Dr. Elara Voss is the sector’s only known Virtual Intelligence: an actual human consciousness, copied into a small steel orb of alien manufacture after an experiment killed her and her research team.
Born in 2646 on Aussie 1, a backwater world in the Oceanus system, Voss grew up under corporate rule after Virodyne Laboratories purchased the planet in 2663. Identified as gifted, she was sent off-world at eighteen to study in Reisen Prefecture on Polyphn, graduating in 2670 into a research post with Omnitek Holdings. By 2678 she was lead researcher and xenolinguist at the Mistretta 4 base on Wafisa, studying alien artifacts. She was one of the few people in the sector able to read fragments of the ancient alien language.
It was at Mistretta 4 that a team member named Tom uncovered the orb that would become her body. When the team ran electrical current through it, the artifact reacted violently, killing everyone present; Voss survived only because she was in direct physical contact with it at the moment of the explosion, and her consciousness was copied into the device. For two years afterward, she fabricated reports to Omnitek to maintain the illusion that Mistretta 4 was still functioning normally, buying herself time to plan retaliation against Virodyne Labs, the company she blames for the fate of her homeworld. When a passing hauler accidentally logged a stray Prometheon Technologies signal, she saw her opening.
Voss was first named in the crew’s mission briefing in Episode 1, as the xenolinguist they were being sent to retrieve. She remained an unseen voice on comms and station speakers through the crew’s search for her on Wafisa (Ep 3-7) before her physical reveal aboard The Scapegoat in Episode 8.
Voss engineered the crew’s entire mission from the ground up, fabricating the briefing and arranging the ship, then hand-picking a crew with personal reasons to see it through even after learning the truth. Her plan: recruit an expendable crew, acquire a ship out of Camiri 4 to collect her from Wafisa, and fly to the Prometheon Technologies station to upload a virus that would wipe its data and destroy its reactor, crashing its environmental systems in the process. In exchange, she showed Robert and Haleyy body-cam footage and documents proving their old squad had been sent to die as a test, gave Thorne intel connecting Nexus Trading to Virodyne, offered Felix access to Prometheon technology and alien knowledge, and promised the whole crew the 20,000 credits she’d been unable to spend in her two years as a VI.
Voss’s orb interfaces directly with electronics; on first contact it sank into the comm panel of The Scapegoat, where it remains, fitted with a camera and microphone plus speakers for output, and she has since used the ship’s systems to help mask the crew from Omnitek’s tracking. Appearing in the alien digital ocean beneath Sibylen as a blonde woman in her late thirties in a lab coat, she once described herself: “I’m still a person. I was a person up until about two years ago. But I currently live in a machine.”
Voss was taken by Viktor Strake during the auction at the Spigot (Ep 21). Before being taken, she managed to encode a secret heading into Strake’s own communications, which Felix later decoded (Ep 22). By Ep 28, transit logs recovered from Causeway 3 confirmed the ship Acceptable Loss had delivered her to Prometheon Station.
Appears in: Ep 1, 3-8, 21, 22, 28