Tobias Four

Tobias Four is the protagonist of The Architect Codex. He is a Titan Pilot, one that originally fought for the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, but joined the Frontier Militia after meeting KT-0298.

Early Life
Tobias grew up on the planet of Gridiron, an IMC-controlled system, with his mother; his father is never mentioned aside from having died early on in his life. He initially had a fear of the soldiers' occupation of his home planet until his mother taught him that the world was not morally black and white through the use of a parable about a knight and the kingdom they protected. In the story, the knight was cast out after the citizens of the kingdom decided they no longer needed him- but he returned to defend them once they were sieged by evil-doers in his absence, despite their treatment of him. This marked the beginning of the peace-loving philosophy that Tobias would hold onto for most of the rest of his life.

When he was seventeen, he and his mother were the victims of a terrorist attack carried out by the Militia in a busy tram station. Though he survived, the aggressors successfully completed their mission in killing an IMC official of importance who had been scheduled to pass through the station at that time via a detonated explosive- though they also killed numerous civilians as part of what they considered to be acceptable collateral damage. Tobias's mother was fatally wounded by the blast, and her death caused him to form a hatred of the Militia as well as a personal bias favoring the IMC. Over the next few years, he would use the excuse of 'peace' to justify his actions in taking revenge against the Militia through selfish and sometimes cowardly behavior.

IMC Service
Within a year, he enlisted into the ranks of the IMC as a Rifleman, but received advanced training as well as all necessary certifications to become a Pilot except for his Titan certification, which meant he could not link to a Titan nor be assigned one.

During the Battle of Demeter, Tobias and his friend (and squad-mate), Sergeant Jospert, were ready to deploy as the final wave of ground infantry on the surface before their drop-pod's launch was cancelled, as Spyglass had judged the refueling facility to be a lost cause and ordered all ships to retreat from the planet before it exploded due to the efforts of the Militia ground forces to overload the core reactor.

Nearly three years after the event and seven years after first joining the IMC, Tobias's squad was assigned to investigate rumors of a Militia presence on Nedar, a planet with a climate almost always in a near-freezing state. During the attack, he and Militia Pilot Captain Shears engaged one another with the latter being fatally shot by Tobias. The IMC soldier was knocked out by a concussive grenade, and was unable to make it in time to join Jospert and the other survivors on the dropship sent to extract them. In a twist of fate, this would actually save his life as the ship was blown up by a Militia Titan that self-destructed next to it in an effort to keep them from escaping.

Joining the Militia
While looking for a way to survive the harsh cold of Nedar's night temperatures and frequent blizzards, he stumbled across KT-0298 as she mourned her dying Pilot. The Titan did not initially react to his presence, and he approached the two until he saw that her Pilot was none other than Captain Shears, the man he'd shot before being knocked out. Instead of leaving the scene, he decided to comfort the dying man in an rare show of selflessness. Though the two exchanged no words, they came to a mutual understanding of forgiveness and acceptance of one another's role in the ongoing war. Once Shears died, Tobias was left alone with KT and feared that she would seek retribution against him for killing her Pilot.

Unexpectedly, the Titan began a conversation with him instead, wanting to know why he did not run. She explained that she was tired of death, and did not wish to contribute to further killing. Allowing him to leave and directing him to the nearby Militia outpost, she revealed that she could not accompany him as her chassis's casing had been damaged and had ruined the battery within. Instead of accepting her offer, he scavenged an unharmed batter and installed it in her so that she would regain motor functions and be able to leave if she wished.

The two did not trust each other yet, each fully expecting the other to turn on them at some point- but they were forced to form an alliance to repair a communications array atop the Militia outpost in order to send a distress signal to the nearest ship. While waiting inside the base for the Militia to extract them, they further conversed and began to form an attachment to one another as they realized that they were kindred spirits, both rejects in their own right; KT had failed to uphold all three of her core protocols, and Tobias hadn't acted as he'd been led to believe was right, thinking he shouldn't have shown her mercy. They agreed that, in the end, none of it mattered because the two of them were alive and would not have been if they hadn't failed in the first place.

The pair was retrieved by Captain Gates, and brought to a Militia frigate that had responded to KT's signal. There, Tobias was interrogated by Gates and Dimitri. During their questioning, they revealed the many unethical experiments and actions the IMC had taken towards the civilians of the frontier, and Tobias' loyalty to them was shattered. He continued to reject their offer of joining the Militia, however, insisting that he simply wanted no part in the war anymore.

Upon learning that KT was slated to be decommissioned, he recanted his earlier statement and agreed to fight for the Militia on the sole condition that KT would be his Titan. Without many other options at her disposal, Gates begrudgingly agreed.

Pilot and Titan
With his enlistment official, Tobias was assigned to Foxtrot-Three where he met Amelia Vale, Tyra Crane, and Robert McFarlane. The three explained that Gates was angry with Tobias for challenging her authority so openly, and so she had spread the word that he was going to attempt to link with KT, a process which was almost certain to go badly due to his inexperience and it being her second link with a Pilot.

Unexpectedly, he asked Gates for her help with linking to KT. Despite her attempt to humiliate him, he only had KT's best interests at heart. Accepting his plea, she coached him through the process. Though their first attempt failed due to KT's personal concerns of potentially losing another Pilot, their second attempt succeeded to the incredulity of everyone present.

The Hunt for Erebus
Once the two were linked, they were ordered to take part in the ground assault against Tyche as part of Operation: Broadsword. The dropship Tobias was riding in was shot down, and his squad was forced to move into the nearby IMC research facility on foot, where they discovered the existence of a superweapon the IMC were developing, one that could fold space and time. They likely would have died had it not been for the timely arrival of the 6-4, the mercenary group led by Gates. Rescuing the squad of Pilots at the last minute, they safely made it out of the facility before it was destroyed by an orbital bombardment.

Though chastised for their disobedience, they were ultimately thanked by Commander Briggs, the leader of the Militia, and told not to discuss their findings with anyone else. Tobias and Gates later ended up playing a card game where an idea came to Tobias, and he suggested that they could find answers in a connection terminal to the IMC's server-network hosted by Spyglass. After bringing the thought to Commander Briggs, she agreed to sanction an operation to infilitrate an IMS frigate and access its connection-terminal.

Though the operation was a success, Tobias was severely injured in the process. Both Gates and KT had revelations about themselves and about Tobias- for Gates, it prompted her to reveal her growing interest for him. For KT, she realized that her relationship with Tobias was affecting her in ways she could not have predicted, most notably in how she viewed herself as a person.

Ancient Powers
Over the next few months, various operations led them to the planet itself, where an IMC presence had been established on the planet. It was here that Foxtrot-Three discovered evidence of an ancient alien civilization that the IMC referred to as the Architects, an advanced race that had left behind ruins on Erebus and beyond. They planned to escape the planet using a stolen IMC dropship, but were stopped by Kuben Blisk. The mercenary revealed that the Militia had a mole in it, and Tobias believed it to be Gates. Due to KT's intervention, the others were able to escape, but Tobias and KT were left behind with the latter heavily damaged.

Accessing information they'd stolen from the IMC, Tobias discovered that the IMC were searching for something the Architects referred to as the Inferno, believing it would allow them to use the fold-weapon. Without a way for KT to move, Tobias took her data-core from her chassis and trekked off into the tundra by himself to escape the IMC.

One week later, he came across a large cave system the IMC had excavated. Upon investigating it, a passage led him to a platform overlooking the fold-weapon itself, though it had become defunct over millenia and unusable. Noticing a mysterious orb on a pedestal, he attempted to pick it up- but immediately after coming into contact with it, he hallucinated scattered visions from the Architects' reign, and was imbued with the power of the Codex.

Assault on Erebus
The act of Tobias' evolution into the Inferno did not go unnoticed- it released an unimaginable wave of energy that could be detected all across the frontier. Believing that this was a sign that the fold-weapon had been completed, an attack from the Militia was launched within the hour.

The IMC also traced the energy signature to Tobias, and took him back to their main compound in the artcic. There, he was interrogated by Blisk who revealed that the orb had rejected any who interacted with it- except for Tobias. Determined to learn why, he stuck a knife in KT's data-core to motivate the Militia Pilot, but was interrupted by the sudden arrival of Militia forces, and left to escape being killed.

Tobias was freed by the 6-4, now including Davis and Droz, and revealed his findings to them. He confided in Dimitri that he believed Gates to be a traitor, and they needed to be prepared for her betrayal. KT was placed into a spare Tone chassis, and reunited with her Pilot. With extraction impossible due to the anti-air turrets stationed around the base, a plan was made to enter the trenches surrounding the compound and disable the forcefield protecting the Turrets' targeting systems from the blizzard.

While inside the turret control-room, Dimitri confiscated Gates' weapon and handcuffed her to a pipe due to Tobias' fear of her turning on them. He then revealed himself to be the spy and shot Tobias before killing McFarlane, stealing the orb, and abandoning them to rendezvous with Blisk. After he and Gates were rescued by KT, Tobias pursued Dimitri himself and made his way to the compound's command center. There, he and the traitor had one final fight where both agreed to forego weapons- but in a move of deception, Tobias grabbed Gates' pistol from Dimitri's holster and used it to kill his former friend.

Using Dimitri's data-knife to deactivate both the turrets and the force-field, Tobias knew that the IMC would need the Codex to use the fold-weapon, and so he destroyed the orb. He was unable to kill himself, however, before other IMC forces captured him.

A New Threat
Tobias was held captive for over two years on Typhon, the home of another fold-weapon that the IMC had reconstructed with the knowledge granted to Tobias as the Inferno. During this period, he was haunted by visions implanted in his mind by the Codex, visions of utter decimation from an unknown entity. The IMC dismissed his claims.

He was finally rescued by Gates and KT right before the destruction of the fold-weapon by Jack Cooper and BT-7274, which resulted in the obliteration of the planet. After being brought back to the fleet to recover from his PTSD and recuperate from his injuries, he and KT reconciled after their two-year absence in each other's lives.

His nightmares became increasingly worse until Gates discovered a map he had scratched into the floor in his sleep with a piece of metal. It was a starchart that led past the edge of known space, beyond the frontier to an uncharted planet. Once he was deemed ready for deployment, he and KT departed the fleet to follow the map and discover the source of his visions.

The Planet of Storms
The planet they found was an ice-world with constant inclement weather. Over the time they spent there, they unraveled several clues detailing what might have happened, including various frozen corpses on the ground and the husks of seventy-year old ships hanging in orbit. KT detected a large amount of temporal residue, indicating that time-energy had been heavily affected in the vicinity at some point. While trying to figure out what this meant, Tobias began to alternate between the past and the present, sucked into each without control due to the timeline becoming unstable.

In the past, it was revealed by the last surviving member of the Architects, Al'cor, that an ancient enemy of theirs known as the Seed was poised to consume all organic life in the galaxy by converting them into Amalgamates in an effort to start a cataclysmic event known as the Amalgamation. The only way to ensure the Architects could properly build a countermeasure in the past so that it could be ready in the present would be to send the Seed into the future where it would hunt the Inferno of that time- Tobias. Understanding that there was no other way, Tobias activated the fold-weapons in the past which targeted the Seed and contained it in the core of the planet whilst transferring it into the present. With the Seed now active in the present, Tobias and KT barely managed to escape the planet with an unconscious Al'cor in tow, and left to find the first of three arrays that needed to be activated to initiaite the Tempest, an event which would destroy the Seed at the metaphysical level.

The Amalgamation Event
The Seed quickly spread across the frontier, utilizing its unique and almost omnipotent abilities to travel quickly and unleash its Amalgamates on various colonized worlds. During this time, Tobias, KT, and Al'cor traveled from each array world to the next based on coordinates the Architects had left behind on the planet of storms.

After the first two had been activated, the last array world was found to be none other than Harmony, the planet acting as the Militia's base of operations. The efforts of humanity to push back this new foe culminated in a truce between the Militia and IMC as they took a last stand together in the capital city of Chorus.

After reuniting with Gates, Tyra, and Vale, they attempted to locate the last array itself to no avail. Jack Cooper told them of the Floating Gardens, an anomalous location outside the city where gravity did not act as it was supposed to, one of the telling side-effects of the array platforms. Tobias, Vale, and Tyra were sent out to find the array and activate it at all costs.

Harmony's Last Stand
As they made their way through Chorus, it became abundantly clear that the city was close to being overrun. Before long, the Seed telepathically penetrated Tobias' mind and discovered where he was going. During this attack, he had been neurally linked to KT, and the two of them were shown the void-scape, a realm between physical reality and the soul. The Codex, sensing the presence of another, exchanged itself with KT and bonded to her just as it had bonded to Tobias. Realizing they were seeing the truest versions of themselves, KT revealed her feelings for him- he reciprocated said feelings, and the two left the void-scape together.

As the skirmish between the Militia and the Seed's forces continued, a group of Amalgamates overpowered Tyra in her Titan just before they made it outside the city boundaries and rendered it inoperable. Tobias tried to save her, but was unable to due to her being paralyzed and the sheer weight of the debris atop her. In the end, she urged him to leave her behind and took her own life rather than become an Amalgamate.

Vale was heartbroken at the news, and decided to buy Tobias time to make it to the array rather than accompany him there. With only Tobias and KT remaining, they made the rest of the journey alone.

Al'cor suddenly contacted Tobias through her telepathic abilities and disclosed to him the true nature of the Tempest; for it to work, it needed a massive source of energy to jumpstart it- energy only contained within the Codex. As the Inferno, he alone could provide that energy, but would be killed in the process. Angry at Al'cor, he told her of what she was taking from him- namely his newfound future with KT.

The Dragonhearted
Finding that the array had been covered in rock in the millenia since its construction, a bombing run led by Rose was called to free it from its rocky prison. All the while, Tobias, KT, and Skids sans Vale defended the array from wave after wave of Amalgamates as the Seed tried desperately to stop them.

When the time finally came to activate the array, KT surprised Tobias by refusing to let him activate it. Al'cor had contacted her as well, and told her that as a new carrier of the Codex, she was just as eligible to start the Tempest as Tobias. Sacrificing herself for Tobias and the rest of the galaxy, KT initiated the Tempest and was killed along with the Seed.

Tobias became severely depressed over the next week in spite of the near-universal celebration held by the rest of the frontier due to humanity's survival. It wasn't until a conversation with Gates that he remembered a message KT had left for him in his helmet's HUD, and realized that there was a possibility she could be brought back from the void-scape due to her copying the entirety of her data-core into his helmet. He was proven right when he ventured into it willingly, his control over the Codex growing, and found her waiting for him.

A New Era
Just a few weeks afterwards, the frontier was taken over by Spyglass, an AI designed and created by General Marder of the ARES Division of the IMC. Briggs and other Militia leaders, as well as Marder himself, were killed by the rogue AI while in the middle of peace talks between the IMC and Militia.

Announcing a new era of peace and prosperity for the frontier, Spyglass invited all those in favor of such ideas to join him and help enforce this new peace where no factions such as the Militia or IMC would be allowed to grow and war with each other anymore. Many believed him, and Tobias and KT were forced to go into hiding to escape persecution.

New Humanity
Four years passed with the galaxy believing that Tobias and KT were dead before a chance encounter with Gates led her to find the former Pilot on Ceto where she learned that he had been living in a self-imposed exile for half of that time. He revealed that he and KT had gone their seperate ways two years previously, with the Titan believing that they had a responsibility to help the people of the frontier while Tobias simply wanted to escape a life of warfare.

Convincing him to rejoin the resistance against Spyglass, the two encountered the fragmented personality of KT, Artemis, now under Spyglass's leadership in a simulacrum body. Capturing her, they returned to the Embers fleet and learned that Spyglass was planning to unleash an event known as the Coalescence, one modeled after the same ideology as the Amalgamation.

Gates had been working with a scientist named Carson who had been ordered by Spyglass to produce a type of nanite that could infect a person's nervous system and hijack their brain to link it with Spyglass, and given a device called the Cinder in an effort to counteract the nanites. The Cinder could only work if used against Spyglass directly, however, which meant they had to travel to the planet Regis where the AI had been stationed.

During the midst of their talks, they were ambushed by a New Humanity fleet which had been led to them by a tracking device within Artemis. Artemis then escaped, killed the scientists studying her, and made her way to the hangar of the frigate they were all on. It was here that she fought Tobias for a second time, though she became erratic and unstable when he questioned her loyalties. It turned out that this was because of the other fragments inside her all fighting with one another over how to responda as each of them had their own ideas and arguments.

Fragmentation
Saving Tobias from the fleet, the new personality in control, Pietas, explained to him the nature of her condition. Having been captured by Spyglass, KT had been tortured relentlessly in the AI's attempt to extract the Codex from her- but she no longer had it after her experience with the Tempest. Because of all the trauma she suffered, her mind split into five core fragments, the foremost being Artemis. Each of them was a centralized component of KT's personality, but could not function as a whole without the agreement of the others.

Knowing that they needed to figure out what Spyglass was up to, Tobias opted to travel to Luma and follow up on a lead he'd received from the Advocate during his search for KT over the last two years. He believed Al'cor was being held in a New Humanity facility there, and utilized the fragment known as Virtus to aid him in freeing her.

When they had retrieved her, he returned her to the Embers' base of operations on Atania. There, she divulged a terrible truth; the Architects were responsible for the creation of the Seed as a result of their greed and use of the Codex to harvest other species' essence. She told him of how the Architects did not really die, but instead had their collective consciousness and knowledge stored within the Codex until such a time that they could be retrieved- after having been isolated from the species' consensus for so long, Al'cor advised not allowing them to be free lest they attempt to subjugate humanity.

The Embers' Assault on Regis
With time running out before Spyglass initiated the Coalescence, the Embers launched a final assault against the AI's headquarters in the Regis system. Though the action was originally deemed a suicide mission, the Embers' fleet was reinforced by a massive fleet of civilian ships who arrived to assist with the liberation of humanity.

During the suicide mission undertaken by the Embers, Tobias' dropship was shot down. Having been present in the ship, KT's fragments began to war with one another once more. Though Themis had been in control at the time, she quickly lost to Athena who assessed the situation, understood the likelihood of Tobias' survival, and decided to hand off control to Artemis once more.

Engaging in a fight where she continually taunted Tobias over his failures and personal shortcomings, they were interrupted by Dean Fallon, who had come to investigate the dropship's debris in his Titan. Remotely accessing the Titan's systems, she forced it towards Tobias and initiated the self-destruct sequence. Though Dean survived through an ejection seat, the ensuing blast knocked Tobias unconscious and allowed Artemis to call for a retrieval team from Spyglass.

Bringing him directly to the tyrannical AI, Spyglass attempted to infect Tobias with the nanites so that he could extract the Codex directly with the assurance that he would spare Tobias continued enslavement once the Codex was in his possession. She and Spyglass explained the terms of their agreement with one another and the true nature of Artemis' origins; Artemis was the core trait of love, specifically KT's love for Tobias and willingness to protect him at any cost.

Upon finally learning this, Tobias forgave Artemis and accepted her for who she was, rather than who he had seen her as. Nonplussed by the fact that he still saw her as KT, she and the other fragments quickly realized what they needed to do to join together again- they needed to see each other as equals and work together rather than against one another. Artemis vowed that, despite her love for Tobias, she would let him go for the greater good.

One Final Effort
Freeing him from Spyglass's control with the Cinder, KT led Tobias outside where he realized they were on a heavily modified fold-weapon which Spyglass intended to use to transport the nanites around the frontier, and then combine humanity's forms with the essence of the Architects stored within the Codex. After KT was put into a Titan chassis, the two of them charged the portal at the weapon's end and fought Spyglass via his proxies.

At long last, and heavily wounded, Tobias and KT had defeated all enemy forces in the area- however, the nuclear core inside KT's chassis which they had planned to use to destabilize the portal was no longer viable, and Barker was forced to crash the Ember's flagship into the weapon to destroy it and Spyglass's core matrix.

Tobias awoke from the brink of death to the sight of the portal quickly growing in size due to its destabilization. Grabbing KT's data-core, he attempted to crawl to a nanite-capsule that could potentially protect them from the following temporal explosion.

Despite the heavy losses taken during their attack, the operation was condidered a success. Tobias and KT were left behind on Regis as the planet imploded, and their fates remain unknown.

Trivia

 * A character from Divergent is also known as Tobias "Four", though this is accidental and a total coincidence.
 * In the original series, Tobias' eye color is never specified, left to the Reader's imagination; in Six, however, it is stated to be a stormy-blue. The reason for this is unknown.
 * Tobias has been heavily 'shipped' by readers with either KT or Gates; the ship names for these relationships have been dubbed 'KTobias' and 'Fates' respectively.