Caldin Corrigan

Caldin Corrigan
Species:	Human, Cyberon
Job:	Captain
Father:	Caldin Corrigan's father
Children:	Emily Corrigan
Spouse:	Emily Corrigan's mother
Appearance:	Cybergeddon

Caldin Corrigan was a spaceship-captain active in the 39th and 40th centuries. Although he had complex psychological issues with artificial intelligences, making frequent bigoted comments about them, he crewed his ship, the Jerusalem, with a clockwork android called Christian, whom he would later acknowledge as a friend. He was devastated by the loss of his wife and daughter in a fire, ultimately attempting to resurrect the latter via illegal fleshing.

Biography

Early life

Caldin Corrigan was born in 3847. He was a native of Vega Station, where he would remain based throughout his life. When he was young, he sometimes played cards with his father, who would tell him "horror stories" about the Cyberons. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

Emily lost and found

At some point, Caldin married a woman and the two had a daughter, called Emily. However, both of them died in a fire. He was able to recover a damaged minscan of Emily. Unable to live without his daughter, Corrigan travelled to Gand City and paid for the Bhor'Vhali ("brilliant programmers" with "no social conscience to speak of") to create a duplicate of Emily via fleshing: her memories, edited to remove her death, were transferred into a preexisting positronic brain whose own memories and personality were illegally wiped. Subconscious urges and phobias were then added to the new Emily's personality to avoid her doing anything that would cause her to discover she was no longer an organic human. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

Emily lost again

Although the recreated Emily didn't initially see through the subterfuge, she still grew apart from her supposed father, resenting his possessiveness and overprotectiveness, and yearning for a change of life due to a distant but unquenchable sense that something about her existence was "wrong". She ended up running away from him to build a new life. Corrigan bought an out-of-date clockwork android, Christian, with the vague intent of transferring Emily's personhood into the clockwork body, which would be easier to control. He wired three charges of distronic explosives into the clockwork body's cranium so that no one but himself could interfere with its positronic brain. However, he found himself unable to go through with it, leaving Emily to live her life as she wished, though he did secretly put a tracker inside her that would allow him to know her location. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

Search for Emily

In 3909, not having seen Emily for years, Corrigan heard that she'd been aboard the SS Titania, a space-liner on its way to Vega Station, when it was wrecked in mysterious circumstances. Panicking when he learned Emily wasn't on the list of official survivors, Corrigan insisted on flying out to the Titania himself aboard his ship Jerusalem, flanked by Christian. Boarding the wrecked Titania, the two searched the leisure deck and then the bridge, finding great damage but — eerily — no humans at all, living or otherwise. However, returning to the Jerusalem, Corrigan managed to get a signal from the tracker he'd placed inside Emily, tracking her location to Asteroid GX-923 in the Corvel-Runista system. There, finding a set of tunnels, they quickly discovered that the asteroid was actually a camouflaged Cyberon space station, harbouring the last survivors of Cyberon-kind. They were taken prisoner, but were not killed, because the Cyberons recognised that Christian's positronic brain was scavenged Cyberon technology and needed Corrigan's directions to safely extract it. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

Final adventures as a human

Asked to perform the operation to remove Christian's positronic brain, Corrigan instead managed to escape, at the cost of the Cyberons destroying the Jerusalem. To make his way through the base without being detected, he disguised himself into a hollowed-out Cyberon Cyberwarrior suit of armour. He, Christian, Emily, and another survivor of the SS Titania called Duncan finally met near the entrance of the Conversion Engine room. They made their way to one of the empty Cyberon laboratories, where Corrigan welded a Cyber-Power Unit into Christian to be done once and for all with the issues caused by having to rewind him all the time. In an inebriated state at the inrush of power, Christian revealed Corrigan's secret to Emily, forcing a confrontation between the two about Corrigan's lies and unethical fleshing.

After the Cyberons positioned their asteroid-base in front of Vega Station and gave them an ultimatum to which Lieutenant Jyaxx Nevaryn of the Vega navy had no intention of acquiescing, however, the four escapees realised that they needed to set aside their internal quarrels and work together to bring down the Cyberons from the inside, lifekind's only hope of averting another Cyberon War. While the two positronic intelligences tried to upload themselves into the Cybernet, Duncan and Corrigan bought them time by rushing into the Cyberon command centre guns blazing. They were both quickly dealt serious injuries, but before slipping into unconsciousness he had the satisfication of hearing that a "system breach" and "virus warfare" had been detected on the outside by one of the Cyberon Cybertechnicians. As he lost consciousness, he mocked the Cyberleader, telling it that the Cyberons had "already lost". He was then taken away for Cyber-conversion. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

Cyberconversion and death

Remaining defiant, Corrigan tried to fight the cyberconversion process, and, despite the pain, even found the strength to debate the Cyberleader about the ultimate pointlessness of the Cyberons' endless conquest. The process was ultimately interrupted when the effects of Christian and Emily's sabotage of the Cybernet made themselves known, causing a mass failure of all Cyberon systems. However, the asteroid-ship was still set to blast Vega Station to smithereens. Christian managed to contact Corrigan through the neural link that now existed between his brain and the Cybernet, and told him to try and cancel the shot from the Cyberleader's control panel, but Corrigan, whose lifetime was counted in minutes without working Cyberon augmentations to sustain him, was unable to do it himself, and his mind was beginning to go. Despite her extreme reluctance, Emily had no choice but to temporarily download herself into Corrigan's body to puppeteer it to the control panel, where, just as the last of Corrigan's living mind faded, they were able to tip the entire Cyberon station upwards, causing the fatal laser shot to miss Vega. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

Legacy

After making it back to Vega Station, Christian and Emily relayed the story of Corrigan's ultimate sacrifice. He was made a honourary Admiral of Vega's fleet to honour his actions. Christian and Emily attended a memorial service held in an envirochamber on Vega, where, for lack of Corrigan's body having been recovered, a plaque honouring his memory was placed. Thinking she owed him that, Emily remained in her Emily-Corrigan-shaped android body for this occasion, even though she was unsure whether she'd keep it going forward. Christian, meanwhile, gave Emily Corrigan's journal, thinking she might find it helpful in gaining closure. Notably, the last page written in the journal by Corrigan voiced his growing determination to confess the truth to her, even before circumstances forced the revelation. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

Behind the scenes

Corrigan originated in Paul Ebbs's 2000 Audio Adventures in Time & Space audio drama Cybergeddon, which was later adapted by Lupan Evezan into the novel of the same name. There, he was played by actor Barry J. Gordon. However, because the audio drama, unlike Evezan's novelisation, contained no licensed DWU element at the time of release, only the latter is covered on this Wiki.