Standing in Amos Beeson’s daughter's room on Ezra and pointing his pistol at her head is Ruan's first clear memory. Privately, he celebrates this day in January as an anniversary of sorts; each year that goes by is another year spent free.
Most of this time has been spent trying to answer the question “free from what?” Though Ruan has a clear memory of everything that has happened since the Beeson job, memories from before that time are hazy or even nonexistent. The reason for this has to do with the Academy’s methods of programming and brain washing its subjects.
Because the Academy put such emphasis on creating subjects that could not run away, there were many many blocks in place to prevent them from even forming the idea that they COULD run away. When Ruan was a happy working agent, his programming worked as it should. However, after Agent Y Ruan’s feelings about the work he was doing, about Locke, and about his future were all very negative. And even though these feelings were suppressed, they festered deep under the surface until the moment he found himself pointing a gun at an innocent sleeping girl.
It is unfortunate then, that Ruan’s second clear memory is the discovery that there were 2 other girls in the room and they were already dead. At that point he became so disgruntled that he was able to short circuit his embedded programming with a single idea: Run away. Run away now.
The only problem was that in doing so, he short circuited nearly everything else and that became the ONLY thing he knew. He forgot who he was and what he was capable of. At that moment his mind so consumed with escape that it was the only thing he could formulate thoughts about. So he knew to take the money from Amos Beeson’s safe. He knew there was a transport parked outside that he could use to get away. When he came upon Locke, who had stepped outside the transport to investigate why his agent was no longer responding to him, Ruan only recognized him as someone that could stop him from leaving and knocked him out. Once inside their transport Ruan knew he could use the cortex link up to find someone, anyone, on Ezra who could help him evade capture: Adelai Niska.
Since the Beeson job, Ruan has been slowly working on trying to remember and reconstruct his past. Hazy and forgotten memories have begun to clear as he learns more about himself and people who have a link to his past. He has begun to realize what he was and its implication. He remembered that he has an enemy named Locke for the first time when they were both on Persephone at the same time (Alone in the Night), but sometimes when he thinks about Locke, he wonders if they actually might have been friends. On Silverhold, as he walked from door to door while psychically “sniffing” for Naomi at each one (Silverhold Shuffle), he realized that it was a type of work he’d done many times before.
He writes all these thoughts and memories in his journal.
(Player’s note: Hey. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Waitaminute, where was their escort detail? Why weren’t there a bunch of guys in riot gear with machine guns ready to gun both of them down when Ruan started acting oddly?
That’s a very good question. Here’s what I think: Given the stealthy nature of the approach, the geographical isolation of the ranch, and the plot requirement that the two of them be alone in order for this to happen, their escort detail remained in town to monitor remotely. Given that Ruan and Locke had proved themselves trustworthy time and time again, AND the Academy had all its new failsafes in place, they considered it worth the risk to have them in the field on their own.
Unfortunately for them, Ruan also understood this to be most unusual, which helped take that deeply buried desire to run away and bring it to the surface.)
(GM's note: Academy missions are done with a minimum of support, first off for stealth and secondly, the more people involved, the bigger the chance of a security leak)
