VARRIS KANE,

ARCHITECT OF THE CONTINUUM

He built machines to understand life. Now he is building one to decide what should be allowed to exist.

Before the Ashfall Breach, Varris Kane was regarded as one of the Iron Assembly's finest engineers. A senior advisor of the Assembly, he had spent his career designing machines and systems intended to make life in Caldra safer. To Varris, engineering was more than the pursuit of efficiency or profit. Every failure was a problem waiting to be solved, and every problem could be solved if its underlying principles were engineered. 

The Breach changed that conviction. After his recovery, Varris became consumed by what he had witnessed beyond it. The Nexus represented something entirely outside the established principles of known science, and his strange new perception allowed him to sense aspects of it that others could not. The more he learned, the more convinced he became that whatever was beyond the rift was not simply another power source waiting to be harnessed.

Varris began to see the Breach itself as the problem. If the Nexus could not be reliably predicted or controlled, then giving Mechanica admission to it was not progress. It would be an invitation to catastrophe. His solution was radical even by the standards of the Iron Assembly: rather than finding a way to contain the Nexus, he would eliminate the means by which anyone could reach it.

He called his design the Continuum.

This revolutionary apparatus was intended to seal the Rifts themselves, severing the connection between the Nexus and Caldra. No extraction, no experimentation, no access. Varris believes that a force too dangerous to control is too dangerous to leave within reach, and that the safest solution is to make the choice compulsory.

The Continuum has become the defining work of his career, consuming years of research and increasingly ambitious engineering. Yet the project has raised questions that Varris has found considerably harder to answer than any technical problem. By attempting to protect Caldra from the Nexus, he is also forcing the decision that no one should ever be allowed to reach it, certainly not anyone who might believe the Nexus holds answers worth the risk.

For a man who once believed engineering existed to give people greater control over their world, the Continuum is a troubling evolution. Varris is no longer trying to make the dangerous safe. He is attempting to make danger impossible altogether. Whether that is wisdom or simply another form of control is still a question Varris is trying to solve.