REAL NAME: AUGUSTUS SILK
TITLE: Doctor Silk
ABILITIES: Genius scientist; memory-implanted clones; functionally immortal.
KNOWN ASSOCIATIONS: Rebekah (surname unknown); Ivar Anni-Padda.
Augustus Silk was born in 1882 to Rebekah, a Cantor’s daughter from Rhode Island who fled west to reinvent herself. She worked as a carnival performer for Sandria Darque.
After his mother died of breast cancer, Silk dedicated his life to finding infinities. In the late 1930s, he joined a scientific group that would set the bases for Project Bloodshot and the first AI. During this time, Augustus fell in love with Dr. Deloris (or Dell, as the others called her) but she rejected him.
The isolation that followed allowed him to focus on developing a process to store an entire human brain into a new cloned body, which he used countless times on himself and Fitzhugh, his personal assistant in charge of ground operations. In a desperate attempt to make Dell love him, he forcibly subjected her to mind-transplants to no avail until he admitted defeat. When Dell’s latest clone met the Eternal Warrior, she revealed how she had spent the ensuing years traveling the world tracking Augustus and Fitzhugh’s clones to eliminate as many as possible.
Ninjak reportedly killed Silk’s original body stored in a secret location in South East Asia. MI-6’s Neville Alcott believed this would end Webnet, Silk’s organization formed by hundreds of his clones and other agents that were spreading a biological virus that replaced people’s brain with a zombie brain tailored by Silk.
When sinkholes appeared around the globe, opening portals to the Faraway, creating chaos everywhere, Silk addressed the world as the benefactor of humanity, promising to cure all diseases and bring an end to death itself. The sinkholes, or wellsprings as Silk called them, were areas emitting energy from the Faraway that could heal even the most deadly wounds. This was possible due to the Judgment, a machine attempting to recreate the Boon. Millenia ago, Ivar Anni-Padda had failed to use it to harness the power of the Faraway for his own goals, but Silk believed he would be successful.
Silk’s followers — called “the Weavers” — organized camps that welcomed everyone that believed in his utopia. Believers included teenagers like Chris C. Clark from Kansas, who Silk came to see as a protegee and potential successor.
Rai – the 41st Century techno-human hybrid – informed G.A.T.E. that Silk is still a prominent figure in his time, having been integral in the creation of Father, the AI that ruled New Japan and created Rai himself.
OTHER DETAILS: nobody knows how old he is; finding his original body could give an advantage.
