Steven Erickson

Erickson presents as a Black man of middle age, with black hair and a thin pencil mustache.

Erickson operates with a near-total absence of empathy that shades into outright sociopathy. He treats Atom Eve not as a person with her own will but as property, a weapon he owns, and he pursues his goals through monstrous means, including reviving Polly and keeping her in a brain-dead, catatonic state so her body can be mined to produce more living weapons. Though he has the smarts and charm to run a covert government operation, that same emotional blindness leaves him hopeless in delicate moments, since he fails to anticipate how devastating it would be for Eve to see her mother's ruined condition or to watch him gun down Elias Brandyworth.

Working inside the United States government, Erickson ordered the project that produced Phase One, the child who becomes Atom Eve. Her intended donor Polly and the scientist Elias Brandyworth secretly conspired to keep the unborn girl out of the program's hands. When Brandyworth warned Erickson that the facility had been exposed and slipped away, Erickson pressed him to turn back, then tracked him down with soldiers and another researcher and ordered a sweep for the infant. The search failed, but they recovered Polly's body, revived it into a brain-dead husk, and used her to spawn Phases Two through Five, none of which reproduced the original.

Roughly ten years later Erickson finally located Phase One, now known as Atom Eve, and sent the other phases after her. They were destroyed, yet they served their purpose by leading him to both Eve and Brandyworth, whom he hauled back to the facility and reunited with Polly. When a horrified Elias lunged at him, Erickson fired, hitting Polly and accidentally killing Elias as well. The sight pushed Eve past the mental limits Brandyworth had once placed on her, and she wiped every trace of his and Rodgers's schemes from their minds, leaving Erickson to wake with no idea where he was. What became of him afterward is unknown.