- "Kuttner was already on the edge; his grief over his daughter. The shard pushed him over into a delusional state."
- —Nolan Stross about Kuttner's homicidal outburst after touching a shard of Marker 3A.
Nickolas Kuttner was an ex-Marine employed on the USG O'Bannon as a security officer.
Biography[]
About a week before its arrival on Aegis VII, the O'Bannon picked up several engineers and technicians from Titan Station for an unknown mission. Later, during a briefing for the mission, as Kuttner gazed at a picture of himself and his daughter, Nolan Stross mentioned that his son had the same eye color. Isabel Cho told Stross to be quiet, revealing that Kuttner's daughter, Vivian, had died in an accident back home a few weeks prior. Captain Caleb Campbell then arrived and told them about their mission to Aegis VII.
Events on Aegis VII[]
The planet had been damaged because of the actions of an engineer named Isaac Clarke and had become highly unstable. The team's mission was to set up several gravity stabilizers to stabilize the planet at specific locations and hold it together. Moreover, the team was to secretly pick up any surviving fragments left from Marker 3A which had been destroyed by Clarke. Each fragment was worth two million credits per kilo; an offer that the team could not pass up.
On Aegis VII, Kuttner found a fragment of the Marker and picked it up. He immediately began to hear whispers and experienced a vision of the Marker in its unbroken form towering over him, before seeing his daughter, Vivian. His daughter asked why he did not keep her safe before being struck by a car, recreating the accident that had killed her weeks prior. Her head was twisted off by the force and Kuttner begged for the visions to stop, saying "not again". He woke up from the vision with Control trying to get in contact with him. En route to the stabilizer, Vivian appeared again, saying that she missed him. He said that he missed her too before a shadowy creature appeared and killed his daughter yet again, spraying Kuttner with blood, but this was just another hallucination. His crewmates contacted him, complaining that all they heard was static. Kuttner then began to see his crewmates as the shadowy creatures and saw Vivian again, being dragged into the stabilizer tower by monsters. He ran after her, screaming her name. Inside the stabilizer, the engineers led by Alejandro Borges were attempting to stabilize the planet, and Kuttner saw them as monsters too, one of them holding his daughter. He promptly attacked, wounding them. When he finally attacked the one holding Vivian, who was in reality Borges' cousin, Noah Pawling, Pawling dodged one of Kuttner's strikes and caused him to hit the control panel of the stabilizer. The resulting damage killed Pawling and destabilized the tower. Borges then knocked out Kuttner with his mechanical prosthesic arm, and the crew promptly restrained him on their shuttle.
On the USG O'Bannon[]
Kuttner showed no signs of recovery as he was questioned later in the medical lab of the O'Bannon about what happened, as he continually said that his daughter was out playing. When the Necromorphs eventually broke free, accidentally released by Nolan Stross, Isabel Cho released Kuttner and allowed him to help as he used a medical blade device and fought off one of the Necromorphs. In the middle of a firefight with the creatures, Kuttner saw Vivian once more, who led him and the team down to a ventilation pipe and towards Stross' lab, where the Marker shard was located.
Arriving at Stross' lab, Kuttner met Borges, who wanted revenge for his cousin's death. Kuttner insisted that he only wanted safety for his daughter, but Borges angrily yelled that his daughter was dead, just like his own cousin. Kuttner reassured the hallucination of Vivian that Borges was just scared.
Later, Kuttner attempted to destroy the fragment of the Marker by shooting at it, but was unable to even scratch it. Stross assured him that the only way to destroy the fragment was to throw it into the ship's reactor core. On the way there, the Necromorphs attacked again. A grenade damaged the wall of the ship and the vacuum began to suck the survivors out, but Kuttner was saved by Borges, who rose above his anger for his cousin's death. During the last scuffle on the O'Bannon, the team managed to destroy the fragment and in the process, the Necromorphs on board. However, their problems were far from over.
A rescue team from the USM Abraxis arrived, finding the group in the engine room where they had been since the creatures were destroyed. Kuttner, still delusional from his contact with the Marker, swore that they would not hurt Vivian and opened fire, killing one of the Marines. The Marines used tasers to knock out the survivors and took them aboard their ship.
Aftermath[]
On board the Abraxis, Kuttner incessantly spoke to his daughter as if she was alive. He was interrogated via a machine that utilized the fear receptors in his brain to torture him. By exploiting his pyrophobia, Kuttner was forced to talk. After telling his story, the EarthGov interrogator was pleased that they had someone who made direct contact with the fragment. However, Kuttner broke free and killed the guards with an acquired pistol, following the hallucination of Vivian down the expansive hallways of the Abraxis.
Killing several Marines and being mortally injured in the process, Kuttner begged Vivian to wait for him. He watched her floating outside the window of the ship, asking him to come out since the "bad men" were coming to take him away from her. She said that if he came to her, they would be together always and forever. The Marines ran at him, just barely getting to him before he opened the door of the airlock and launched everybody into space. As he floated, Vivian floated toward him and he hugged her, saying "always and forever". His dead body floated away, smiling as he was finally reunited with his beloved daughter.
Trivia[]
- Nickolas Kuttner is voiced by Christopher Judge from the TV series Stargate SG-1.
- Kuttner shares some similarities with Alissa Vincent, the main protagonist of Dead Space: Downfall; both were security officers, used the Divet pistol, came in contact with the Marker and had hallucinations, died the same way (getting sucked into space and suffocating, with a the trademark "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" playing in the background) and only appeared in a movie.
- The Marker shard that Kuttner found on Aegis VII had the letter "E" in Marker script.
Gallery[]