The people of Clavius Deep

01

A Navajo man from the Navajo Nation, Vincent is one of MMDI's most accomplished field agents and its greatest recruiter. Fluent in eight languages, he travels undercover to 1991 Arizona as a sex worker who accepts only male clients — a role that makes him unnervingly effective at getting close to targets. His long dark hair, commanding physical presence, and ability to read people border on the supernatural. He recruited Ted Avila into the agency and the two become inseparable partners across missions spanning decades.

02

Theodore Joseph Avila was born in Sedona, Arizona and carries the desert in his bones. His cover on the 1991 missions is television news producer, but his real value to MMDI is a rare cognitive ability: he can process memories in non-linear ways that no other agent can match. That gift comes at a cost — his recollections of past missions tangle and contradict each other, leaving him perpetually unsure which version of events is real. A failed fifteen-year marriage and an instinct for self-destruction make him the most human character in the book.

03

Chinese-American by heritage, Yang grew up in Beijing and rose to command MMDI at the height of China's time travel program. He is physically imposing in his all-black uniform, quick to anger, and addicted to the authority his position gives him over younger men. His catchphrase — "Kiss, kiss" — is as much threat as affection. Yang is not purely a villain: the novel grants him self-awareness about his abuses, and his retirement to the Sonoran Desert of Arizona carries a surprising note of regret.

04

The doctor is not human. He is a synthetic, automated life form created by the Ezuoia — the extraterrestrials at the center of the novel's cosmology. He presents as a distinguished man with a prominent British accent who resembles a retired celebrity rock star, and he serves as both physician and confidant to returning agents. His real function is more complex than medicine. He also fronts a jazz and rock combo called Doc Ozzie and His All-Male Nurses Band, performing at Las Vegas venues in a white medical uniform.

05

Born in Tokyo on December 25th, Yotaro Tai is the most spiritually driven character in the book. After exposure to the alien intelligence known as the Ezuoia, he founds a religious movement inside Clavius Base built around the belief that male ecstasy is the most sacred act in the known universe. He demands that followers address him as Tai-sama. His movement sets off the violent internal conflict that drives the novel's final third, and his fate is brutal.

06

Eduardo chose his own face — a handsome Hispanic man with a precise Spanish accent, built to put agents at ease. He claims that he was constructed in Argentina and Colombia. He is the true operational brain of MMDI: he tracks every timeline alteration, protects the agency from self-destruction, and maintains a set of private time-travel devices hidden from General Yang. His name, he explains, comes from the Latin for "guardian of prosperity." He is the most powerful entity at Clavius Base, and he knows it.

07

Matthew Lejeune from New Orleans carries a hereditary psychic gift he cannot switch off. He encounters Ted Avila at a roadside diner in Kingman, Arizona and immediately reads from him a cascade of memories that should not exist — underground machines, naked men, a Navajo figure from another century. He is the first outsider who sees the truth about what Ted is, and his role in the story resurfaces across decades. He joins MMDI later in the timeline, aged to his forties to give him credibility on missions.

08

Katherine Snowe, born in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, is the ex-wife of Ted Avila. Vincent Wauneka travels to meet her while she is working as a Brown University professor. Motivated by revenge against his employer MMDI, Vincent persuades her to write a motion picture screenplay that reveals long-held secrets about extraterrestrial aliens, human time travel, and the mistreatment of dozens of young male time travel agents working at a lunar base. She agrees to be the screenwriter in exchange for the chance to travel in time for one last visit with Ted Avila.