Kelsey Bax

Kelsey Eliza Allison-Bax (born Kelsey Elizabeth Clarke; born 29 Jun 2457) is an Orinian astronautical engineer who acted as the scientific counsel to the director on Masson Station from 2474 until the station's destruction in 2477, served as an associate professor at Orion's University for the Gifted in the same period, and presently acts as scientific counsel to the president of the Federate.

Birth and early life
Kelsey was born on Attenborough, a protected world with a population almost entirely made of xenobiologist field operatives. Her parents were removed from their program for hiding a pregnancy from the governing chain on the planet, where they return to Masson Station, settling on the 23rd floor of Trinity Tower aboard the station.

In her early years, Kelsey displayed a strong affinity for the sciences and completed the general courses program shortly before her tenth birthday. In September 2465, she was admitted to Orion's University for the Gifted, where she studied biological integrations and astronautical engineering. One month into her studies, an antique freighter had it's VI log off suddenly and sent it crashing into the tower's 23rd floor, forcing a decompression that resulted in the death of her parents.

On June 29th 2466, the day of her eleventh birthday, Nolan Allison, her second cousin and elected director to Masson Station, took over parental guidance from Masson Station's orphan authority via a director's order and formally adopted her the next day. She had lived on residence at the university for her studies but had funding and extracurriculars administered by the orphan authority.

Kelsey went on to continue her degrees, finishing biological integrations in 2470 and astronautical engineering in 2471. The university employed her afterward to develop methods of improving access to threads for interstellar travel and other spaceflight technologies mixing between safety and utility.

Masson Station
As the scientific advisor to the director on Masson Station, Kelsey spent her time fine-tuning subroutines in the station and enforcing improves to the traffic code of the space lanes to prevent approach collisions by high-weight cargo freighters as they often could not be slowed significantly by available tug ships. She continued to impress the director with her knack for solving peculiar problems, and - perhaps due in part to the familial connection - earned nearly complete unmonitored access to the station's systems as a result.

Her range in technological development on Masson Station was wide, acting on various classified projects including Project Soul and Project NETWork. The latter became partially declassified in 2479 to deter from a growing issue of incidents with terrorist organizations responsible for the searing of threads.

The Federate
Kelsey survived the Masson Station Incident in 2477 with then-director Allison and gathered key information on the Node device that the terrorist organization was using to wipe out accessibility to systems. Though incomplete, the data proved fundamental in preventing the Masson thread from being completely dismantled, which left it much like the Downey Terminal thread where it was partially accessible with modified ships that could absorb the heat transfer and abrasion caused by the poor alignment of threads.

Project SOUL
Kelsey was the lead systems integrator for the upgrade of the Masson directorate VI to a functional sentient artificial intelligence. The goal of the classified program was to produce an emulation of the contents of a 1:1 brain scan of Evie Allison taken on the day before her death. The initial attempt proved to be a resounding failure as the AI refused to remain stable under emotional load and attempted to space both Kelsey and Nolan during first contact. As a result, the silver plate containing the brain scan was sucked into the void of space around the station. Nolan attempted to find the shard through visual and compositional scans but failed to find an accurate trace, there was a ton of space.

In SEW Expedition One, not long after, Nyreen was able to locate previous backups of the entire family stored in a cracked-open vault in the director's suite of Downey Terminal. When they were handed to Nolan following the expedition, he refused, saying that he "would rather contain a synthetic AI over wedging past and present together".

The Masson Station Incident
In 2477, a Node came out of subspace and migrating into the center ring of Masson Station. Ultimately resulting in a detonation in the form of subspace collapse in the same way as Downey Terminal in 2462. Kelsey remained on board the station to allow for the evacuation of students from Orion's University for the Gifted. Completing her goal there, she assisted Nyreen in evacuation preparations and attempting to disable the Node. The attempt failed. Kelsey and Nyreen survived the incident, leaving the pair stranded on the station with no means to get off the station and a limited oxygen supply.

Fighting through survivors to arrive in the Director's Quarters, they found the QEC beacon from Project SOUL had survived in part. However, with only a few transfer bits available, transfer rates of Kelsey's files of thread reconnection took two weeks of consistent upload to complete, and rescue came in the form of Nolan's ship The Inundator with a modified subspace drive capable of creating a subspace bubble large enough to travel through.