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Born in 2189, Stephen Dexter was the son of Matthew
and Fiona Dexter, the leaders of the telepath underground
movement. He was less than a year old when his parents
were killed by the Psi Corps. Kevin Vacit, director of
the Corps and Fiona's father then made sure that little
Steven, a P12 telepath, was taken under the custody of
the Corps. To keep the child's true identity a secret,
Vacit renamed him Alfred Bester after a 20th century
science fiction author.
Unaware of his true inheritance Bester, who had been
told that his parents had died in an accident, spent his
childhood in the care of the Corps. He was among the most
ambitious and loyal students (he even turned in his lover
who wanted to escape the Corps) and because of this and
his high telepathic ability, he eventually became a Psi
Cop. He worked hard and created two of the Corps' most
feared tools: the Black Omaga Squadron and the Bloodhound
Units. Bester dedicated his life to the Corps, but he
also had another obsession: scanning the dying and thus
finding out if there was anything beyond death. According
to rumours it was during one of these deathbed scans that
he went a little too far and lost most part of his
humanity. True or not, Bester didn't mind his anti-social
reputation because he had no life outside the Corps. Even
his marriage (arranged by the Corps) was an unhappy one
with him loving nothing but his precious Corps and his
wife having an affair with another man.
Bester's first visit to Babylon 5 was in 2258 when he
was chasing the rogue telepath Jason Ironheart who had
ran away from the Corps after being submitted to various
inhuman experiments. Bester never caught him because the
experiments eventually caused the rogue to evolve into a
higher lifeform.
The next time Bester stopped by to spread happiness to
the station was a year later when the Psi Corps suspected
that the underground railroad for rogue telepaths was
using B5 as a stopover. Bester believed Talia Winters to be as loyal to the
Corps as he was, but she turned against him using her
enhanced powers to make him believe that the rogues had
died. Unaware of this betrayal Bester left the station
believing to had succeeded in his mission.
In 2260 he was back again, but this time people
weren't smuggling telepaths via B5, but telepathic drug
called 'dust'. This time Bester really did succeed in his
mission; both the official one (confiscating a large
shipment of dust) and the unofficial (keeping dust from
falling into the hands of alien governments and hiding
the fact that Psi Corps was, in fact, involved in the
development of the drug).
Though Bester was still married and had two children -
an adult son and a six-year-old daughter - he had an
affair with the rogue telepath Carolyn Sanderson. Carolyn
had been caught by the Corps and put to a re-education
center where Bester met her, fell in love and did
everything in his power to give her better conditions.
Still, he wasn't able to give her freedom. When Carolyn
became pregnant, Bester begged her to join the Corps, but
she refused. She disappeared soon after. By accident
Bester found out that she had been turned over to the
Shadows so that she could be used as a central processing
unit in one of their ships. Bester then conned Captain Sheridan into rescuing
her (alongside with about a hundred other telepaths) from
the Shadows, but it was too late. Her mind had been badly
damaged by the Shadow implants and she had to be kept in
cryogenic freeze in order to keep her from hurting
herself or others. Enraged, Bester swore revenge to the
Shadows and promised to help the Army of Light if they in
return tried to find a way to cure her.
Bester redeemed his debt the next year when he warned
Sheridan about the actions President
Clark was planning to take against B5 (he even
sacrificed his beloved Black Omega Squadron for this).
Unfortunately the price of this information, a trip to
Z'ha'dum to find a cure, was a failure as Lyta Alexander set off the planet's
self-destruction. Still, Bester's trip had not been all
in vain. Thanks to Lyta's actions he now knew of her
enhanced powers and offered her safety from the
persecution of the Corps in return for a claim to her
body after she died. Initially Lyta refused, but
eventually money problems forced her to comply.
Another victim of Bester's schemes was Michael Garibaldi. After being
abducted by the Shadows and Psi Corps, he had been
brainwashed to act as Bester's spy. The unwilling puppet
resigned from his job, turned against his friends and
eventually turned Sheridan over to the enemy. This
brought Garibaldi to the inner circle of William Edgars' conspiracy to
enslave all telepaths with a virus that was harmless to
the mundanes, but lethal to telepaths. Bester now knew
what he had wanted to find out and let his spy go. Still,
he did make sure that Garibaldi could not harm him in
anyway by putting a telepathic block into his mind. After
releasing Garibaldi he sent his troops to kill Edgars and
to confiscate the virus.
After the Civil Warhad ended, Bester found out that
Sheridan had been using the Shadow enhanced telepaths as
weapons during the battle. Enraged he confronted the
Captain, threatening to kill him if anything had happened
to Carolyn. He was relieved to find out that Carolyn was
still safe on Babylon 5 and that she would be shipped
back to Earth as soon as things settled down.
Even though Carolyn was now safe on Earth, it didn't
take long until Bester was once again forced to visit B5.
Sheridan, now the president of the Interstellar Alliance,
had taken a group of rogue telepaths under his protection
and allowed them to form a colony on the station. This
didn't change the fact that the rogues were still under
the jurisdiction of the Psi Corps. Bester contacted Captain Lochley who owed him a
favor, and demanded that she turned over the telepaths.
Lochley was willing to comply, but Sheridan forced her to
buy some more time to the rogues. When the telepaths
began causing trouble Lochley had no other other choice
but to call Bester back.
Bester had personal interests in the matter as well as
professional: the leader of the rogues, Byron, had once been a Psi Cop
and Bester's protégé. As the situation progressed,
three factions formed. The rogues who wanted a homeworld
of their own, Lochley and Sheridan who wanted a peaceful
solution and Bester who wanted to apprehend the telepaths
at any cost. When Lochley and Sheridan finally managed to
make a deal with the rogues, Bester marched in with a
Bloodhound unit. As a result Byron and some of his
followers committed suicide.
Somewhere around mid-2260's the hostility between
mundanes and telepaths, and also between rogues and the
Psi Corps turned into a shooting war. After unspeakable
bloodshed - committed mostly by telepaths under Bester's
command - the war ended thanks to intervention by
Sheridan. Because of his actions during the war Bester
had to flee in order to avoid imprisonment. Not that he
had anything left. His beloved Psi Corps was gone and
even Carolyn had died during the fighting. For years he
was on the run, pursued by both the new Psi Corps and the
revengeful Garibaldi (now free of the mental block Bester
had put in his mind). He travelled from one colony to
another until finally returning to Earth. For a while
Bester managed to lead a happy life living in Paris and
in love with his landlord Louise, but eventually
Garibaldi was able to track him down by his medication.
Bester was put under a trial and he spent the rest of
his life imprisoned in 'Teeptown', the same place where
he had spent his childhood. He died peacefully in 2281 at
the age of ninety-two.
Episodes: 006, 030, 050, 058, 073, 080, 083,
087, 094, 098-099, 101
List of Episodes
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