Roy Mannen: The Trooper Who Became Shesh-Mannen

Full name: Roy Mannen
Also known as: Shesh-Mannen; the Mannen Monkey (to the Hish)
Species: Human
Affiliation: UNISC; former Orbital Marine
Role: Corporal aboard the cruiser Lazy Eye
Known for: Mind-probed into believing he was Hish; ravine ambush; destroying the Hish parentship
Family: Unnamed father and mother on Landfill Island Three
Setting: Midnight and the Hish parentship in orbit, May 2117
First appearance: Predator: Forever Midnight (2006)
Status: Presumed dead when the parentship exploded in orbit
Injuries: Mind-probe helmet; Karna dart in the right thigh; rifle-butt scalp wound
Kills: 1 Karna father (finished after Shesh-Kuk's plasma shot) · 2 Amengi · Goreph and 1 scarred Hish · Sterilizer technicians · all aboard the parentship

Roy Mannen was a UNISC corporal and former Orbital Marine in John Shirley's Predator: Forever Midnight. After his cruiser crashed on Midnight in May 2117, he was captured by the clan of Shesh-Kuk and put under a mind-probe helmet until he believed he was the Hish warrior Shesh-Mannen. He hunted beside his captors and led his own squad into an ambush, then broke free of the conditioning, helped Commander Randall Ness seize a Hish lander, and turned the Large Sterilizer on the Hish parentship.

Biography

Early Life On Landfill Island Three

Mannen grew up on Landfill Island Three, known to its residents as LI-3, one of the artificial trash islands built off the coast of Florida in the mid twenty-first century. His father had been thrown out of the Orbital Marines for drunkenness and, after a famine in North America, took work in the island's trash mines. He beat his son and pushed him into gang fights, although Roy was more like his mother and preferred games and movies. Before Roy enlisted, his father told him that survival meant being savage and ready to kill first, and Roy doubted he could ever be that kind of man.

The Crash Of The Lazy Eye

By 2117 Mannen was a corporal with the UNISC and one of sixteen troopers aboard the war cruiser Lazy Eye, bound for the colony on Midnight under Commander Randall Ness. Like Ness, he had served in the Orbital Marines before joining UNISC. When the cruiser attacked a ship near the planet on May 14, he cheered the hit over the comm, then challenged Ness for not reporting an earlier sighting in a tone close to insubordination.

On May 15 the bridge section of the Lazy Eye crashed deep in the dark jungle of Midnight's main continent. Mannen was among the seven survivors who set out in a rover toward the colony, with Ness, Sergeant Georgie Johnson, Lieutenant Slim Summers, Gerrick, Ramirez, and Hobbswell. Feverish on the trek, he complained about the broken transmitters and argued with Georgie, who outranked him. When he threw a racist insult at Hobbswell, Ness ordered him out to patrol the edge of the clearing.

Capture And The Mind-Probe

On May 16 a herd of giant burrowing animals broke out of the ground around the clearing. Ness ordered everyone to hold fire, but Mannen shot at the nearest beast, lost his rifle when it swiped at him, and fled screaming into the jungle. He breathed toxic fumes, became lost, and could not answer when Ness called for him. About nine Hish switched off their camouflage around him and knocked him unconscious, and he woke bound in self-tightening nanotech cords in a camp burned out of the jungle beside their lander.

When he tried to wriggle away, the cords sounded an alarm, and a Hish forced a coiled helmet onto his head that drove its points into his skull. Shesh-Kuk searched his memories through the device, which had been built by the Amengi, the slave engineers of the Hish-qu-Ten. He found that Mannen had almost no real combat experience, only training exercises, and decided to keep him alive as a test of whether humans could be turned into a slave race. A telepathic transponder then imprinted Mannen with Shesh-Kuk's own thoughts and with Hish culture.

Strapped into the helmet aboard the lander, Mannen lived through Hish memories as his own and thought of himself as Shesh-Mannen, a name that carried the same Shesh prefix as Shesh-Kuk and his son Shesh-Terk. In one vision he fought two challengers in the swamps of the Hish homeworld under the influence of the kill-gland and pinned both with a single pike thrust. In other visions Genghis Khan, Richard the Lionheart, and General Patton appeared with Hish features and let him lead their charges. Being a Hish felt better to him than being Roy Mannen.

Hunting With The Hish

The under-warrior Kaleps-Sis supervised his conditioning and reported on May 22 that the human identified as a low under-warrior. Without the helmet, Mannen walked in a clumsy copy of the Hish gait, imitated their gestures at the control panels, and tried to reproduce their speech with a human mouth. He also repeated a line from the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil" over and over. Shesh-Kuk planned to feed him to his spawnlings eventually, but for the moment treated him as a test subject.

On May 23 Mannen ran ahead of Shesh-Kuk with a pike in a hunt against a family of three Karna, the lizard-like natives of a nearby star system stranded on Midnight. The Karna father hit him in the right thigh with a dart, and after Shesh-Kuk set the father on fire with a plasma bolt, Mannen stabbed him to death with the pike while Kaleps-Sis beheaded the mother. The child escaped into the forest. Shesh-Kuk told him he might be useful, and Mannen took it as the closest thing to praise the leader would give.

Through his link with Shesh-Kuk, Mannen learned that the Hish meant to wipe out every intelligent species on Midnight and to burn any survivors with a weapon from orbit. Aboard the orbiting parentship he was chained by a collar to the deck of the surveillance chamber, and the chain made him understand that the Hish only tolerated him. Later the Hierarch Bel-Cann warned Shesh-Kuk that the mind-control link worked both ways and that the human had taken in too much.

The Ravine Ambush

The Hish dropped Mannen near a fire set by Ness's group so that Shesh-Kuk could test his theory about controlling a human. Mannen cut his hand and face on a thorn branch, tore his clothes, and walked out of the brush pretending to have escaped. He told Ness that the Hish had tortured him for the squad's route and that he had slipped away during an attack by small insect-like creatures. The Karna Rattle and the young Karna Pleth, the child from the hunt, watched him with suspicion, and Ness made sure Mannen walked ahead of him.

On the morning of May 24 Mannen dreamed that he was Shesh-Mannen again, running down Ness in the swamps of the homeworld and killing him with a pike. He woke on the hillside shaken, but he intended to signal the Hish to attack. Later that morning he urged the group onward and took point when Ness told him to. In a ravine he stepped aside as Kaleps-Sis and her warriors dropped from the rim, and the Hish killed Slim Summers and the Atavite woman Ann Louise.

Return To The Humans

Before he died, Summers shouted that he hoped there was a hell for Mannen. Mannen watched the aftermath from the brush and saw Ann Louise's head hanging from the belt of Kaleps-Sis. Unable to say whether he was Roy Mannen or Shesh-Mannen, he crawled deeper into the undergrowth instead of reporting to his handler. The Hish burned him out and gave him a long-range plasma projector with eight shots, ordering him into the tunnel where Ness and Georgie had escaped. The weapon was remotely locked, and when he did not turn it on them, Kaleps-Sis took that as proof of his conditioning.

In the tunnel Mannen broke free of the imprint. He caught up with Ness and Georgie in a flooding sinkhole, held the projector on Georgie long enough to stop her from shooting, and then handed the weapon to Ness. Georgie split his scalp with her rifle butt before a wall of water knocked all three of them down. When a Hish flying platform came down the shaft, Ness used the projector to kill its three warriors, then pulled Mannen and Georgie out of the water and flew the platform up to the treetops.

Hidden in the canopy above the Hish lander-camp, Mannen told Ness there were about 40 Hish on the planet, plus five spawnlings and an old monitor on the parentship. He said he could not leave the planet alive and wanted to help first. Because the Amengi designed Hish craft to fly themselves, he believed he could fly the lander, and Ness agreed to the attempt. While Rattle drew the guards away, Mannen led the way to the command center, shot two Amengi with Ness's pistol, and powered up the forward guns for Ness.

The Parentship

While Ness and Georgie were outside, Mannen closed the hatch and lifted the lander into orbit alone. The lander docked automatically with the parentship using a preset password, and on the way up Mannen wondered whether he was going back to serve the Hish. The old ship monitor Goreph and a scarred warrior found him on an observation deck above the hangar where the Large Sterilizer was being readied. Both were intoxicated, and they talked about feeding him to the spawnlings or hunting him themselves.

Mannen slipped away and found an armory cabinet holding two plasma projectors. When Goreph and the scarred warrior followed him, he killed both of them with four shots. He then killed the Hish technicians in the Large Sterilizer control room and sealed the door with the projector's last charge. While the Hish burned through the door, he worked out how to turn the weapon. He had hoped to set a timer and reach an escape pod, but there was no time. Thinking of Summers and Ann Louise, he chose to stay and fire.

At about 4:41 p.m. on May 24, 2117, the colonists below saw an explosion in orbit and debris falling toward the planet. The Hish parentship had been destroyed before the Large Sterilizer could fire on Midnight. Commander Ness, who had expected the weapon to kill everyone in the colony, credited Roy Mannen with turning the weapon on the ship when he told his son Derry what the explosion meant. Mannen was not seen again.

Behind The Scenes

Roy Mannen appears in Predator: Forever Midnight, a novel by John Shirley published by DH Press in 2006. Mannen is one of the few humans who lived as Predators in the franchise, though his Hish identity came from a machine rather than a hunt or a blood rite. The Hish in the novel call humans Tall Monkeys, and they refer to Mannen as the Mannen Monkey. The novel never describes his death directly and ends his story with his finger over the firing control.

Famous Quotes

"I can't leave this planet. Not alive."
"Actually, I do know how to use it."
"Sure there's a hell, Summers. I promise you."

Conclusion

Roy Mannen was a complaining, inexperienced UNISC corporal who became the first human test subject of Shesh-Kuk's mind-probe on Midnight. As Shesh-Mannen he hunted Karna for the Hish and led his own squad into the ambush that killed Summers and Ann Louise. He broke free of the conditioning, helped Randall Ness take the Hish lander, and flew it to the parentship, where he turned the Large Sterilizer on the ship and was presumed killed in the explosion.