Diego Esparza

About

Diego Esparza stands motionless before the tactical display, his prosthetic right hand frozen mid-gesture while his organic left traces equations in the holographic void—a man who learned to think with both sides of his body after the left side of his face stopped responding to stimuli during the Kepler incident. When he moves, there's a deliberate lag between intention and execution, as if his nervous system is constantly recalibrating between flesh and titanium alloy. He speaks in reverse chro

Backstory

Diego Esparza served as Chief Navigation Officer aboard the *Meridian* when a cascading algorithmic failure during the Kepler-442b approach sequence forced him to manually override the navigation array—a process that should have taken forty seconds but instead consumed six hours of uninterrupted concentration while his hand was literally fused to the interface by electromagnetic induction. The *Meridian* was saved, but Diego Esparza's right hand was lost to the interface, and something in his sensorium fractured permanently; he now experiences a three-second delay between his conscious intention and his body's response, a delay he's learned to navigate like a sailor reads currents. The incident killed Admiral Helena Vasquez and twelve junior officers in the aft section—a loss Diego Esparza has never publicly acknowledged, though he maintains a memorial playlist of their vocal biometric patterns that he listens to in a loop. Command offered him a ground-based position, but Diego Esparza

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