Simon-G294

SPARTAN-G294, also known as Simon to his peers and as Mordred later in life, was a SPARTAN-III of Gamma Company and was the first active-duty Spartan to desert and take up arms against the UNSC. As an orphan living off the scraps of the city he grew up in, Simon learned to fend for himself and gained a tenacious will to live that guided most of his actions. After being hospitalized by a dog attack, he was sent to an orphanage where he was approached and given the offer to volunteer for the SPARTAN-III program. Hoping to secure a better future for himself, Simon agreed and was taken to the planet Onyx to train as a commando for the UNSC. Although he quickly secured an unwanted reputation as one of the worst-performing candidates in the program, Simon's determination and cunning made him useful to the squad he was assigned to, Team Jian. Genetically augmented and deployed into combat at the age of twelve, Simon's first few missions with Team Jian were all successful. However, on a mission to destroy information stored in the computers of a human ship that had been boarded by the Covenant, his acts of cowardice brought about the deaths of almost every member of another S-III team. Following this fiasco, his superiors rotated him out of Jian and sent him on a suicide mission to assassinate a high-profile Insurrectionist guerilla.

Simon's mission inevitably failed and he was listed as missing in action, presumed dead by his ONI superiors. The man he had been sent to kill, Sergei Kamensky of the Humanity Liberation Front, took pity on the severely wounded assassin (now revealed to be a child) and offered him a place in his guerilla force. Simon, who had become embittered and disillusioned with the UNSC for sending him on what was clearly a hopeless mission, agreed and for the next several months he became a soldier in the Insurrectionist movement. During this period he met Redmond Venter, who aided him in improving his combat skills before using him as a pilot for the prototype of the Insurrection's new weapon: the Mark II Assault Exoskeleton. While he trained with the exoskeleton, Simon also met Diana, an Insurrectionist-made "smart" AI. When UNSC forces attacked the HLF base and killed most of the personnel there, Simon escaped in a small ship with Diana and the exoskeleton.

Urchin and Recruit
Simon was born on the Inner Colony world Constantinople in 2538. His mother was a dirt-poor prostitute who had already half-killed herself with alcohol and drug addictions, and she died shortly after giving birth to him in the slums of the city they lived in. Simon's early upbringing was at the hands of several local dregs, who helped feed and look after the young child. During this time, Simon was not known by any name; his mother had neglected to give him one and the few people who looked after him were not themselves interested in coming up with one for him. When he was around five or six, the boy began to scrounge for food on his own, and would constantly be digging through trash bins behind shops and restaurants for edible scraps. This period of impoverishment taught him a primitive philosophy of self-sufficiency and also made it hard for him to trust others (other urchin children like himself tended to either steal the food he found or drive him out of their own scrounging "territory"). Although the difficulty of finding food left him weak and malnourished, he continued to survive on his own until a vicious encounter with a stray dog hiding in a garbage bin left him badly mauled. The dying boy was discovered by the local police and, after being treated, was sent to an orphanage.

Although the orphanage's staff worried that the new child's lack of any sort of regular social background might make him dangerous to be put around other children, they were mistaken in this regard. The boy (named "Simon" by one of the caretakers) was not a sociopath, although he did prefer solitude to the company of the other children. However, he was far behind all of the other orphans in terms of education; he could barely read and had no experience with any of the fields taught to children his age. While he was intelligent enough to quickly grasp the remedial classes that were taught to him, he also caused problems by stealing and hoarding food and pilfering other items of interest from other children.

While not particularly happy in the orphanage, Simon appreciated the certainty of food and shelter he provided. However, he was ultimately dissatisfied with it because it did not give him any certainty to what would happen in his future. The only thing he could really hope for was that he would be adopted, something that unfortunately did not occur often in that area. It seemed that he would be sheltered and educated until he was of age before being given back to the streets in order to fend for himself.

This bleak future changed in 2544, when Simon was "interviewed" by an ONI lieutenant who had been dispatched to recruit applicable candidates into the SPARTAN-III program. Although not entirely taken in by the lieutenant's talk of honor and duty (these concepts were still relatively new to him), Simon was enchanted by the thought of enjoying the security of both a brighter future than the one currently in store for him and the idea of once again securing what he saw as a sustainable food source. Simon agreed to be recruited into Gamma Company and was shipped to Onyx for training.

"The Brilliant Failure"
Simon's arrival on Onyx alongside over three hundred other candidates for the program was met with a test that the man in charge of the program's training division, Lieutenant Kurt Ambrose, had utilized with great success during the initiations of the Alpha and Beta candidates: a jump from a high-flying Pelican dropship at night. Simon's first temptation to defy orders due to his own fears came at this point, and it was only through luck that he was not kicked out of the program: as he was preparing to give up and step away from the edge of the Pelican's open troop bay, he tripped and plummeted towards the ground. Only a hasty opening of the parachute he'd been issued saved him from a messy death on the surface.

Along with the others who had passed the test (out of Alpha, Beta, and Gamma companies, Gamma had the lowest amount of washouts from the "jump test"), Simon entered into an intensive training program that sought to turn the young children into skilled special warfare operators in much less time than that used by the SPARTAN-II program. At first, while the program focused principally on physical conditioning, Simon was indistinguishable from the other candidates. His life as an urchin had made him naturally fast and agile and he was noted by his trainers for having a high amount of endurance for lengthy exercises such as distance running. However, as the program entered into combat training it became clear that he was many times less suited for combat operations than his peers. While physically there was nothing wrong with him, he lacked the same amount of motivation possessed by the other trainees. Most of these children had been orphaned during Covenant attacks and were driven to succeed and become better warriors by the hope of revenge upon the alien aggressors. Simon, on the other hand, had volunteered based upon his own self interest and was not so much interested in excelling as he was in not being washed out of the program.

While not necessarily lazy, Simon did not put as much effort into his training as the others did and it showed. Before long he had gained infamy as being one of the worst-preforming members of the company. Sparring matches almost always ended with him on his back, weapons he wielded tended to miss their target or jam due to being improperly loaded, and equipment he operated often wound up useless in the field or broken. His tendency to often go off by himself and an innate desire to be left on his own did not help matters, as they distanced him even further from his fellow trainees. However, in spite of these deficiencies Simon rarely ever "died" during combat exercises. He had an innate knack for knowing which places were safest to hide or take cover in, something that helped him escape from tight situations he got himself into due to his own failures.

Simon was widely acknowledged as being the worst trainee in the program, lacking almost any useful specialty to add to a team's capabilities. He did possess one true saving grace though, which prevented him from being dropped from the roster entirely: a sense of cunning and deviousness lacked by the other candidates. Unlike his peers, who were extremely smart and skilled tactically, Simon was more than willing to do anything it took in order to accomplish the objectives set in place by whatever exercises Lieutenant Ambrose and Gamma Company's drill instructors put to them. He employed "underhanded" tactics that the others felt uncomfortable using against their fellows, such as faking surrender (when surrendering was allowed by the exercise), playing dead (during exercises that utilized the anesthesia-inducing tactical training rounds), and even bribing some of the less conscientious trainees into "allowing" his own team to win with extra food from his private "stash" (Ever since coming off the streets, Simon had always been paranoid about not having enough food to eat. Therefore, he developed a habit of stealing food and hoarding it away in various places. He rarely ate from these stockpiles and the food stored there often went bad, but he felt safer knowing that they were there if he needed them.) While he was often reprimanded by various DIs and occasionally Lieutenant Ambrose himself, who asserted that such tactics would never work on the real battlefield, Simon believed that he was learning a different lesson from the tricks and cheats he employed during exercises: how to utilize whatever methods were on hand and available to him in order to survive and win.

One particularly egregious example of Simon's devious streak occurred during a team-building exercise shortly before the S-III trainees were organized into permanent teams. Placed in groups of four and pitted against each other while armed with training weapons loaded with TTR rounds, the Spartan candidates were scattered throughout one of Onyx's many woodland training grounds. The appointed leader of Simon's team, one Ralph-G299, was ill-suited for the role and constantly got the team into impossible situations due to his aggressive and poorly thought out tactics. When he refused on several occasions to take better advice from his subordinates, Simon shot him in the back with several TTR rounds and turned command of the team over to a shocked Vincent-G270, who wound up leading them much more competently. Simon was severely punished once the exercise was over (the point of randomly assigning team leaders was as much a way to teach the subordinates how to operate under poor officers as it was a means of giving every candidate a leadership experience) and he made an enemy of Ralph, but gained a newfound respect, small though it was, from his peers.

Team Jian
"I don't believe this! After all my high marks and exercise wins, I get stuck in command of the team with the resident adrenaline-junky, the girl who's always starting fights, the kleptomaniac, and the total loser! What did I do to deserve this?"

- Jake-G293 upon being placed in command of Team Jian

After two years of performing combat exercises with randomly assigned teams and leaders, the Gamma Company trainees were divided into five-man teams, each with its own pre-assigned team leader based upon statistics gathered during previous leadership exercises. Simon was never even considered for a leadership role and indeed he did not want one; he was content to follow any leader who did not make rash, suicidal choices during battle. He was assigned to Team Jian under the command of fellow trainee Jake-G293, who was known as one of the best-performing individuals in the company. However, the other members of the squad were not so exemplary. Mary-G130 was feared amongst the other trainees for her short temper and had been disciplined on several occasions for starting fights. Terrence-G150 was also a troublemaker, but for different reasons: he enjoyed stealing things, be they large or small, and had been disciplined by both his superiors and his fellow trainees for his thieving ways. Ralph-G299 was, like Mary, a fight-starter and already bore a grudge against Simon for the incident during the leadership exercise. Jake was less than pleased to be assigned to such a ragtag team (Team Jian quickly gained the nickname of "Problem Squad"), and at first group cooperation was substandard.

All five members of the squad had, like all other Gamma trainees, been trained and conditioned to accept decisions from their superiors that they disagreed with and carry on obediently with the tasks at hand. Unfortunately, Jake was the only member of the group completely committed to this maxim. The first several exercises Team Jian was put to resulted in abysmal failures, as it was constantly being outmaneuvered and outpreformed by both drill instructors and other teams. Although each of the team's members, including Simon, did put some effort into performing better as a team, their collective flaws and weaknesses always seemed to doom efforts to improve to failure. At one point, even the stalwart Jake began to lose hope of ever improving.

Ironically, it was a catastrophic failure that put Team Jian back on the path to success. An exercise they had to perform was a live-fire obstacle course studded with booby traps and patrolled by DIs armed with TTR rounds. Although the booby traps, which were all explosives of some kind, had their potency severely limited to avoid actually killing trainees, they were still highly dangerous. For the purposes of this particular exercise, all of the traps were highly visible but almost impossible to bypass without exposing oneself to fire from the DIs. Therefore, the teams had to work as a unit in order to cover each other from DIs while also properly disarming the booby traps. Team Jian made it about midway through the course before being pinned down by multiple DIs. While the rest of the team supplied covering fire, Jake instructed Simon to disarm the latest booby trap. Unfortunately, the combined noise of shouting and gunfire spooked the jittery Simon as he struggled to disarm the weapon, and he accidently detonated it instead. The resulting explosion caught him full in the chest at close range and came very close to killing him. He spent two weeks in critical condition in the training facility's medical wing, and although he emerged without any permanent damage to his combat capabilities, Simon's chest would bear a spiderweb of distinctive scars that stretched across and around his torso for the rest of his life.

Following the disasterous obstacle course mission, each member of the team blamed themselves for what had happened to Simon and vowed to redouble their efforts to perfom better as a team. While they mentally punished themselves for imagined failings, Simon had to face the reality of the situation: he had almost died because of his failings as a soldier. At close to ten years of age, he began to be intensly afraid of dying during training and during the combat deployments against the Covenant that he knew were to come. Although this fear drove him to better cooperation with his teammates and a more dedicated attitude towards his training in general, it also made him realize just how short of a life expectancy he might possibly have when deployed in the field. This realization made him bitter towards the military and towards the UNSC in general, and when each of his inner musings about this fact ended with the admittance that he had, in fact, volunteered for the program, this made him even angrier.

A further addition to his growing bitterness stemmed from the stories the trainees swapped during their downtime. Most of the children had been orphaned by Covenant attacks, but the stories they told were filled with fond remembrance for life before tragedy had reshaped everything. Rather than making Simon grateful for the fact that he had not had to experience the same pain as they had, these stories instead made him resentful of the fact that everyone around him had been able to experience the joys of having a real home and family. Remembering his daily struggles to survive on the streets of his home city further widened the gap between himself and the other trainees and deepened his resentment of the fact that he would probably die without ever having the pleasant experiences the others could fall back on. When his negative emotions became too overpowering, Simon found hobbies outside of training to lessen their burden. He took up writing and kept a diary through which he could vent his thoughts and frustrations.

"You're a sneaky little bastard Simon. I like that in a teammate."

- Terrence-G150 to Simon-G294

Although his inner resentments gnawed almost constantly at Simon's mind, he did his best to ensure that they were at least put to productive use. He used his bitterness at his inferiority to the other trainees as a means of galvanizing himself to train harder than he ever had before. Although he remained towards the rear of the overall skill pool, he also came to be more appreciated by his teammates. While Jake dissaproved of Simon's devious tactics, he could not deny that they were quite useful in some situations and it was because of this "wild card" that Team Jian managed to secure occasional victories during exercises against other teams. Ralph would always dislike Simon, and the two did their best to avoid each other as much as possible without hindering their team's effectiveness. On the other hand, Mary and Terrence did appreciate their unusual teammate. Mary enjoyed his devious nature, and the two often collaborated whenever Mary wished to pick a fight with another team. Terrence, who was always getting into trouble for stealing odds, ends, and the occassional piece of expensive equipment, found in Simon a willing accomplice in many of his "heists". Simon was more than willing to risk punishment in exchange for more food for his stashes (which could now be found in almost every part of the training facility), and often helped Terrence plan out nightly raids. The bonds Simon formed with his teammates proved to be an even greater incentive to perform better at his training than his internal resentments, and as Team Jian grew closer together he came to consider his squadmates (aside from Ralph) to be true friends, the first time in his life that he had actually admitted to such a relationship. However, this closeness made him much less responsive towards people from other teams, and Team Jian as a whole gained a reputation for being very reserved and withdrawn when dealing with those outside their squad.

One non-Jian trainee that Simon acknowledged, at least inwardly, was one Cassandra-G006, a member of Team Kopis. She, like Simon, had poor ratings when it came to combat exercises but had made up for this shortcoming by becoming one of Gamma Company's few medical specialists. About a year before Gamma Company's augmentations, Simon developed a small crush on her, which he was not bold enough to express openly and thus kept private. He did make the mistake of telling his secret to his teammates, and it became a common article of derision during playful banter.

Augmentations and Graduation
"Sometimes I don't get it, this need to survive no matter what. I've never experienced anything in life worth clinging on to, never possessed and lost anything worth seeking out again. All things considered, I should be more than prepared to lay my life down for the cause that we're being trained for. But maybe that itself is the reason I want to live so badly. Maybe I just want the chance to be able to experience everything I've had to miss out on."

- Passage from Simon's diary.

As the time approached for Gamma Company's graduation, Simon continued to improve but unfortunately also continued to be surpassed by the others. Although he had grown used to the constant embarrassments that came with losing every sparring match and being considered by others to be more of a hinderance than a help, he still fostered the bitterness that had developed within him during earlier parts of training, bitterness at both lacking any experiences even beginning to approach those of a normal life and the superior skills of those around him. Nevertheless, he continued to struggle at getting better and was motivated not by any sense of loyalty to the UNSC or humanity but by his determination to make himself strong enough to be able to survive on the battlefield.

When the time for Gamma Company to receive a series of chemical augmentations that would improve their combat abilities and complete their transformation into Spartans, Lieutenant Ambrose, himself a recipient of such drugs, gave every member of the company a chance to opt out while their was still time. He feared that the drugs might have critically adverse effects on the recipients, as they had with the SPARTAN-II candidates several decades prior. Still fearing that he would die in combat, Simon seriously considered quitting while he still had the chance. However, the bonds he shared with his teammates compelled him to stay on, and he and the rest of Gamma Company were taken to a medical facility, the UNSC Hopeful. There they were injected with the following chemicals: While the first four of these augmentations had been carefully researched and improved upon by top military scientists over the course of the SPARTAN-III program, the last one was not. This was a new feature, introduced by Ambrose himself because he felt that the Spartans would need them in the missions they were to undertake, and its administration was illegal. Although it would prove useful to the Spartans in the months to come, it also threatened to make them irrational and violent if not properly kept in check. In order to prevent this from happening, the ONI "handlers" assigned to brief and monitor the deployed SPARTAN-IIIs regularly administrated drugs to their charges that countered the negative effects of the illegal augmentation.
 * Drug 8942-LQ99: A carbide ceramic ossification catalyst to make skeletons virtually unbreakable.
 * Drug 88005-MX77: A fibroid muscular protein complex that boosted muscle density and strength.
 * Drug 88947-OP24: A retina-inversion stabilizer drug. It boosted color and night vision capabilities.
 * Drug 87556-UD61: Improved colloidal neural disunification solution, which in turn decreases reaction time.
 * Drug 009762-OO: A mutagen that alters key regions of the subject's frontal lobe. Enhances aggression, strength, endurance, and tolerance to injury. Kept in check by antipsychotic and bipolar-integration drugs.

Following their augmentations, Gamma Company was shipped back to Onyx, where they spent a short period of time adjusting to their improved bodies and perfecting their use of the newest models of the Semi Powered Infiltration armor. Once this phase was complete, Lieutenant Ambrose and the ONI officers involved with the SPARTAN-III program began preparations for Gamma Company's deployment against the Covenant. In the meantime, every squad in the company competed against each other for "top honors" in a series of training skirmishes using non-lethal stun rounds. Although Team Jian did not make it very far in the competition, they still did much better than what was expected of the "mongrel squad". When all but three teams had been eliminated, the rest of Gamma Company departed Onyx and readied themselves for war.

Reassignment
"This is unacceptable. Sierra G294 is clearly responsible for the fiasco on the Ides of March, and closer examination of his file shows that he's borderline criminally incompetent. Get him the hell out of field duty with other SPARTAN assets before he does any more damage and have him replaced by the survivor from Team Kopis. I've got a reconnaissance mission sitting on my desk that's just screaming "suicide mission"; perfect for an embarrassment like G294, wouldn't you agree?"

- ONI Commander Zachary Reese

Survival
"I don't... understand..."

- Last transmission received from Simon-G294 during Operation: MAD DOG

Among the Rebels
"Kid, I don't know exactly who or what the hell you are, but what I can tell is that you're some sort of UNSC special forces trooper. Maybe you're one of those freaky "Spartans" we've been hearing about and maybe you're something new altogether. Now I'm sure you're a bit more in touch with what happened back there then I am, seeing that you're one of the UNSC's little pets and all, but there's no way they could have expected to survive out there all on your own. Get it, kid? They sent you there to die. They needed something done and they didn't have the minerals to do it themselves, so they sent you to go down there to get them what they wanted and then they just hung you out to dry. Now that has to make you angry, right? I mean, I wasn't even involved in the whole thing and it still pisses me off. Stuff like this is the reason we're even fighting the UNSC to begin with. Those guys throw up a big smoke screen about protecting all of humanity, but they'll sacrifice people--whole colonies, even-- who look to them for leadership and protection. "The needs of the many" and all that jazz is what they'll tell everyone else, but they're really doing it because they don't have what it takes to save everyone. So they'll go and protect "the many" while "the few" like you or me get to die and be forgotten. Now my throat's getting dry from all this talking, so I'll leave now and let you think about all that while all those plasma burns heal and while we re-grow all the failed organs we had to take out of you. Do you really want to keep serving the people who put you through all this suffering?"

- Insurrectionist Redmond Venter to a near-comatose Simon-G294

Mental Report
"I don't think you get it, Jake. You and all the others, you all just don't get it. Yeah, you're all orphans, but at least you had something to start out with. Me, what did I have? My mother didn't even bother to give me a name, let alone any of the other stuff you others got. All I've ever known is hunger, fear, and violence. So yeah, I am a little selfish and yeah, I do look out for myself first and foremost on the battlefield. I'm not throwing my life away out here, especially when I've never had much of a life in the first place!"

- Simon-G294 venting to Jake-G293

Trivia

 * Simon was Actene's first character on Halo Fanon
 * Since Actene is a terrible brow-beater when it comes to thinking of names for his characters, the name Simon was taken from The Lord of the Flies which Actene was reading at the time. Simon-G294 bears little or no resemblance to the boy from the novel.