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**Eon** is a figure of the C9 universe, a resonant-symbiote variant who joined the House of Confidence on the morning the Klak Grove fell, and the author of *The Silent Decade*. He came out of the Lost Boys training camps and the underground beneath the towns.
He is compact and wiry, around 175 centimetres, built for stealth and small spaces rather than for the front of a line. His eyes are dark blue and take the light differently, and he tends to wear a smirk that does not agree with the rest of his face.
## Joining the House
Eon arrived with the Lost Boys, on the wrong side. He gave his name to [[life/sienna-astrid-helvig|Sienna]] when she asked for it: Eon, and then he was quiet[1]. It was [[life/chryssander-randolf-lyall-helvig|Chryssander]] who told him that his allies were his friends, and that he should find whoever had sent him and ask their forgiveness anyway[1].
He was in the tesseract, and came out of it into the end of the grove[2]. On the bridge at the eastern edge, with the shield sealing behind them and the plateau ahead, he stood slightly apart from the group and looked back. Then something in his face rearranged itself, and he asked whether he could come with them[3].
There were eight of them on that bridge, and Eon, and the counting was exact[3].
## On the plateau
He works. The perimeter went out twenty metres east because he and [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Samantha]] extended it that morning[4]. He is the one who shouted the warning at the quicksand, too late[3].
At the gate he sat on a rock to the east with his notebook open on his knee, writing. Samantha noticed, the way she notices things, without calling attention to the noticing, and let him be[5].
That notebook is the second book. *The Silent Decade* is his.
## The black fish
Eon was born in year 313 and grew up hungry. When he was four or five he caught a small black fish
and ate it.
By then the Voidomorphians had been out of Void for seventeen years and were breeding. Their adult
form runs to four metres, so their young are small, and a small black thing in the water is a fish
to a boy that age.
Neither of them had any language for what happened next. They agreed, the way small things do, and
got on with the afternoon. What came out of the water was one creature.
He does not know. The other one keeps it that way, and has kept it that way for the whole of his
life, and does it well enough that he has never once suspected there was anything to suspect.
The camps in year 325 are recorded as the **activation** of Eon the Mimic. Activation, not training.
Something was already there, and had been for seven years.
## What the file records
The species line on his record reads *homo sapiens, resonant-symbiote variant*. It has been written
that way since the file was opened and nobody has asked what the second half of it means.
His life cycle is filed as parasitic and symbiotic adaptation. No one else in the House has a line
of that kind.
The condition on the ability is connection: he has to be in physical proximity, or in emotional
resonance, before he can take anything.
During a copy his sensory channel is forced open and he cannot close it. He does not only get the
skill. Copying [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Sam]]'s aim, he gets the tremor and the
particular fear she is holding at that moment. He carries everyone's worst material without having
asked for any of it.
His entry has no surname. Where the others carry a birth name, his reads Eon, unknown.
His eyes are dark blue and take light differently from anyone else's, and the smirk he wears does
not match what is behind them.
After a battle in which he has copied several people he cannot find himself again. He forgets his
own favourite colour. He reaches for a rifle he does not use. He goes into isolation for days until
the others are out of him and he is himself, and the record files this as a cost of the ability
rather than as anything else.
## Ability
Eon replicates. He does not learn a technique; for a moment he becomes the person who made it, taking the shape and keeping what came with it, and his own pace changes with whoever he is copying. Copying [[life/eevi-charlotte-helvig-norgaard|Eevi]], everything accelerates. Copying [[life/marcus-norgaard|Marcus]], everything slows and gets heavier.
His own baseline energy is low, and he compensates by storing energy taken from elsewhere and spending it later. He is a battery as much as a mirror.
## What he wrote
*The Silent Decade* is his, and he is not in it. He is the voice on every page and the subject of
none. He witnessed every marriage, every child and every turn in the House of Confidence and
recorded none of himself except as the hand holding the pen.
The book contains [[life/sienna-astrid-helvig|Sienna]]'s first contact with the Voidomorphians, a
night she kept to herself for years. He reconstructed it from what she would give him and tried to
give it the weight it deserved.
What he says he has arrived at is that to understand is to forgive. Sienna, writing her own study of
minds that are not ours, opens by saying it is not a weapons manual, and that she is describing a
species not as a threat but as a life. Neither of them appears to have noticed the other got there.
## Character
The squad he lost in the camps is the part of him that is his own, formed before he started carrying pieces of other people. Because he can be other people for a moment, he ends up holding what they cannot say, and the House used him as a confidant whether or not he volunteered. The heaviest of it belongs to Samantha and Marcus.
In later years he keeps the archive and warns the children what the ability costs.
## See also
- [[works/book-two|Book II, The Silent Decade]]
- [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama]]
## References
1. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-3-the-lab-and-the-threat|The Glass House, chapter 3]]
2. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-5-the-first-of-senetis|The Glass House, chapter 5]]
3. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-7-the-generator|The Glass House, chapter 7]]
4. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-12-the-new-normal|The Glass House, chapter 12]]
5. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-17-the-explosion|The Glass House, chapter 17]]