WIWAW - Dead Space: Kendra

Somewhere in space hangs my heart, shaking in the void, from it stream sparks into other intemperate hearts.
—Edith Sondergran, "On Foot I Had to Cross the Solar System"

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God, writing this story felt incredible. Dead Space: Kendra is the longest piece I've written here, and I completed it in just over a month. Might not sound all that impressive, but it took a full year of research, drafting, editing, and revising to get Crash Into Me done, and Crash is eight thousand words shorter. I pounded out the first fifteen pages of Kendra on 14 April, and completed the final draft a little before 2 AM on 20 May. That sort of manic energy is not normal for me unless I'm writing something very short. To maintain that obsessive drive for almost forty thousand words feels ridiculous, like I broke some law of literary physics and got away with it.

Don't tell, OK? It'll be our little secret.

Also, here there be spoilers. I don't know why you'd want to read this before reading the story itself, but you do you.

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Fanfic and I go way back, with my earliest dabbles of writing falling into that hole. Video games and I likewise have a long and sordid history, and horror-themed games hold a dear place in my heart. One of my absolute favorites is Dead Space, which I picked up for the PS3 shortly after its release in 2008 and played until I had the Platinum trophy. For non-gamers, the Platinum trophy is an achievement awarded for earning every other achievement in the game. Earning a Platinum doesn't just require you to finish the game, it requires you to master the game, and with Dead Space, I was happy to put in the time. By the end, I was intimately familiar with the characters and the setting. I played through its two sequels, and consumed much of the additional media related to the franchise.

Fifteen years later, the publisher of Dead Space decided the time was right to remake it, and boy was this girl skeptical. This wasn't just any game, this was Dead Space: an absolute classic that everyone could agree on, with none of the original developers being involved in this remake. And this wasn't just any publisher, this was Electronic Arts: a company with a long history of creatively bankrupt choices with regards to their intellectual properties. This was a shit tsunami waiting to happen.

But then the remake arrived and even the most vocally skeptical were coming out to say that somehow the developers had accomplished the impossible: they had not only remade, but also improved, one of the greatest horror games of all time. To put this in perspective, it's like directing a version of Psycho that winds up universally hailed as superior to Hitchcock's. And upon experiencing it for myself, I fell in love with the character of Kendra Daniels.

In the original game, Kendra is a complete bitch from the opening cutscene. She argues with the other members of the team, loses her cool as soon as things start to go wrong, and basically does everything possible to get the player on her shit list. That she betrays you in the end might come as a surprise from a narrative perspective, but not from the player's unless you've really not been paying attention. When she's killed by the final boss, we cheer because it's been a long time coming and we're all out of fucks. Nobody mourns Burke in Aliens. Nobody mourns Kendra in the 2008 Dead Space beyond the fact we didn't get to shoot her ourselves.

In the remake however, Kendra is a completely different character. While she retains the same general story beats, including that end-game betrayal, the writers went out of their way to not have the player hate her. Remake Kendra is warmer at the beginning, friendly and encouraging in her interactions, even cracking the occasional joke. When she butts heads with her team mates, her objections make logical sense. She is cunning, intelligent, resourceful, independent, and feels like she has her own agency. While she betrays you in the end, the reason for that betrayal is both understandable and noble in a way. This Kendra isn't an antagonist; she's a secondary protagonist whose goals diverge from yours. Ironically, almost everything in the Dead Space universe would likely have turned out better if Kendra had succeeded. In foiling her, the player may technically win the game, but literally everyone else in the galaxy loses.

That's the Kendra I became enamored with, the one whom I decided to write about after a friend suggested she was pretty hot and would be fun to sleep with. If not for that comment, this story wouldn't have germinated.

Thank you, Carla!

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In the Dead Space canon, Kendra's backstory is non-existent. There are bits and pieces revealed to the player from conversations you have with her, and a few logs you can find which reveal some of her past, but she is largely a blank slate -- and that assumes she isn't being intentionally deceitful with the information she shares. We learn she's an agent working for the government, posing as a computer analyst employed by a mining consortium. We learn she had a younger brother named Kieran. We know she's good with computers, holds no love for the Church of Unitology, and will kill in service of her mission. Beyond that, though? The sandbox is wide open.

There's a line at the start of the remake where she says she'd rather listen to a recording from her girlfriend than to the team leader reciting security protocols. There's no further context, and it's unclear if she's simply saying that because the protagonist was listening to a recording from his girlfriend, or because she has a girlfriend herself. But the idea of Kendra being gay is appealing to me for obvious reasons, and I wanted to play with that. I wanted to figure out what kind of woman Kendra might fall for, or at least be interested in, and I decided she'd prefer someone who was brainy over brawny, someone intelligent but also awkward and naive, someone she could keep off balance, manipulate to get what she wanted, then ditch when she grew tired of playing with the new toy. That sketch became Sasha Prescott: intelligent, awkward, geeky, a True Believer in Unitology, an everyday woman working a non-glamorous job on an ore processing ship whose spends her time eating space ramen between shifts while waiting for her life to happen. She's someone whose existence is turned upside down once she meets Kendra, and who ultimately is so earnest and stubborn that Kendra almost makes the right decision at the end.

Then I decided the most interesting way to tell the story would be from Sasha's point of view: this preserves Kendra's mystery and allure, because we aren't spending the whole story in her head. Sasha's an unreliable narrator, but not deliberately so. She isn't lying to the reader so much as she is presenting her story as she sees it, with all her faults and blind spots. My hope is that once my reader gets to the end, they'll want to give it a second read to pick up on things they overlooked because Sasha didn't put the pieces together, but now they can.

Plus, the sex scenes are fucking hot, so I'm hoping even if the twist ending doesn't pull you back in, the sex will. I wish there had been space for me to do more of them, because Kendra and Sasha are so right for one another.

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I love dropping Easter Eggs into my stories, and Kendra is no exception. Many of the ship names come from the Alien universe: the Cameron, the Fincher, and the Jeunet are named for James Cameron, David Fincher, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the directors of Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien Resurrection respectively. Later in the story, Sasha encounters a maitre d' named "Ridley", a nod to Ridley Scott, director of Alien. Captain Harris and XO Biehn are references to actors Ed Harris and Michael Biehn, while Private Cartwright was named for actress Veronica Cartwright—all pretty obvious, but I figured I should mention it anyway. The Dead Space franchise has done similar things in its expanded media with ship names, including one, the O'Bannon, named after Dan O'Bannon, who wrote the screenplay for Alien, worked with John Carpenter on Dark Star, and directed Return of the Living Dead, all of which were influences on the game's original dev team.

The names on the group messages sent to Sasha's work team are all comic book creators and manga artists who have inspired me over the years. Most of them come from the 80s and 90s, but "Piskor, E." is a nod to the late Ed Piskor, co-host with Jim Rugg of the "Cartoonist Kayfabe" podcast/YouTube show, which brought me years of nerdy enjoyment. The rest of the names you can look up/figure out on your own, but Ed deserves a shout-out.

A few of the other names used in the story come from real-life friends, who are the only ones who would recognize their cameos and were happy to play their bit parts. They know who they are.

Thomas Gregor isn't based on anyone specific, he's just every power-tripping middle manager you've ever dealt with in your life; if your first reaction upon meeting him wasn't, "Oh no, not this guy...", be thankful.

Kendra's middle name has never been officially revealed in any source materials. The one I gave her, Tonantzin, is a tip of the hat to Tonantzin Carmelo, the actress who played and voiced Kendra in the original game.

Even most of the planet names were chosen deliberately. Look up the meaning of the Greek word 'Kapsoura' some time.

Sasha's parents live on Titan Station. Fans of the games know this means they're doomed, as Titan will be overrun with Necromorphs three years later in Dead Space 2. There really are no happily-ever-afters for anyone in this universe.

Also, as a couple people already pointed out in the comments, when she first gets to Kapsoura and is waiting around for Kendra to show, Sasha's story of the space marine sergeant is set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, another sci-fi setting I enjoy. Some of you even asked me to write something set there. Some of you might get what you asked for.

Most of the haiku in the story are obvious, but there's one I snuck in just to see if you were paying attention. It's right at the start of page seven.

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Something I try to do with most of my stories is deliver a surprising but fair ending. I knew how the story was going to end from the opening scene, because the opening scene and the final scene are exactly the same, but written in such a way as to play with the reader's expectations. Years ago I had a discussion with some other writers about how fight scenes and sex scenes are similar in terms of their execution, and this led to the scene that bookends this story: my hope is the reader sees the opening's clear aftermath of exertion, the kisses, Kendra dressing, and assumes we're in media res right after a sex scene, only for thirty-five thousand words to go by and completely flip the script. Same exact words, two different interpretations.

People who have played the game know Kendra is doomed, that a happy ending was never in the cards. Even if the final confrontation between her and Sasha had played out differently, or not at all, Kendra's next assignment is her last. She dies on the surface of Aegis VII, crushed by a literal subterranean necrobestiality abomination. But her parting statement to Sasha, that maybe she'll be seeing her sooner than she thinks, isn't just a nod and a wink to the fact she's going to die herself in a few hours.

The more Kendra has learned about the mission she's supposed to perform for EarthGov, the more she realizes what's ultimately being asked of her. This is a suicide mission. If the reports of what the Marker does to people around it are correct, then there's a good chance she'll lose her sanity. And even if she doesn't, even if there were no Necromorphs and the Marker was just an ordinary piece of stone, her job is to steal it and deliver it to her superiors. Literally every Unitologist in the galaxy is going to be looking for her after that, so her only choice would be to go underground, where no one knew who she was, and just wait for everything to blow over.

The tragedy isn't that she and Sasha have no future; it's that Sasha so earnestly believes they do, and Kendra, by the final few pages, has to choose between falling in love and finishing her mission, because she cannot have both. It's the most depressing ending imaginable, and the only one possible given the canon. I both loved and hated writing it.

I hope you both loved and hated reading it.