Carla Zod
Biographical Details
- Full Name
- Carla Zod, later Carla Marks.
- Born
- 12 March 1960; San Francisco, California.
- Died
- Unknown.
- Relatives
- Carl Zod, father; Frida Zod, mother; Franklin Marks, husband.
- Occupation
- Experimental physicist and teacher.
- Associates
- Ally of Strikeforce.
Description
Height 5'5" (165cm); Weight 114lbs (52kg); slim, shoulder-length brown hair (greying in 2014); brown eyes; wears glasses to correct long-sightedness.
History
Carla was the daughter of Austrian immigrants, Karl and Frida Zod, who moved to the United States in 1937 to escape the Nazi annexing of their own country. Karl Zod, though only 20 at the time, was already a well-respected theoretical physicist. Zod also had considerable inherited wealth, which he managed to bring out of Austria with him, meaning he and his family could live comfortably in their adopted country.
Carla, their only child, was born in late in their lives. Frida Zod had a difficult pregnancy and never fully recovered, dying while Carla was still a baby. Carla was raised by her father and a succession of housekeepers.
After excelling in school Carla was accepted as a physics student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where her father had studied, where she remained until completing her doctoral thesis in 1983 at the age of 23. Though she received employment offers from many universities and private companies at that time, she elected to move back to California to be near her father, who was growing frail and suffering ill health. Carla took a research position at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP). When failing health caused her father to retire and relocate to San Francisco, Carla moved with him, while continuing to work with research groups at ITP. She was the author or co-author of multiple papers in theoretical and experimental physics.
In 1987, Karl was kidnapped by the Anarchists and held prisoner for several weeks. Carla encountered Strikeforce during this incident, and as they feared she was also an Anarchist target she was relocated to their space station for safety. She naturally became privy to many of their secrets and became exposed to 24th-century technology, which she quickly mastered. Over the next several months she became Strikeforce's unofficial scientific adviser, and eventually made the breakthrough that allowed them to time travel back to the 24th century.
During this period, Carla began a romantic relationship with Franklin Marks (Electron). The two were married in 1993 and lived in suburban San Francisco where Carla continued to research and teach.
Psychological Profile
Carla is an open, easygoing person with an insatiable scientific curiosity. Though she is invariably the smartest person in the room, this doesn't interfere with her ability to relate to people.
In 1988, the stress of her father's kidnapping and her enforced isolation on the Strikeforce space station caused her to drink excessively. She quickly recognised the problem, and when her life returned to a semblance of normality she stopped drinking, and was tee-total for the rest of her life.
Skills and Abilities
Carla Zod had one of the keenest scientific minds of the 20th century and produced numerous papers on many varied topics of both theoretical and experimental physics. She was one of the very few 20th-century scientists to be exposed to 24th-century science and technology, and soon mastered everything she was exposed to. It is certain that she would have been considered brilliant in the 24th century as well as the 20th.
Carla built on both the theoretical work of her father and the scant data provided by the practical work of the 24th century's Carl Zod to construct a working time machine, becoming the first person in history to do so and so arguably the inventor of time travel. (Paradox makes it hard to state this with certainty.)