Drake Gorrister

“In an ideal world, we’d take as much time as we need to grieve, but we’re on the clock, and Exotech has us on a tight schedule.”
~Drake Gorrister

The Gorristers are an Exotech family, and have been for three generations. Drake’s grandfather Nathaniel joined the company during its initial boom after it developed superluminal drive technology, securing a solid corporate legacy for his children to follow. A legacy that Drake Gorrister has yet to live up to. 

Despite being born into a respected upper middle-class family and provided all the proper care and resources a growing child would need to thrive, Gorrister’s performance in school could best be described as “uninspired.” He consistently scraped together passing grades, but only with the extensive assistance of tutors. He showed below-average problem-solving skills and limited creative thinking, and showed no initiative at all to do more than the bare minimum in almost every task set before him. 

Though his educational performance was lackluster, his name recognition wasn’t. Gorrister was admitted despite substandard grades to Oberon Flight Academy: an Exotech training facility his grandfather had made extensive donations to. His performance was no less lackluster at Oberon, and though he managed to graduate with a Master’s degree in Expeditionary Management, it was hard for his teachers or classmates to picture him going very far with it. 

Gorrister’s eventual job placement was reflective of these low expectations. His first company job after completing his degree was as a mid-level supervisor for a first generation asteroid breaker rig called Brecherhaus 19 in the Kuiper belt. These aging ore refineries were barely profitable enough to keep deployed in the corporate fleet as it was, especially since the Kuiper belt had become largely nonviable for mining in recent years thanks to excessive use of a wasteful mining technique called shatter mining. This was a vocational dead-end for Gorrister; a place for Exotech to shove him out of the way of more promising workplaces. 

But even though he had been handed the career equivalent of a deep space broom and dust pan, Gorrister approached his work with the utmost professionalism. He kept the workers under his supervision in line, holding them to the highest performance standards and keeping Brecherhaus running in perfect alignment with Exotech’s operational regulations.  

Many in Gorrister’s position would have taken a lax approach to their leadership, knowing Brecherhaus was far enough out of Exotech’s line of sight that the station would never face much scrutiny from the higher ups as long as it met its annual quotas. But Gorrister was an Exotech man to his core. Nothing in the operational handbook was optional, no deviations from corporate guidelines were acceptable, and no infractions were to go unpunished. He took his dead-end position running a rock-chopping rig on the shady side of Neptune’s orbit as seriously as if he was one of Exotech’s system directors, and while the workers under his supervision did not appreciate this, somewhere somebody did. 

One day Gorrister received an unexpected offer from upper management; the chance to serve as mission commander for a mining survey expedition to a recently discovered exoplanet called Tantalus 13. While the planet in question was only predicted to be of moderate value to Exotech in terms of projected mineral yield, the chance to be a part of the first expedition to a new planet was still far more prestigious than anything Gorrister had imagined he might achieve in his career. It seemed his many years of unquestioning, unbending devotion to Exotech had finally paid off. 

Knowing he would likely never be given a better chance than this, Gorrister jumped at the opportunity to advance his career and finally live up to his family’s Exotech legacy. For whatever reason, Exotech had decided had the exact qualities they wanted to run this operation. He may not have been a quick or creative thinker, an ambitious leader, or good at working under pressure, but he was unfailingly loyal to Exotech Industries, no matter what.  

Whatever his crew encountered on Tantalus 13, Gorrister would see to it that they dealt with it the Exotech way.