“"The future of our kind isn’t back there. The nautilus does not move backward in its shell. Our future starts here, and moves forward. It’s there. Now, come. We’ve much to do."
- – Kevin Vacit, 2265
Kevin Vacit was a human telepath of Zuni descent, on his mother's side.
History[]
Early Life[]
In 2116, when he was only six years old, Kevin Vacit and his mother was driven from their home in Arizona when her Psi ability was discovered during the initial hysteria surrounding the announcement of verifiable telepaths. Shot and mortally wounded, Kevin's mother managed to get them away from their pursuers and into the same caves that had once protected their ancestors. Though they were successful in evading capture, Kevin's mother did not survive her wounds, bleeding out with Kevin still in her arms. However, as she died, the Vorlon consciousness she had been carrying passed along to her from her father, transferred into Kevin.
Kevin would spend the next year or so living on the streets until he is found by Monkey wandering the streets with a low powered telepathic Indian woman. Apparently glad to be unburdened, the woman lets O'Hannlon take the child with him back to the Kith, a tight knit surrogate family of telepaths. Blood, posing as Kevin's aunt, enrolled Kevin in a local school under the assumed name James (though the Kith call him "the Kid"). Shortly after, Mercy, another member of the Kith, is detected as a telepath by the mandatory screenings at her workplace. Tired of the constant wandering, and given her relatively low abilities, she opts to co-operate with the law, and volunteers to take the sleepers. The lethargic and "soul-destroying" side effects are instant and devastating, causing an enraged Blood to remove James from school and move the family before anyone else is detected. She is too late, as, upon arriving at the school, she finds that the children, including Kevin, have just been screened; however, to her surprise, his test comes up negative. Fortunately for Kevin, he was one of the thirty percent of telepaths who did not have the mitochondrial marker screened by the test.
Seeing that the Kith could not run forever, Blood, Teal, Mercy, and Smoke decide to join the MRA, agreeing to serve in rounding up other telepaths. Monkey objects, and decides to leave the group, taking Kevin with him.
Both Sides Against the Middle[]
By 2133, Kevin Vacit, now twenty-four, was successfully passing as a mundane thanks to his mitochondria and the power the Vorlon consciousness gave him to hide his nature from other telepaths, and had earned a Bachelor of Science in neurophysics from Arizona State, a master's in the same from Harvard, and a degree in law, graduating first in his class. After which he worked with the Houston special attorney for metasensory evidence under Ernesto Perez before being selected by Tom Nguyen to replace him as assistant to MRA Director and Earth Alliance Senator Lee Crawford. In this capacity, he worked alongside Blood many times, but she did not recognize him.
Serving Crawford until the senator's death in 2161, just after first contact with the Centauri, Vacit took the position intended for Lee as director of the newly established Psi Corps following Crawford's death in an explosion caused by Monkey. All through his career Kevin's status as a telepath never became public knowledge, even over a century later he was still thought to be a mundane, a ruse necessary to maintain his position as director. Neither Blood nor Senator Crawford learned that the senator's trusted aide was telepathic, but his lover Ninon Davion became aware of the truth (an unavoidable consequence of lovemaking between two telepaths).[2] By the 23rd century, some senior Psi Corps members were aware.[3]
About two months before the assassination of Director of Psi Corps Lee Crawford, Ninon Davion gives birth to Kevin's daughter Fiona Temple. Not wanting his daughter to be raised by the harsh Corps he believed it was necessary to create, Kevin instead gives her to his old caretaker, Monkey, while she is still a baby. Vacit's idea was that by entrusting the resistance to Monkey and Fiona, and himself controlling the Psi Corps he thought that he could aid evolution by ensuring that the strongest telepaths would survive and breed.
While in his role as Director of Psi Corps, Vacit put a great deal of personal effort into continuing Crawford's research of the origins of human telepaths. Eventually tracking down a Vorlon who stayed behind on Venus after the seeding of telepathy on Earth, he learns of their purpose in fighting an approaching "evil" and changes his plans for the resistance. Evolution moving too slowly to effect real change according to Vorlon philosophy, Psi Corps-approved breeding would be instituted to ensure that stronger telepaths would be born.
In 2189, Fiona, now married to Matthew Dexter gives birth to their child, Stephen Kevin Dexter. When Vacit decides to crush the Resistance that he helped to foster, Fiona and Matthew Dexter are both killed, leaving baby Stephen orphaned and taken in by the Corps. To ensure his connection to the child and the former resistance remains secret, Kevin renames his grandson Alfred Bester, after the twentieth century science fiction author. Vacit watches Bester's development as he grows up in Cadre Prime, speaking to him on only one occasion in the middle of the night.
Vacit set his new plans for the Corps in motion without telling almost anyone within Psi Corps, citing that a machine works best when it does not know its purpose.
The Nautilus Moves Forward[]
In 2195, after saying goodbye to his grandson, Kevin Vacit arranges for the Centauri to transport his one-man ship to the nearest jumpgate to Vorlon space. Before leaving he places a heavily encrypted file into the system at the secret archive on Ganymede. Time-locked for the next sixty-five years, the file details Vacit's flight plan and his reason for going. After being dropped off by the Centauri, Vacit pilots his ship at sublight speed, beginning the just over fifty eight light year journey to the Vorlon outpost where telepaths were first engineered.
Due to the relativistic effects of near lightspeed travel in normal space, Vacit experienced less than a year's travel time, though for the rest of the universe he did not arrive at his destination until 2257. Upon his arrival, Vacit finds the Nephilim, non-sentient but terrifyingly powerful telepaths that were engineered by the Vorlons millennia ago from the ancestors of many races across the galaxy. It was from these that the Vorlons engineered a baseline for the telepath gene that they could then slowly integrate into the population of each respective race over the generations. When Vacit first arrived, there were more than a million individual Nephilim scattered through the forests and savannahs of their world, though not long afterwards - possibly prompted by events taking place on Z'ha'dum following the landing of the Icarus - the Vorlons set about exterminating the Nephilim, to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Shadows, satisfied that they had everything they wanted from them. Vacit however, had other ideas. Thanks to the Vorlon fragment that still lived within him, Vacit was able to harness the Nephilim's unparalleled collective Psi ability to fool the Vorlons that they had succeeded in their task, while in fact Vacit and a portion of the Nephilim had survived. Making use of the remaining Vorlon organic buildings and synthesizers, which like the Nephilim responded to his Vorlon tainted telepathic signals, Vacit set about studying what he could find, safe in the knowledge that the Vorlons would not return.
His isolation was not permanent as in 2265, during the midst of the Telepath War, the Psi Cops were able to crack some of Vacit's time-locked files on Ganymede and traced his course aboard a Cyclops class cruiser. The group lead by Mr. Diamond arrived and were quickly overpowered by the Nephilim under Vacit's influence. They were shortly followed by the Toreador, led by Michael Garibaldi and Lyta Alexander, expecting to find Bester. Again using the Nephilim, Vacit fooled the newcomers, even Alexander, that the Vorlons had succeeded in wiping out all life and then projected a telepathic image to make them believe that Diamond had arrived and killed Vacit before being shot himself along with all of his crew members.
After Alexander and Garibaldi leave, Diamond pleads with Vacit to let his group go as well. Vacit tells them that he needs them there and they still have a lot of work to do.[1]
Notes[]
- It is worth noting that most people cannot feel Vacit's scans, but Bester was able to detect it. Whether this is because of their relationship or Bester's higher Psi ability is unknown.