Cormire Emelich

Cormire Emelich (pronounced /ˈkɔrmaɪă ˈɘmɪlɪk/) is the director of a genetics laboratory on the planet Kadis in the Dupliverse. He is most famous for his development of intercrypsis, a complicated algorithm for generating a viable genome combining characteristics of two or more different and not generally interfertile species, even those of different empires and, with limited success, even possibly different &foelig;dera. The most notorious application of intercrypsis is its allowance of artificial reproduction between individuals of different species.

History

Cormire Emelich was born, and spent much of his childhood, on the barren planet of Mirol. He was born a biological female, named by his parents Cormine. He never felt right in a female body, however, and as soon as he was old enough to choose opted to make some of his duplicates male, increasingly giving himself a higher proportion of male duplicates as he got older. Today, he has no female duplicates, and he fully identifies as male, having reclept himself the less feminine (in his opinion) "Cormire".

From his youth, Emelich was a quick study and highly intelligent, though something of a loner. He was especially interested in codes and ciphers—loving to pass coded messages to his few friends, and unknowingly reinventing a number of famous codes as well as creating at least one genuinely novel one, a holocryptic cipher with a musical melody as a key, which he called Cadecode. As he grew older, he also developed an interest in biology and anatomy, and loved learning more about the life forms that populated not only his home planet but the rest of the known universe. His interests in biology and steganography converged when he discovered the genetic code, and decided to devote himself to finding out more about it. Emelich excelled in his studies, and while still quite young—twenty-seven (Terran) years old—attained a research position with the government of the Yellow Alliance.

His position at the Alliance left Emelich a fair amount of autonomy, the more so the more he showed his brilliance and his wealth of novel ideas. By the time he was 38, he was set up as the director of his own fully-staffed laboratory on the artificial planet Tamex, where he could more or less pursue whatever avenue of research he wanted to. While he made many inroads into xenogenetics there, and probably would have made a name for himself even had he never developed intercrypsis, it is this last innovation that he has become the best known for. Indeed, he's had so many offers from private businesses and organizations to fund his further research in exchange for certain exclusivities that the Alliance has given him an unprecedented freedom of action and high pay just to make sure he isn't tempted to leave them. While Emelich's real reasons for delving into intercrypsis remain obscure, and may be (and quite likely are) little more than academic curiosity, the fact that intercrypsis permits mating and childbearing between totally different species has given him a not entirely warranted popular reputation as a romantic.

Description

A tall, thin man with a round head topped by a shock of unruly black hair, Cormire Emelich gives the impression of being constantly off balance, and when he walks looks as if he ought to fall over at any moment. His ears are small and nearly circular and stick out almost perpendicular to the sides of his head, and his nose is narrow and slightly crooked—he broke it once in his youth on an expedition to the wildworld of Arbackus, and decided to retain the injury in all his duplications as a souvenir of his trip (or perhaps for other unstated reasons).

Emelich usually wears a threadbare gray suit with wide sleeves, in which he keeps several handkerchiefs. When he finds it necessary to dress up, he accents the gray with various articles of colorful jewelry, his favorite being a bright red necklace and matching bracelets. (Among Emelich's home culture, jewelry of this sort is considered an epicene accessory, neither particularly feminine nor masculine.) While not particularly concerned with appearances, he is mindful of cleanliness, and won't wear the same clothing two days without washing it... though he may wear clothing similar enough that it may not be obvious it's not the same suit.

Professional work

Over the course of his career, Emelich has made several important contributions to the field of genetics, and xenogenetics in particular. He is credited with being the first to crack the unusual genetic code of the wahali, and to unravel the complex workings of the multiple sexes of the minndreen. He also pioneered the now fairly common use of stabilized pions for genetic markings of certain fœdera.

However, undoubtedly what he is now best known for is his invention of intercrypsis. Intercrypsis at least partially solves a problem that was long thought intractable: the crossbreeding of species of different empires. Intercrypsis involves a complex set of algorithms with many special cases, but has proven successful at identifying enough parallels and analogues between genomes using entirely different genetic codes to be able to effectively "translate" from one genome to the other—or from both genomes into a viable intermediate code—, thus effectively allowing a new organism to be made that is a hybrid of the original two (or more). To date, there is still much progress to be made in intercrypsis; there are reasons to believe that it can be made much more efficient than it currently is, and there are some obscure empires that still resist incorporation. Furthermore, there are attempts underway—already with some albeit limited success—to expand the procedure to be able to include fœdera aside from Spirileges. Though others have since worked to further study and develop intercrypsis, however, Emelich is justly credited as the founder of the field.

Personality

Cormire Emelich is a diffident and soft-spoken man, rarely raising his voice and only asserting himself in matters of great importance. This sometimes frustrates his coworkers and underlings, since he is reluctant to point out mistakes until they've already been integrated into a system and get to the point where they're causing so many problems they can't be ignored, problems that could have been averted if he'd pointed them out in the beginning before things got that far. He is talkative in the company of close friends but uncomfortable speaking with other people he doesn't already know well. The sole exception is when he is speaking about his research; then he can go on at length regardless of his audience (or their apparent interest). He is afflicted by onychophagy, the habit of biting his fingernails, and unless he's in a fresh duplicate his nails are usually work down to the quick as a consequence.

Emelich is also characterized by a mild ataxophilia, taking pleasure in disorder and slightly uncomfortable when everything is too neat and tidy. His offices, laboratories, and living spaces tend to be disorganized and seemingly chaotic, but that is not because he is too lazy to clean them up and too cheap to hire someone else to do so, but rather because he prefers such an environment.

Somewhat ironically, given the application of his work to bring together lovers of different species, Emelich himself is a célibataire, not having any wife or partner and never having been known to even engage in relations. While there are rumors of his having had some secret amorado, or perhaps of his harboring some unspoken béguin he's too shy to act upon, there is no evidence of any such thing, and most people who know him assume he's more or less asexual.