Dr. Harmon

Dr. Harmon is a character in The Vivacious Deadlock.

Description:
A professional woman, Dr. Harmon carries herself with a severe dignity. Coming up through the male-dominated world of physics, all the weakness was burned out of her. She feels the need to project an air of hyper-competence at all times and is liable to react very badly to any situation where this is not feasible. She is around five-foot seven with shoulder-length auburn hair. At the time she was chosen she was wearing jeans and a green plaid flannel shirt. She has a thin, athletic build.

Weapons and Abilities:
Dr. Harmon was field testing a prototype of a portable multiple-worlds sensor when she was chosen, and it was brought along with her. The device has a backpack containing fuel cells and a compact cyclotron for exotic matter production, as well as a hand-held probe and readout for measurements. In its current form it is only good for detecting the hyperdimensional proximity of parallel worlds, but it is fertile ground for raw materials and modifications. Dr. Harmon has a sharp mind and extensive training in electronics, programming, mathematics and particle physics. She is also an avid rock climber.

Biography:
“In the mid-21st century, observational astronomy[1]-[8] and high energy particle physics [9]-[14] came together to produce the crowning achievement of physics: the Theory of Everything[15]. It was said louder and with more conviction than ever before that the pursuit of science was now largely over, the rest being merely the filling in of details. However, there were still frontiers not yet explored. Though we knew what was, the question still remained: what must be?”

Thus opened Experimental Validations of The Many-Worlds Hypothesis, the Ph.D. thesis of Melissa Harmon. Over the course of her graduate career, she demonstrated that micro-singularities could be produced, contained, and used to transfer information between the realities bifurcated during the collapse of quantum wavefunctions. Starting with seeing a single atom scattering in a slightly different direction than it did, refinements and higher power have led steadily towards seeing realities which split off further and further in the past.

Yet another late night found Dr. Harmon in her lab, trying a new focusing configuration. Upon activation, the needle on the harmonometer immediately topped out, followed nigh immediately by the power grid for the entire city blowing out. Future tests of the configuration produced enhanced results, but nothing like the first test. What she didn't know was that she had, that night, punched through to a completely different plane of existence, diverged from her own at the very moment of creation. This was a howling chaos, without form. A connection was created between Dr. Harmon and this place, it giving her its ambition and her giving it a body.

Since that time, she has at times found herself compelled to dismantle equipment and appliances and reconfigure them into devices she can not fully understand, though they seem to be related to her research in some distant way. On that other plane, eldritch energies congeal writhing at the point of contact, waiting for their chance to pour across the boundary into the world of matter...

Theme Song:
She Blinded Me With Science, Thomas Dolby