[Lieutenant Julien Blanchard]

UEA Personnel Records
Application Status: in progress/Download Complete

Primary Data

Character Name: Lieutenant Julien Pierre Blanchard
Aliases, nicknames Jules
Age:(m/d) November 25 - 40
Classification: UEA Personnel
Specialization: Lieutenant, Science Officer
Nano-enhancement: Combat-capable translator, nano-communication, impervious immune system
Gender: Male
Sexuality: Straight
Height: 6'5''
Build:
Eyes: brown
Hair: black
Tattoos/scars/distinguishing marks: none
Playby: Ioan Gruffud

Secondary Data

Personality:

The opposite of an absent-minded professor, Julien is more attentive and open with others than most people around him. Not naturally born with these traits, he developed them consciously late in his life, and puts a lot of effort into it every day to gain even more on his personal features.

Strengths:

Despite not having any nano-technology he is able to recall almost everything he ever read or experienced, calculates at speeds even surpassing the AI sometimes, and is profoundly learned in many branches of sciences, a natural-born genius. Together with his unique way of approaching things, his reliability and organizational talents, it made him the perfect choice for a mission in unknown space as lead scientist on the ship.

Weaknesses:

Lt. Blanchard is extremely dependent on what his intellect knows about emotions, as he himself never experienced them innate, and does not naturally express or comprehend feelings himself. Having his emotional personality being built up himself from conscious decisions, his understanding of feelings is limited to only a part of the emotional spectrum, making him not cold, but tranquil.

Likes:
• Classical Music, playing his flute
• Books and other people’s personal writings
• French cuisine
• Curios and inquisitive minds
• Crystal’s rationality
• Helping others
  
  Dislikes:
• Laziness
• Whining and overtly emotional people
• Addictive behavior
• Crystal’s emotional programming
• The captain’s distractedness in presence of young females
• and similar emotional vulnerabilities in other officers endangering the mission
  
  Fears:
• His own emotional void
• and Crystal having more feelings than him
• Children
  
  Goals:
• Refuting the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
• Proving the human mind to be the most powerful force to be
  
  Habits/mannerisms/secrets:
• He scheduled weekly interdisciplinary meetings of the science-teams assigned to his command, to keep the creativity in the monotony of space alive
• Makes up new possible things to consider when living on another planet
• Grows a few special plants to supplement him with spices for his cooking
• Brought homing beacons aboard, to lead ships to their location when he has valuable extra-terrestrial products to sell
• Secretly tampering with the ships environmental systems to test effects on the crew

Tertiary Data

History:


On a beautiful evening of 2049 in Avignon, France, Julien Blanchard came to see the crimson light of a setting autumn day. With its warm and gentle rays, the sun was more a father to him than the man his mother Vivienne shared a single night with in that years early Mediterranean spring. And his father’s single noticeable heritage, Julien’s gleaming brown eyes, were the only fulfillment of a promised “Au revoir” from her lover that ever came true in Vivienne’s life.

Spring came home, brought with it the singing birds and the colorful flowers. But unlike them, it was not bloom that reigned in Vivienne’s heart – it was the gloom of uncertainty as she did not know what was wrong with her baby. He didn’t cry, he didn’t laugh and showed little interest in toys. Despite all the love she gave him over the years, she was never meant to see him laugh. What she couldn’t give in life, she gave 30 years later in death, when he shed the first and only tear in his life.

Julien turned out to be affected with a form of synesthesia that made him almost emotionally inert. Not having it easy in these trying times of a bad economy, but also not being poor, the single mom reared her son with everything she could give. He being a prodigy in maths and physical sciences made his mother proud, and even, or maybe just because, he had to pay so high a price for these abilities, she supported him going all the way, and made it possible for him to attend very good schools and at the age of 14 he entered the École Polytechnique.

After graduation in 2069 Julien left Paris, which was about to become a hive, returned to southern France, and joined the fusion research teams in Cadarache, close to his home. Only 3 years into the program and he developed a method to increase the likelihood of quantum tunnel effects of particles by utilizing a beam of tau neutrinos, which in turn greatly improved the performance and energy output of fusion reactors.

Shifting his interest away from fusion, he wanted to investigate annihilation processes at CERN. Two years of his life in the research project got him so far as to realize that there is no way around the necessity of high-energy particle collisions to produce the desired anti-matter. The only idea that came to his mind was that there might be a way to simulate high energy states in particles by altering the space-time in which they were immersed. Nearly being at light speed would be unnecessary if particles could traverse electromagnetic accelerating fields within a sufficiently big gravity manifold.

Therefore in 2076 he joined the French-Italian research project at the VIRGO of the European Gravitational Observatory in Cascina, Italy. Although he became the head of his investigation on the effects of gravitational distortions on subatomic particles, it was difficult to obtain the necessary funds from the government, as well as developing the new mathematics needed, since the system of metric tensors proved inadequate for the particles in Riemannian phase-space manifolds. Julien soon turned to other sources trying to obtain the means to further his research, and he was more successful with private companies than with government-run funds.

The monetary problems largely resolved he dived into the development of new maths to accompany the physical research, until something happened that the equations never prepared him for: In 2080 his mother died, and her being the only person close to him in his life, he knew he lost something.

He cried at her funeral on a sunny auburn day, and something changed within him. It was not a crack, and neither did he fall or drown in sorrow. As he experienced a real emotion the first time, it came to him like drawing the first sudden breath after being born, surging like a shock through him. Everything he ever learned, all the things he did, they may have remained true, but somehow invalid, because he came to know that he missed something important through all his life. With his mind being paralyzed by what just happened he lost speech for 3 weeks, struggling with his inner self, the brilliant scientist in him who did not want to accept the fact of being inadequate, and his heart that has lain dormant in hibernation due to the life-long winter of his cold rational mind.

Unable to deal with the ability of having emotions inside him, and much less being now consciously confronted with all the feelings of other people around him, he chose to realize the option that he first dismissed after graduating from the École Polytechnique: The military. Seeking order and security in this secluded and highly organized structure, he desired time and peace to fully grasp the void that he became aware of in himself in an environment that allowed him to approach this slowly.

The following 7 years were a struggle like never before, as he made himself conscious of emotions and other people’s feelings. He learned a lot, but unable to naturalize it like a child, he had to pay much more attention to recognize someone else’s emotional state. While every child could easily see if someone is enthusiastic, sad or mean, Julien needed to make himself aware of physical signs of that, for example if the pattern of speech includes many subordinate clauses, what kind of gestures someone uses to underline arguments, or what melody someone is using.

Most of his free time was now dedicated to the research of melodies, and he started to listen to classical music, took singing lessons and trained on a traditional gaul flute. With each advance made, Julien gets to realize even more, exactly how much he was missing with his lack of emotions.

On one side being sad that he was never able to show how much he loved his mother, he decided to do good unto others as she had done unto him, as on the other side he knew that most other humans are easily carried away by their emotions, by addictions and sorrow, without realizing how much of a gift they are, since they never struggled to have them in the first place. While he himself is always up to help, he turned out to be a bit cynic towards those who have neither a high intellect, nor a stable emotional personality. His only fears are to remain merely superficially emotional like an AI, and the cheerful banter of playing children, reminding him of a world he had never experienced.

Yet, he fulfilled his duties in the service par excellence, even if now most of the time is used up for implementing scientific research into practical applications, like improving nano-technology and the gravity drive. With nothing bonding him to earth, he decided to join the colonization projects aboard one of the spaceships, where he hopes to find something to discover and the solitude that is so far only in his musical play.




OOC additional info:

I tried to make his career as plausible as possible, by keeping him close to his home in France, with scientific institutions close to that location. The places I mentioned in his biography do indeed exist in the form I portrayed:

WIKI: École Polytechnique, Military Engineer University, Paris, France

WIKI: ITER fusion research center, Cadarache, France

WIKI: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), Geneva, Franco-Swiss border

WIKI: VIRGO Interferometer, French-Italian project at the European Gravitational Observatory, Cascina, Italy

---

OOC

RP sample:

The alarm on his clock went off. It was 7:25, and Julien rose from his bed, with a last glance at his old clock, an antique from the times when digital clocks weren’t the only option. But in his mind, a digital clock could never be as beautiful as a real one, since they show numbers so indifferently, without any sense of where they come from and where they are heading, and only experience made people aware of the fact that their clock would reset at 24:00, back to 0:00 to begin anew.

After he switched off the alarm and got out of his sleeping boxers, he went to get a shower. The water started pouring as he turned it on, it came forth and fell down, or rolled down along his skin, something everybody would expect after years of experiencing it. But he didn't expect it due to experience, he knew about the gravity generator that made the water fell down and not remain floating in midair. Because like every good scientist, he didn’t like to rely on experience; he preferred being able to know something derived out of the inner structures, from the principles that ruled an objects behavior.

That is also why he always kept this old clock around, so much different they were, so much more magnificent, showing the numbers to be aligned on a circle, immediately allowing the mind to grasp the fact that once a revolution was completed, it would restart on the same journey, an act of thinking, not of experience like with digital watches. The clock did not only show a single number, a single moment of time, no, it illustrated the complete flow of time, while only pointing to one little point in that stream with a little hand.

Just as much as he liked the time of his awakening itself, 7:25, a golden moment, when the little hand of the clock divided the circumference of the circle in a way that the bigger part to the smaller one was the exact same ratio as the complete circumference to the bigger part, an eternal ratio, based in a form of divine beauty that governs all of natures growth, and had many names throughout history, but is now termed the golden ratio, the very ratio in which the proportions of his body were formed, on which the cold water was trickling down this moment.

It was a beautiful piece, a form of beauty only a few people can enjoy, and everyone who came to his quarters just said upon seeing the clock "What a niece old piece, does it still work?". It was deemed sentimental by the naive minds, and another little smile hushed across his face. With closed eyes he remembered its practical use: The mechanics in the clock were independent from the ship’s internal chronometer – something that wasn’t as reliable as the rest of the crew thought it to be. A year ago Julien changed the chronometer parameters, going with 10 minute steps each day from a 24-hour to a 25-hour day for 3 weeks. Not being connected to earth, but surrounded with the infinite monotony of space, there was no way to tell what happened, and the ships clock was not considered a safety risk, which made it easy for him to access it. He turned off the water and started to rub himself dry with a towel, while his mind was still a year in the past: Even in the 21st century people tend to attach their thinking to objects, rather than principles, so they put heavy security measures around the armory, but none around their “time”.

2 weeks into his experiment and he witnessed the first symptoms of people being a bit more distracted, tired or exhausted. Hard to notice for everyone who didn’t know about the change of time, or if recognized then attributed to space travel, Julien made mental notices of how easy it were to exhaust the entire crew by changing their day to full 26 hours instead of 24. He looked into the mirror and began shaving, conscious of the blade that was adapting to the geometry of his features, as it moved along his skin. Yes, he thought, humans are adaptable too, but with their biology trained over millions of years in a 24-hour circadian rhythm that can only change so much, they were vulnerable to these invisible changes. Finished with his work he reached for his uniform, proudly depicting a symbol of earth on the arm. He hoped that the average day on the planet they were headed to, didn't deviate too much from earths, as it could bring a lot of unforeseen troubles with it that go beyond mere symbols on clothes.

Hello… my name is…

Your Name: David
Age: 24
Contact: (PM is fine)
Desired Member Title: It's unknown - reason enough for me.
Other Characters?:

[I.C.E.]

Dedicated to science, and determined to see the mission through...he's perfect. Welcome aboard!