Frederick Baxter

The youngest child of Erica Baxter, one of three triplets, the eldest being Terence, named after the captain of the Astrala - the first PPB colony ship, from whom the Baxter family descended - and the middle child, Harriet.

An interplanetary explorer, Frederick was responsible for the discovery of more habitable worlds than anyone else, including the world he chose to give the family name, Baxter's World, which is now the capital world of the PPB.

His final expedition led him and his crew to a world full of just the kind of mystery that made explorers go weak at the knees, but the exploration went calamitously wrong when one by one the crew fell to a mysterious illness that was brought aboard from a probe which had not been adequately decontaminated.

The contamination was a bizarrely resistant fungus which could penetrate the dermal layer and, once infected, the individual would suffer a gradual but unstoppable calcification of the neural tissues, leading to paralysis and eventual solidification of the brain itself.

While Baxter was the last of the crew to succumb to the paralysis, he was not yet dead when his body was recovered, and due to his revered status in the PPB he was placed in suspended animation in the hopes that one day he could be cured. His not-yet dead body is on permanent display in a cryogenic chamber in the central meeting room of the PPB Committee on Baxter's World.