Most people like to blame their lot in life on a single big event or missed opportunity ignoring the millions of other decisions and variables that led to that path. In Rig’s case, however, a single event might have been strong enough to forever alter his trajectory.

Rig grew up in a nice middle-upper class home. His mother was an industrial engineer and passionate inventor and would often rig up crazy contraptions inside their house to do otherwise mundane things. When Rig was old enough his mother had him help in the construction and his fondest childhood memories were of designing giant multi-story, multi-step contraptions just to automatically let the dog outside.

Then his mother got sick and while she survived the treatments a big part of her spirit had died and Rig fell into a bit of a depressive streak. His mother’s condition wen from bad to worse while he was in college and he ended up dropping out to help take care of her before she died.

Rig couldn’t bear to try and reapply to University so he instead decided to bury himself with work to avoid the pain and enlisted in the navy as an engineer. He found comfort in the work and the routine helped break his depression.

Then, however, came the event. It was supposed to be a routine transport where he and most of the rest of the crew would be frozen in cryo-sleep during transit. While he was asleep the ship’s power plant experienced near catastrophic failure. A freak one-in-a-trillion collision with a micrometeor destroyed the sensors that would have detected the damage and so the compromised reactor slowly became unstable. By the time the crew realized what was happening and got the damage repaired the ship had experienced both complete power loss as well as several power surges. Over four dozen crewmen died from cryogenic malfunctions and Rig was lucky enough to survive, although just barely.

Rig ended up spending six months in and out of medical as they fought against systemic organ failure, blood toxicity and an acute muscular degenerative condition due to the damage the cryogenics had done to his DNA. When he finally emerged cleared of cryosickness he developed a fear of being put back into stasis. As such he would always be on the “awake” shift during transits which meant he was short staffed when another catastrophe happened. A drive plate hadn’t been properly checked after battle and when it buckled and collapsed two people had died.

While technically not his fault he was the crew chief at the time and so responsibility landed on him. He mustered out shortly afterwards. Still he had nearly a decade of service in the Navy and there were plenty of merchant vessels willing to pay good money for a skilled engineer, even one with a black mark on his record and he spent the next twenty years plying the space lanes between systems.

In that time he saw a lot of things and had a lot of faces come and go. His skills were recognized and he slowly climbed through the ranks but he eventually reached the top of the corporate ladder for an engineer. If he wanted to go any further they were going to force him into leadership, a position he didn’t want and with the companies “up or out” policy he took his pension and went back home planning to stay on the ground for awhile.

That plan didn’t last too long as an old Naval buddy of his called him up and offered him a position and partnership on a free trader. This was what Rig had been looking for and he jumped at the chance to ply the stars again, but this time getting his fair cut of the profits.