James Carter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personal Information
Name: James Rustin Carter
Place of birth: Hera
Gender: Male
Age: 35 (born 2484)
Height: 5'11
Weight: 150 lbs
Eye colour: Blue
Hair colour: Hazel

 

Relatives: Spencer 'Spence' Carter (father; survivalist - lives on St Albans), Jenna Katie (mother; estranged), Lucy (daughter, deceased), Nicole (ex-wife, estranged)

Rank/Profession: Special Agent, Serious Crime Division, Interpol

Demeanour: Intense, cerebral

Motivation: "Verse needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door."

Religion: Cynic, anti-theist

 

Quotes:

"I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution... We are things that labour under the illusion of having a self, sensory experience and feeling programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming; stop reproducing; walk hand-in-hand into extinction. One last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."

 

 

Background summary:

Carter is an intense and cynical Interpol agent with extensive experience in homicide and narcotics departments in several jurisdictions. He has been sent to Greenleaf as part of the Alliance's crackdown on crime.

 

Childhood:

"Nothing's ever fulfilled, not until the very end. And closure? Nothing is ever over."

Carter was conceived in a bit of a one-night stand. His dad Spencer worked for the Alliance as a frontiersman preparing new colonies, and was visiting Hera (in its busy transport lane) on shore leave when he met Carter's mum Jenna, then was away for most of the next two years on ships and frontier worlds. When he returned, Jenna dumped the toddler on him and left for the bright lights of the Core. Spence, a survivalist, moved to St Albans and Carter lived with him there til he was 17 years old. According to Carter, he and his father never got along.

 

 

Marriage:

"You know, people that give me advice, I reckon they're talking to themselves."

Carter left St Albans (his dad never forgave him, saw it as a betrayal or, worse, as weakness) and returned to Hera in 2501 because he hated the cold of St Alban's and remembered Hera as always being warm. He became a local law officer, got married to a Hera native called Nicole in 2502, and the following year they had a daughter, Lucy. Carter worked hard and was quickly assigned plain clothes work as a detective where he could use his astute perception and analytic mind to best affect. Meanwhile, his home life was comfortable. Nicole was a Christian and for a while before their wedding and for two years after Carter went with her to church.

"People...so God damn frail they'd rather put a coin in the wishing well than buy dinner."

Carter's father had raised him to be distrustful of other people, though, to always suspect ulterior motives, and to be wary of a trap in any situation. Carter found he wanted to believe, very much, but struggled to engage with supernatural beliefs, and after some time found himself entrenching his own resistance through cognitive dissonance, with ad hominem attacks on the Shepherd, and distaste at the emotional neediness among the congregation and at the collection for the money that went round every week.

"There is no such thing as forgiveness, people just have short memories."

 

 

Bereavement, and divorce:

Just as things between Carter and Nicole were becoming strained, in 2505, aged two, Lucy rode her tricycle under a cart and was mortally injured. After a short coma, she died. Carter and Nicole's marriage didn't last long after that, he took to drink and she left him.

 

 

Interpol:

Carter threw himself into his work, transferred to Interpol to work as a detective and moved off Hera (in fact, he was moved around the 'verse on various cases), working homicide. However, suffering from undiagnosed PTSD, as well as drinking he now began doing mind-altering psychoactive drugs which he scored on the job and by building networks in the drug-using underground.

 

 

However, he remained thorough in investigation and insightful in interviews and managed to maintain his job through those rocky months and first year after Lucy's death.

"Yeah of course I've always taken a lot of notes. I mean, you never know what the thing is gonna be, do you? A little detail somewhere way down that line that makes you say "Ohh!", breaks the case."

 

 

He continued in his job as a lawman when war broke out in 2506, and was hostile to the partisan jingoism and political narratives given to justify the war, seeing it as all just excuses for folk to hit each other with sticks like cave men. Possibly he found in critiquing the war and his peers' responses to it a vent for his inner unhappiness. He was drinking less, smoking less, and taking fewer drugs, though he was finding company more irksome and found excuses to be out of the office, seeking sanctuary from banal banter with colleagues by searching through records and working cases.

In 2507, though, coming up on what would have been his daughter's fourth birthday, Carter was investigating a secured crime scene with other officers, and he shot dead a drug addict who had surrendered to the police after murdering his own infant daughter in a drug-induced delusion.

 

 

Hauled up in front of a review board, his job (and possibly his life) were spared when he was offered a deal by an anonymous Intelligence officer to transfer to work as an undercover agent for Interpol in a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area around Greenleaf.

"Back then, the visions... most of the time I was convinced that I'd lost it... but there were other times, I thought I was main-lining the secret truth of the universe."

Assuming the alias 'Crash', he remained deep undercover infiltrating the criminal networks of an obscure wolf-worshiping stim-addict tattoo cult that his taskmasters were interested in, but he also took to robbing couriers and taking harder drugs, more often. Partly because of the upheaval caused by the war, he was left undercover far longer than was usual practice - 4 years in fact, til early 2511, when he was involved in a shootout at Greenleaf Skyplex in which he shot and killed three (Ysvek) cartel men and was himself hospitalised with 3 gunshot wounds to the torso and leg.

 

 

"The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel: that's what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it's a virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that."

Subsequently he spent 4 months in Lubeck Psychiatric Hospital where he detoxed and got clean. While the intervention helped stabilise his state of mind, he also cultivated an antipathy towards shrinks, rejecting the metanarratives that were offered to him, maintaining his own misanthropic perspective.

However, also while at the psychiatric hospital, he was given the option of being pensioned off, but he declined, asking to be returned to duty, claiming to a review board that he believed he could still "do some good".

 

 

"Days with nothing... that's what it's like when you work cases."

Over the next 8 years he worked homicide cases and came to specialise in serial killers and symbology in crime.

However, he was now characterised by brutal, even uncaring honesty, a tendency to reject others, and to be hard to work with. He became renowned for his consistent success at securing convictions of suspects at interview, but his persistently negative, materialist, critical view of humanity and society made him unpopular with his colleagues and earned him the pejorative sobriquet "Taxman". None of this phased him: he was now convinced he was good at what he did, even if what he did wasn't very nice, and he didn't need to be nice to do it.

"Given how long it's taken me to reconcile my nature, I can't figure I'd forgo it on your account."

In 2516 in the line of duty he was involved in another shootout (this time in a poverty-stricken residential area) while undercover working a case, and again in 2518 (this time in a jungle in the ruins of an Alliance installation that had been abandoned and was already reverting to jungle) on the trail of fabled serial killer Joseph Smith.

"Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at."

After securing the conviction of Smith, Carter took leave for personal reasons, feeling he needed some time to process and dissociate. When he returned to work he moved from homicide to Serious Crime, and after a while recently relocated to Greenleaf.

"People out here, it's like they don't even know the outside 'Verse exists."

 

 

Carter remains motivated by a drive to catch and defeat criminals, but still suffers from a defeated world-view that the human condition is irredeemable and life itself is vain. Ultimately he has seen death to be the great equaliser, but sees this as enervating, not energising.

"Everybody sees. Once the strings are cut, all fall down."

He is obsessive and can be myopic, and is troubled by what he sees as loose ends, inevitably left untied in earlier cases.

 

 

 

Allies:

1. Dr Shane Howard. Carter and Dr Howard first worked together bringing serial killer Joseph Smith to justice some years ago. Carter has invited Dr Howard to join him in his new investigation on Greenleaf.
2. Carter has few other friends, but those he has are totally watertight.

Associates

Carter has various associates such as criminal informants from across the 'Verse.

Enemies
Carter's enemies include criminals he's put away, or just insulted, and colleagues or others who've found his demeanour impossible to work with.