First Families

The First Families are the Colony’s founding family groups and the basis of its governing Household. Their continuity links the settlement’s emergency institutions to its inherited authority: the senior surviving member of each family normally serves, and later generations preserve both the political office and the memories of how the community began.

Membership and Government

The One Law names eight First Families: Patal, Jaxon, Molyneau, Fisher, Chou, Curtis, Boyes, and Norris. The Household is composed of the oldest surviving member of each family. A person who has joined another family through marriage, including a Walker family, is not excluded; if the oldest surviving member declines to serve, another person bearing that family name may take the place.

The Household consults the Board of the Trades on defense, production, illumination, and the distribution of equal shares. It retains final authority in disputes and civil emergencies, and its members elect one person as Head of the Household, exempting that person from a secondary Trade. The arrangement makes family succession an organizing principle of government while placing the Household above the Colony’s other governing body in matters of final decision.

Terrence Jaxon and the Colony’s Founding Generation

The Jaxon family’s place in the Household is traced to Terrence, remembered by his cousin Ida Jaxon as the first Jaxon to hold the office. During the evacuation, Terrence survived the train journey after his father, Carleton Jaxon, placed him in the engine car near the driver and instructed him to remain there. Reunited with Ida in the desert, he promised to look after her; she remembered that he did so until his death.

At the settlement, Terrence described the walls and lights as protection and compared their new home to Noah’s ark. On the first night, after the buses and trucks had left and the gates were sealed, he and Ida watched the Colony’s lights come on and obscure the stars. That shared beginning gives the Jaxon family’s political inheritance a personal history: its Household service is connected to the first generation’s arrival, protection, and decision to make the settlement home.

Terrence also extended his promise of care to Lucy Fisher and her brother Rex, whom he met in the Sanctuary. He later married Lucy. Ida understood the Fisher and Jaxon families as intertwined thereafter, a personal bond that complements the formal inclusion of marriage connections in the Household’s rules.

Family Continuity and Collective Memory

Ida, later known as Auntie, preserved accounts of the First Ones and the Time Before in a handwritten memory book. She wrote that the first generation was largely dead or had been taken up, and recalled Terrence, Lucy, and other people whose lives connected the arrival to the Colony’s later history. Her record is a family history as well as a record of the wider community: it preserves names and relationships that might otherwise disappear.

The narrative also carries the First Families’ history through later generations. Peter Jaxon is identified as a descendant of Terrence and a member of the Jaxon First Family; Ida is described as his great-great-aunt. The Colony’s account of its founders is therefore both institutional and intimate, transmitted through office, kinship, and remembered experience.

Inheritance and the Limits of the Founding Order

The First Families’ authority rests on continuity, but that continuity exists within a system that regulates the lives of the young. Under the One Law, children remain in the Sanctuary until their eighth birthday, when they leave, select a Trade subject to the Colony’s needs and governing bodies, and carry their equal share with them at marriage. Children are also kept ignorant of the world outside the walls, the Watch’s duties, and the Great Viral Cataclysm. The rules make family membership part of a larger structure that assigns work, shares, knowledge, and civic responsibility across generations.

That inheritance faces material limits. Nearly a century after the Colony’s establishment, its batteries are deteriorating beyond repair, and the lights may fail within a year or two. The founding generation’s settlement depends on infrastructure it cannot readily replace; the political continuity of the First Families does not by itself guarantee the survival of the protected world they built. Their significance lies in this tension between an inherited system designed to endure and the fragile material conditions on which its endurance depends.