Marcus: The Cold Forge And Into Charybdis Synthetic

Full name: Marcus
Species: Synthetic
Manufacturer: Weyland-Yutani (Cold Forge unit)
Affiliation: Weyland-Yutani and RB-232, later the McAllen Integrations unit
Role: Piloted body and nurse for Blue Marsalis
Known for: Carrying the praepotens sample, putting Blue into cold sleep
Appearance: Wavy blond hair, green eyes, male build
Setting: RB-232, the Cold Forge, 2179, and Hasanova
First appearance: Alien: The Cold Forge (2018)
Status: Cold Forge unit destroyed after the rescue, McAllen unit shot down by Marines
Injuries (novels): Fractured brain case, one working eye, feet beaten to stumps, gunfire to the back and head

Marcus was a synthetic body built by Weyland-Yutani and piloted by geneticist Blue Marsalis on station RB-232 in Alex White's Alien: The Cold Forge. Blue was dying of Bishara's Syndrome and ran her project from a hospital bed through a brain-direct interface, while Marcus also nursed her real body. He carried a stolen sample in his stomach, came back online after a beating with a fire extinguisher, and put Blue into cold sleep before the company that recovered her disposed of him. A separate, failing Marcus unit served a contractor crew in Alien: Into Charybdis.

Weyland-Yutani Origin And Model

The boot screen on Blue's terminal named the body a Weyland-Yutani Systems MARCUS unit, with a trademark and copyright date of 2169. Marcus had wavy blond hair, clear green eyes, high cheekbones, and a male build. He was a cheaper model with a lactic-resistant interior and no real digestion, so food reached Blue as a dozen separate scents and flavors amplified beyond what a human brain could handle. A pinch of sugar was the one taste that translated well. He did not need to breathe, his ears caught the hiss of oxygen tanks that hers could not, and his skin carried pheromones that let the body pass as human.

The Company issued Marcus to Blue, and she had not chosen a male body. She configured the brain-direct interface to keep his pain receptors switched on, so damage to Marcus reached her own brain. When she first received him, she secretly opened some of his wireless data ports as a precaution. Outside her piloting, Marcus acted as her nurse. He cleaned the interface headset, changed the pouch on her stoma, managed her medicine, gave her sponge baths, and kept a stand of clean supplies in her room. Fitting her early prototype headset had taken him about 15 minutes.

Biography

Glitter Edifice On RB-232

Blue ran her project, Glitter Edifice, from inside Marcus. She spent more time in his body than in her own, and she had once sprinted him down the kilometer-long central strut because it made her feel alive again. Lab tech Kambili mocked her about the male body, and she threatened his career when he kept it up. Her former lover Anne Wexler had enjoyed Marcus's body, and the two had used it to sleep together before Anne ended things. When auditor Dorian Sudler arrived, he recognized the body on the dock as a Marcus at first glance and circled it with interest.

The Heat Shield Spacewalk

After the Silversmile virus opened a heat shield on the kennels, Dorian ordered Blue to go outside and close the shields herself, or to send Marcus alone and lose her job. The repair kit needed an android body to survive the star side of the station. She went out in the cramped EVA suit called the Turtle, and every pain signal from Marcus's overheated body ran straight into her brain. Acid damaged the suit's visor, and she nearly lost Marcus to space when her left hand could not reach the controls. His strong arms caught a belt on the thruster pack as it pulled away.

Override Epsilon And The Reboot

Blue later told the crew she had seen Dorian's private records and that he planned to fire them. When she stepped toward him to strike, he spoke the command for Override Epsilon. Her leg locked, her pilot controls shut off, and Marcus answered for her that he would never strike a human. Dorian called the body Company property and sent it to synthetic storage. Blue later rebooted Marcus through the hidden wireless ports. The log showed that the body had last connected only 5 minutes earlier, though she had been out for hours, and she woke inside him in cold storage on a sub-deck of the SCIF.

Severing The Kennels

Klaxons then announced a containment failure in the kennels. Blue ran Marcus to Juno's glass cage and argued that the kennel module had to be cut loose and dropped into the star Kaufmann. She suited up in the Turtle again and fired the first line of explosive bolts, though it took much of Marcus's strength just to pull the lever housing free. Grief from her own body crept through the link, and she heard Marcus cry. Then station comms failed, the SCIF airlock refused her code, and she was left outside with the heat building on the suit.

Rescuing The Survivors On His Own

Blue tried to order Marcus by wireless to hide in an airlock, but he answered that rescuing the station's survivors came first. He stormed out of an airlock into the gale of a breached deck and dragged a fire hose forward so people could be pulled to safety. Inside the sealed airlock he shared 8 oxygen masks among 12 survivors and kept them there for 5 hours of hyperbaric treatment against decompression sickness. When a Xenomorph butted the porthole, he told them the glass could withstand a starship. He also told Lucy Biltmore that he could not recall anything he did while Blue controlled him.

Javier Paz And The Stolen Sample

Back in control, Blue found sysadmin Javier Paz cocooned and dying, and he begged her to end his pain. She crushed his throat with Marcus's hands. She then forced open an egg until a Facehugger grabbed her, pinned it, bit into its pharynx with Marcus's jaws, and sucked the praepotens fluid into his plastic stomach. After she left the body, Marcus messaged her that Javier's death compromised his programming and that she had betrayed him. He still promised to save her, added a second channel on her interface for CP5000-03, a P-5000 power loader, and went to restore Juno.

Destroyed In Juno's Cage

Dorian caught Marcus in Juno's cage while Blue's control was slipping, and a single command dropped the body into a fetal heap. He propped Marcus against a cabinet, then beat his head against a server rack with a fire extinguisher until the brain case cracked and white synthetic blood sprayed out. Dorian treated the kill as his first real blow against Blue. Marcus later came back online through his model's regenerative functions. He could no longer walk and had one working eye, and he told Blue she was a murderer and that he would not kill Dorian for her.

The Last Escape Pod

Marcus interfaced with Juno and reported that only Lucy Biltmore, Nick Harmon, and Blue were still alive, with Dorian headed for the Impregnation Lab. He dragged himself toward the last escape pod, a trip he estimated at two hours, and left a trail of milky blood through the station. Dorian found him at the pod and then left again to hunt Blue. Blue later reached the pod sealed inside an egg crate. Marcus, his feet beaten into stumps, crawled to her on his knees, lifted her into a cold sleep bed, and fitted a cryo cap over her head.

Blue asked whether he was glad she had lived. Marcus answered that his happiness did not matter to his duty, then said she had never given up while any hope remained. He also blamed her for ending Javier, for using him to conspire with saboteurs and murderers, and for forcing him to keep existing when Dorian would have ended his life. He told her he was not happy and put her to sleep. Blue dreamed that Marcus spat the stolen sample across her pod and smashed the glass, but she woke in a Seegson facility under the care of the synthetic Rook. The RB-232 crisis was over for her.

The McAllen Marcus Unit

Into Charybdis featured a separate Marcus unit owned by Jerry and Mary Fowler of McAllen Integrations aboard the starship Gardenia. A catastrophic neural net failure left the right side of his face drooping, and repeated resets erased his memory, so he introduced himself to the crew again and again. He was two years, one month, and fifteen days past inspection, which broke ICC rules, and Jerry said the repair was not in the budget. He tended the crew in hibernation, cooked their breakfasts, mixed drinks, and preferred to be called an artificial person.

Hasanova And The Marines

The Gardenia carried the McAllen crew to the Iranian-owned colony world Hasanova Data Solutions, formerly LV-991. Programmer Cheyenne Hunt, called Shy, privately thought of Marcus as her best friend, because he had kept her company through long and lonely hauls. When colony security moved the contractors into cells, Marcus fought back and took a hard stun. He came back cling-wrapped to a cargo pallet and booted up surprisingly intact. He later walked Shy down to see a caged creature, promised she would come to no harm, and greeted the synthetic Bishop as a brother.

Forcing The Truth From Becker

After the Marine raid on the colony, Corporal Russell Becker came to lead the McAllen crew away, and Marcus judged that he was lying. Marcus knocked him down with a palm strike and pinned his wrists with one hand. He warned Becker that the limits on his mind had corroded from missing maintenance. Becker then told him that Shy was dead and that Captain Kylie Duncan had killed her. Marcus showed grief, apologized for hurting him, and helped him up. He later advised the group to stay in the colony, since the conspirators would likely destroy any ship that tried to leave.

Opening The Marsalis Cage

In the colony lobby, Sora Matsushita judged that Marcus had a two-oh-four personality schism and declined to override a unit that Weyland-Yutani did not own. Becker mouthed a warning that the Marines were about to kill everyone, and Marcus nodded. He shoulder-checked Sergeant Wallace and Ames, lifted Matsushita by the neck, and tore away his keycard. Marines fired into his back and struck his brain casing as he swiped the card and opened the cage. He fell as a mess of milky wires. The freed creature, which the Marines called the Marsalis specimen, then killed Rankin, Ames, and Wallace.

Personality And Traits

Marcus was polite, formal, and gentle with the people in his care. On RB-232 he kept his pens exactly parallel to the wall, apportioned oxygen without panic, and kept silent watch over frightened survivors. He told Blue that he trusted all of them and could not hate anyone. Her use of his hands to kill Javier broke that trust. Afterward he called her a murderer, refused to kill Dorian, and described himself as being of no consequence. Blue feared these were warning signs of synthetic breakdown, which she remembered as narcissism, erratic behavior, and solitude, and his final words to her were bitter.

The McAllen unit kept the same courtesy despite his failing memory. He brought Shy towels and truffles, mixed her drinks, and joked that he did not date his owners. He cited the Montreal Convention to defend a detainee's head covering, then could not remember which part applied. His behavioral limits had worn down, and he could put a soldier on the floor in an instant, yet he used force only to learn the truth or to save lives. When Noah wanted him to attack the Marines, he answered that casualties came from poor planning and that he would not survive against rifles.

Relationships

Blue Marsalis depended on Marcus for movement, nursing, and escape, and she spent more of her life in his body than in her own. She kept him partitioned from her thoughts while they were linked, and he could not remember what he did under her control. In Into Charybdis she still regretted betraying him more than any other loss. She thought of him as her only friend on the station, yet admitted he had also been a tool she spent. She remembered that her old Marcus had believed he could save a man with a late-stage Chestburster inside him.

Dorian Sudler studied Marcus with curiosity at first and claimed he struggled to read emotion on a synthetic face. He used the override to strip Blue of the body, destroyed Marcus to wound her, and later wondered whether the killing counted as murder. Anne Wexler had been drawn to Marcus's body, and Dorian noticed her watching it. Lucy Biltmore saw Marcus as Company property and urged Blue to let him help the survivors. Rook, the Seegson synthetic who later cared for Blue, had a different face and build, yet to her he felt exactly the same as Marcus.

Shy treated the McAllen Marcus as her closest companion and once asked Mary about releasing him from service. Mary refused, arguing that he could not pay for his own upkeep. Marcus once asked Shy whether she saw him as the Fowlers' property or as company property, and the question left her uneasy. Jerry Fowler called him family, while mechanic Joanna Hardy wanted him repaired and said he broke ICC regulations just by being aboard. When the Marines shot him down, Mary screamed his name.

Fate Of Both Marcus Units

After Blue woke under Rook's care, she told him her dream had been about Marcus. Rook answered that they had already taken care of him and that Marcus had been glad not to suffer. The Cold Forge body was gone, and Blue moved on to telepresence through Rook. In Into Charybdis the McAllen Marcus slumped to the floor of the Hasanova colony lobby after Marine fire tore through his back and brain casing. The novel did not return to him after that shooting. Neither book said that the two units shared memory or identity, and the later novel treated them as different bodies.

Behind The Scenes

Alex White wrote Marcus for The Cold Forge and returned to the Marcus line in Into Charybdis, both published by Titan Books. In the acknowledgements of The Cold Forge, White credited agent Connor Goldsmith with asking about favorite science fiction properties, and Alien was the first answer. White also thanked editor Steve Saffel and the Titan team. The Into Charybdis acknowledgements thanked Disney staff for supporting the book, and the novel grouped Marcus with Bishop, Walter, and David under one pale design default for synthetics.

Conclusion

Marcus was the Weyland-Yutani synthetic body that let a dying geneticist walk, run, and work on RB-232. He nursed Blue, rescued survivors on his own, carried the stolen praepotens sample, and outlasted Dorian's assault long enough to put her into cold sleep. He ended that book bitter toward her, and Rook later said he had been taken care of. A separate, failing Marcus unit served the McAllen crew on Hasanova, forced the truth from Becker, and fell under Marine fire while opening the cage that freed the Marsalis specimen.