, Ramirez, finally kills him. The bridge crew brings the captain’s body to the morgue, and the ship’s power goes out shortly after. Vincent, Ramirez, and Irons arrive at the bridge as the power comes back on, but the ship’s thrusters begin to malfunction. They examine security feeds and see Kyne, running around sabotaging the ship’s guidance systems to try to scuttle it. In the quarantine area, Lexine awakens first, and speaks with Nicole Brennan, who explains that everyone’s tests are fine, except hers. While she’s not infected, her readings are unusual, with a very high blood pressure and brain activity that’s “off the charts”. The rest of the group are awoken and Nicole introduces herself. Suddenly, Eckhardt faints and a lockdown occurs. The group tells Nicole about the infection on the colony, as well as the danger the Ishimura is in now that it’s on board, as Eckhardt looks over Lexine’s vitals. McNeill puts on a RIG suit and enters the ship’s vents to find the lockdown override. As he does, Eckhardt strangely asks Nicole if Lexine is “healthy”. McNeill makes it through the vents, but not without some hallucinations. He soon reaches the console and disengages the lockdown, and he regroups with the others in the nearby morgue. There, they see that one of the bodies is Captain Mathius. They continue on to the ER, finding Nicole’s partner, Perry, still there tending to the wounded. Suddenly, one of the creatures falls from a vent above and slices Perry’s head off, forcing the others to fight them off while they escape to the security station. There, they barricade themselves in, and one of the security officers mentions a distress call in engineering. Nicole stays behind with the officer, and the rest of the group move on to find a tram. Alone with the security officer, who doesn’t allow her to leave, Nicole uses a computer terminal and examines Lexine’s scan results, where she notices distinct, unusual patterns in her brain waves. She doesn’t have much time to analyze this finding, as a monster bursts from the vents above, killing the security officer and forcing her to run. Nicole then reaches a sick bay where she finds some of the remaining medical staff. Vincent and company then head to try to stop Kyne, but Irons begins to hallucinate on their way. Vincent hears a group of scared crew members trapped by the creatures, and in an attempt to save them, Irons creates a diversion to allow Vincent and Ramirez to get the survivors out of the room so they can run to safety. Outside, Irons is killed by the creatures, and subsequently turned into one of them as Vincent and Ramirez watch on. The pair escape through a tram, running to the computer core but finding the door locked. Ramirez hacks the door open, but admits that he’s starting to feel the Marker’s influence. He then pushes Vincent through the door and closes it behind her, sacrificing himself for her safety. Inside the computer core, Vincent confronts Kyne. The man renounces his faith in Unitology, trying to reason with Vincent that they must destroy the infection so it doesn’t take over all of mankind. She knocks him down and tries to bring the guidance system back online, but Kyne runs off with her weapon before he can give her the access codes. McNeill and the group reach the tram station, but find the tram itself missing. They decide to climb down below the platform to walk to engineering instead. On their way, however, they fall through a hole in the ground and land in the sewers below. After navigating through the sewers, the group reach a water treatment facility, where Lexine is attacked by the small, swarming larvae-like creatures and falls into a water tank. While the others dive in to rescue her, they lose her and, assuming she drowned, they are forced to continue on. Eventually, the trio come across agricultural engineer Dr Karen Howell on a platform above them, but when they go to meet her, a massive creature emerges from the water, prompting a grueling battle while she runs to safety. Afterwards, the trio make their way above to hydroponics to try to find Dr. Howell. Meanwhile, Howell is safe, and decides to go to the shuttle bay to look for survivors. On her way, she begins to hallucinate, and uses a Disc Ripper saw to fight off the creatures she sees. She soon finds Lexine, unharmed but feeling sick. Howell takes her to a nearby medical station and gives her an antibiotic that helps her get back on her feet and the pair head out to look for the others. After fighting a giant “Brute” of a creature, Lexine starts to run to the water tunnels, but Howell convinces her to come to the tram station instead. On their way, the pair happen to regroup with Weller, Eckhardt, and McNeill. Howell stays behind with Eckhardt to work on the atmosphere controls to trap the creatures, and she speaks with the man, and accuses him of being an undercover Unitologist who swapped out most of the ship’s crew with his fellow clergymen once the Marker was found. During their argument, a tendril rips through the wall and attacks, and Eckhardt runs off, locking the door behind him, sealing the doctor’s fate with it. Eckhardt reaches the tram station to regroup, and he lies about Howell’s fate to the others, claiming that she locked herself inside to protect them. As creatures begin to advance, the group enter the tram to the shuttle bay. On the way, Weller recommends splitting up, with McNeill taking Lexine, and him taking Eckhardt. In the sick bay, Nicole’s crew runs out of supplies. She sits down at the terminal and returns to analyzing Lexine’s brain waves. She’s soon overcome by a headache and hallucinations, which distract her, and when she turns around, she finds the dead in the sick bay mutating and attacking. Nicole is able to hold them off, and her colleague, Evans, notes that there must be some kind of “recombinator virus” spreading to the dead bodys. Nicole returns to her terminal and realizes that the patterns in Lexine’s brain waves

were symbols: 1:35:48

the same symbols on the Marker. Nicole then devises a way to decode the Marker and design an antivirus. Nicole figures the only way she could inject the antivirus was through a medkit, but Evans reminds her that they have run out. Dejected, Nicole sits down at a terminal, turns on the vid recorder, and begins to film a message to send to her boyfriend, Isaac Clarke. Weller and Eckhardt reach a shuttle bay and find an operational shuttle. Inside the control room, they find an engineer, but he refuses to open the door. A creature falls through the ceiling and creates a blast, killing the engineer and blowing the windows open, allowing Weller and Eckhardt to enter. However, Weller learns that he’ll have to climb down and manually open the launch hatch so it can embark. Weller gets a call from McNeill and tells him they found a shuttle, before climbing below the platform and successfully opening the hatch. When he returns to Eckhardt, he catches him recording a vid-log stating that Lexine should“undergo further examination on Earth”, ending it with “Altman be praised”. Waller confronts him over this obvious message to the Church of Unitology before playing back the message, which reveals that Eckhardt is a high ranking member of the Church, sent on a recon mission to determine if the Marker is genuine. He further reveals in the message that Lexine appears immune to the Marker’s effects. When Weller turns back, Eckhardt pulls a gun and shoots Weller, stating that he must save Lexine so she can save “all of us”, and he walks away. As Weller lies injured, he watches Eckhardt get ambushed and killed by one of the creatures. McNeill and Lexine make their way to the shuttle bay to regroup with Weller and Eckhardt, but while looking for it, McNeill notices an outgoing transmission and intercepts it. In the transmission he sees Nicole telling Isaac that she loves him, before injecting herself with an empty syringe to induce an air embolism and kill herself before the creatures can reach her. McNeill comforts Lexine and the pair continue on, and find the control room with the dead Eckhardt and injured Weller. Weller fills them in on Eckhardt’s betrayal, but doesn’t reveal the man’s interest in Lexine. McNeill goes to take care of the automated defense systems so the shuttle can leave without getting shot down. After fighting through hordes of creatures, as well as his worsening hallucinations, McNeill is able to enter the engine room and shut down most of the defenses, but he learns that he has to find a malfunctioning cannon and disable it manually. He then dons an astrosuit, exits to the exterior of the ship, finds the cannon, and disables it. On his way back, however, he encounters a giant creature on the hull of the ship, and after the ensuing battle, his arm is pinned, forcing him to amputate it. Lexine finds some painkillers and gets Weller back on his feet, and he begins to fight off the horde of creatures that advance while Lexine preps the shuttle for escape. McNeill arrives just as the shuttle prepares to launch, and the three of them successfully board the craft and leave the Ishimura. Meanwhile, an injured Alissa Vincent tries to call the bridge, but gets no response. She returns to the Marker room and stands before it, witnessing a horde of creatures advancing towards her. As she takes cover next to the structure, the dead space surrounding it prevents the creatures from advancing, giving her safe haven. Vincent passess out from exhaustion and wakes up to find a hallucination of Ramirez speaking to her, telling her to “finish the job; save the ship”. She then walks to a computer terminal, and in her last moments records a video distress call to the CEC describing the events that transpired and instructing the viewer to destroy the Marker, and the Ishimura. She then triggers the ship’s vents before racing to a shuttle. Unable to enter it in time, the vents open and she is sucked into the vacuum of space. As she dies, she watches the Ishimura fade in the distance. Sometime later, the CEC hears the distress call and sends the USG Kellion to respond. In the escape shuttle, Lexine hears the Kellion respond to the distress call and she tries to warn them to turn back, but her efforts are in vain, as the ship’s crew are left not knowing the horrors that await them on the Ishimura. Sometime later, McNeill dies from his wounds and mutates into one of the creatures, attacking Lexine and forcing the woman to kill him, leaving her and Weller the only survivors. Aboard the Kellion, Isaac Clarke watches part of the message Nicole recorded for him, with the transmission cutting off before the final moments. Unaware of his girlfriend’s fate, Isaac volunteered to join the crew of the Kellion to respond to the Ishimura’s call in hopes to see her again. When the Kellion’s auto-dock protocols fail, the ship crashes into the landing bay of the Ishimura. Isaac, along with technologist Kendra Daniels and security officer Zach Hammond, exit the Kellion and begin to look for the Ishimura’s crew. As they investigate, the trio notice that the ship appears to be abandoned. Isaac heads into a sealed room to use a terminal for more information, and when he does, a quarantine lockdown occurs and the creatures break through the ceiling, killing two of the Kellion’s security detail and forcing Isaac to run. Isaac soon finds a plasma cutter and a message written in blood to “cut off their limbs” before continuing on and finding Daniels and Hammond, who survived the attack, on the opposite side of a tram station. Hammond has Isaac repair the tram so they can get to the bridge, promising to help him find Nicole if he does so. After repairing the tram system, Isaac is sent to return to the Kellion to prepare it for launch while Hammond and Daniels investigate the bridge. However, when Isaac returns, he finds the shuttle damaged by the creatures, and it explodes shortly after, with the engineer making a close escape. With the Kellion destroyed, Daniels determines they need the captain’s authorization to access the Ishimura’s primary systems. They determine Captain Mathius is in the morgue, and Isaac makes his way to find the man’s corpse. On the way, Isaac finds a few surviving, but very mentally unstable Ishimura crewmates, who either die or commit suicide. Through various audio and text logs left by the crew, Isaac learns about the Red Marker, the colony, and the creatures he’s been encountering, including the name Dr. Kyne

came up with for them: 1:42:58

necromorphs. After acquiring thermite explosives to blast his way into the med bay, Isaac finds the morgue where Captain Mathius’s body is being held. However, an Infector necromorph soon arrives and mutates the captain, springing his dead body to life. After Isaac takes care of the creature, he is able to retrieve the captain’s access codes and transmit them to Hammond and Daniels. Isaac heads to engineering to try to fix the Ishimura’s engines, and while doing so, he gets a call from Kendra about getting separated from Hammond. After repairing the engine, Isaac must then fix the asteroid defense system. When he heads off to do so, Kendra confronts Hammond about his knowledge of the Marker, accusing him of lying about it to cover for CEC. Hammond denies this, and instead asks Isaac to meet him at the captain's nest. In the captain’s nest, Isaac finds Hammond, who reiterates his ignorance of the Marker or the infection overrunning the ship. Isaac helps Hammond repair the asteroid defense system before having to repair the air circulation system as well. On the way, Hammond jettisons an escape pod he trapped a lone necromorph in previously. On his way, Isaac finds the surviving Dr. Challus Mercer, who has gone mad with the Marker’s influence and has begun worshiping the necromorphs. He then comes across a “regenerator” necromorph that relentlessly hunts him down, regrowing any body part he shoots off. After escaping this “hunter”, Isaac reaches hydroponics and fights a massive necromorph called “the Leviathan” to return the oxygen levels to normal. Daniels then finds an SOS beacon on the Mining Deck that Isaac can use to call for help, and he heads there to do so. On the way to the beacon, Isaac sees Nicole, and “she” helps him get to the beacon. In the mining bay, Isaac attaches the beacon to an asteroid before launching it. The beacon attracts a military ship, the USM Valor, and Isaac fixes the communications system so they can speak with it. When he finally gets in contact with the Valor, however, he finds that they picked up the Ishimura’s escape pod… the one containing the trapped necromorph. The Valor becomes overrun with necromorphs and crashes into the hull of the Ishimura. Hammond decides to salvage an escape shuttle from the Valor, and Isaac heads to the cargo bay to meet him. On the way, Isaac begins to hear Nicole tell him to “make us whole again”. Afterwards, Isaac gets a call from the still alive Dr Terrance Kyne, who had been monitoring all of their communications, and pleads with him to use the shuttle to return the Marker to Aegis VII to prevent it from destroying humanity. Isaac retrieves the Valor’s power core to repair the shuttle, but is forced to watch as Hammond is murdered by one of the large, Brute necromorphs. While retrieving more parts to get the shuttle operational, Isaac meets Kyne face to face, who shows him a video of a giant, tendrilled necromorph creature in the core of the planet controlling all of the others called “the Hive Mind” before asking him again to return the Marker. Isaac goes to meet Kyne on the flight deck to load the Marker, and on the way, he sees Mercer get infected and transformed into a necromorph, which he disposes of. Isaac reaches the flight deck to see Kyne land the shuttle, and he retrieves the Marker from the cargo bay and loads it on board. As he prepares to board the shuttle, Isaac is shocked to see Kyne shot in the chest and killed by Daniels, who then flies the shuttle away alone. In a call to Isaac, she reveals that she was an undercover operative of a government agency the whole time. She explains that the Marker they recovered was a reverse-engineered copy of the original on Earth. After she flies off, Isaac gets a call from Nicole to meet her in the flight control room. In the control room, Nicole tells Isaac that he can pilot Daniels’ shuttle remotely. He does so and brings it back into the flight bay. Daniels escapes in one of the shuttle’s escape pods, but Isaac is able to board the shuttle with “Nicole” to return the Marker to Aegis VII. After flying down to the planet, Isaac unloads the Marker and returns it to the excavation site where it was dug up. After it’s placed back in its original location, Nicole states “we are whole” before disappearing. This action then disturbs the gravity tethers, causing the piece of the planet extracted by the Ishimura’s planetcrack to begin speeding back down to the planet. As he goes to leave, Kendra Daniels appears again and takes the Marker back towards the shuttle, and she finally shows him the end of Nicole’s video, revealing that she had killed herself, and Daniels knew all along, hiding it from Isaac to manipulate him. Furthermore, she reveals that Isaac’s visions of Nicole as of late have just been effects of the Marker-induced dementia that Kyne and Mathius both faced. Isaac returns to the shuttle just as Daniels is boarding it, but one of the Hive Mind’s tendrils emerges and kills her before she gets the chance to. Isaac is then forced to fight the giant creature, eventually emerging victorious. After the fight, Isaac rushes to the shuttle, leaving the marker behind on Aegis VII just before the piece of the planet can crash back down to the surface. Isaac is able to board the shuttle just in time and watch the destruction as he flies off. Later, in the cockpit, Isaac finally takes off his helmet. Nicole’s final video plays, and he shuts it off. However, as he turns, he sees another vision of her lunging at him, as well as the symbols from the Marker, showing him that while he has left the Marker behind, its effects will remain with him. A few weeks after Aegis VII’s destabilization, the CEC sends the USG O’Bannon to investigate. After it is dispatched from the “Sprawl”, a space station built on the remaining shard of one of Saturn’s moon Titan, the crew have a briefing to go over the mission. Attending the meeting are head of security Nickolas Kuttner (who’s daughter just passed away in an accident a few weeks prior), chief science officer Nolan Stross, medical doctor Isabel Cho, a surveyor named Rin, engineers Omar Nayim, Noah Pawling, and Alejandro Borges, as well as the ship’s Commander Sergenko. Finally, the ship’s captain, Campbell, enters the room and explains what happened to Aegis VII and their mission to hold it together by planting gravity stabilization units. While Borges disagrees with the plan, the captain simply states it’s too late to back out, and the crew is dismissed. After the meeting, the captain speaks with Stross, Cho, Kuttner, and Rin about the rumors circulating around what happened on Aegis VII, including Isaac Clarke finding something alien there. Captain Campbell confirms the rumors and reveals the Marker, explaining that the current party’s true mission includes secretly retrieving fragments of it left in the wake of the destruction. The crew shoot down the gravity stabilizers and land on the planet to begin their work: the engineers work to get the stabilizers working, while the other four look for the Marker fragments. Kuttner finds one, and immediately upon picking it up, he starts to feel its effects, including seeing his dead daughter Vivian. Seeing his crewmates as monsters trying to capture his daughter, Kuttner attacks them, killing Noah and damaging the gravity stabilizer. Afterwards, Alejandro knocks him out, and the crew tie him up on their shuttle, with Sergenko retrieving the piece of the Marker. As the stabilizer fails, the planet begins to break apart, and the crew run back to the shuttle for escape. On the way, Rin falls into a chasm and dies in the lava below. Sergenko then gets trapped himself, throwing the Marker shard to Alejandro before the lava envelops and kills him as well. Shortly after, a massive piece of rock falls on Omar, crushing him and killing him instantly. The remaining crew get to the shuttle and successfully make it off the planet. While the O’Bannon tries to leave without the shuttles, Alejandro is able to pilot the shuttle back to the main ship and make a crash landing inside. With the shard on board, Captain Campbell tries to make a ShockPoint travel jump, but Aegis VII explodes just before they can, damaging the ShockPoint Drive. Campbell sends Alejandro to fix the drive, but he refuses until the captain explains what’s so important about the shard. The captain then takes the team aside for a debriefing and expresses the monetary value, causing Alejandro to strike the man out of anger. Cho and Stross are able to hold him back, and he reluctantly goes to fix the ShockPoint Drive. On the O'Bannon, Stross returns to check on his wife and son. Stross and his wife, Alexis, are having issues with their relationship due to Stross’ fixation with his work as well as Alexis’ jealousy of the time he spends with Cho. The proximity with the shard begins to affect both the captain and Stross, with them growing paranoid, hearing voices, and seeing symbols. As Stross studies it more and more, he sees the equations from the Marker’s surface in his mind, translating it to the equations encoded within. He shares his excitement with Cho, and the pair sleep together, proving Alexis’ suspicions. The next day, Stross shares his theory with Captain Campbell: that the Marker generates a wave that can mutate and reanimate dead tissue. He also predicts that there are humans who are immune to the Marker’s influence, but he is not one of them, as his nightmares are getting worse and worse. Needing a subject to test on, Stross takes a body from the morgue and examines how the Marker transforms its flesh. The corpse mutates into a necromorph and breaks out, killing and transforming several crew members. Stross, suffering from the panic as well as the hallucinations from the Marker, returns to his family, but sees them as necromorphs, killing them in his madness. Meanwhile, Cho checks on Kuttner and discovers the necromorph outbreak. She releases Kuttner from his cell, who protects her from one of the monsters before they look for Stross. When Cho finds him, however, she sees him standing above his dead family. The captain arrives, and the surviving staff become overwhelmed by the necromorphs. Forced to flee, Campbell, Stross, Cho, and Kuttner reach Alejandro in his lab. There, Stross theorizes that destroying the shard could stop the necromorphs. Alejandro then determines that by throwing the shard into the ship’s reactor core, they can not only destroy the piece of the artifact, but restart the ShockPoint Drive and escape to safety. The group fight their way through the necromorphs on the way to the engine room, but soon, debris crashes into the ship, breaching the hull. Captain Cambell, knowing he must seal the airlock manually, sacrifices himself to make sure the shard can be destroyed, closing the doors and blowing up a group of necromorphs with himself.. The remaining four reach the ShockPoint Drive and prepare to throw the shard into the core. They’re quickly stopped by necromorphs, and a battle ensues. When Stross retrieves the shard, he finds himself unable to throw it into the core. Cho attacks him and takes it from him, throwing it down into the core herself. Meanwhile, the Earth Government, or EarthGov, loses contact with the O’Bannon and sends the USM Abraxis to check on the ship. When a group of marines enter, they find mass casualties and symbols written on the wall in blood. They detect four living crew members in engineering and the squad make their way as the O’Bannon’s engines begin to fire. Cho then states that “finally, it’s finished”. As the marines burst into the engine room, Kuttner pulls a plasma cutter and shoots one of the Marines, stating that they won’t be “taking [his] baby away from [him] again”. The Marines tase the survivors and knock them out before taking them onboard the Abraxis for interrogation. As the Abraxis flies off, its defenses destroy the O’Bannon. On board the ship, the lead interrogator sent by EarthGov speaks with the “Overseer”, who authorizes “enhanced interrogation techniques” in order to get to the bottom of what happened within the seven hours it’ll take for the Abraxis to reach the Sprawl. In their holding cell, Kuttner keeps talking to his daughter, Vivian, who none of the others can see. The marines enter and apprehend Kuttner, much to his anger, and he is taken first for interrogation, seeing his blood-covered daughter as he’s dragged off. After torturing Kuttner using a forced electrical hallucination of his fear of burning alive, the interrogator asks him to tell him what happened with the O’Bannon’s mission to Aegis VII. After Kuttner gives his account, he is released to be placed in cryosleep, but he breaks free and makes quick work of the guards before holding one of their guns on the interrogator. Still mad from the Marker’s influence, he runs out into the ship to look for his daughter, but he’s shot by the Marines. Although injured, he is able to follow his“daughter” to an airlock, and when he opens it to be with her, he is pulled into space with the Marines and dies. Afterwards, the interrogator fetches Alejandro and uses his fear of spiders to have him continue the story where Kuttner left off. After giving his side, the interrogator allows him to leave, telling him he’ll return to his family as soon as the Abraxis docks. However, after he leaves the interrogation room, one of the Marines immediately executes him. The interrogator then questions Stross, exploiting his claustrophobia. He then gives his side of the story, believing his family to still be alive and safe. Thinking Stross may be of use communicating with the Marker, they lock him in a cryogenic

storage pod and bring in their next interviewee: 1:57:01

Cho. After torturing Cho physically, the doctor gives the details of her affair with Stross and the events that led to them destroying the fragment of the Marker. Cho realizes that EarthGov knew of what would happen if they were exposed to the Marker, and simply used them to observe its effects on humans. The interrogator reveals that they’ve docked at the Sprawl, and the Overseer arrives to speak with Cho, taking her off the ship. After he leaves, his men kill the interrogator and his assistant. The Overseer speaks to Cho about their research into the Marker, and how they can use it to advance humanity. Cho disagrees with this research, and rejects an offer to join in on the project. The Overseer then has her strapped to a bed, where a drill descends on her, lobotomizing her. Later, the Sprawl Network News report that Cho had been arrested in connection to a series of terroristic attacks on the Ishimura, Aegis VII, and the O’Bannon. With Cho being used as a perfect scapegoat for the cover story, the Overseer plans to study Stross, as well as another individual who came in contact with the Marker, an engineer

they found half-crazed in an escape shuttle: 1:58:13

Isaac Clarke. A year or so later, we find a group of illegal miners, known as magpies, aboard the ”Black Beak”, captained by Benedykt Malyech. The ship’s second-in-command, Julia Copland finds a motherlode of materials, and the Black Beak flies in to recover. Meanwhile, EarthGov Defense Secretary David Chang arrives aboard the USM Victory, in the middle of the Aegis VII blockade. Chang is briefed on another mission to find evidence of the Marker as well as the remains of the Ishimura, which has currently been fruitless. While the magpies are conducting their recovery operation, the USG Ishimura somehow ShockPoint jumps to their position, destroying the ship holding all of their cargo and killing it’s crew. The magpies, including another ship called the Hunter Moon, then engage their gravity tethers, trapping the ship so they can board it and investigate. Magpies Gatura Okeke, Stefan Schneider and Jessica Li board the ship, while Malyech stays outside to investigate some kind of shards lodged into the hull. Inside, the magpies find the remains of the Ishimura’s crew, while outside, Malyech learns through contact with them that the shards are pieces of the Marker. The magpies inside the ship decide to scrap its systems for raw materials, and Malyech arrives to show them the pieces of the Marker. Li suggests selling the shards to the Church of Unitology for profit, angering Malyech, who strikes her, prompting a fight in which she gets the upper hand. After he’s knocked out, they decide to throw him into the Ishimura’s brig to give him some time to calm down, much to Copland’s dismay. The magpies then find the ship’s logs and learn that there was once an entire Marker onboard, but before they can wonder what happened to it, they spot Copland in a ship, heading towards the EarthGov blockade with some of the shards to sell them out. Onboard the USM Victory, Copland produces a shard and speaks with Chang. She offers a deal for the location of the Ishimura, and Chang brings in some “negotiators”, two men from an elite secret EarthGov group called “Oracles”. The Oracles are able to get the information out of Copland before she asks for a reward,

which they proceed to give her: 2:00:42

in the form of death. Malyech awakens in the brig to see a vision of the captain of the cargo ship killed in the collision with the Ishimura, who distracts him long enough for the corruption to reanimate and encapsulate his body, turning him into a necromorph in the process. Around the same time, one of the crew, Venschiff, attacks the others, showing his own signs of the Marker’s influence, and Schneider is forced to stab him with one of the shards. The magpies then recover the rest of the Ishimura’s logs, learning about the Aegis VII colony that went crazy and the dangers of the Marker. Li goes to the brig to check on Malyech but finds him missing. She soon finds him, however, or at least the necromorph that once was him, who attacks and quickly kills her. More necromorphs begin to awaken on the ship, killing the various magpie crew, leaving Schneider the sole survivor. The Oracles arrive with EarthGov on the Ishimura and speak with Schneider over the radio, and he tricks them into coming to the cargo bay, which is swarming with necromorphs. The Marines sent into the cargo bay are quickly killed, and the Oracles realize Schneider is in the bridge, so they activate the quarantine protocols to trap him inside. When the Oracles reach the bridge, they find the rest of the Marker shards, but Schneider is nowhere to be found. When they notice a spacesuit missing, they don their own and head out into space to look for him. While he is momentarily able to slip past them thanks to the distraction from a Hive Mind, when he heads back inside the ship, he finds them waiting for him. Schneider is able to outwit them and escape, closing a door behind them on one of the Oracles’ arms, dismembering it, and retrieving his weapon in the process. The necromorphs then swarm on the Oracles while Schneider makes a break to the Oracle’s stealth ship which he is successfully able to launch and escape in. In space, he speaks with the Defense Secretary Chang aboard the Victory, and tells him where the Ishimura is, wishing him luck with it before ShockPoint Jumping out of the system, finally reaching safety and leaving the horrific events behind him. A few years later, the Church of Unitology send an agent, codenamed Vandal, to the Government Sector on the Sprawl to sabotage some power boxes to cut off the station’s communications. After doing so with the help from their support, Tyler Radikov, Vandal goes to leave the station. On the way, however, they begin to see Necromorphs, and they’re forced to make a run for a nearby tram. A Unitologist named Daina Le Guin calls Vandal on the way, expecting them to die from the outbreak they’ve unknowingly created, thanking them for their sacrifice for the cause. Feeling used and betrayed by the church, Vandal works with Director Hans Tiedemann to undo the damage they’ve done by repairing the quarantine systems they sabotaged before the necromorphs can reach the population of the Sprawl. After repairing the seals, experiencing some hallucinations on the way, Vandal is led to the Government Sector Underbelly to the Titan Mines. There, Vandal gets a call from Tyler, who claims to have not known about the church’s intentions on their previous mission, vowing to help Vandal figure out how to stop the infection from spreading. Fighting through more hallucinations, Vandal works with Tyler to lock down various doors to the Titan Station. Vandal soon reaches the Crossover Seal Maintenance tunnel, and Tyler convinces Vandal to take out the seal door security to trigger a lockdown and protect the surface of the Sprawl from the necromorph outbreak. When Vandal does so, however, they quickly find that the opposite was the case. By sabotaging the doors, Vandal left them open for the necromorphs to swarm to the surface, and Tyler, an agent of the Unitologists, had used Vandal once again. Now with only Director Tiedemann to trust, Vandal works to fix the station’s core to protect it from total destruction. Facing more hallucinations, including one of a giant white Marker in a desert, Vandal reaches the core, where they find a giant Necromorph they are forced to battle. After gaining the upper hand, Vandal’s helmet is knocked off, and she’s revealed to be a woman named Karrie Norton. While Karrie is able to escape the necromorph’s attempt to drag her into the core, she is left horribly wounded. She calls Tiedemann to tell him that she stabilized the core, but hears no response. Sometime later, Karrie’s helmet is seen alone, with only a trail of blood left in her wake, while the Unitologists celebrate their successful sabotage operation. Around the same time, we find Sprawl technician Franco Delille, sent by his superior, Weaver, to fix a malfunctioning door. He’s accompanied by a security and repair officer for the “CPD” named Sarah Andarsyn, whom he is currently having a secret relationship with. When the pair reach the door, they meet Supervisor Berkhoff, who believes that the door isn’t simply malfunctioning, but was deliberately sabotaged by someone. After fixing the door, Berkhofff asks Franco if he can check on the computer systems in logistics, as they’ve also been having issues lately. Franco and Sarah examine a terminal and find it to likewise be deliberately infected with some kind of virus. The pair are then sent on one more repair job to fix solar panels on the ship’s exterior, and while Franco fears spacewalks, he nonetheless goes out and successfully fixes the panels. As they return to re-enter the station, however, the pair hear a loud crash as a meteor strikes the air seal, forcing Franco to quickly lock it down. Once safe, however, they receive a call from Weaver with bad news: some kind of outbreak occurred while they were outside the station, and the citizens of the Sprawl are starting to panic. Franco then receives a text message from an unknown sender simply stating “READY TO RISE”. Weaver sends them to the tram station to wait for further instructions, and once there, Sarah sees a crowd of people being chased and attacked by a necromorph. Sarah and Franco are knocked over by the stampeding crowd, and in a panic, Sarah grabs a nearby plasma cutter and shoots off the monster’s limbs, incapacitating it. As more necromorphs advance, Sarah, Franco, and the rest of the survivors board a tram and ride off. On the tram, Franco gets a call from Weaver about the monsters popping up all over the Sprawl, while Sarah gets a call from her former partner about an active hostage situation. At this point, the pair can choose which situation to handle, and after doing so, another choice presents itself. Regardless of what decisions Franco makes, the pair work their way through taking care of a few dire situations caused by the outbreak, but their efforts are ultimately futile, as the necromorphs continue to overrun the Sprawl. Meanwhile, Gabe Weller, now a security officer on the Sprawl, is sent to the Titan Mines to deal with the necromorph outbreak. After his entire squad is wiped out, Gabe calls Lexine (whom he has since married), warning her about the necromorph outbreak and instructs her to leave the hospital where she is currently in the fertility ward, and to get to their private shuttle to escape. Weller fights through the various necromorphs to escape the mines, getting a call from Director Tiedemann instructing the remaining security teams to have the “key subjects terminated” and the “facility scrubbed”. Meanwhile, no matter what actions Franco takes, Sarah ends up killed in the process. Afterwards, Franco gets another message stating“HE AWAITS”. Franco then goes to the hospital on the Sprawl, enters the Psychiatric Ward and finds the cryogenic storage pods. It is then revealed that Franco had been working undercover as an agent for the Unitologists, assigned on a mission to free a particular patient. He then hacks one of the pods, and he looks inside the viewing window, telling its inhabitant, Isaac Clarke, “you’re a free man.” After awakening Isaac, Franco calls Daina Le Guin to inform her of his success. As he goes to remove Isaac’s straight-jacket, however, Franco is instantly killed and transformed by a necromorph. Still hindered by the straight-jacket, Isaac is forced to run to safety, where he finds logs and recordings of EarthGov’s “Project Telomere”, led by Hans Tiedemann and conducted by scientist Foster Edgars, in which they extracted information about the Marker from those who had come in contact with it; namely Isaac Clarke and Nolan Stross, in order to build another one on the Sprawl. Isaac, not remembering any of the events since the Ishimura incident three years prior, soon meets Foster face-to-face, and the now deranged scientist cuts him out of his straightjacket before killing himself. Isaac continues on and gets a call from Daina, who offers to help treat his dementia if he meets her at her location. On his way, Isaac comes across Stross who asks for his help, but the pair are very quickly separated. Isaac continues towards Daina’s position, seeing hallucinations of his dead girlfriend, Nicole Brennan, once again, who repeatedly tells him to “Make Us Whole”. On the way, Daina informs him of Project Telomere and Stross’s madness. Elsewhere, Gabe exits the mines to reach a gunship he can use to rescue Lexine at the hospital, but when he arrives, it fires upon him, forcing him to launch explosives at it to stop its barrage. His superior officer, Victor Bartlett, reveals that he tried to kill Gabe to prevent him

from stopping their mission: 2:10:36

Lexine is one of the “key subjects” that must be terminated. Gabe then enters a gunship of his own to make his way to the hospital. Meanwhile, Daina leads Isaac to the Church of Unitology, and there, he finds her but is quickly subdued by two guards, and Daina reveals her allegiance with the church. Daina then states that they freed Isaac and brought him to the church to have him build more Markers for them using the knowledge locked in his mind. As her guards take him away, however, an EarthGov gunship arrives and fires upon the Church, killing Daina and her guards while Isaac narrowly escapes. After facing a giant necromorph called the“Tormentor”, Isaac is flung out into space, but is able to destroy both the gunship and the Tormentor, and he crashes back into the Sprawl. There, he gets another call from Stross, and left with no other choice, decides to trust the madman and help him destroy the Marker, which is currently in the Government Sector. Gabe Weller reaches the hospital, racing Victor to get to Lexine. On the way, Lexine calls Gabe and mentions two strange men dressed in white looking for her, and Gabe instructs her to hide while she waits for him to get there. Victor intercepts the call and learns of Lexine’s location before telling Gabe that she was part of the “Oracle Program”, which involved her resistance to the Marker on the Ishimura, as well as Gabe impregnating her. When Gabe gets to Lexine’s position, he sees that Victor has beaten him there. He watches through a window as Victor grabs Lexine but is then subdued by the two men in white (the Oracles), wielding some kind of stasis ability, before they take Lexine with them. Gabe chases the Oracles to their ship, where Lexine is able to board, but the Oracles are mauled by Infectors and transformed into necromorphs. After Gabe takes care of them, he and Lexine overhear that the airlock is currently on lockdown, and Gabe hacks the panel. Just as he does, however, Victor ambushes him with a live grenade, which explodes, taking out Victor as well as Gabe’s leg. Incapacitated, Gabe uses his final moments to protect the ship and shoot open the airlock, allowing Lexine, as well as their unborn child, to escape the Sprawl in the ship. In his final breath, he tells Lexine goodbye, and that he loves her, before dying from his wounds. EarthGov later find’s Gabe’s remains and collects them for study, while Lexine’s whereabouts remain unknown. As Isaac makes his way to the Government Sector, he meets another survivor, a CEC Officer named Ellie Langford, who initially decides to go off on her own, but once she finds Stross, she agrees to work with them to destroy the Marker. Despite Tiedemann’s efforts to stop them, including cutting power to the entire public sector, Isaac is able to regroup with Stross and Ellie at a transport hub. There, they are able to board a tram together, and on the way, Isaac spots the Ishimura, and explains to Ellie that the events that transpired there were no terrorist attack like the Government states. Tiedemann then uses the station’s Solar Array beam to slice the tram’s track, halting their progress. Isaac decides to enter the Ishimura to use its Gravity Tethers to pull the tracks back together so they can move it forward. Isaac then leaves Ellie behind to watch after Stross while he enters the Ishimura, re-living the horrors of the events years prior. After his trip down memory lane, Isaac enters the captain’s nest and activates the gravity tethers. Afterwards, Isaac escapes the Ishimura in one of the last remaining escape pods, and while inside, he gets a call from Ellie, who is currently fighting off the crazed Stross, who is attacking her with a screwdriver. Isaac crash lands and gets another call, seeing Stross stab Ellie in the eye with the screwdriver, stating that it’s one of “the steps”. He soon comes across Stross behind a locked gate, holding Ellie’s eye. The woman then stands up and attacks him, and the pair fight as Isaac tries to find his way to them. Stross runs off to the Mines, where he finds Isaac and attacks him with the screwdriver, forcing Clarke to rip it from his hands before planting it in his skull, killing him. Isaac works his way to regroup with Ellie, as his visions of Nicole get more and more hostile until he realizes why he can’t give her up: because then he’ll have nothing left. When Isaac finds Ellie, the pair devise a plan to use a giant drill to reach the Government Sector. There, Ellie enters a gunship, and Isaac closes the door behind her, staying behind as he launches the ship so he can save her the way he couldn’t save Nicole. After the ship launches off, Isaac is left alone on the Sprawl to talk to his vision of Nicole. Tiedemann calls Isaac and threatens him before his men descend and attack. Isaac initially avoids them, before opening the doors holding back the necromorphs, forcing Tiedemann to fall back to the Marker chamber. When Isaac reaches the chamber, he finds the massive Marker, with a giant crowd of necromorphs just outside of its dead space.“Nicole” tells Isaac that “Convergence is at hand” before Tiedemann calls and the Marker starts to emit massive pulses. Nicole then tells him he has to “make [them] whole”. Isaac comes across the machine the maddened Stross was trying to replicate the steps to use, which Isaac enters. The Machine then probes a needle through his ocular cavity to unlock the part of his mind that holds the knowledge from the Marker’s influence. Isaac then fights his way to the Marker, where he is stopped by Tiedemann, who he quickly disposes of. Isaac then meets “Nicole” at the Marker, who tells him that now he must die so the Marker can “re-birth” the body of its creator; the last step to Convergence. Isaac’s consciousness then transforms to a vision inside his mind, where he destroys the Marker’s influence as well as the Nicole vision. Afterwards, Isaac regains his consciousness in the real world to find the Marker collapsing. Exhausted and content at completing his final task, Isaac falls to the ground and waits for the Sprawl’s destruction… That is until he receives a call from Ellie, who soon crashes the gunship through the roof to rescue him. Using his astrosuit, Isaac flies to the gunship, narrowly avoiding the debris to successfully board and escape with Ellie, with whatever new life awaits them ahead. After the Sprawl’s complete destruction, including the Marker, a call is made to the Overseer informing him, to which he simply replies that “the other sites will have to pick up the pieces.” Three years later, at one of those sites with another manufactured Marker, on Planet Uxor, we find Sergeant John Carver on patrol, speaking on a call with his wife, Damara, who is frustrated at his lack of time spent with his family. During the call, Carver spots some kind of laser sight trained on the Marker, and he instructs his wife to get to safety with their son just before a missile strikes the Marker, creating a massive blast. With the safety shroud around the Marker destroyed by the blast, the exposed structure emits a powerful electromagnetic pulse, temporarily knocking out all power in the area, including on a ship passing above, which falls from the sky and crashes directly into the colony’s residential area. As Carver tries to make his way home to check on his family, he is soon attacked by necromorphs, which he is able to fight off to reach a science block in the residential area, which he enters, locking the necromorphs outside behind him. Inside the facility, Carver comes across a man named Jacob Arthur Danik, talking to a group of fellow Unitologists around him about the ship crashing down, which wasn’t part of their plan, before Danik instructs them to “find [him] that data.” Damara calls John, alerting his presence to the group, who chase him and knock him out with concussion rounds. When he awakens, he finds himself tied up, and the group interrogates him to learn who was working on the Marker. Carver refuses to answer, but one of the men looks up information on him to learn that his wife, Dr. Damara Carver, was one of the scientists studying the Marker, and they find his address to go capture her. An angered Carver breaks free of his restraints, and is able to grab one of his captor’s guns. He begins to open fire just as the necromorphs breach the perimeter and break inside the facility. Using the distraction, Carver escapes, but Danik is unphased, knowing they’ll soon find what they’re looking for. Carver returns home to his wife and son, but is horrified to find they have both been transformed into necromorphs, and he is forced to put them out of their misery. Overwhelmed with grief, Carver puts the pistol to his own chin, but is stopped by an incoming call to Damara coming from a hidden radio. He answers the call, and finds Ellie Langford on the other end, who has been working with Damara on uncovering the centuries-long cover-up of human tampering on the Markers. She instructs Carver to grab Damara’s data drive, and the pair plan to meet at the main cargo dock where her boyfriend, Captain Robert Norton can get them off-planet on the USM Eudora. At the cargo dock, the pair are ambushed by Danik’s men, as well as necromorphs, but just as they’re cornered, Norton descends and they are able to escape in the Eudora, with Carver swearing his revenge on Danik as they fly off. Aboard the Eudora, Norton and Ellie play the footage from Damara’s drive, in which the deceased doctor reveals the results of her research: the true history and purpose of the Sovereign Colonies replication the Marker over two centuries ago: to triangulate the location of a “Master Signal” which was then broadcast through all of the Markers. Carver agrees to help finish his wife’s work to honor her memory, and they head to

the location of the triangulation operation: 2:21:13

the Ptolemy Station. On the station, Ellie uses Damara’s research to restart the triangulation protocols, and they locate the origin of the Master Marker Signal. Needing to use a shock station to send a beacon far enough out, the group then travel to the Keyhole Station, destroying the Ptolemy Station as they leave to protect it from falling into the Unitologists’ hands. On the way, Ellie examines more of Damara’s data, finding blocks of data written in the Marker language, and she states that she knows somebody who can translate it: Isaac Clarke. Norton doesn’t like the idea, knowing that the Unitologists are probably tracking him, as well as harboring some jealousy over Ellie having previously briefly dated Isaac following the events on the Sprawl. Ellie goes to comfort Carver, still grieving his family’s death, and the group soon reach the Keyhole Station. When they enter, however, they find evidence of the necromorphs being there, frightening them that the plague is spreading. Their fears are soon confirmed, when they are attacked by necromorphs, forcing them to fight their way past them. Meanwhile, the Eudora’s crew start to take fire from an unknown enemy. One shot misses the ship and strikes the Keyhole Station, compromising the hull and separating Ellie from Carver and Norton. Ellie soon meets station technician Jennifer Santos, and Marker researcher Austin Buckell, and the group work to regroup with Carver and Norton in the control room. Meanwhile, in the unknown craft, Danik chastises his men for hitting the station instead of the ship, knowing that if the Eudora went there, it must be important. Carver and Norton are forced to fight through a large necromorph to reach the control center, where they use the command console to input the coordinates into the ShockRing gate relay. Ellie, unable to reach the command center due to necromorph resistance, instead takes

a flyer straight to their destination: 2:23:10

Tau Volantis, where she’ll take a ShockPoint beacon so they can find each other later. Ellie’s flyer reaches the station’s ShockRing gate, allowing it to travel to Tau Volantis. Ellie and Norton say their goodbyes, and her craft makes the jump, while Norton uses the station’s defenses to fire on Danik. Knowing they must stop Danik from following Ellie at any cost, Carver and Norton then fire on the gate, destroying it and damaging Danik’s ship. The Eudora pick the two up, and they destroy Keyhole Station. Carver then realizes that without Damara, they can’t translate the Marker symbols in her data, and he asks Norton if anyone else can do it.

Reluctantly, he states that there is one other: 2:23:53

Isaac Clarke. Nearly two weeks later, we find Isaac Clarke living in hiding from EarthGov on the New Horizons Lunar Colony. Still grieving from his breakup from Ellie, Isaac sulks in his apartment when suddenly his door opens and he’s knocked out by John Carver. Robert Norton arrives and tells Isaac that they have a job for him involving a Marker, and that recruiting him was Ellie’s idea before they lost contact with her. Suddenly, the colony is attacked by Unitologists, and Isaac agrees to help Norton and Carver in order to help them rescue Ellie. The group are ambushed by radical Unitologists, separating Isaac from them. On his way back to Norton, he learns that the Unitologists are trying to kill him to stop him from preventing Convergence by destroying more Markers. Isaac reaches the extraction point on top of a DredgerCorp building as directed by Norton, but upon exiting an elevator, he is ambushed by Unitologists, and he’s met by Jacob Arthur Danik. Danik then authorizes another strike on a nearby Marker testing facility, exposing the reproduced artifact and awakening the necromorph infestation on the colony. Isaac is able to escape Danik in the ensuing panic and rushes to a nearby tram station where he is able to get one moving. After boarding the tram, Danik’s gunship arrives, but the Eudora shows up in tow and takes it out. Isaac is then able to jump onto the Eudora just before it ShockPoint Jumps out of the system. Isaac passes out, and Carver watches over him until he awakens. The pair then share a less than cordial greeting before Norton calls Isaac to the bridge. There, he’s briefed about Ellie’s jump to Tau Volantis, and the Eudora then makes its own jump to her beacon. After emerging, the crew spot a giant moon, then hear an S.O.S. signal from the nearby CMS Roanoke but when they go to investigate the signal, they enter a minefield and collide with them, damaging the hull. Isaac finds an EVA suit and dons it before getting blasted out into space, where he releases an escape pod containing the crew, allowing them to dock at the Roanoke. Isaac goes on his own to restore power to the ship and find the source of the S.O.S. After fighting through several necromorph, he and Norton finally find Ellie. When she rushes to embrace the captain, Isaac learns of her new relationship with him. Ellie tells Isaac about Marker symbols written all over the Admiral’s quarters, and Isaac heads there to translate them while she and Norton help Austin Buckell and Jennifer Santos get to safety. While Isaac is angered at Ellie moving on to Norton so quickly, he still goes to the Admiral’s quarters on her suggestion and examines the writings. Through them, he learns that the Admiral had discovered an alien machine that could control the Marker, but she became obsessed with creating a key she could use to “turn it off.” Ellie then determines that Tau Volantis must be the Marker homeworld, and the group agree to meet on the bridge. On his way to the bridge, Isaac gets a call from Ellie, who has found a shuttle called the Crozier on a neighboring ship called the CMS Terra Nova. Ellie wants to use the shuttle to reach the planet’s surface, but Norton protests, wanting to take it to escape so they can reassess the situation. As Isaac heads to retrieve the shuttle, Norton calls him privately, and aggressively tells him that Ellie is over him, and he shouldn’t be making decisions based on trying to get her back. Nonetheless, Isaac goes to the Terra Nova and learns from logs that the ship was used by General Mahad to store cryogenically frozen Miners from the planet after they started to show signs of Marker influence. Isaac is forced to unleash and fight through the necromorphs on the ship before he is able to secure the shuttle and return it to the Roanoke. After repairing the shuttle and getting it ready for flight, Ellie and Norton once again argue about how to use it. Norton is outvoted by the others, who hope to do what the Admiral couldn’t and turn off the machine to stop the Markers. The crew board the Crozier and take it down to Tau Volantis’ surface. On the way, however, they hit some floating debris and are forced to crash land. In the ensuing collision, the shuttle is ripped in half, and Isaac is separated from the rest of the crew, including Ellie. When Isaac awakens, his helmet malfunctions, leaving him vulnerable to the frigid elements of the planet. While searching for survivors, he thankfully finds a video message left for him by Ellie, Carver, Norton, Buckell, and Santos, revealing that they’re still alive. Isaac then follows a trail of flares left by the group until he finds Buckell, freezing on the floor of a building, left behind when the rest of his companions found one too few environmental protection suits, and he shortly passeses away from the cold. Isaac is able to head into the necromorph-filled basement to find another suit, finally allowing him to brave the frozen air of the planet. Now able to fully explore the surface, Isaac finds Ellie and the rest of the group, fighting through more necromorphs to reach them. When Ellie is a bit too happy to see Isaac for his taste, Norton’s jealousy boils over once again. Santos interrupts them by sharing a discovery that the humans stationed in the research facility they now occupy conducted an experiment to locate the alien machine that they should be able to replicate to find it themselves. The team heads to the other end of the complex to conduct the experiment, but on the way, they are ambushed by Danik’s men. Isaac is again separated from the group, and they separately fight their way through the Unitologists to regroup at the warehouse to conduct the signal tracking experiment. There, the group find a giant, frozen Necromorph called the “Nexus”, which the humans had used to track signals from the Marker which led them to the machine. Isaac starts the furnace to power the heat exchanges to thaw the Nexus, and Santos tells him that she has also found blueprints to create a sensor to track signals conducted through the necromorphs to find the Machine. Isaac heads out to another warehouse to retrieve the materials for the sensor, and the group discuss more of their findings, with the Admiral mentioning the Codex as well as someone called“Rosetta” in her logs that they hope will lead to learning how to use the machine to stop the Markers. After retrieving the parts for the sensor, Isaac assembles it and enters the belly of the beast, so to speak, lowering inside of a metal cage to enter the Nexus’ body cavity to scan for the signal. After helping Santos successfully triangulate it, Isaac returns to the surface. When he reaches the top, however, Norton locks Isaac in the metal cage, deciding to “take control of the mission” to get Ellie off the planet to protect her, jamming Isaac’s coms on the way. While Isaac is able to break out of the cage, he exits the warehouse to find Danik waiting for him, and he is ambushed by his men, who have already incapacitated Carver and the rest of the group. Danik reveals that Norton sold them out, revealing their position in a deal to give up Isaac for the rest of their safety. Danik “alters” the deal, however, instead threatening to just kill them all. As Danik pulls his gun on Norton, Isaac tackles him, and Carver uses the distraction to shoot the Unitologist guard. While Danik is able to escape, the Nexus awakens and emerges from the facility, killing the Unitologist backup. Isaac and Carver are able to slay the giant beast, but Norton then attacks Isaac, blaming him for putting Ellie in danger. Norton pulls a gun on Isaac, forcing him to pull his own and fire, killing the former Captain. He and Carver return to Ellie, who notices Norton’s absence. Isaac admits that he killed the man, and Carver explains Norton’s betrayal and attempts to kill them. The group work their way up a nearby mountain to look for a research lab where they might find “Rosetta”. On the way, Isaac and Ellie discuss Norton, with Isaac admitting that he may have pushed the man over the edge by forcing him to continue the mission. Further up the mountain, Santos is attacked by a giant Necromorph known as the “Snow Beast”, and Carver is forced to let her die to stop it from bringing down the entire cliffside. Nonetheless, Isaac is also pulled down the cliff, where he is forced to fight, and defeat, the Snow Beast. After making his way back up the mountain, he finds Ellie and Carver at the research lab, where he apologizes to his former girlfriend, and the pair reconcile. Inside the lab, the trio find “Rosetta”, an apparent alien lifeform that was dissected into multiple pieces. In order to retrieve the information Rosetta holds, Isaac is forced to retrieve and reassemble the pieces of its body. Once complete, Isaac has a vision of Rosetta’s civilization, which uncovered a Marker on

Tau Volantis, before the Converge Event occurred: 2:33:25

after a massive necromorph outbreak, the collection of necromorph biomass was then pulled into orbit with the Marker, combining together and creating a Moon; the same moon that now orbits the planet. Isaac puts this all together and learns that the aliens built the machine to freeze the planet so the Moon couldn’t obtain the last bit of biomass it needed to finish Convergence. Isaac then realizes that if the machine is turned off, it won’t stop Convergence, but rather it will thaw the planet and resume it, causing it to spread everywhere the Markers have influence. Isaac looks to his side and sees the Codex, but when he turns to show it to the others, he is met with a pistol in his face, with Danik on the other end, having heard Isaac’s entire speech. Danik takes the Codex, now knowing that it’s the key to resuming Convergence. Isaac is able to release a deadly gas into the room, and Ellie and Carver kill Danik’s guards as he escapes with the Codex. The door to escape malfunctions, and Ellie realizes she won’t be able to get to it with the gas in her way. Submitting to her fate, Ellie tells Isaac to close the doors so he and Carver can get to safety. The pair share one final look, and Ellie tells Isaac she loves him, before he is forced to close the doors as the gas fills the room. Carver tries to get a distraught Isaac to focus on the mission, and the pair fight through the Unitologist forces to reach Danik before he can make it to the machine. After repelling underground to the remains of the alien city and fighting the powerful necromorph opposition, Isaac learns more about the Moon, which operates on a network of “Brethren” Moons which span the entire universe. If the Moon is allowed to be completed, the Brethren Moons will then come to absorb all mass in the galaxy. Furthermore, Isaac learns that the Codex was not only designed to turn off the machine, but also to re-configure it to destroy the moon as opposed to simply delaying it. Isaac and Carver find the machine, and Danik arrives shortly after. Isaac creates a blast, knocking down Danik, and he and Carver are able to retrieve the Codex before falling to the depths below, where they’re split up. Isaac, following Dr. Earl Serrano’s research from centuries prior, figures out how to enter and reconfigure the machine. Just before he can finish this task, Danik confronts him, holding Ellie at gunpoint, revealing that she survived the gas in the research lab, but was later captured. Danik holds her hostage in exchange for the Codex, but Isaac refuses. Carver, hoping to give Isaac the second chance he never got with his own family, takes the Codex and throws it to Danik, who releases Ellie to catch it before he quickly places it into the machine. Tau Volantis immediately starts to thaw, and the massive necromorph Moon begins to reawaken. Danik revels in his victory, but he is soon impaled by a piece of falling debris and instantly killed. With the Convergence Event resume, Isaac and Carver stay behind to stop it, while Ellie kisses Isaac goodbye before escaping in Danik’s shuttle. Isaac and Carver then fight the massive necromorph organism, using smaller, Marker-like objects to pierce its eye-like organs, weakening it enough for the pair to reach the Codex in the machine, which they are able to re-configure to stop the Convergence event. As Isaac is blasted into the sky, he looks at a photo of Ellie one more time before the moon crashes down to the planet below. Meanwhile, Ellie watches from the shuttle, and when she’s unable to reach Isaac, she notices that the Marker signal is also gone. Grieving for her lost love, but nonetheless proud that he completed his mission, Ellie sets course for Earth before ShockPoint Jumping out of Tau Volantis’ orbit. Sometime later, however, Isaac is heard breathing once again, as he calls out for Ellie. Isaac then awakens in a bed, inside a seemingly normal apartment. When he looks in the bathroom mirror, however, he sees Carver on the other side. The pair then realize that they aren’t in an apartment, and in fact, shouldn’t be anywhere, as they both believe the fall from the Moon should have killed them. Not knowing if they’re dead or alive, the pair decide to examine the planet, climbing back up to the surface to find the remains of the crashed Moon. Now believing that they’ve defeated the moon, the Marker, and the necromorphs, they then decide to split up and look for a ship to escape the planet. Their celebration is soon cut short, however, as Isaac and Carver both start having visions of the moon. Not long after, Isaac is shocked to see Norton, alive again, before he transforms into a necromorph that attacks. As more follow, Isaac and Carver realize that destroying the moon didn’t stop the Marker’s influence. Carver then concludes that when Danik turned off the machine, the Brethren Moons were awoken, and they’ll soon come searching for Earth. The pair continue looking for a ship, coming across several Unitologists going insane from the Marker’s influence. They soon find one of the Unitologist’s ships and they board it, hoping to return to Earth so they can warn the rest of humanity about the Moons, but they soon find that the craft’s ShockPoint Drive is nonoperational, meaning they can only return to the Orbiting CMS Terra Nova to look for a replacement. Aboard the Terra Nova, Isaac finds the remnants of Danik’s men, now gone even more deranged and worshiping the Brethren Moons as part of a new Cult, and he continues to see visions from the Brethren Moons, asking him to lead them to Earth. The new Cult Leader is able to get into Isaac’s head, and he begins to argue with Carver about whether or not they should use the ShockPoint Drive to return to Earth, with Carver wanting to use it, while Isaac fears that if they do, they’ll lead the Brethren Moons there and doom humanity, instead electing to blow up the ship. Isaac and Carver then fight one on one… or at least they both hallucinate fighting each other. When the Brethren Moons get back in Isaac’s head, they reveal that they knew where Earth was all along, and have been on their way, simply toying with Isaac and Carver to slow them down. Isaac kills the Cult Leader before returning to Carver with the ShockPoint Drive. Now knowing they must get to Earth immediately, they put it in the ship’s reactor and power it up using plutonium cores. After powering up the drive, the pair enter the Terra Nova’s cockpit and make a successful Jump to Earth. When they arrive, however, they attempt to make radio contact but only hear the sounds of pain and anguish, as they look out to the planet to see the Brethren Moons attacking. Another then emerges just in front of them and attacks the ship, knocking out John Carver and Isaac Clarke, leaving their futures, as well as the fate of all of humanity, unknown. While this has unfortunately been the end of the Dead Space story as we’ve known it for nearly a decade, with EA’s renewed interest in the franchise, we can only hope that one day, we’ll see another chapter in this vast sci-fi horror epic. Wow, what a journey. I can easily say that this video consisted of the most work I have ever put into one of these timelines. Weaving together all of the various forms of media was extremely challenging, but just as rewarding in the end. I really, really hope you enjoyed it, and if you did and you appreciate the work I put into it, I do ask that you check out my Patreon, or a channel membership here on YouTube, to get early access to these videos and just to help support. Just a reminder that I am only a one person team, and I read through every book, watched every movie, and played every game to research for the hundreds of hours it took to make this video, so your support goes a long way to keeping these massive videos coming out, maybe even a little more frequently.

Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter: 2:41:55

@SuggestiveGames, or join us to chat in the community Discord to give me feedback, get sneak peeks on the behind the scenes of what I’m working on, and even help out on future videos. I’d like to thank the folks on screen who pledge monthly to help me out, and also to everyone who suggested I cover Dead Space over the years here on YouTube. Leave your own suggestion of a franchise you want to see me cover on What You Need to Know in the comments and who knows? Maybe it’ll be the next one I do. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.