chronology

[Escape from Skylark 5]

[Animated feature film]

[2368 to 2558]

Sex/genderless, silver-skinned immortal construct attempts to escape Skylark 5, a massive testbed starship orbiting an exoplanet hidden between Delta Pavonis and Sigma Draconis.  

 

During the escape, it encounters many horrifying and confusing experiments conducted by the Solar Assembly, and, though being an infant in experience, is an elder in intelligence, and grows disdainful towards the Assembly.  The overseer of the its wing of Skylark 5 is a clinical man, solidified in his world view. He sees the construct as a "failed experiment", and goes out of his way to dispose of it.  As the construct escapes, armed mercenaries that dot the overseer's wing search for it, with intent to kill.  After sneaking past most of the mercenaries, and seeing them execute other experiments thinking they were the construct, it is forced to kill one of the mercs in mortal combat.  It takes his guns and armor and continues wandering through the labyrinthine corridors of Skylark 5.  After what could be days of searching, it comes across the docking hangars of the ship.  The construct forces a pilot at gunpoint to fly it to the planet below to just to get away from Skylark 5.  The ship adjusts its attitude with its puffers and launches from inbetween Skylark's habitation toruses, and enters the atmosphere of the frigid exoplanet.

 

The construct spends two years on the planet, searching for anything.  Not requiring food, fuel, or anything else a normal living being would, it can walk forever on those frigid sands.  It finds a cave on the planet, one filled with other beings similar to it.  The construct greets them, and they introduce themselves as the liberators of sentient life, but are shamed and hunted as "psytrans" by the humans. They were on their way off this planet, and decide to bring the construct along for the ride.

 

By 2370 it has passed as a psychological transhuman and fights on the terrorist side of the Absertion War.  It works on large organic war machines called biotitans for the psytrans on planet Selous.  Eventually grows weary of its psytran colleagues after they release a squadron of biotitans on a peaceful civilian city, and defects to a skyhook orbiting Selous.  

 

It proceeds to masquerade as a mentally human transhuman and wishes to be more human.  Being genderless and sexless, it goes through a period of dysphoria which results in it choosing to be the female gender, though remains sexless.  As time goes on, she, being mentally more than human, becomes spiteful towards the human race and turns into a recluse, studying philosophy and science, and eventually publishing a paper called "The Existence of Immortal Sentient Beings", and the only copy ends up in a databank on Selous.  She continues to engross herself in scientific endeavors, until she catches word of another immortal in the galaxy, living on the Tannhauser ring. Her initial mission is to find the immortal, and befriend them so her infinite life won't be spent alone.  However, she gets sidetracked, living in the moment and not thinking of the big picture. By 2588 she's settled down on the Tannhauser, working in a hospital as a nurse.  Then she meets a man named Christopher Johnson, a TANSEC officer.

Soundtrack: Sting/Sting and the Police/The Specials/Prince Buster

 

[Network]

[Animated series, 20-25 episodes]

[2551-2588]

A cop's daily trials while serving on the Tannhauser Ring.  

The man is Christopher Johnson, a first-generation extra-terrestrial with an older earth-born brother.  Conceived and born of an American man and a Cape Verdean woman on a space station in 2551, Christopher was quickly brought to the closest celestial body with sufficient gravity for human development- the Tannhauser Ring.  He was given very invasive surgeries to correct numerous musculo-skeletal, neurological, and general developmental abnormalities.  His bones were cut down and reinforced with alloys, his system supplemented with many drugs and therapies, among other things. His life until he was 13 was spent in and out of hospitals and therapy centers, payed for in part by the government, since his father was an officer of the Tannhauser Security Network (TANSEC, or just, "the Network").

 

Christopher's family was heavily impacted by his medical needs. Eventually his father sold nearly everything he owned to pay for his procedures.  His father resorted to drinking, he lost his job, and eventually, his wife.  His brother grew to hate him.  With a single, jobless parent, a sullen older brother who turned to a life of crime, and a life on welfare in the bad part of town, Christopher was seen as an unsavory citizen, and after being labelled and treated as such, it was reflected in his personality.  He joined a gang, did things he regretted, and saw some traumatic things.  

 

At the age of 16, he gradually began to move away from his past and, inspired by his older brother's artistic prowess, worked on being an artist in secret.  By 19, he gave up on his aspirations of being an artist due nerve damage and shaky hands, and began studying to be a Network officer.  His reenforced bones made him slightly stronger by default, and his nerve damage was a mixed blessing considering that he had a very high pain tolerance in some areas from it.  When he was 24 he met the qualifications and worked as a low-level officer.  

 

At age 29 (year 2588), he was well into his career of being a Network officer, and was a rather esteemed one at that.  He was paying for his father's costs of living, albeit neglecting his drunkenness.  His brother was still in a gang, though Christopher largely turned a blind eye to his brother's crimes.  

 

The story begins here, where he's an esteemed officer working in Huntington Greens, one of the oldest and most crime-ridden boroughs of the Tannhauser Ring.  Life goes as "normal" for about two months.  These two months are comprised of him being assigned to cases that, while he completes them, take their toll on his mind and foreshadow things to come.  

 

The universe is getting stranger with the advent of psychological transhumanism.  Psycho-transcendants, also known as "psytrans", have modified more than their physical appearance and prowess, and have moved to the illegal art of expanding their minds and life span.  However, the way that one goes about modifying their mind and lifespan leads to problems.  A mind that is "more than human" tends to find alternate thought patterns, thought patterns that are unattainable to normal humans.  That, mixed with their longevity, leads to disdain for humanity, seeing them as inferior, wasteful, and evil.  They can see things in us that we can never see, and the way that they reach that conclusion leads to genocidal tendencies, as they eventually see us as below them (expendable).  The number of psytran terrorist organizations is on the rise, and so is their bodycount. This gives the mentally-human transhumans (mentra singular, mentras plural. or derogatorily, "xenos") a very bad name, and this begins a subplot surrounding Christopher's routine protection and bonding with several mentras facing prejudice and violence.  His interactions with many mentras show the many colors of humanity, since they're just humans that were given a new form of expression.  He begins with preconceived notions about them, but comes to the conclusion that they're just like the rest of us.  People, mostly bad people, but people nonetheless.  Just like the rest of us, when they're good, they're good, and when they're bad, you have to take it as it comes.  

 

At the same time, Christopher has to deal with his drunk of a father, distant mother, and criminal brother.  He sees a shrink once a week, but even the shrink is at a loss.  When Christopher was 14, he saw his brother get stabbed in a schoolyard fight.  When he was 17, he saw a man get wrapped around the axle of a Monte Carlo driven by his brother (24 at the time).  At 19, he was held hostage in a bank during a robbery, and saw a lady get executed.  He's got more kinds of PTSD than he has fingers and toes, and it's getting the better of him with each passing case.  Every thump and crash he hears turns into a gunshot, every whisper in the wall is someone scheming against him. When one of his friends gets run over in an accident and wrapped around the axle, he gets so messed up he has to take a mandatory vacation.  

 

This vacation is spent lazing around his house, reading books, and going to clubs.  On one of his outings with some mentra friends, they decide to go to a club.  The drinks are some crazy off-world cocktail, really just ethanol mixed with fermented alien berry juice.  Two shots in he begins hallucinating, but hallucinating good things.  When staggering around the club, his eyes get locked on a thing of beauty.  Wide hips, thin waist, and beautiful face with innocent cat eyes.  One thing leads to another, and they wake up at her place.  Upon coming to, Christopher sees that he just stuck it in a mentra.  At first he's disgusted, but when she gives him that innocent look, he doesn't know what to think.  Eventually, he makes it over the hump, and stops caring.  He did what he did, and he liked it.  No need to regret it.  At that moment he learns to go with the flow, and the flow lead him into the arms of a 6'8 grey-skinned kinda-human named Yolandi.  

 

The final two weeks of his vacation are romantic, as him and Yolandi spend their days mostly talking.  Yolandi wants to help him with his trauma, and he just wants someone who cares about him.  He ends up caring a little too much, and the relationship becomes a dangerously co-dependent one.  After a week of being together, Christopher is at her house as intruders break in.  They've targeted her house because she's a dirty xeno that to them, doesn't belong in their neighborhood.  Yolandi has a gun, but due to Huntington Green law, the magazine is restricted to 5 rounds, have a "bullet button" extending the reload time to at least thirty seconds, the barrel has to be 18.5 inches, amongst other meaningless restrictions.  Her gun isn't meant for home defense, and she is subsequently shot by the thug's fully-automatic submachine guns built from sheet metal and nails.  Once Christopher gets downstairs, he shoots the intruders with his advanced police-issue pistol, and runs to Yolandi's aid.  She's fine, but the encounter scared the shit out of both of them.  Yolandi is sent to the hospital where she remains for several weeks.

 

Christopher's partner of three years is shot by a psytran terrorist in a case which was brushed under the mat. His father is drinking more heavily, his brother is digging deeper into the underworld of the Tannhauser Ring, and his partner and one of his last good friends was just killed by a creature that is, by proxy, threatening the livelihood, safety, and life of his mentra friends and Yolandi.  After being pressed by Yolandi, he quits his job (which secretly, he's been considering for a good while).  Final scene is of him waking up in Yolandi's house just as the sun rises, then going for an early-morning walk with an injured Yolandi through the park, helping her recover.  This marks the end of the episodic series.

 

[Network (movie)]

[Feature-length animated film]

[2588-2588]

 

(cont. from "Network") Then comes the Groombridge 34 incident, shown at the beginning of the cinematic portion of the story. It leaves an entire system destroyed by two immense, unknown alien creatures.  This is the first encounter with alien life beyond cavemen and worms. The TASEN (Tannhauser Alliance of Solar Entities) frantically looks for actions to take, but there is no protocol or preparation for such an event.  Politicians butt heads and sides are taken.  This tears the TASEN in two, beginning with the USA's allegiance with the USSR wearing thin.  Paranoia and fear is stricken into the hearts of humanity, as Earth faces another war which may spread to the Jovian system.  Fears of Solar War III fill the minds of those on the Tannhauser Ring, and the Soviet section of the Network begins to butt heads with the American section.  Thankfully, the Soviets and Americans were separated, with the Soviets on one side of the ring, and the Americans on the other.  

 

Christopher is called back to work against his will, as per a secret loophole in the contract he signed when he joined the Network.  

 

Tensions rise with each passing case as the relationship between the USA and USSR sours.  Legislation is passed banning arbitrary things, and restricting importation of Soviet goods to certain boroughs on the American side, and vise versa.  The two powers are showing their teeth, while crime has a field day and corruption fills the Network. The degradation of society lead to the disruption of Christopher's, and everyone else's life.  

 

The growing presence of psytran terrorists eventually catches the attention of the divided Networks.  Both the USA and Soviets want to be the heroes and end this threat, and subsequently, dirty cards are played that undermine the entire case and only help to make the population more agitated and paranoid.

 

The TANSEC Network becomes a festering mass of bureaucracy and corruption, and the once-peaceful earth is thrown into a cold war.  Crime and poverty rise as literacy rates and quality of living dive.  Christopher is told that his brother was killed along with five others in a shooting but nobody knows because the media doesn't care about black-on-black violence.  His good mentra friend has been lynched, but nobody bats an eye because nobody cares about minorities.  His dad drinks himself half to death, but he can't help him because he's too busy being put on menial missions whose sole purpose is to shame the Soviet TANSEC Network.

 

Christopher confronts his commander about these missions and is eventually met with "there is something bigger than all of us going on out there", after pressing him.  This cryptic answer drives him into a violent mental breakdown on the drive home.  He exits his car on the drive home and joins a nearby riot that broke out, but sees his brother partake in it.  He follows his brother and catches up with him, and they get into a fight.  After the fight is fought and both lose, Christopher asks his brother why he threw the first punch. He says he was just afraid he was going to arrest him for rioting.  Christopher proceeds to tell him he should have been dead because of the shooting.  His brother tells him he never died in a shooting, and asks him where he got that.  Christopher leans back, confused and overwhelmed.  Wordlessly, he gets up and walks back to his car and drives back to his commander.  

 

At TANSEC HQ, Christopher, agitated, forces his commander to tell him the truth at gunpoint.  The commander, not as loyal as he should be, spills his guts.  The feud between the USA and the USSR was rigged, and the cold war back on earth was just to stimulate their economy.  The higher ups on earth knew that the Tannhauser Ring would be thrown into chaos, but they cut their losses and let it happen.  The TANSEC Network couldn't be trusted with the real knowledge, since they are generally more kind-hearted and honest than earthlings, but the commander figured out the truth.  He tells Christopher that others must have too, but they might have told people.  The commander was afraid that making earth's malevolence common knowledge would just make things worse.  Maybe someone told everyone, and that's why the riots are breaking out.  There's no way to know if people know, and there's no way to know what is the truth and what isn't.  Nobody can be trusted anymore, only a fool would trust the modern TANSEC, and they would be even more foolish should they trust their neighbor.  

 

Christopher, visibly shaken, futilely tells the commander to not tell anyone he knows.  As Christopher exits the room, the paranoid commander calls officers into his room, saying that Christopher has gone rogue.  

 

Christopher runs immediately upon seeing a group of stern-looking officers heading up the stairs, and he runs through the HQ and jumps out a window, missing a soft-top Buick and landing on the concrete.  Thankfully his reenforced bones allow him to leave with only minor lacerations, but he has to run as fast as he can away from the pursuing officers.  This isn't that fast, since the fall left one of his artificial bones bent.  His nerves flair painfully as he staggers to his car.  He hobbles through the riot outside HQ as a large screen in the square plays the local news.

 

The newscaster has a mental breakdown (audio from the "mad as hell" scene from Network [1976]), and his agitated, fierce catharsis fills the streets.  Directly at the end of his angry speech, a passenger plane skids across the ground, destroying buildings and killing hundreds.  Christopher comes to the conclusion that this is another attack, and he gets in his car and speeds home as fast as possible.

 

He gets to Yolandi's house after she was discharged from the hospital, and tells her to leave the Tannhauser Ring as soon as she can.  He tells her go to Spacedock 13^5H to find a cargo ship, a spaceliner, anything, and see if she can hitch a ride.  After some persuasion, she does so.  

 

Christopher drives to a suspected base of operations for the psytrans, and sneaks in.  Luckily he found the right place, and he proceeds to slaughter everyone inside.  Once done, he drives through the chaotic streets to the next suspected psytran hideout.  He succeeds in killing everyone there, but he got shot in the process.  On the way back to his car, he hears the loud bang of a space ship slamming into the hub of the Tannhauser Ring followed by the noise of the suspension cables snapping, and feels the ground shake.  He looks up and sees the hub of the Tannhauser Ring pulling itself apart, along with numerous detonations along the spokes of the ring.  The ground bends and warps, leveling buildings and ripping itself apart.  He realizes that he lost, and drives as fast as he can to Spacedock 13^5H.  

 

Upon reaching his destination, he finds the hangars destroyed, filled with piles of what used to be ships.  He assumes that every other spacedock must be like this. Thinking on his feet, he dons a space suit, and waits until the correct moment of rotation to jump off the ring.  After doing so, an old man in a trenchcoat walks through the spacedock.  The man is in his 150's, but looks even older.  He walks over to Christopher, who is sitting on the wreckage of a ship, and sits down next to him.  After a few seconds the old man asks what he's doing here.  Christopher says he doesn't know anymore, everything has been going too fast.  He says he's just been on autopilot for the past few weeks.  The old man asks what he does for a living, and Christopher replies that he works with the Network.  The old man perks up, and says that he used to be a detective for the Network in the 2250's.  He shows him his badge which reads "Thomas Doyle".  The man says he carries it with him to remind him of the good old days, to which Christopher asks, "what good old days?".  The old man says, the days when the Network was good.  Back when the men knew who the men were, and the women knew who the women were.  The blacks and the whites knew their places, the men knew how to treat the women and vise versa, and before the "goddamn xenos took over".  Christopher rolls his eyes, and says nothing.  He thinks to himself, this is who he's fighting for?  This is who he protects?  The rich old men with nothing better to do than shit on everyone who isn't a rich old man?  Christopher began to be ashamed of who he was, who he worked for, and who he let use him.  He lost his phone somewhere in all this chaos, so he can't call Yolandi to see if she's safe.  After a few minutes, the ceiling begins to creak and bend, and the ring seems to be near the right position to fling him far enough away from Jupiter to be rescued.  The old man mumbles something as Christopher stands and puts on his helmet, and silently walks away into the airlock.  He launches himself into the darkness just in time to see the ring tear itself apart.  Then the credits roll.

 

After the credits, it shows Christopher after three days of floating in space (fed by the suit's nourishment tubes).  He finds himself above the dark side of Jupiter.  His suit computer warns him of impending impact with Jupiter.  The automatic SOS signal has been fried by radiation, and the alloys in his bones magnetize in the harsh magnetosphere of Jupiter.  He can barely move and his suit is malfunctioning.  He looks around for the Tannhauser.  He sees nothing where it should be, but upon looking more, sees wreckage that has been flung in every direction.  One section looked about six boroughs long, then it collided with Jupiter, lighting up the night in a silent show of fire and smoke.  His suit shorts out, and just as he spots the wreckage, his HUD vanishes.  Knowing the inevitable, he punctures one of his oxygen tubes with a knife, and suffocates himself before he starves or burns up in the radiation.  The final shot is of Yolandi looking out at Jupiter from inside a freighter.

Soundtrack: Non Phixion/Psyche Origami/Deltron 3030/heavy use of silence in most scenes

 

[The Jaunt]

[Live-action feature film]

[2601-2601]

An experimental jaunter "Chuck Yeager" is created to beat the warp speed record. The ship is sent to another dimension mysteriously.  Story follows the crew of the Yeager fighting to survive in the strange dimension.  

Contents of the negative matter bottle fired from the RSP assembly are revealed to have been sabotaged by a Hermian crewmember, who turns out to be not a Hermian, but Yolandi.  She escapes into this strange dimension and leaves the crew of the Yeager for dead.  The co-pilot survives and follows the immortal into the unknown.  

Soundtrack: Ennio Morricone

 

2601 is the farthest into the future we go in that series, and here is marks the beginning of series 2:

 

[Triple-X]

[Live-action feature film]

[2370-2371]

Follows the exploits of a COMSA mercenary named Joe Fosbery in the Absertion War, circa 2370. Upon setting foot on the planet Selous, he is met with disdain by the Solar Marines.  He meets a fellow mercenary, named Ryan Lamont.  His face has been destroyed in an unknown accident, his arms have been replaced with bronze-colored prosthetics, earning him the nickname "Golden Arms". He is more machine than man, and anyone could have guessed that by his lack of face.  They met in a bar, and bond over their fascination with weapons and military air and spacecraft.  They are sent on varied missions over the course of the story and end up, six months later, being used as expendable troops in a dangerous mission.  

 

The mission was "accompany Solar Marines on an infiltration of a captured planetary defense cannon".  This was a misnomer, as what the higher-ups had in mind was "use the mercenaries as bait for biotitans, luring them into the orbital cannon to be destroyed by an orbital laser".   Upon getting word of their true purpose, Joe insists they go AWOL while Ryan wants to go deeper into the cannon for reasons he won't tell.  

 

They eventually argue and split, ending with Ryan going deeper and Joe leaving.  Joe sneaks out and is killed by a psytran biotitan.  It then switches to Ryan's point of view, showing what he wanted to go deeper

for.  He finds a console with a file named "The Existence of Immortal Sentient Beings".  He hastily reads the file, and is destroyed when the orbital laser fires on the cannon, destroying it.  Ryan's death scene is juxtaposed with images of a soldier in WWII being disfigured by an artillery strike.  After being disfigured, the mystery man wakes up in a hospital, face bandaged, and with no legs and one arm.  

Soundtrack: Wendy Rene/Bad Brains/Love/Cream/Les Rallizes Denudes/Death Grips/Hank Williams Sr.

 

[World of Dogs]

[Live-action feature film]

[1945-2000]

Opening scene is of a group of soldiers storming a hill in Germany, in 1945.  An artillery shell bursts on the ground, right in the center of the group.  The disfiguration scene is cut from the end of "Triple-X", as is the following scene where one of the soldiers wakes up in a hospital bed, face bandaged, missing an arm and both legs.  He overhears the talk of V-E day, and a nurse giddily tells him that Hitler has fallen, and Tojo is next on the chopping block.  He moans through his bandages, and begins to unravel them once he hears the room is empty.  His face is missing his left eye, and instead has a large hole where the eye should be.  Large pock marks pepper his face, from where shrapnel was removed.