Daniel Calhoun

Daniel Calhoun is a character from the 2000 AD strip The Order. In 1580 he was a young illiterate man working for the state torturer Intuitor Browne in London. His duties included menial tasks such as scrubbing the blood from the floor. While he was doing this in cellar three one day, a mysterious 'rotting man' who had been hideously tortured but had miraculously not died stabbed him, injecting him with the personality matrix of the robot Ritterstahl. Driven half-mad by the strange images flooding his head, and his new ability to read, Calhoun fled from his employers and was rescued by Iztaccihuatl, a member of the mysterious cabal known as the Order.

Izta stabbed Calhoun to let Ritterstahl's personality matrix out of him before it killed him, and then saved his life by imbuing him with the combined power of the 'golden seed' and the 'grey seed'. These were techno-magical artefacts, and the golden seed was the last relic of Izta's lost South American civilisation. Their amalgamated potency started a new seedline in Calhoun, and gifted him with supernatural abilities such as night vision. Ritterstahl's personality, meanwhile, was installed in a new robot body. Calhoun maintained a close bond with Ritterstahl for the rest of his life.

Calhoun's former boss Intuitor Browne joined the Order when he realised that they were fighting for humanity against the malevolent extra-dimensional wyrms. (Fortunately, Calhoun and Browne had always had a good working relationship.) The Order defeated a huge Wyrmqueen hiding in Somerset House. Calhoun and Izta fell in love and decided to spend the rest of their lives at each other's side.

Having married Calhoun, Izta became queen of New Atlantis, which existed in a bubble universe outside space and time. She and Calhoun had two children, a red-haired girl called Ixchel and a black-haired boy called Sean. Calhoun enjoyed reading stories to them. Intuitor Browne and Francis Bacon worked as Izta's advisers while Calhoun spent long periods in New Atlantis' library, which contained books from different points in time. (Cyrano de Bergerac visited the library and was stunned to find it held one of his own works which he hadn't written yet.) When wyrms attacked New Atlantis, summoned by a version of Ritterstahl from early in his timeline which had been infested and become a Trojan horse, Calhoun used his knowledge of Ritterstahl's systems to overpower that version by mounting a denial of service attack.

Ritterstahl and Calhoun planned to visit a hollow moon full of wyrms, following directions given to them by the wyrm-woman Donna Catalina, so that they could destroy the wyrm super-string which was vibrating and altering human history. Izta realised that this would mean that New Atlantis would cease to exist. She was furious and told the pair that she would never forgive them, even though Intuitor Browne knocked Calhoun out so that he could go in his place, as he knew it would be a suicide mission.

Ritterstahl and Browne reached the super-string, in a giant metal man-shaped machine Ritterstahl had named Iron John, and Browne became one with it, allowing the wyrms to enter his body as his mind entered their collective consciousness. This allowed him to reset history and New Atlantis duly vanished, along with the children Ixchel and Sean. Izta and Calhoun could both, however, remember that the city and their children had once existed. Consumed with grief and rage, Izta banished Calhoun from her presence.

Powers and abilities[]

Powers

Can see in the dark.

Abilities

Cleaning; armed and unarmed combat; reading several languages; knows the flaws in Ritterstahl's software; can speaking Ritterstahl's computer language.

Strength level

Occasionally superhuman.

Paraphernalia[]

Equipment

Scrubbing brush; bucket.

Transportation

Velocimount (ye olde motorcycle); motorboat.

Weapons

Shotgun.

Links[]

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