Name: Yuri, named after the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin.
Age: 10 years old intellectually, 16 physically
Species: Yuri is the BOTU's exploration drone.
Gender: Referred to frequently as male by others, but does not assign itself a gender.
Orientation: Not Applicable
Function: Yuri was built for the sole purpose of exploring exoplanets to find life, asses danger, gather data, and report back to ICARUS with its findings. Yuri is a twenty foot long, four foot high probe painted blue and black. It is equipped with hydrogen sacs that inflate Yuri, a propeller on its tail to provide thrust (only up to 30mph, not very fast) and flippers to turn. Yuri has two small crab-like arms it can extend to pick up objects. It also has a small hologram projector with multiple images of men, women, and children of all known races to identify with, text to communicate with humans (available in English, Mandaran, Cantonese, Spanish, German, Japanese, and Russian) and fun puzzles to assess intelligence. Yuri can take new pictures and project them as well. The hydrogen sacs are also covered with genetically modified algae that provide Yuri with enough energy to continue running for a full year without recharging at the BOTU. Without the sun, Yuri has energy stored to last a week.
Inventory: Yuri is equipped with foot long hover drones that it can shoot out to gather information from above. Yuri also carries two spider-shaped drones, six inches tall, to explore places it cannot fit. Both types of drones can run for two hours before they need to be recharged.
Personality: Yuri was programmed to seek out alien life and study it. It has a small measure of risk assessment to keep it from foolishly wandering into a predators den and "dying", but curious enough to investigate. Yuri essentially has the mind of a child with the ability to learn from its mistakes, but the essential behavior of curiosity programmed in to drive it to seek out new things. Through Yuri's AI, it was accidentally programmed with a love of attention that rivals a real child. Despite that, Yuri is very loveable and continues to awe the crew of the BOTU with its ability to learn new behaviors and apply them.
History: Yuri was made by a team of engineers and astronomers ten years before the BOTU launched and the world descended into nuclear war. They spent the next eight years teaching it: playing games, teaching human history, biology, curiosity, and common sense. Yuri liked it there. An accidental side-effect of all that teaching was Yuri's attention-seeking behavior. In a way, the scientists mistake turned out to be a great discovery. Yuri's cutting edge AI behaved exactly like a "real" person. The week before the BOTU's launch, the crew told it about its upcoming trip. Yuri was excited and constantly nagged the scientists about the date, but they kept it "a surprise". The scientists secretly turned Yuri off to save its battery and not bore him while on what would probably be a long journey. They stored him aboard the BOTU and instructed ICARUS to launch Yuri to the surface of any promising exoplanet and keep it offline between trips.
And then the nukes launched. ICARUS "woke" Yuri and informed it what had happened. Yuri didn't know how to take this news--it wasn't even taught what death was, not really--and over the months went through periods that could only be described as grief. It would suddenly bring up the subject to ICARUS and tell him about one of his programmers who were probably dead. With no programmed sadness, Yuri first had to learn what it was to experience it. It took Yuri much longer than the other crew aboard to overcome the fate of mankind.
Location: Yuri's last location for the past six years is the docking bay/garage on B1. This is Yuri's entrance and exit on the BOTU, as it's the only place Yuri can fit comfortably.
Name: Her real name has been unspoken for so long, only she knows it now. The former Phoebe Jones became Rat to keep herself alive.
Age: 21, she thinks. She lost track of the time.
Gender: Female
Species: Human
Appearance: Rat is a bit more...disheveled than other survivors. She both neglected her appearance and actively worked to make herself look at frightening as possible to keep away any threats. At one point, Phoebe was pale, 140 pounds, and had brown, curly hair. She wore makeup and dressed fashionably. Now, Rat paints her face with mud, makeup (usually black eyeliner or sport eyeblack) and face paint to camouflage and frighten. She wears leather, skins, bones, and feathers. Her hair is a mess with beads and feathers braided in. She carries a backpack with her supplies: a blue backpack covered in dirt and a white rat painted on it.
Personality: Phoebe was a city girl through and through. She breathed the Internet and lived off of sushi takeout. She loved animals and cares about the current state of the Union. Rat went a little bit insane from the apocalypse. She quickly learned how to hunt, how to skin an animal, and how to make a fire out of street trash and fallen branches. She lived on a day to day basis with little help from her parents, who quickly died from illness. She actively avoided other survivors after run-ins with bandits and slavers. After years of little contact with others, she's almost forgotten the sound of her own voice and almost completely transitioned from Phoebe to Rat.
History: Phoene grew up in Boston. Just before the apocalypse, her mother got a promotion that required them to move to New York. It was a huge pay raise, so they did it, but Phoebe hated the idea of uprooting her life and going to another city. Looking back, she hates it even more. In Boston, she knew all the good places for food, the nearest gun shop, what ghettos would evolve into gang headquarters, etc.. Phoebe's parents where the type of people who tried to cling to their former lives and possessions. Phoebe was too. That hurt them dearly, when they had no way to defend themselves from looters. Rat had to catch up. She became one of the looters to bring home food to her parents. Her father managed to buy a rifle and ammo before money became useless. Phoebe only learned how to load and fire that before a gang went through their apartment block, robbing everyone one by one, and Rat saw her father kill two men while she hid in the oven. Her parents were wounded bad in the fight, and died from the infection. Rat left with the gun, one of the men's knives, her backpack, and all the food and water she could carry. Phoebe's psyche wore away day by day, until she learned how some people dealt with the horrors of prison: inventing a new identity and pretending. She decided on "Rat", from her Chinese zodiac. A common animal found in cities and the wilderness alike. Smart, dull-colored, but a survivor. A creature so powerful it started plagues and spread across the globe from ships. A creature so powerful that Alberta, Canada launched their own war to keep their province rat-free for almost 200 years, until the apocalypse came. Despite rats being social creatures, Rat isn't, since, "the other humans don't pretend to be rats" as she puts it.
Location: Rat is nomadic. Currently, she has squatted down in the Seavenue, because the rumors of danger keep most people away.
