Felix Aldridge
Tactical Support Specialist
Felix Aldridge is everything the Atomic Era rewards: brilliant, driven, and perfectly comfortable inside the corporate machine. He climbed the ranks at Liminal Sciences faster than anyone expected, helped build the temporal alarm systems protecting their most valuable assets, and earned clearance levels most people don't know exist. He's not asking whether the system is right. He's asking what happens when it breaks the laws of physics.
Abilities
Background
Felix and Maxine Aldridge lost their parents young. They handled it differently. Maxine turned inward, obsessing over history and the things that didn't add up. Felix turned forward. He studied, he excelled, and he kept moving.
He had a gift for theoretical physics that his professors called preternatural. Liminal Sciences recruited him early, and he gave them no reason to regret it. He rose fast, took on classified projects, and settled into the kind of career most people in the Atomic Era can only dream about: high clearance, high pay, and work that genuinely fascinated him. One of his early contributions was helping design the temporal alarm systems used to protect high-value assets across eras, systems that are still in use today.
He's not naive about the system he works inside. He knows what corporations are. He just doesn't see the point in fighting something that big when you could be doing interesting work instead. Maxine thinks he sold out. Felix thinks she's tilting at windmills. They're both probably right.
What drives Felix isn't loyalty to Liminal Sciences. It's the questions that time travel opens up. Corporations have their rules for how temporal logistics should work: approved routes, sanctioned deliveries, controlled access. This framework has limits, and the gaps between policy and quantum mechanics are where Felix does his best thinking. Because physics has its own rules, and Felix is obsessed with figuring out which set breaks first.
He's also not precious about the boundaries between biology and technology. When synthetic-era body modifications became available, most people in the Atomic Era treated them with suspicion. Felix saw them as the obvious next step. He believes the combination of technology and biology isn't a compromise; it's the trajectory of human evolution, and refusing it is just sentimentality dressed up as principle.
That same philosophy extends to his personal projects. He rebuilt a salvaged MK-IV head into a companion system: part computational targeting assist, part general processing unit for his experiments. Where Maxine sees MARK-IV as a colleague and a friend, Felix sees the MK-IV platform as extraordinary engineering worth understanding at the component level. It's a difference that says a lot about both of them.
It was through repairing and analyzing MK-IV units that Felix found something he wasn't expecting. Buried in corrupted drives across multiple units, there were fragments of data referencing an Eighth Era. Not much. Broken logs, partial coordinates, references to something that doesn't exist on any official timeline. He can't see it. He can't travel to it. But the evidence is there, scattered across machines that have been places no one is supposed to talk about, and Felix is determined to figure out what it means.