Adorée Bédard

Dr. Adorée Bédard, Ph.D., was a Terran citizen and the Chief Psychiatrist of Operation Ark.

Biography

Bédard was born in the Terran Federation. As the destruction of human civilization by the alien Gbaba became inevitable, she was appointed Chief Psychiatrist of Operation Ark, acting as the effective second-in-command to Chief Administrator Eric Langhorne. She was tasked with creating the psych templates that would be used to erase knowledge of advanced technology from the memory of the colonists of Safehold, to prevent the premature development of advanced technology and potential detection by the Gbaba.

She conspired with Langhorne to radically deviate from Ark's original mission orders by erasing all memory of humanity's past from the colonists, including all knowledge of the Federation's fate and the Gbaba. Instead the colonists were implanted with a false memory, causing them to believe that upon awakening on the surface of Safehold, that they were the first humans and had just been created by a God. Using "miraculous" advanced technology, the survivors were made to believe that the colony's administrators were divine "Archangels."

She shared Langhorne's belief that the only way to ensure humanity's permanent survival was to permanently lock the colonists into a pre-technical societal matrix, therefore preventing first contact with the Gbaba and any sort of space exploration. Exhibiting the same megalomaniacal tendencies of Langhorne, she assumed the role of Archangel Bédard, becoming in the lore of the Church of God Awaiting the patron of divine knowledge and mental well being. Her namesake book of the Holy Writ contained instructions on these subjects.

When Pei Shan-wei defied Langhorne and created the Alexandria Enclave that preserved the knowledge of humanity's past for eventual use in compliance with the original mission orders, Bédard supported the destruction of Alexandria and the murder of Shan-wei and all of her followers with the secret kinetic bombardment platform Langhorne had constructed in space. Bédard herself was apparently killed along with the rest of Langhorne's inner circle when Commodore Pei Kau-yung retaliated with a suicidal nuclear strike on Langhorne's enclave.

The survivors of Langhorne's followers, led by Maruyama Chihiro, enshrined Bédard as a martyr at the hands of Shan-wei's treachery. Thereafter Bédard was recognized as the second-most important Archangel.

By the Year of God 890, the priestly order named for her had developed as the most moderate and reformist of all in the Church's hierarchy. This in part produced clerics like Maikel Staynair and many members of the Circle who were leading to the steady destabalization of the Church's control and, in Staynair's case, served as a key catalyst for Merlin Athrawes's plans to destroy the Church and free humanity from Bédard's matrix. Merlin was bitterly aware of the irony and how much this would likely have horrified the real Bédard. (OAR)