• Department: Engineering
• Sector: Blue
• Email: victor_white@generation.chaosdeathfish.com

Victor is a 22-year-old Engineer, currently residing in Blue. Although fairly new to the department, he has risen to some level of importance fairly quickly through his involvement in the ACTP. He gained some fame by winning the most recent Engineering Creative Design Competition, something for which Carl Grey-Wrench may never forgive him.

Victor often finds himself quite curious to find out how things work, however this is counteracted by an overwhelming sense of self-preservation, which has so far seen him never leave the relative safety of the main population areas of the ship. This gives him the (somewhat dubious) honour of being the only member of the entire Engineering Department to have not been, among other things:

• Irradiated
• Executed
• Plagued
• Shot at
• Blown up
• Attacked by sharks
• Taken hostage
• Drugged
• Arrested

When not daydreaming about whatever technical problem is on his mind today, Victor can usually be found in the Engineering department tinkering with robots, overseeing department missions, and plotting elaborate plans in wax crayon, or occasionally in the Forum holding Engineering meetings while trying to get answers out of Computer.

Victor lent back in his chair, eyes closed, considering the last morsel of his seventh pastry that day. It was nice to just be here in the peace and quiet of Mission Control again, bathed in the soft light of a dozen screens, rather than trying to face down mutant lizards and dodge ITTS carriages in null-grav. It had been exciting, for sure, and he'd learnt a lot from his recent adventures, but with the ACTP once again winding up, Victor knew that a sedate existence of gadget-building and mission planning was the life for him. Which was just as well, given that he had just been made Head of Engineering. Ellis had just given him an epic task, and now this! Well, paperwork had a certain appeal…

It hadn't taken many weeks in the ACTP for Computer's chosen Engineers to realise they knew approximately nothing about the workings of the ship. They all knew how to make basic equipment work, but no-one had ever really had to deal with the greater systems that maintained the Asimov's operation. Where were the Thruster Control Panels, and how did they work? How does one go about turning off the ship's engines? And what the hell do Emergency Stabilisers actually stabilise - in fact, what kind of 'emergency' situation were they even built for?

Still, months of hard work had paid off, and a great deal had been learnt by the Engineering Department, and to some extent by Navigation, too. In a corner of the Forum a few months ago, Varian had passionately made the case to Victor about the importance of making records of all that had been learnt, so future generations of Engineers and Navigators would not have to put up with the same information blackout they had. Naturally, when he heard about this, Ellis was all over Varian…'s suggestion, and Victor, having been involved in a large amount of Engineering's Inversion work, volunteered to set up a collaborative documentation system and to write up everything they knew so far.

So now, here was Victor, writing the introductory article to The Engineer's Almanac.