Pax

There is something almost painful about reconstructing Pax.

He was young. Quick to anger, quicker to joy. The engrams capture a soul still unbruised by the particular cruelties of the black—a young man who had not yet learned that the universe takes more than it gives.

Two thousand years too late, I find myself hoping he learned gently. The subsequent records offer no answers.

The Vaulter

Pax was born and raised in The Vaults—that cold, cobbled district that hung off Tower One at Drift's Edge in the pre-Breakage era. A "vaulter," in local parlance. He knew the politics of the Edge in his bones: that the Helix did not care about people like him, that survival meant clan membership, that dreams were dangerous luxuries.

And yet he dreamed anyway.

He was new to the Caleedan at the time of these engrams, recently inducted despite his local origins. Whether this represented ambition or desperation, the records do not say. Perhaps both. The Vaults did not offer many paths forward.

What He Lacked

I must note, with some discomfort, that Pax lacked basic knowledge expected of deep-black operators.

When Harrow executed an emergency braking manoeuvre, Pax did not have a biter—the leather guard spacers used to prevent biting through their own tongues under high-g stress. He did not know what one was.

"Fuck's sake, Silas, have you told the kid anything about the black?"

Harrow's frustration is understandable. But I suspect the fault lay less with training and more with circumstance. Pax had never needed such knowledge before. His world had been the Vaults, the market stalls, the familiar rhythms of station life.

The black was new to him. And the black did not forgive ignorance.

What He Had

Despite his inexperience, Pax demonstrated genuine competence where it counted.

His sensor work identified critical anomalies in their target—mass readings that did not match the vessel's profile. While others saw what they expected to see, Pax saw what was actually there.

"This doesn't make sense. The profile's right, but the mass readings are way off."

The young do not always know what is supposed to be impossible. Sometimes this is their greatest gift.

Those Who Protected Him

Doc Kline watched over Pax with particular intensity. Her warning to Harrow carried genuine menace:

"If you drag Pax down with you, I'll make sure you never see the other side of your next cryo sleep."

I do not know the history between them. Family? Obligation? Simple decency in a place that offered little of it? The engrams do not clarify.

But someone was trying to keep this young man alive. That, at least, is worth recording across the millennia.

Every generation believes the next is unprepared for what awaits them.

Perhaps they are right.

But I have learned, in my years of reconstruction, that those who have not yet been broken often see most clearly. Pax's easy joy may have been vulnerability—or it may have been exactly the strength his crew needed.

Time told what time always tells. I simply lack the records to know what that was.

~ NV