“I was eight when I was taken to the Watchers Bureau. We called it homework. Mom hated it but to my dad, it was something to be proud of… I was his son. I was supposed to take his place when he couldn’t lead the Order anymore.
It was just me and my dad… I was only eleven back then, but knew enough to take his place. We were there on a business trip when the first catalyst destroyed Ashwater. We were attacked. People were trying to get out, but they couldn’t. We were escaping in an Eider until there was a malfunction… and we went down. Into the city. I remember my father telling me to close my eyes. He started praying to God, or Buddha, or whatever… All those years of perfect obedience, and that one time I didn’t do what he told me. I didn’t close my eyes. I can’t help but remember the look on his face. It was the last thing I ever really saw. Then I saw nothing.”
--Tejinder, explaining his history to Rey
Tejinder Wakeman is a main character in the Project SERAPHIM series.
Appearance[]
word
Role[]
As the Archiver, Tejinder plays a very pivotal role in the government. Even without the Bridge in his brain, Tejinder is something of a prodigy. He always has been. At twenty-three years old he was employed by the Western Order's Programming and Engineering Unit, originally as a Coder, and later becoming the Archiver.
The Archiver is a position created specifically for Tejinder Wakeman. Because there is no one else with the Bridge who can process information as fast as he can, there is no other Archiver. Tejinder Wakeman is a one-of-a-kind animal.
History[]
Before Project SERAPHIM[]
Tejinder was born in Battleground, Washington. Shortly after, his parents moved to Portland, Oregon. As an infant, Tejinder developed night terrors, which prevented him from sleeping much throughout his life. At age ten, he finally saw a psychiatrist for his night terrors after waking up screaming due to falling asleep in class, though none of the techniques offered to him made much progress. He received sleep therapy and became the subject to a lot of tests and was moved to his father's workplace in Ashwater, Washington for more advanced therapy.
Two years later, the First Cataclysm rendered the population of Ashwater to dust. Before that, Tejinder had been with his father, Cecil Wakeman, helping to oversee the Western Order he was going to take charge of one day when the riots started. An assassination attempt was also made on Tejinder, which was intended to be on his father. Cecil attempted an evacuation of the city when their eider is shot out of the sky by the Battle-Brave explosion. Not only was Tejinder the sole survivor of the crash, but he suffered from the lens in his glasses shattering in his face, leaving him blind.
However, the alternative could have been worse. If not for a dying soldier passing upon the crash site, the boy would have died while the eider was going up in flames. But she had carried him to safety where he was found by the salvage team rummaging through the city dust. Tejinder woke up in a hospital, where he spent a year recovering from the injuries he had received from the crash. Some of his vision has been saved, but he would remain legally blind for the rest of his life.
His night terrors also worsened. He returned home to his mother and baby brother, Tamas. Once the bandages were uncovered from the boy's eyes, it started to become apparent to him that, despite his blindness, he was capable of seeing things that others couldn't in the dark. For years he couldn't make sense of the things he saw, though. As a result of the Battle-Brave, he was forced to invest in prescription sunglasses so the light did not cause permanent damage to his eyes. Without sunglasses, enough light exposure could cause Tejinder to develop a disease that would require amputation of his eyes to save further infection into his brain and kill him. They called it Lux Caeco, or "light blindness".
With the remnants of Niflheim's technology, Lucas Coffey developed a device for the young Tejinder, which allowed him to synch the back of his brain with a CPU in order to access terminals. It was technology that had been redesigned specifically for him, allowing Tejinder to physically see and manipulate any kind of code he connected to.
As it turned out, the device was actually old technology belonging to a prototype that Algernon Boryenka had been working on before his murder, as a mean to better simulation programs for future generations. Lucas called the device a Mnemotechnic Serial Bridge -- or just the Bridge for short. The Bridge had been tested on several subjects that had been patients at the Renaissance Sanitarium in Engelus, Nevada. All of them had been rendered in a lobotomized state. Tejinder Wakeman was the sole exception to have properly utilized the Bridge, to which Lucas believed that his exposure to the energy during the First Cataclysm may have had something to do with the boy's ability to adapt to it.
With high SAT scores and overall performance, Tejinder Wakeman was able to skip four grades ahead of his class and graduates high school at age fourteen. He attended a university in Portland, where he planned to go to Engelus after so he can be close to the Western Order. Lucas Coffey saw the mirror image of his younger self in Tejinder Wakeman. As such, he helped Tejinder achieve his potential by offering him special treatment on being able to utilize the Bridge's synchronization as much as possible, figuring out how the device really works.
With six years of experience in computer science and several degrees, Tejinder Wakeman graduated tech school. He then was able to move out of his mother’s home in Portland, Oregon and went to where he thought he could find tech work in Engelus. He worked some small odd jobs there for awhile, before he went to seek out Lucas Coffey as a mean of finding work. However, by then he learned that the bossman had gone missing.
Three years later, Tejinder was hired by the Western Order as a Coder. Despite being the youngest on his team of engineers, Wakeman tested the highest and most qualified in his field, and was promoted as the Archiver for the Western Order. This more or less alienated him from those he works with (especially the Patrol Units, who incidentally see him as something of a freak kid who survived a freak accident after the First Cataclysm). Wakeman became self-conscience of his eyesight, and decided to hide his Lux Caeco by keeping on his prescription sunglasses at all times (not that he had much of a choice, unless he wanted to inevitably kill himself).
Over the year he had been employed, Tejinder submitted several ideas and innovated schematics that help better their security systems. In spite of his best efforts, his contributions went ignored. He started to grow bitter when he realized how under-appreciated he was, and started sneaking into the restricted areas of the workplace. It's then that he discovered that the chancellor was manufacturing synthetics. Using the Bridge, he found out that some of the synthetics were also organic, and were former patients at the Renaissance Sanitarium.
Determined to find out what is going on at the sanitarium, Tejinder lashed out at a colleague and bit some of their face off. He was taken away by security where Chancellor Tremond ordered that Tejinder be committed for awhile for his anger. At the Renaissance, he was subject to permutation, but was somehow invulnerable to it, which ended up extending his stay at the sanitarium.
It was then that he met David Wednesday. He and Tejinder oddly get along after some disagreeable encounters, with David recognizing that Tejinder was sound of mind and not belonging with the other head cases in the hospital.
Together, David and Tejinder executed a plan called the Vorpals. Once Tejinder was released, he bartered to have Wednesday taken out soon after. They agreed afterwards to pretend like they’ve never spoken before, only periodically keeping contact with one another. They referred to each other on the Wire under different alias: David as "Thimble" and Tejinder as "Dodo". Dodo became a very popular name on the Wire, as he often fed the news stations covert information regarding the government. Tejinder started working anonymously with several reporters in regards to the things he found out about the Western Order, including the patient experiments at the Renaissance Sanitarium. Most of which ended up being buried before they had the chance to be published, and the reporters' headquarters shut down. While Tejinder went back to his life as the Archiver, David continued to incite riots and galvanize the public against the Permutation Regimen.
In order to protect himself, Tejinder continued to pretend as if he had no affiliation with David Wednesday. He never met anyone else who becomes associated with the Vorpals, preferring to maintain his anonymity for everyone’s safety as he works too closely with the Western Order. But as he gathered information on the GRIGORI and took more backdoor odd jobs for the company, Tejinder learned that the GRIGORI was not a person at all, but an old self-aware artificial intelligence that functioned behind the scenes with the Western Order. He also learned that Gregory Tremond, despite being chancellor, was trying to take down the GRIGORI by utilizing a weapon called FREYJA -- and now someone named FREY. This information nearly got Wakeman killed, but instead he had his memories permuted. As months went by, the memories of his discovery started weeding through the block that Gregory Tremond had installed into Wakeman’s brain. He could only thank Algernon’s brain-device for this not being a total waste.
Due to recent failed attempts of espionage, David and Tejinder were once again under suspicion, and were taken back to Renaissance Sanitarium. Both were psychologically tortured. While the permutations cannot affect someone’s personality, they scramble their memories some more. Wakeman develops frequent migraines and auditory hallucinations for a year.
Months later after his capture, Tejinder and David decided to take out the Permutation Regimen from the inside: They instigated a patient riot, which ultimately took down the Renaissance Sanitarium and its permutation devices (which turned out to be a futile effort, seeing as Gregory Tremond kept more equipment in the Engelus Correctional Facility). David had Tejinder stowed away so he did not have to become part of the riot, and he enlisted several patients to take down staff members using home-made gasoline and torches. Eventually, several patients escaped, including David Wednesday himself.
The riot eventually ended when the Engelus law enforcement stormed the place in heavy armor gear and canopy gas. They eradicated many of the deranged subjects, and some staff also were killed in the confusion. The Renaissance Sanitarium was left in ruins after the destruction by its patients. Both Tejinder and David were taken and permuted at the Engelus Correctional Facility. They temporarily forgot that they had any part in the riot, or were ever in the Renaissance at all.
It was thanks to a doctor, Abigail Klinkenberg, who unintentionally aided in Tejinder unearthing the memories that the permutation had attempted to remove. Tejinder delved into the nightmares that he'd been rid of.
And then the events of Seraphim ASCENT happen.