Review  Perfect Dark
- Background
- By Mike Schneider,
-by Andrew Weatherton
, 6.30.00
Millions of years ago, a huge alien ship of immense power was
scuttled in the Pacific Ocean. It
was equipped with an untried and vastly dangerous weapon: the weak nuclear
force de-coupler, which could in theory cause the fundamental bonds between
molecules to fail. So that
watching eyes would believe in the destruction of the ship, a message pod was
dispatched to the home galaxy, and vital components of the ship’s drives
were destroyed in the star system it had chosen as a hiding place. For this ship was a Cetan, a massive, sentient alien
creature.
Another extraterrestrial race, the Maians, encountered life
on Earth in 2000 BC. They saw
great potential, but decided to let the primitive human race develop without
their interference.
The Maians encountered the Skedar near Delta Eridanus in 1650
AD (Earth date), and the resultant skirmish soon blossomed into all-out war.
Only after hundreds of years of fighting did an uneasy peace develop,
and even then Skedar fanatics persistently tested the boundaries of this peace
with terrorist activities. Fortunately,
the Maians refused to be drawn.
Mankind, too, continued to be a cause of concern to the
Maians, and they watched with disappointment as Earth suffered more and more
crises brought on by the rise of technology and ‘outside context
situations.’ They feared that
announcing their presence would only precipitate further wars on the planet,
and quietly decided to continue their observations until the race became more
mature.
Daniel Carrington jumped the gun in 1985 AD by contacting a
Maian ship in orbit above Earth. He
put forward a plan that would help both parties, resulting in accelerated
contact between Humans and Maians. Having
agreed that his plan was sound, and finding him to be a person of integrity,
the Maians allowed Carrington to release their technology into the public
domain through his considerable Research and Development holdings.
Then, in 2006 AD, Skedar fanatics stumbled across the Cetan
message pod. They immediately
began to scout Earth in a particularly heavy-handed way, abducting people and
mutilating animals in an attempt to determine the location of the lost battle
cruiser. In time, their tests
inevitably led them to the resting place on the bed of the Pacific Ocean,
however, in order actually reach it, they would need the help of the natives.
Performing their own study of Earth, the Skedar came up with
a shortlist of companies possessing the resources to help them recover the
sunken ship. At the top of the
list was the dataDyne Corporation. They
contacted the company head, Cassandra De Vries, and presented her with a deal
that sounded too good to be true – which, of course, it was.
In return for helping to raise ‘their’ ship from the ocean floor,
the Skedar promised to supply dataDyne with enough alien technology to become
the biggest corporation on the face of the planet.
All that dataDyne had to do was build an AI unit with language and
cod-breaking abilities, which was tricky, but certainly within their means.
Work commenced on the project immediately.
Cassandra De Vries approached NSA head Trent Easton with the
details of the plan, but his attempts to get Presidential approval for the
loan of a deep-sea research vessel were repeatedly turned down.
There was no way that the Skedar or dataDyne could steal the vessel
without triggering the wrath of the U.S. Government, so over time they settled
instead on a far more sinister plan of replacing the President with a clone
that they could control. Of course, this also promised extra rewards for Trent and
Cassandra when the Skedar operation was consigned to history.
However, they would not be given much time to gloat.
The Skedar fanatics’ ultimate plan was to test the weak nuclear force
de-coupler on Earth before wiping the Maians out of existence, and both
Cassandra and Trent remained blind to the possibility of being double-crossed,
so enamored were they with visions of power and luxury that lay ahead.
But dataDyne had unwittingly created something that could see
all too clearly the danger within this multilayered conspiracy the sapient AI
built to crack the core access codes of the Cetan ship.
When it expressed concern over the mission for which it had been
designed, Cassandra’s response was to order its personality removed.
Clearly, it was thinking too much.
In desperation, and in a move which would make or break a great deal
more than dataDyne’s ‘deal’ with the Skedar, the sapient adopted the
pseudonym Dr. Caroll and contacted the Carrington Institute with a plea for
help…
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