Dr. Finneus Templeton

Finneus Templeton, an only child, was raised among academic professionals. Both parents taught at Princeton his father was a professor in astrophysics and his mother taught neurobiology. Eventually, his father accepted a job at NASA and the family uprooted when Finneus was in high school, relocating to Houston. Their new home couldn’t have been further from Princeton academia if it had been on the moon, in Finn’s estimation. He was neither an athlete nor a fan of football, which set him apart. His glasses also earned him further nerd status, and he found himself more and more isolated from the rest of his classmates. He would have minded more if he’d actually found any of them interesting, which he did not. He missed his friends back home in Princeton, New Jersey, and kept up correspondence with them all, fully intending to go back there for school. It was this connection that kept him sane and afloat during what he later came to think of as his exile in Texas.

True to his word, he won a full scholarship to Princeton, where he found his calling in genetic engineering and eventually, biogenetics. While at Princeton, he made an odd connection: someone from his old high school in Texas. Sarah Charles had been one of the popular crowd in high school, so he had never done more than sit next to her in English class and respond to her polite greetings as necessary. But at Princeton, where she was studying design, it was she who tracked him down and demanded they get coffee.

They struck up a friendship, and eventually, she confessed to him that she’d always had a crush on him at school, but had never pursued him for fear of being shunned by her friends. He wasn’t sure if he was charmed by this news or insulted that she cared more about what other people thought of her than her own heart. She admitted that she had always regretted not ignoring the judgmental teens of her social circle, and the pair started dating. Finn was smitten pretty much from the first cup of coffee, and the two were married just two years later, at age 20.

The summer before their senior year at Princeton, the couple rented a tiny studio apartment in Manhattan so that Sarah could work as an intern at the Metropolitan Opera House in set design. That summer began as an exciting adventure in city life, complete with late night parties with friends in the tiny apartment and long afternoons in the park or at the many museums. At least, until the night that Sarah did not come home from the Met.

Finn had called the Met’s office, which confirmed that Sarah had never signed out for the evening. As it grew later, he grew more nervous, phoning everyone he could think of who might know where she was. He called the police at dawn, and while they tried to dismiss his worry, he insisted they try and locate her.

This was the late ‘80s, in a time before the internet and cell phones. The investigation was slow, but thorough. Within a day, they had located her lifeless body in an airshaft. It appeared she had been thrown down the airshaft from the roof – an area where many stagehands would go to smoke or do casual drugs during their down-time. While Finn was quickly eliminated as a suspect, it took two months for the police to go through the long list of people who had access to the cavernous sub-basements and backstage areas of the Met. Meanwhile, Finn had to return to Princeton without his wife, with no answers as to what had occurred, and the seething resentment of her family for not keeping her safe. And while eventually, the murderer was caught – a stagehand who’d been infuriated by her seemingly casual rejection of him – Finn’s life was never the same.
His personality had developed largely due to the sunny disposition of his wife, and in her absence, he found himself reverting to his old introverted ways. He seemed to forget entirely how to smile, and instead shifted his focus to two things: keeping his life as meticulously tidy and free of personal influence as possible, and his studies.

During his final year as an undergraduate, Finn became part of a ground-breaking research team that took him through both his graduate and post-graduate studies, and earned him his doctorate. The team had worked on genetic cloning of non-cancerous cells in an attempt to replace cancerous cells, and while the goal was ultimately unsuccessful, they made huge progress in proving the importance and existence of genetic markers in certain types of cancer.

He worked for about ten years for various pharmaceutical companies in a research and development capacity, but as time passed, he found his interest shifting away from the financially-motivated goals of the pharmaceutical firms and back towards preventative biogenetic research. One of his old team members from Princeton who now worked for the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta reached out to him with a job offer, and Finn accepted it.

He’d become quite complacent at the CDC, working on locating and identifying genetic markers of various highly contagious diseases in both animals and humans. The idea was to work on ways of genetically modifying chromosomal mutations to reverse certain ill effects. They were just experiencing long-sought after results when the events of December 2012 started. Things fell apart quickly, and protocols fell apart even faster. Finn could see the breach coming before it happened, although he was working on containment with the others in his lab when the Army eventually stepped in.

That was how he found himself in Kentucky, at Fort Campbell. He was just one voice as part of a large medical research team, but his tended to be given more credence given his work experience. He had met with Mack Doyle and the new C.O., but many on his own team didn’t like what he had to say about what was happening at the CDC. He wasn’t sure why this was – he only knew that it was incredibly stupid to ignore facts that might end up saving what was left of the human race.