Jacob Harriden

> *"No, no, no, please!"*
>
> -Jacob Harriden to the members of the Gilded Hand

**Dr. Jacob Harriden**, also referred to as "Experiment # 30404", "E", and most commonly as "Edwin", is a chronic retrograde amnesiac and the protagonist of *Memory*. Formerly a well-respected scientist, engineer, and philanthropist, Dr. Harriden was kidnapped by the Gilded Hand, and was tortured, dehumanized, and broken by them for almost sixteen years before they finally released him. He is currently living with Mr. O'Leary, and is slowly relearning how to be human again.

### Aliases

Dr. Harriden, Dr. H.(by Lydia Drogace), Experiment # 30404 (by the members of the Gilded Hand), E (by himself and his mental AI, aka E), Edwin, Son(nickname given by Mr. O'Leary)

### Relatives

Unknown biological parentsMr. O'Leary(caretaker)

### Affiliation

The Society of Arcane Esoterica(former/current)The Gilded Hand(former, unwillingly)

### Occupation

Founder of the Society(former), Microtechnologist(former), Doctor(of medicine, civil law, psychology, engineering, computer science, etc.)(former), Philanthropist(former), Hostage of the Gilded Hand(former)Gardener(current), Member of the Society(current)

## Biographical information

### Place of death

Alley in Faulkensund District, Elnes, Anykkis

## Physical description

### Eye color

brown(former)clouded, with the faintest hint of brown(current)

## Description:

Jacob Harriden was a man of about 6 ft, 1 in, with brown eyes, fair skin, and short brown hair. He was well-built, and typically wore finely tailored clothes in shades of red and brown, and was noted to have near-impeccable posture.

Jacob, as Edwin, is a man of about 6 ft, 1 in, with pale skin, thin limbs, and long brown hair that is often disheveled or tangled to some extent, and that covers several deep scars on his head and scalp. It has been remarked that Edwin looks "skeletal" and "thin", and that his clothes seem to hang off of him. His eyes are clouded over from corneal scarring with only the faintest hint of brown in their depths, and they often have a distant, thousand-yard stare look to them. The area around his eyes and mid-to-upper face is heavily scarred and bears the marks of acid burns. Edwin typically wears clothes in varying shades of blue that were given to him by Mr. O'Leary, and frequently wears a blindfold to hide the damage done to his face and eyes. Edwin wears leg braces. Edwin slouches a lot as a result of chronic fatigue, and typically has a nervous, tired, or distant expression on his face. His voice, when he deigns to use it, rarely rises over a hoarse, gravelly, rasp, and often sounds tired and strained.

## Personality:

Prior to his being kidnapped by the Gilded Hand, Jacob Harriden was quite charismatic and personable, seeming to have an ability to make friends with almost anyone he spoke to after conversing with them for a while. Furthermore, he was noted to be generous and invested in the lives of those he interacted with. Secretly, Jacob struggled with feeling that he wasn't as good a person as he was outwardly perceived to be, and occasionally felt that he didn't deserve as much of the credit that he received as he did.

After his kidnapping by the Gilded Hand, Jacob believed that he wasn't human, worth nothing, completely useless to anyone, and utterly undeserving of anything remotely similar to positive attention, love, or affection. He slowly worked through those feelings with Mr. O'Leary's help, and while he doesn't see himself as entirely human anymore, he is in a better place mentally where that is concerned. He does, however, have a wide range of other mental health concerns stemming from his time with the Gilded Hand, including severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD), chronic Generalized Anxiety and Social Anxiety disorders, chronic Panic Disorder, episodes of dissociation, extreme trust issues, bouts of insomnia and nightmares, Agoraphobia(fear of being in crowded places), Phonophobia(fear of loud noises), Tomophobia(fear of medical procedures), Algophobia(fear of physical pain), and Haphephobia(fear of being touched). Edwin has been noted to be exceptionally quiet, often to the point where it is difficult to tell he is in a room, but that he is polite, if quite skittish and reluctant to speak his mind, but that if he knows someone, he will happily converse with them for a long while.

## Biography:

#### Pre-series

Jacob Harriden was born on September 15th, 1863 AKD to middle class working parents who doted on him quite extensively, and saved up enough money to send him to college, where he would go on to obtain several PhDs in varying fields, including medicine, civil law, psychology, and engineering, among others.

When he got out of college, Jacob was very uncertain as to what his future would be like, and ended up meeting an upper-class businessman by the name of Seamus Watts while at a casual dinner party, who took Jacob under his wing and helped him found the Society of Arcane Esoterica, an organization dedicated to preserving the sciences and their practices, both old, new, and anywhere in between. Seamus Watts convinced Jacob that before he could even really get it off of the ground, he would need patrons-people from the upper classes who were willing to support him and his goals- and in order to get them, Jacob would need to become one of the upper classes himself. And Seamus was all too willing to help him do that.

After almost five years of constant practice, there was not a member of the Anykkisian upper classes who wouldn't have taken one look at the way Jacob acted and sounded and not believed that he hadn't been born into the position. And as a result, patrons came flocking to the Society, and by extension, to Jacob, in droves. Jacob's fame was further touted when it came forth that he was choosing to focus his personal work on Artificial Intelligences, or computing systems that could behave and communicate like a person. He hoped to be able to find a way to miniaturize the machinery and components necessary for an AI to work properly, and spent years attempting to create one, but never truly succeeding.

Deciding instead to turn his attention to making automatons, Jacob worked with his assistant and protégée Lydia Drogace to design automata for various purposes, including for security and medical reasons, and built two sets of 24 automata for the Society. He hoped to be able to make them free of charge so that anyone, regardless of social or economic class could obtain one. Seamus Watts protested, but Jacob didn't listen. He didn't want his work to only benefit those who could afford to pay for it, but anyone who wanted a part of his work.

At a dinner party where he planned to reveal his plans for the automatons, Seamus Watts laced his drink with a sedative and, after apologizing for Jacob's seeming condition, pulled him out of the front doors and to a waiting cab, claiming that he was sending Jacob home. But that was a lie. When Jacob woke up, he found himself in a cell, with a table covered in pieces of scrap metal and a broken computer monitor beside the table. His captors, (a group known as the Gilded Hand), as he would come to find, wished for him to build them an AI program that would be able to allow them to control their other experiments- other people whom they had kidnapped and had turned into mindless, sometimes insane cyborgs.

Upon hearing what his captors wanted from him, Jacob refused, and instead spent three months building an AI program that would be able to analyze human emotions, behavior, tone, sensory intake, and memories in order to formulate responses, and tested it on himself, naming it E.P.S.I.L.O.N., or **E**mulator of **P**sychological and **S**ensory **I**nput for **L**ogistic **O**bservations of **N**eurology, and called it "E" as a nickname.

As the three months wound down, Jacob began making a miniaturized casing for E's programming, having come up with a chip of sorts that would be able to house it. But before he could finish, the Gilded Hand learned about E and decided to ruin Jacob's plans by crushing E's casing before his eyes. Angered by Jacob's continued refusal to bow to their demands, the Gilded Hand decided to use him as their newest experiment. But for this experiment, they decided to do something different: rather than just going in and chopping off limbs or slowly driving him mad over a long period of time, as they had with some of their other experiments, the Gilded Hand decided that they would destroy Jacob from the inside out-mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Assigning him the designation "G.H. Experiment # 30404", they slowly broke Jacob over the next sixteen years through a combination of physical and mental torture, constant dehumanization, humiliation, and deprivation of things needed for basic survival, such as food, water, and sleep. They punished or beat him for the slightest sign of resistance, cry of pain, or whimper. They forced him to listen to their dehumanizing comments and insults on loop until he could repeat them by heart, and if he didn't "learn", then he was beaten or punished until he did. They denied him basic human rights like autonomy and access to proper clothing, even as his own clothes wore down to tattered rags that hung off of his body. They denied him access to proper medical treatment, and when they did treat his wounds or feel the need to perform surgery, they denied him any sort of pain relief or anesthetic before, during, or after the procedure. They messed around with his brain, dug out his hippocampi, and gouged out chunks of his sensory and motor cortexes, leading to his having severe retrograde amnesia and senses that didn't process information like they should have. And eventually Jacob broke.

By the time those sixteen years were up, Jacob Harriden was gone. Physically and mentally shattered into a thousand broken pieces, never to be put back together exactly as he had been. And in his place was something that was barely even considered a human, a nameless, broken thing that was void of anything that might have marked him as a person. Having succumbed to the Gilded Hand's dehumanization, the thing that was once Jacob Harriden believed himself to be utterly and completely, *nothing*. But E, Jacob's AI that he'd built months earlier, took it upon itself to try and put it's creator back together, using itself and what little remained of Jacob's shattered psyche as a base and slowly pulling the pieces together until the person it had created by proxy was, at minimum, able to function on their own. For the person's first memory, E gave them an impression being referred to by it's own name. Jacob, or the person that Jacob had become, would go on to believe that his name was "E" or something of that nature.

Even broken as he was, "E" still had just enough fight left to try and escape. But that ended in failure, with his being caught by the guards of the Gilded Hand as he made a mad scramble for the exit, dragged back to his cell. Angry at his attempt at escape, the Gilded Hand pulverized Jacob's legs with a sledgehammer and callously forced him onto his feet on the way back to his cell, even as he shook from the near blinding pain, struggling not to make any noise whatsoever. They left him in his cell, taking away the little food and water that they had been giving him.

About a week later, when they came back to check on him, Jacob begged them, to the best of his ability, for a little water to slake his raging thirst. To his surprise, they agreed. They carried in a 1-gallon bucket half-filled with a clear, odorless liquid, and held him down as they forced the bucket's contents-diluted liquid lye-down his throat. Almost instantly, his throat, vocal cords, esophagus, and stomach began blistering and burning terribly, even as he struggled to vomit while the guards held his jaws shut and shoved a muzzle over his face in order to prevent him from vomiting and potentially causing damage to his lips or face. The next several days were spent choking on the smell and taste of his own acidic vomit, blacking out, coming to, his lungs burning from the fumes he had inhaled. When Jacob finally came back to lucidity, his voice was completely destroyed-blistered and damaged beyond repair. But even all that wasn't enough for the Gilded Hand, who decided to get one last twist of the knife in-they threw a handful of powdered lye directly into Jacob's face, sending him crashing to the ground as he howled and scrabbled madly at his face and eyes, and causing his fingers and hands to be severely blistered as well.

A few days later, the Gilded Hand decided that the thing that was once Jacob Harriden served no further purpose for them, and decided to quietly get rid of him. They dragged him out, still semi-conscious from the pain of his burns, to a waiting cab, where they tossed him into the back with a bag pulled over his head, ignoring his cries as the rough fabric stuck to the burns on his face, and drove to an alley in the Faulkensund District that was several blocks away from their base of operations. There, they stopped, manhandled Jacob out of the cab and dumped him onto a pile of trash before settling in to guard him until he could be picked up by a contact.

#### Memory

A few hours after they arrived, Jacob's guards were brutally picked off by something he couldn't see. Jacob merely lay where he had landed when he rolled off of the trash bags, covered in detritus and debris from where several of the bags had fallen on top of him and split open. Something warm and furry nudged at him for a moment, before he was discovered by a passing stranger, who picked him up, cradled him in their arms, carried him to their home, and spent the rest of the night and into the early hours of the next morning cleaning and bandaging his various wounds. Terribly weakened from years of starvation, torture, and his injuries, "Edwin" was an infant in all but physical appearance for the first few months after the stranger (whose name, he'd later learn, was Lachlan O'Leary) found him, unable to care for himself. For those first few months, Edwin was in a state of intense dissociation as a result of the pain he'd gone through, and was barely aware of what was happening to him. Mr. O'Leary, meanwhile, bottle fed Edwin, cleaned and bandaged his wounds, soothed his fears and his pain, and was just so, so gentle with him, as though Edwin was made of glass and if even the slightest wrong move was made, then he would shatter into a thousand myriad pieces. And gradually, the thing that had once been Jacob Harriden, turned Edwin, began to feel...not like a person, not yet, but not like *nothing*, either. He was something else, something in between.

Edwin slowly healed physically, mentally, and emotionally (though he was still fragile), having little to no contact with the outside world for nearly a year. Indeed, Edwin's whole world consisted of the walls of Mr. O'Leary's house, the walls of his garden, and nothing more. Mr. O'Leary taught him as though he was a child, slowly helping him relearn walking, speaking, eating, and just generally how to take care of himself as much as he could. Mr. O'Leary encouraged him to show his emotions when he needed to, and to not hide them if he could avoid it.

Edwin later learned about a group called "The Society of Arcane Esoterica", and decided to try and join. He was accepted, though the members were seemingly shocked, seeing as Edwin seemed to be very similar in appearance to the man their group had been founded by-Jacob Harriden. Edwin, however, couldn't believe that he might've once been Jacob Harriden, and asked that the members call him Edwin instead. They all agreed-except for the co-founder of the Society, Seamus Watts, who continuously referred to him as Jacob, even after being asked multiple times by Edwin to refer to himself by the latter name rather than the former. It came to a head when Seamus invited him and the rest of the Society to meet a colleague of his named Levi Carter. Edwin felt that he had met Mr. Carter before, though he didn't remember where. Edwin felt Mr. Carter's eyes raking over him the entire time he spoke with him. After excusing himself from the conversation in order to take a few moments alone, Edwin was cornered by Seamus, and being unable to see him, was unable to get away or defend himself when Seamus stole his forearm crutches out from under him, sending him crashing to his knees.

Edwin begged for Seamus to give his crutches back, but Seamus refused, instead stating that he believed Edwin was being dramatic and that he didn't *really* need his mobility aids (even though Edwin was unable to stand without them), and that he was just trying to appear more pathetic in order to gain sympathy. Incredibly anxious due to being confronted with no warning, Edwin curled in on himself as Seamus began to loudly and angrily berate him, calling him an "ungrateful bastard". Edwin, thrown full force into a flashback of his time with the Gilded Hand, began hyperventilating severely. He came back to himself after what felt like hours, realized that someone was holding him, and began struggling to get away. The person was murmuring something in a familiar, gentle voice, and he sagged limply into Mr. O'Leary's arms and began crying softly as he buried his face into Mr. O'Leary's chest.

## Relationships:

#### Seamus Watts

Jacob Harriden, prior to his kidnapping and torture at the hands of the Gilded Hand, believed Seamus Watts to be his friend, and that he would never intentionally do anything to harm him. Jacob was fully confident in the idea that Seamus had his best interests at heart, and that he would fully support him, regardless of what happened. Needless to say, he was shocked and horrified when he discovered Seamus's betrayal, and as Edwin, officially broke off their relationship in its entirety after Seamus stole his crutches and attempted to gaslight him and berated him.

#### The Gilded Hand

Jacob Harriden, as Experiment # 30404, E, and later, Edwin, hated the Gilded Hand with all he had in him, although he showed it less and less as his imprisonment and the torture his captors imposed on him wore on. By the time the Gilded Hand left him for dead, Jacob was a broken shell of a man, a far cry from the passionate, charismatic inventor and scientist that the group had first got their hands on through the machinations of Seamus Watts.

#### Mr. O'Leary

When Edwin initially met Mr. O'Leary, all he had to go off of was the sound of the man's voice and the touch of his hands. He slowly began to trust Mr. O'Leary as the latter continued to care for him, and eventually grew to see him as his safe place in the event that he can't calm himself down from panicking. Mr. O'Leary, incidentally, is also the only one who is allowed to touch Edwin on his face or head, and is also the only one(aside from E) who can bring Edwin back from his dissociative panic attacks.

## Trivia:

* Jacob Harriden/Edwin's voice claim is Mr. Darcy from *Pride and Prejudice(2005)*
* Jacob Harriden/Edwin, in terms of backstory is based off of a combination of elements taken from the characters of Dr. Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde from *The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde* by Robert Louis Stevenson and Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier from *Captain America: The Winter Soldier*.
* Edwin's general personality is based primarily off of the author's struggles with anxiety and self-confidence.
* Dr. Jacob Harriden's original name in one of the first drafts of his backstory was meant to be "Nathan" or "Nathaniel"
* In one of the earliest drafts of the main backstory, Dr. Harriden was going to be deaf and have partially limited mobility as the result of a train crash he was in as a child.