Dr. Soo Sun

This is my character in"Long March," a science-fiction, planetary exploration campaign. Essentially, humans crash-landing on an alien world and having to semi-circumnavigate the globe to reach the beacon to send for a rescue ship. Unlike the previous entries, this is not a narrative scene, but simply a straight-forward background.

Dr. Sun was born in Seoul, South Korea and though she never became the concert pianist that her parents wished for her, she did eventually make them proud. The musical talent skipped to her younger brother, Seung, who play viola in a renown string quartet. Soo's passion and talent has always been in the sciences.

After receiving her PhD in Chemistry from the Seoul National University, she went to Cornell for post-graduate work in their expanding planetary sciences department. The acceleration of space exploration and colonization made finding grants and lab time easy. Her work on atmospheric terraforming earned her a second doctorate.

Among her colleagues, she is known for her dedication and working long hours. Though her lab techniques are meticulous and methodological, they are also innovative and efficient. By mastering the fundamentals and establishing a solid foundation, she is able to improvise and be creative. The ironic parallels with playing music are lost on her.

Teaching never appealed to her. Her annoyance with the distraction of tutoring undergraduates and grading papers (taking her away from her own work) reflected in the harshness with which she dealt with students. This is not to say she was not fair, but she was demanding and strict. Students in the know avoided her classes when they could.

She avoids confrontation and arguments when she can. Intelligent people, she feels, can always agree to disagree on matters that are unproven one way or the other. But if their arguments and evidence cannot stand on their own, they should yield gracefully. The hallmark of a good scientist (or just a good person), she feels, is allowing yourself to be proven wrong. Faith and superstition have no place in her life. She considers herself a perpetual student and views the end of learning as equivalent to death. Her interests cover a broad spectrum and she enjoys civil discussion and debate an almost any scientific or technical topic (though she certainly does not restrict herself to those fields). Though she may come across as a know-it-all at times, she will always be the first to defer to another's area of expertise and seek input from colleagues. She is a consensus builder who has never been accused of being a egoist or a glory hound.

While not a hypochondriac, she nonetheless takes every reasonable measure to avoid becoming ill. She stays fit, takes vitamins and (proven) immune boosters, and has meticulous hygiene. At the first sign of an infection, she immediately takes corrective action. The only chink in her armor is her inability to rest or get a full night's sleep. There are simply too many ideas swirling in her mind and too many projects she could be working on to do that.

When she does find time to relax, she enjoys reading novels, mostly thrillers (mysteries are too easy and horror is too often mired in the supernatural), but she also indulges her guilty pleasure for historical romances. She also pulls herself away from the lab to see a movie, often a film in limited release or one from Korea, at least once a month. Her favorite gemstone is opal which (as an amorphous hydrated silicon dioxide that is also a known fossilizing mineral) she finds more interesting than "carbon with impurities."

She received word of her acceptance to a Survey Development ship while on Mars. Though she had applied years before and eagerly waited the chance to explore planets beyond Earth and the Sol system, the assignment put her at odds with her parents and her fiancé, Dr. Gi Kim, a molecular biologist and close friend of the family. They started dating while she was still in Seoul, and their relationship was casual, existing comfortably on the far side of "more than friends," lacking deep romantic attraction that would have kept them together. It had always been assumed they would eventually get married, but they kept putting it off while they both advanced their careers. Their relationship was often strained by distance—Gi stayed in Korea when Soo went to New York—but both of them knew (though never acknowledged it vocally) that it would not survive the interstellar void. They both knew the dangers involved; they both knew she might never return; they both knew he could not (and should not) wait.