Erica Evilhead - Backstory

Erica was born on Proxima to Maria Benevento and Giovanni Evilhead, both of her parent’s lineage goes back to the first settlers of Proxima.
As her family was considered practically royalty on her planet, everything was handed to Erica, but she was smart and was able to start to see how the world worked from an early age. But wasn’t until she first read Bell’s Hell by Danny Webb, the book that depicted the riots leaded by Gabriel Bell that she really understood. People usually focused on Gabriel and his feats, but she was most interested on Michael Webb and how he organized the community to solve all the problems they faced, even before Bell’s riots and long after them.
As Proxima trinary system had common solar flare events of diverse intensity, the colony used modern technology but didn’t rely on it too much. Because on some events it took several days to recover from the damages.
Erica grow used to pre-industrial technology, having hard copies of all documents and printed books, she was surprised when she started to study on Earth that printed books were considered collector’s items and everything was digital. She was involved with some retro-freaks from the Guttenberg club on her Boston college to keep access to the printed books and she realized that you get better results when you rely on other people’s recommendations than a search on Fednet. This made her interested on the idea of communal intelligence and as a side effect she started building a nice library.
She did well on her studies and after graduating she received a Christine Chapel grant for her proposal on studying the Importance of Ethnoecology on the 2nd Green Revolution. She was thrilled that Andrew Wakefield whose equations on complex systems analysis were the foundation of modern data analysis was the director of her doctoral thesis.
When Erica was ready to publish her thesis, she run into some data inconsistencies. There was no correlation on the results expected depending on the dates. After careful analysis she realized that there was cherry-picking of the data models before a certain date, that is the date professor Wakefield started to test his algorithms. She presented her findings to her thesis director, and he started to make silly excuses, but finally he confessed that he modified the data models, so his algorithm had consistent results in some fringe cases. She asked him to announce that an issue was discovered and that the algorithms will be reengineered, so they work in all cases.
After 2 weeks of not hearing of the announcement, Erica try to schedule another meeting with Wakefield, his assistant told her that he was on vacation and currently unreachable, but Erica felt her tone was nervous. Later that day she got the message that her grant was rescinded, her book will not be published, and she was expelled accused of forging data.
She went to Federation Science Academy and meet some of her friends from the Guttenberg club that they knew she never would do what she was accused of, and they recommended her to go public. A few days after going public she hear the news that Wakefield committed suicide on Risa. She contacted her friends to see if the algorithms will be withdrawn until corrected or at least a warning will be issued when they are used, but they said that sadly the Science Academy didn’t want to implement any of those measures as they were used in a lot of systems and didn’t want the scandal to stain the reputation of the institution.
Out of job and out of hope Erica decided to start a new life on Salem as a schoolteacher. She began depressed but find out later that everything that happened was a blessing, the best way to heal the world was to teach people and give them the tools to do it themselves. Her friends from the Guttenberg club recommended a bookstore there named Noam’s treasures, the old shopkeeper was a wise man and helped her improve her library. Her library was now so exquisitely curated that some of her students made a meme of go to Erica’s library whenever one of them got stuck on their assignments.
Erica thought she could not be happier, but life prove her wrong again when she meet Ernesto, an intelligent and dashing man that studied to be a doctor but ended being the major of Salem. He gifted her for her birthday a printed copy of Importance of Ethnoecology on the 2nd Green Revolution, she didn’t understand, she didn’t need that book, she wrote that book. Then he explained that he went behind her back and contacted members of the Guttenberg club to make sure a printed copy of her book was on- the shelves of every college on the Federation. Erica knew that day that Ernesto was the one.
During her first pregnancy she discovered that she was carrying twins, she felt double blessed, later in the pregnancy she showed some concerning symptoms and when she heard the diagnosis Erica though she would have to rest in bed until delivery, but the doctor told her that this condition has been easily treatable for some time and shot her with an hypospray. Three days later she was admitted in the hospital and the doctor extracted the corpses of the twins from her belly.
Erica was devastated, she didn’t understand what happened, she was obsessed that the hypospray shot was the culprit, why she trusted the doctor instead of her instincts, she felt guilty. Ernesto trying to comfort her wife and defend the doctor, his best friend, showed her all the records and the hypospray logs showed exactly the right amount of drug recommended. But Erica kept reading medical records trying to find similar cases. Ernesto felt her latent hostility because Erica though his best friend was responsible, but he was also grieving his unborn daughters and was desperate because he was not able to help his wife, he was torn apart and eventually give up and left her.
Erica was travelling interviewing other women that had similar cases, but she was not able to prove anything, she wanted to examine the remains of the unborn children but federation regulations mandate to incinerate all biological tissue after removal. Finally, she encountered the case of an Andorian woman, she was treated on an Earth hospital, but Andoria considers life starts at conception and traditional rites were to bury the corpses on ice. She was able to convince the woman to let her examine her child remains and was able to confirm the dosage on the child tissue was consistent with the mother receiving 50 times the indicated dose. But that make no sense the hypospray logs showed the Andorian woman also got the right dose.
She was desperate, she had proven an impossibility but had no way to explain it. She received from one of her friends the original hardcopy of the researcher papers. When she asked for them was hoping to find a discrepancy on the dosage with the medical database files, but now she noticed that the hypospray model used at the time the paper was written had 50 times less efficiency than modern ones. The federation medical database look at the issue and she was right, the dosage was correct but the field of the hypospray model had flipped from the newer model to the older model, later the experts determined that a random event flipped the same bit on that field and the error correction field, on a very bizarre coincidence. They corrected the mistake on the medical database but take no other action, they allow hyposprays to automatically take the settings and very few doctors will set the dosage manually when they can be set automatically.
She won, she find out what happened, but she didn’t feel like a winner, she was at her lowest. After 2 weeks of moping around at home, now alone and without hope, she went out for a walk aimless, she ended on Noam’s treasures, perhaps the old men had some wisdom that will help her. The shopkeeper gave her a wrapped box, inside she found a very old book, he told her it belonged to his family for almost 30 generations, but he felt she should have it. He said: “You see the author’s name, Malatesta, like your family name”.
Erica read the book, it was a collection of articles and pieces of life journals, she had a revelation like the one she had on her teenage years when she read Bell’s Hell. She read a lot of books about anarchist movements and ideology, but for the first time she saw what it was really about, she realized the base of the ideology is none other than love, this gave her hope again, she will start again building a community from scratch with love as guiding principal.
She enrolled in a new colonization effort and convinced the captain to grant her the extra space to take her library, she is now ready to face the next challenge with love and hope.