The Wasteland Refuge

Chapter 4: Hostile Elements
They had settled the ship along the terminator point of Earth's moon, the soft and pitted landscape shimmering a dull grey under the light. As soon as the ship had settled, ACe immediately went into observation mode, pooling most of the ship's power towards scanning, listening and watching the planet as it sat there shinning in the dark like some blue and white marble.The ship's audio speakers were overlapping various comms chatter on the planet, seemed to be listening and filtering through everything, pulling up random landmasses on the surface and putting them through various scanning programs; infrared, broad-based mineral viewers, various other spectral analysis scans, the works.

"There!" ACe suddenly barked out. "There! Right there! I have something." Korrza glanced up at the holo-monitor, brow plate slightly furrowed. ACe pulled up a large cross section of what looked like the southwestern section of one of the planet's larger landmasses. "What do you have?" Korrza asked. ACe moved closer to the control console, taking that small slice of land and magnifying it. It appeared to be, at first glance, just a small, nondescript little settlement of oblong buildings, asphalt streets, and a thin, nearly three mile long runway. It was nestled at the southern shore of some long dried out lake bed, the bleached and harsh white soil looking like a large icy blob in the middle of a desert. The area was surrounded by sandy yellowed tundra, red colored hills and mountains, virtually an oasis in an otherwise lifeless speck of land. ACe pulled up a scanning grid over the buildings, channeling through various programs until a small, golden orb appeared to pulsate on the screen. "There, you see that?" ACe said. Korrza simply frowned, still not understanding. "I can see what appears to be some kind of....anomaly, but it's showing in the middle of nowhere. I didn't see any buildings or structures on the initial scan."

ACe swiveled to look Korrza, "That's because this power source is underground. Deep underground." Korrza waited. "And....?" "And," ACe responded, "based on extensive and repeated analysis of the source, it's coming from an Eronian slip space engine." Korrza gawked. "Eronian? What in the name of the abyss is an Eronian ship doing this far out, and on the surface of an inhabited planet?" ACe pulled up the entire facility into a 3D map, showing the initial surface scan and the deep ground penetrating radar/L-adar image of a virtual catacomb hive of underground tunnels and buildings. The power source was pulsating from the deepest, largest chamber in the image. "I don't think they're there of their own volition," ACe seemed to say matter-of-factly. "I believe their ship has been captured."


ACe and Korrza were back in the tech lab, looking at the large, nearly room filling 3D image of the facility in question. "The locals call it 'Area 51.' It's gotten a sort of clan-destine conspiracy theorists moniker labeled all over it. And for good reason. Most of those theories are right." ACe began to compile every tech advancement that the human race had managed to make in the last 30 cycles. "Fiber wire, or what they call fiber-optics, Micro-processing, superconductors, radar and L-adar stealth coating, night-vision amplification, I could list off nearly three hundred other advancements these humans have made since they first started reverse-engineering the Eronian's scouter that initially crashed," ACe pulled up another cross section of the map of the south western section of the United States (as ACe eventually told Korzza) and magnified the area, "here, in Roswell, New Mexico, approximately 1,108.25 metreclicks from where it currently resides. The ship crashed on Earth date July 7, 1941 A.D. Nearly seventy two cycles ago. There were two survivors but, according to secret intel, they passed away and were autopsied a few clicks later."

Korrza nodded, feeling his stomach turn in uncomfortable butterflies. "What do we know of early Eronian tech by the way?" ACe pulled up a image of your typical Eronian; tall, thin and frail looking creatures, with four fingers, large bulbous heads and very large almond shaped black eyes. "Typical Eronian, generally green to grey skinned, 6.4 to 6.8 quads in height, point of origin; sector 259.17-A. Roughly thirty nine slipcycles from our current position. Their tech is comparable to ours since becoming slip space capable roughly one thousand cycles after we did." ACe pulled up the galaxy map of a binary star system, the small red planet of Eronia circling around the larger star of the two. Korrza frowned. "That's a lot closer than I thought it would be," he admitted. "Maybe they're not out as far as I thought they were. In fact, Earth is practically in the Eronian's own back yard." ACe nodded. "Indeed sir, they are. Which makes their tech-theft a cause for alarm."



Korrza put his hands up and waved them gently, "Whoa whoa whoa. Slow down ACe, slow down. Not EVERYTHING these humans have come up with over the last thirty cycles could have come come directly from Eronian tech. You and I both know they were able to crack the atomic code by themselves, what's to say that they weren't able to do the same thing with some of these techs you pointed out on their own?" he asked. ACe shook his head. "Directly, no, they didn't just gut the Eronian ship and tech jump by about three hundred cycles. They took their time, dissected and "invented" the small stuff after taking some time to study it. Fiber-op--fiber wire, micro-chips, those they introduced subtly. It didn't happen overnight, of course, but going from computers that were nearly a hangar's length in diameter that couldn't even properly formulate the mathematical equation of pi down to handheld communication devices that have nearly quadruple that processing power in less than one hundred cycles screams of reverse-engined tech. Given another twenty cycles, if even that long, and it'll be a mathematical certainty that they'll "introduce" anti-grav capabilities. That will push them closer to crossing the threshold of slip space capabilities. That is what will make them dangerous."

"Dangerous how?" Korrza asked, crossing his arms. ACe leaned his camera forward. "You've seen how casual they look at violence, how desensitized they are to it. They're too militaristic. If they spread out into the galaxy, the mathematical certainty that they go to simply conquer and destroy other civilizations is beyond refute. They have no unified government, no unified currency, no unified religion. Why? Because their draconian religious ideologies dictate that it would be evil. A sign of their "end of days." And so they wage war with themselves and kill and murder their own kind because of these archaic dogmas. They're not a truly sentient species. They're just slightly evolved animals that steal and murder and destroy anything that tries to resist. And if they're given the ability to expand out across the stars unchecked, everything, every last thing that the High Council has ever accomplished, all of its advancements, all of its achievements," ACe leaned forward even more, "all of it. ALL of it will face inevitable annihilation by a species that is not ready and not capable of understanding that the universe is bigger than they are. That they're not special. That they're not unique. They're simply a very small speck on a very large playing field."

Korrza could feel a chill running up his spine. This conversation had taken a unexpectedly morbid turn. Listening to ACe spout off (in a very angry and almost fanatical way he noted) against a species that they only recently found, how so profoundly ready he was to judge them based on circumstantial evidence; evidence that yes, deemed them violent, but also capable of such beauty and of such creativity. To dismiss them as vermin, in ACe's eyes....eh eye, just seemed unnatural in a way. He was a creation of the Council, of the Exploratory Committee, but he was also capable of forming rational and independent thought. A "free will in the wire" so to speak. So it wasn't hard to discern that he saw humanity in a less than admirable light.

"So why don't we simply teach them to be responsible with the gifts they currently have?" Korrza asked. "I'm pretty sure that, according to you, the Eronian tech is too imbedded in their every day lives for them to simply do a reverse course and give it all up. But as explorers, as scientists, as keepers of Abborian law and tradition, then isn't it simply our duty to help show them the way? A better way than what they're currently on? Yes they're dangerous, but they're also capable of art, science, open-mindedness, free will. Those are tools that we can use to help them. Guide them. Teach them."

ACe seemed to take it all in for less than half a bit before shaking the camera. "That's a noble ideal, Protectorate. And at one time that might have been a possibility. But that's not going to happen. The High Council has decreed that a punitive force must be sent to Earth. Under Council orders both the planet Earth and Eronia are hereby annexed under the Abborian Hegemony and protocol 625-2 is to be maintained until their arrival." Korrza took a moment to recall what that was, which was simply to enter visual observation mode until further notice. No transmissions to or from the ship would be possible during that time. Korrza didn't like this at all. In fact, the steady taste of bile in his throat made this whole incident seem.....almost predetermined. "So tell me," he asked. "What will this....punitive force do once they arrive?"

ACe turned to glance at the planet out of the view port. "Simple. They clean slate the entire planet and start over......"

Chapter 3: Hard Contact
"There it is," ACe almost whispered. Both he and Korrza were leaning almost inches from the floating holo-image that the probe had at last compiled on its scan of the planet. "Isn't it beautiful?" he whispered. Korrza could only nod, transfixed by the spectacle of a living, breathing world. It was a deep set blue, swirling white clouds roaming across its skies. Small ripples of brown and green threaded land poked through the cloud cover here and there, the soft red and yellow light of its star reflecting off the waters giving parts of the planet this almost orange and rose colored glow. As the probe flew past to the dark side of the planet, the natural wonder was replaced by the glittering twilight of industry, cities that seemed web out in almost candlelight-like globes of white. Off to the left and just peeking over the curve of the planet, the small grey and white luminous surface of it's moon poked out.

"Mag...nificent," Korrza finally managed to say when he collected his breath. The probe's final image of the planet was a small half shimmering ring of the world shining in the light, that peek-a-boo lump of its moon, and finally broken static and darkness as the probe self-destructed. ACe looped the feed and paused it at the light-facing side, glancing at Korrza gently. "That's not the only thing the probe picked up. There's a lot of chatter down there, so many different dialects, so many different voices. I don't think that the planet's home to just fifty dialects. I think it's home to at least six thousand." Korrza could feel the gooseflesh ripple up his back. "Six thousand?!" he gasped. "Indeed," ACe seemed to beam. "Random communications chatter for the most part, it seems they've developed rudimentary broadband capabilities in the last fifty cycles since launching their probe. Which would suggest they're using fiber wire tech, much like our own. I was also able to pick up some kind of....visual transmission as well."

Korrza frowned gently. "Of what?" ACe pulled up the data stream, showing the small dimly lit room, an iron box with a large tube leading into the wall, inside that iron box flickered the hard red light of a fire. A man stood at the doorway, rain beading off his long trench coat and broad brimmed hat, as he cradled some long metal tube like object. Another man in the room seemed to stare him down. "You'd be William Munny out...(unintelligble).... women and children." Korrza started a little. "Hey I understood some of that." ACe nodded, "The translation matrix must be kicking in, it'll still be spotty until it compiles the total language components, but it should give us the gist of what they're saying." ."..or crawled at one time or another," the transmission continued. "And I'm....(unintelligible)... kill you, Little Bill....for what...(unintelligible) Ned," the man in the doorway said in a sandy, rough voice. ACe leaned closer to the video screen, tightening his eye shutter a little. "Wait did he just say he was there to k--."

The scene showed a terrible and deadly battle, small hand held and double barreled weapons that spat fire and bullet. Men screamed as they were shot and spout gouts of blood over the walls, across each others faces, or pooled out across the floor. It all ended with the man in the trench coat standing over the one who first spoke to him. "I don't deserve this..(unintelligible)...a house," he seemed to lament. "Deserve's...(unintelligible) with it," the other responded. "I'll see you in hell William Munny," the man on the floor spat out.  The other man leveled up his weapon and in that cold and gritty voice simply replied, "...Yeah..." Both Korrza and ACe seemed to jump out of their skins as the man's weapon fired.


Both of them sat there staring at the planet's image in complete and total silence for almost an entire click. Korrza finally managed to blink, inhaled deeply and rubbed his hands against his upper legs. He looked at the floor plates, and leaned forward in his chair. "I still feel like I'm going to be sick." ACe finally managed to shut the video feed off, leaving the both of them to sit there under the soft blue light spilling off the various command consoles at the cockpit. Korrza tried to find something positive about what he had seen. On the one hand he at least got to see the males of the species in a more definitive light as opposed to the silly little silhouettes the golden disk had shown. Their noses were more pronounced, ending in a slight up-curving point, unlike Korzza's which was more squared and flat against the face. Their lips were dimpled under their noses, as opposed to the smooth and flat set of Korrza's people. The ears were rounded instead of being slightly pointed in the middle. Their eyes were of particular interest, being white with colorful irises, instead of being covered by the thick black u.v. membrane of Korrza's people, which suggested their sun wasn't emitting as much ultra violent radiation as his own, instead they simply had a light patch of hair instead of scale plates over the crown of their eye sockets. They also didn't appear to have the skin spots down their necks and shoulders, and of course they had five fingers instead of four.

But the violence, the open and uncensored violence that he had just witnessed, was something completely and totally unique. And unexpected for a species that seemed to project themselves as an open, peace-loving society. A lot of things might have changed in the nearly fifty cycles since they first launched their probe, but to display it in such brunt and frank manner suggested to Korrza that this mind-set was deeply imbedded into their core makeup. That violence had become something so commonplace and readily accepted that they had simply become....detached from its overall impact. The more Korrza dwelt on this particular aspect of these humans (as ACe had finally told him what they called themselves) the more that doing a close orbit fly-by of the planet seemed like a very bad idea.

They could react in any number of ways. Some of which involved him and the ship being obliterated in orbit. Something that seemed to creep up Korrza's spine like a cold and icy finger. And it was something that seemed almost....probable considering what he initially knew of them. What was the old saying? First impressions aren't always the correct one, but they aren't always the wrong one either. ACe slid up to Korrza, his small camera eye glancing up and down worriedly. "Are you OK Protectorate?" he asked quietly. Korrza glanced at him gently and nodded. "I'm thinking that maybe this is as close as we get to Earth. In fact the further we can get, the better."

ACe seemed to understand, and yet seemed disappointed at the same time. "So what are you thinking?" he asked. Korrza cleared his throat and sighed. "I say we save the information, catalog the planet as 'progressive but hostile' and keep traveling. It is a scientific wonder to find a habitable planet this deep in space, but their casual approach to violence leaves me with too many reservations with doing anything beyond that. So the best, and most prudent, course of action is to just move on."

ACe nodded, moving to the command console and began to shunt all the information into the ship's main data cells. "As you wish, Protectorate," he did glance back once as he moved across the console. "It is curious though," he threw out, "how they acquired fiber wire capabilities in the fifty cycles since they sent out their Voyager probe." Korrza titled his head, he knew where the conversation was going, but for the moment he'd play along. "After all," ACe tried to reason, "didn't our own society take nearly three hundred cycles to develop that same tech after we first started exploring the universe?" Korrza simply shrugged. "Curious, but still not worth undertaking an investigation into the why or how." "You're honestly not curious why it only took them ten or fifteen cycles since becoming near-space explorers to having some of the most advanced hardw--" "No," Korrza responded angrily. "No I'm not." ACe paused at the console for a moment, then turned back to face Korrza. "Not even if the Council ordered you to?"

Korrza narrowed his eyes. "What did you do?" ACe pulled his camera back as far as he could from Korrza, suddenly finding the cockpit to be very, very small. "Well, protocol dictated that, with any unusual find in space, I fast track the information to both the High Council and the Exploratory Committee." Korrza's hearts sank. "Let me guess, they want me to investigate the planet." "Yes, Protectorate," ACe meekly replied. Korrza grimaced and sighed, rubbing his forehead. "How long ago did the order come in?" he asked. ACe pulled up the data log showing that they fast pulsed the request while they were watching the planet's visual transmission. Korrza threw out his hand and gestured to the command console. "Do they KNOW what we saw? Did they SEE that transmission?" ACe did that shrug like thing. "I don't think they've seen it, but they'd still probably order us to investigate the planet, nonetheless."

Korrza sat there for a moment feeling totally dejected. "OK," he sighed deeply. "Ok, I won't defy orders, but I want this decision filed with a personal protest." ACe nodded. "Duly noted Protectorate."

Korrza shook his head one last time, "This is a bad....very bad idea."

Chapter 2: More Chuck Berry, Please
Korrza Rahn took a moment for the interior suit pressure to equalize, feeling his ears pop gently as the suit  seals hissed and finally clamped down. The helmet's interior displays fluttered to life, running diagnostic code down as each system came online and flashed a ready green. "Comms check, ACe can you hear me?" A small video display to the left lit up, showing Korrza a ceiling view of the cockpit. "Loud and clear sir," ACe responded. "Good," Korrza said, "now remind me why I'm the one going out here again?" ACe seemed to twitter as he made final calibrations on the ship's interior grav-plate units. "Because I'm not able to sir," he responded casually. "My Mobile Suit Explorer isn't designed for space walks. Every gyro and joint would freeze up in mere bits before I could do anything...productive beyond screaming that it was cold out here." "Hmmrph, that sounds like an excuse to stay safe and warm in the ship," Korrza mused. "Oh it is," ACe shot back, "but seriously, two maybe three bits and I'd be frozen solid. I'm designed for planetary exploration, not the potentially dangerous and suicidal trip you're attempting to make...."

"Wait, what?" Korrza exclaimed. "What do you mean 'potentially dangerous?'" ACe peered out to the view screen as the ship began to parallel orbit next to the probe. "Well, did you even stop to think that maybe the probe might be booby trapped, sir?" "No. Not until you just mentioned--" "You'll be fine, sir," ACe interrupted as the ship finished its maneuver and settled. "Any last words before I shut off the grav-plate units and open the airlock?" ACe seemed to tease him. "Yeah," Korrza nervously said, "maybe this isn't such a good idea after all." ACe's voice suddenly went serious. "You'll be fine," he said. "I already scanned for any potential threats. Shutting grav-plate power down in three....two....one."

Korrza suddenly felt his body lift, the weight of the artificial gravity plates under his feet powering down and giving him the sense that he was free falling. It was almost the same sense he'd felt when he was planetside in the Abborian deep space simulation unit, in that giant and dark tank of icy cold water, having no sense of up or down, top or bottom. Just the quiet black nothing. The cold. That almost dizzying sensation of loosing every sense that your body had relied on since birth; touch, hearing, sight and smell. It was both amazing, and yet terrifying all at once.

"Ready to open the airlock whenever you're ready, Protectorate," ACe responded, now that soft spoken and all-business program. "Is your safety tether secure?" Korrza looked down to the side of the suit, flicking open a small metal box and pulling out a silver-looking wire no thicker than a spider's thread. At the end was a dime-sized electro-magnet synced up with the ship's plating. With a simple flip of the power unit on the box, the mag lock would attach and hold on so tight you could put five of Korrza on the other end and it wouldn't let go. The tether wire, on the other hand...Korrza made the connection and flipped the power on, feeling the small tug at his side as it latched onto the hull. "Ready,"  he said.

ACe moved to the airlock control panel. "Releasing clamps. Opening airlock outer door in three...two...one." The door slid out, almost touching the alien probe ahead of Korrza. Even with suit compensators in place, the full brunt of spacial vacuum hit Korrza like an arctic blizzard. "Wooo that's cold," he muttered. "You're doing fine, sir," ACe tried to reassure him. "All vitals show nominal, for now." Korrza placed his hands on the outer doorway frame, taking a moment to orient his body for that gentle push forward towards the probe's hatch. "Here we go," he said before pushing off.


Korrza and ACe looked down at the small round disk as it floated gently above the grav table in the ship's tech lab, ACe trying to take every possible reading and scan that the ship's various instruments had. Korrza sat retentively in his seat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped gently together. As soon as his hands had pried the probe's hatch open there it was, reflecting golden under the ship's forward lights. It was still remarkably well preserved considering the probe's age. Various pictographs written in some strange dialect adorned the small disk, and after holding it to the light a little closer, he could see small circular grooves of some kind cut into the disk's surface.

After a few minutes, ACe's camera arm retracted, moving across the ceiling of the ship's tech lab and pulling close to Korrza's face. "It's a recording of some kind," he finally said. Korrza's forehead wrinkled gently. "Of what?" he asked. "Well, after finally figuring out the archaic playing device that's required to make it function," ACe said as he swiveled back to the gold plated record, "I can holo-code what's required and....well, we can both find out what it is." ACe turned the camera and waited. Korrza simply nodded, giving ACe all the permission he needed.

The record suddenly stopped spinning in the air as a hard light holo-code construct began to materialize around it. ACe had created a box-like image with a circular top, a small thin needle resting on the neck of some swivel arm. The circular top base began to spin, the swivel arm and needle slowly lowering towards the small grooved disk. As soon as the needle made contact with the record, both Korrza And ACe nearly gasped in shock. The plate had somehow imbedded various pictures of the probe's homeworld, various buildings of glass and metal, images of plant and animal life, silhouettes of two bipedal figures, one more muscular than the other, the other more sleek and curvacious.

Sounds of various....Korrza could only guess as the planet's wildlife; a soft chirping thing, a harsh squawking something, punctuated by what sounded like a booming, grinding wail. "What is that?" Korrza asked. ACe glanced over at him, "If I had to guess, the pitch and the way it's giving off a reverb," he said, "I'd say it's a very, very large underwater animal." Korrza nodded, "It sounds a lot like--"

Music. Soft and gentle music suddenly rang out across the ship. Light and slowly rhythmic, it seemed to convey a time in the species culture of more....refined eloquence. ACe leaned forward, "Oh I like this. It sounds so pretty...I wonder if th-" The music faded, shifting between various instrumental influences, some light and lofty, others more fundamentally primal. It all finally ended in something that neither expected to hear. It was an electrical, high pitched song. Fast and yet oddly fluid. Catchy, if a bit loud. Neither one could make out the dialect being used, but the tempo, the song's beat seemed to catch Korrza's attention the most. Despite himself, he found his foot tapping gently on the floor as it played out. "I like this one better," Korrza said with a grin, "sounds more modern than the last few." ACe seemed to shrug (if you could call it that), and continued to listen. "Sounds like nothing more than twangy noise to me. But to each his own I suppose." Korrza grinned and nearly chuckled. "Wonder if they have any more of that?" ACe shifted and seemed to slink down a little before he muttered quietly to himself. "Creator I hope not....."


Korrza and ACe stood around a large 3D holo-display that the two had managed to piecemeal together back in the cockpit of the various amounts of information they had been provided, using the probe's trajectory line and triangulating the region's various pulsars the disk had provided to show the exact star the planet in question was now orbiting. It was still just a speck of light in an otherwise massive sea of stars, but the two had a rough road map of sorts on how to get there. ACe magnified the star, still extremely blurry in the pictures with the ship being this far out, and pulled up the various bits of information the disk provided. "Two sexes, abundant plant and animal life, one natural satellite, roughly fifty dominant dialects I'm still running through the translation matrix to try to make any sense out of," ACe  listed off. "The only way we're ever going to get a visual of the planet is by either going there or by slip spacing a probe to take readings," ACe's camera turned to glance at Korrza, "which is something I would suggest doing first. Going in headlong towards a remote and potentially hazardous planet blindly is not something I'm comfortable with doing."

Korrza nodded, even though his interest was piqued, erring on the side of caution never hurt. "How long would it take for us to get preliminary data back?" he asked. "Oh, probably about.....ten, fifteen ticks," ACe responded. "It'll be patchy, the probe's sensors can only send back so much data at one burst. But it should give give us a nice idea of what this uh.....Earth should look like." Korrza glanced at ACe for a moment. "Earth? How do you know it's called that?" he asked. ACe pulled up the entire disk's spoken dialog data into one large block text on the holo-monitor. Several of the words were highlighted, each one looked exactly the same. "This word is repeated roughly twenty-seven times on the recording. I doubt they'd do that unless they were trying to tell the listener that 'Hey, this is the name of our planet.' So for now, unless I'm incorrect, we'll simply call it Earth." Korrza shrugged, "Fair enough. Let's go see what it looks like then." ACe seemed to brighten a bit, moving to the command consoles. "I'll get the probe ready, sir."

Chapter One: Chance Encounters

Korrza Rahn looked out to the endless sea of stars, into that infinite void of shadow and light, and sighed.

He sat back in his chair, gazing out to the gaseous reds and yellows and blues of creation still swirling and churning gently in the vast nebula ahead of him. When he set eyes on his first one, gazing out from the u.v. filtered fiber-steel view screen, it was amazing. Almost life altering. To see the galaxy at work, the universe in motion, to bear witness to things that not many of his kind had ever experienced firsthand before, it was both a profoundly humbling and deeply spiritual experience. After looking out to....what was this one, the fortieth, fiftieth one?....that feeling of awe and wonder quietly got replaced by boredom. It was still beautiful to watch, still wonderful to find one as opposed to spending clicks scanning and probing the vast expanses of space in between stars in the off chance you'd run into some anomaly, some unknown element worth taking another look at and ultimately coming up empty-handed.

That was why he volunteered for this undertaking in the first place. To be the first Abborian to find some new species, some new planet worth colonizing, in the deep dark of unknown space. But after nearly ten cycles of cataloging and analyzing various comets, pulsars, nebulas, and black holes, it was becoming something less of an opportunity to expand the knowledge of his people, and simply an exercise in disappointment and boredom and lowered expectations. He leaned in his chair, resting his chin in the palm of his hand and thumb, his three fingers caressing the small stubble on his cheek. That reminded him, he needed to renew himself sometime today in the decon unit before his sleep cycle kicked in.

A small, soft chime rang out across the cockpit, followed by the mechanical pitch perfect voice of the ship's A.C.U., the Artificial Companion Unit. "Analysis complete, Protectorate Rahn. Shall I give you the data brief?" Korrza sighed one more time before sitting back up in his chair and gazing at the data log ready to download into the main data cell. "No, that won't be necessary this time ACe," (that's what he called the program, anyway. It didn't seem to mind). "Very well, sir," ACe responded. "Awaiting your authorization for data transfer." Korrza pressed his thumb down on the console and, with as much energy as he could muster simply said, "Begin." The console flashed pale blue as it scanned his thumb's imprint, before the six hours worth of scan-data loaded itself up to the mainframe storage cells. "Transfer complete, sir. Shall I data shunt to the homeworld?" ACe asked in his usual gentle manner. "No," Korrza responded in a tone a little more harsh than even he anticipated. "We'll save it later for a max cell transfer."

"As you wish, Protectorate," ACe responded. "And if I might ask, is there something wrong? You appear to be stressed." Korrza grimaced a little, rubbing his forehead just above the rigid brow plates above his obsidian set eyes. "No. No, not stressed. Just extremely bored." He looked up at the cockpit's ceiling camera with a small half smile. "I didn't mean to take it out on you. It's just that-" "You expected this journey to be a little more.....exciting," ACe reasoned. "Exactly," Korrza said as he lazily rocked the command chair back and forth with his foot, laying his head back and staring up at nothing in particular. "I knew scouting out unknown space was going to be boring and uneventful at times. I didn't expect the whole damn trip to be like....this."

"I understand sir, and you shouldn't worry about me, I've been designed to expect the boring parts. I'm more worried about your mental well being." ACe's primary camera shutter panned down a little more towards Korrza's face. "You're not going to go all spacer on me and blow yourself out of the airlock are you? I admit it would be nice and quiet for a while, but...well...I'd have no one to talk to."

Korrza stopped rocking in his chair and blinked. "....W...what?!" he asked in an incredulous tone. ACe pulled back the camera and turned it back to monitoring the various control panels. "I'm joking, sir," said in that light metallic voice. "Something to lighten the moment." Korrza couldn't help but grin and shake his head. Out of all of the various cutting edge tech this ship carried with it, ACe had to be the most sophisticated. And the most welcomed. Truth be told, if he had to simply rely on the data bursts that came in from the Abborian Exploration Committee every several clicks (and the deeper he traveled into the unknown regions of space, the further apart those events were becoming) as his only means of companionship and social interraction, he probably would have blown himself out of the ship's airlock. ACe was without a doubt the most sophisticated Artificial Companion Unit the Committee had ever created. It'd taken cycles to teach and show ACe everything that Abborian science had made and created and perfected over the two million cycles that his species had existed, all of that information lay buried in the circuits and silicon that gave rise to his personality.

And even with all that information floating around in that positronic empowered core of his, he'd somehow developed the ability to crack jokes.  

"Alright, enough science for now, I think I'm going to decon, then get some sleep," Korrza said as he spun the chair around and leapt up from the seat. "Understood sir," ACe said without turning his attention off the control displays. "Shall I continue to monitor the nebula or power down in hibernation mode while you rest?" Korrza though for a moment and shook his head. "Neither," he said as he unbuttoned his uniform. "How about we slip jump to that sector you wanted to explore a few ticks back? Let me know what you find out there." ACe's camera unit turned sharply about, the shutter unit pulling forward as far as it could. "Really?" he said rather curiously. If Korrza didn't know it better, ACe almost sounded....excited. "Yeah, why not?" Korrza said with a small grin. "Couldn't be any more boring that this nebula." "Indeed," ACe said in a rather happy sounding tone. The camera spun back around, busily shifting left and right as ACe began the calculations for a slip space jump. "You'll let me know what you find, right ACe?" Korrza said just before stepping into the decon unit. Without bothering to turn around, ACe simply gave a small, "mm-hm," as his only response.

Oh yeah, he was excited. Korrza simply chuckled as he closed the decon door, turned on the misting unit and began to clean himself.


.....There he was standing on the high peaks of the Steppelian Crags, looking down at the twinkling sprawl of Tandria Central, the delicate spire of the Sepulcher Tower, the seat of the Abborian High Council, nestled just at the banks of the Wyrdian Lake, looking out in an almost loving, protective manner across the city. Aegis and Egris, the twin moons of Abboria, stood full and proud as the sun settled over the far horizon, reflected off the lake in gold and silver hues. Korrza looked out to this glorious sight, towards this beautiful world, and nearly wept. He could almost feel the soft H'Oarder stalks under his fingertips, the gentle and warm breeze upon his face, the final flash of light on the horizon just before the sun dipped over and the soft red glow trumpeted the coming twilight.

That final, blessed light. It touched upon his face like a lover, golden, warm, peaceful. He closed his eyes, feeling the energy course though him, renewing his spirits like some strong tonic. And yet the light seemed to pulsate and grow stronger. Even with his eyes fully shut tight it seemed to pierce through his flesh, striking into his skull like a spike. What was once a soft and gentle thing became a discomforting throbbing pain. Even as he turned his head, even as he lifted his hand to cover his face, it still managed to break through. It brought Korrza to his knees, he tried to cry out, to make it stop hurting, but no words could escape his lips nor words form in his throat. It wasn't until he heard that all too familiar voice shouting at him that he realized that all of this, all of what he had seen, had simply been a dream.

"PROTECTORATE!!" ACe all but screamed at him from the cockpit, a bright pulse of the interior lights trying desperately to wake Korrza up. Korrza sat bolt upright from his bed, taking a moment to rub his forehead and sweep sleep from his eyes. "I'm up, I'm up!" he finally said in a dry, throaty voice. "What? What?" ACe's camera unit was all but dancing off its ceiling hinges, desperately trying to rouse his still half-asleep companion. All the while, in his excitement, the interior lights kept pulsating between bright and dim. Korrza groaned and threw his legs over the side of the bed. taking a moment to cap a hand over his eyes. "Ahh. Please stop doing that," he begged. ACe seemed to start a little, "Oh, sorry. Sooooorry." The lights dimmed finally and settled into a comfortable level. "I just thought you should see this," he said in a rather excited voice.

Korrza exhaled deeply before rising, grabbing and putting on his uniform top. "What is it? Another rogue planetoid? Please don't tell me it's another neb--" "No no. Nooooo. Nothing of the sort," ACe seemed to giggle out. "It's a...well I think it's a probe of some kind." Korrza blinked, moving swiftly to the cockpit viewer, his excitement breaking through the cobwebs in his sluggish mind. "Where? Put it on screen," he said as he sank into his chair and leaned curiously towards the viewer. The fiber-steel screen quietly lit up giving ACe and Korrza a view of the starry night ahead, the ships outer lights shining out and reflecting off a small, somewhat round looking craft. Several thin looking antenni jutted out from the circular base, itself covered over with a large white disk and central transponder unit.

ACe moved to almost shoulder level with Korrza, his singular camera eye adjusting and readjusting in excitement. "According to initial readings," ACe seemed to calmly say, "exterior radiational dating of the hull puts it at roughly forty to fifty cycles old." Korrza frowned, looking at the small craft. "Is it still working?" he asked quietly. "Barely," ACe was quick to point out. "I AM detecting minimal power in it's core units, and was able to triangulate that it's trying to communicate with its homeworld," he said. "But being this far out, I doubt very seriously the signal's powerful enough to get there before breaking down into nothing more than background radiation bleed."

The outer hull seemed to glitter a golden hue under the ship's lights, with something in particular catching Korrza's eye. "There. Focus the lights there," he pointed to the screen, catching what looked to be some small hatch or opening. "Is there any way we can get that open?" ACe seemed to think for a moment. "Doubtful," he finally said. "The probe is too big for us to load into the cargo hold. And we don't have any instruments that we could manipulate to do what you're suggesting." Korzza sat back and scowled a little. "There has to be some way to get that panel open," he said. ACe slowly turned to him, rolling his camera eye closer to Korrza. "Well there is one way," he teased. Korrza furrowed his brow plate down, still not sure what ACe was getting at. "What do you mean?" he finally asked. ACe turned away from Koraza, gazed one more time at the small probe shimmering under the ship's lights, then back at Korrza. "Well, sir," ACe's camera did a quick pull-in towards his face,  "how extensive is your external-ship training?"

Bringing (Back) the Payne
"There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask 'Why me?' and 'What if?'. When you look back and see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or forked lightning. If you had done something differently, it wouldn't be you. It would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions." ~ Max Payne

Time is a predator.

Tenacious.
Unrelenting.
Unforgiving.

The moment you're born, it's already caught you. It doesn't kill you right away, of course. That would be too merciful. Instead it lets you linger, it lets you suffer. It peels away just enough of you to feel regret, loss, despair. And when it finally decides to let you go, you're too old, too tired, and too broken to fight back.

Time taunts you with promises of the good life. And when you reach for it, you realize it's just beyond your grasp. It always will be. That's what makes death the punchline to the joke that it's been telling.

The only problem is, even though we all know it's coming, we all fall for it.



Time And Tide
The years have not been kind to poor ol' Max Payne. In fact, judging by the recent pictures of a bald, paunchy Max, it looks like he hasn't been too kind to himself either. Which seems an odd choice to go with since players and fans of the series have two games where that iconic trench-coat and double pistol wielding bullet time master has been the norm. But after nearly nine years since the end of Max Payne 2, Rockstar’s VP of product development, Jeronimo Barrera sees it as an appropriate vision of the character's future.

"The most dramatic visible difference is probably the one that fans have already commented about the most," he says "and that’s the changes to Max's appearance that takes place as you move through the game...but as players dive into the story they will have a deeper understanding of what’s going on for Max and why he looks the way he does." Mr. Barrera was also quick to point out that Max's physical changes aren't the only big difference to the series. Thanks to advancements over the last nine years in the video game industry, a lot of positive changes are coming along with Rockstar's new Max Payne 3. "There are thousands of other significant upgrades to the game" he says, "every aspect of Max has benefited from the huge leaps forward that have taken place in game development since the first two games, from the A.I. to the cover system to the use of the Euphoria [physics engine] to make him aware of his environment, or simply the way advanced particle effects make sure everything splinters, shatters and explodes as beautifully as possible."

In a recent interview with Variety Magazine, Dan Houser, the V.P. and co-founder of creative at Rockstar, commented on the changes to the series as a positive one, and hopes that taking the risk to profoundly unsettle expectations of the series will be a risk well worth taking. "I think the challenge of nostalgia is a profound one, because one thing about video games is your memory tends to remove the horrendous," Houser says. "(The games) become these great, perfect experiences. … It's definitely a challenge to get the right pitch when you want to appeal to the fans of the original and bring in a new audience....any change is a challenge. When they play it, hopefully, they will understand what you've changed, and what you haven't changed, and why you made those decisions, and come to see that they were not made out of anything apart from the love for the property and respect for the people who are playing."

The one thing that the team is taking extra care in maintaining is the overall sense of noir-style storytelling that made the first two games such a hit. "Our goal was to make sure that not only did the game maintain the same dark atmosphere as the original games," Barrera says, "but that both the gameplay and the cutscenes were as cinematic as we could possibly make them. At the same time, there will be no visible load times or level changes throughout the entire game—it will flow seamlessly and non-stop from chapter to chapter. With luck, these are the kind of changes that players feel instinctively as part of the overall presentation of the game."



Gunplay Never Gets Old
What would a Max Payne game be without those epic and tense-fueled gun battles that allowed players to experience the series trademark "bullet time" moments that became such an emulated experience in various third person shooters that tried (and often failed) to perfect in their own titles? You can expect that to make a return and more, promises Barrera. "We’ve included a great variety of firearms and explosives for Max to wield," he says. "Each player will have a slightly different play style, so it was important for us to include a good mix of weapons across multiple categories to provide options and choices. There’s always the hardcore fan who will want to play the entire game using nothing but pistols, but we make sure to add shotguns, assault rifles, submachine guns, and various explosive devices to satisfy the needs of varying styles and situations."

Keeping a keen eye to the realistic, don't expect the game to throw you a curve ball just to appease fans that might want something a bit more....fantastic. That's not going to happen, ever if Barrera has his way, in a Max Payne game. "For Max Payne 3, we wanted Max to feel like a real person in a real place. To that end, players should feel like they’re right there alongside Max every step of the way," he says. "We didn’t want to break that illusion by introducing weapons so outlandish that they would break the immersion. The short answer is no, we don’t have any over-the-top, sci-fi-inspired weapons. In addition, players will see each weapon represented physically on Max’s person, regardless of whether they’re playing the level in real time or watching a cutscene. This adds to the level of realism, and we've created cool custom animations for each scenario, such as smoothly reloading an SMG while Max carries a rifle in his off-hand by hitching the rifle up under his arm for balance."

The one aspect that the game will not be utilizing, however, is the notion that it needs to include 3D elements, something that V.P. Houser is not a particular fan of. "[It's] no passion of mine," he admits. "I don't think anyone has solved the riddle of how you make 3D an integral part of the gaming experience: 3D in terms of depth of graphics of course, but not 3D in coming out on the screen and stereoscopic. Is it really able to impact gameplay in a meaningful way? That is something that we haven't solved. You know, I don't think any of us have come close to solving it yet, and I don't think they've solving it in cinema. But that's a more complicated debate."

Instead, he hopes that the story in Max Payne 3 will be the game's strongest selling point, something that will make it impactful in a meaningful and almost artistic way. "If games are to be the next major form of creative consumption, art, cultural expression or whatever the correct term is, then strong narrative has to be part of that," he says. "If the mechanics are fine and the story is ridiculous, the experience is much diminished."

Max Payne is on target for a May 2012 release.

Also, feel free to visit http://www.variety.c...le/VR1118045632 For the full Variety interview with Rockstar's Dan Houser.

The Air Up There

High

Higher than the sun
You shoot me from a gun
I need you to elevate me here
At the corner of your lips
At the orbit of your hips

Eclipse

You elevate my soul
I've got no self control
Been living like a mole now
Going down

Excavation

I and I in the sky
You make me feel like I can fly
So high

Elevation - U2, Elevation



Fresh Powder
It's been five very, very long years since players were able to cut snow down the mountainside with fan favorites Mac, Elise, Kaori, Zoe, Psymon and Moby (just to name a few) from EA Sports' SSX franchise. But fans need not to worry for much longer, because they're gearing up to end that dry spell very soon.

"It’s one of those weird things. It’s really popular within the company," says EA Canada's Game Producer Sean Smillie, "....but development is a weird thing, it takes a long time to get some guys together, pitch it, get this meeting, get that meeting. We saw a couple of things happening [in the meantime]; technology started going a certain way with the PS3 and stuff and we were like ‘Oh, there’s something we could do with SSX’. We got the right people together, got some interest generated within the company. It just kind of took a long time. Nothing was going on for a while and then it just sparked and basically it was like a perfect storm, everything just kind of came together, it got a lot of momentum and everyone started jumping on board."

Smillie is also aware that the landscape was a little iffy for a while when it came to extreme-style sports titles, due in no small part to the tepid and outright hostile market created by games under the Tony Hawk banner. "I kind of think it hit its time there for a while and then got a bit diluted and a bit [overdone]," he says. "But I don’t really look at [SSX] as an extreme sports game; it’s more fantastical when you’re doing 150 ft. jumps, it’s a little bit more make-believe. Personally I haven’t seen any good extreme sports games in a while....I mean, I do like Trials HD, that was a lot of fun but.....We’ve been making [SSX games] for some time and...there’s nothing really anything else quite like them out there."

Smillie, himself an avid snowboarder, made use of his experience by doing some hands-on 'boarding of his own for the game's various sound effects based on different types of snow (and yes there are different types beyond white and cold). "I actually went up to one of the mountains and mic’ed up a snowboard and myself and rode down...so we could get a recording of the board on snow," Smillie says with a grin and twinkle in his eye, a tell-tale sign that business and pleasure can sometime come together. "[I tried] it on powder, on ice, on packed. Because we’re going to take that and the sound effects and manipulate them and SSX’ify them. But you go up there....you have to explain to people all the different things about snow, and we’ve got to do it visually too. Powder does a certain thing, ice does a certain thing [and so on]."



Going Out of Bounds (Is A Good Thing)
One of the big features of the new title is the sense of being more open world, with more of a "sandbox mountain" feel to the overall environments. "It’s open world in a sense you get out the chopper and you go ‘Okay, I’ve got to get down this huge face of the mountain’," Smillie says. "It’s open world in a sense that, in normal SSXs it’s kind of a spline, that goes down and you can follow and go underground and you’re set. What we tried to do is craft it so it’s the whole area, so you can go down and you’ll see the chevrons and flares in the snow and you’ll know that that’s track. But if you cut way, way, way, way left and start riding then you can still ride there."

But, as with all things off the beaten path, use caution; the mountain may not like you going where you're not supposed to. In other words, don't make the mountain angry; you won't like it when the mountain gets angry. To help explain what that entails, SSX’s Lead Designer Todd Batty steps up to the plate. "We built the whole game around the idea of freedom....[so] when you look at open world game design the best thing about it is when they design systems that are very sandbox in nature. So we looked at it with our avalanche [system]. They’re a perfect microcosm for what we we’re trying to do with this freedom. We wanted to have avalanches in the game. It’s not as simple as have the player activate an invisible trigger volume and then have the avalanche come. It’s not just about timing and cinematic cameras. The problem with all that is even though it would be epic; it would only be fun once.

"Every time I play that level again I’d know exactly when that avalanche is going to come. The thrill and immersion is removed......The way our avalanche system works is that the computer does a stability analysis of every part of our game and it creates what looks like a heat map, but it’s a stability map. It looks for things like overhanging crevices or icy and rocky ledges and then anytime you’re riding on any piece of terrain, we just monitor the forces you’re exerting on the terrain like turning really sharply at 200 miles an hour or landing on a 500 foot cliff. These exert a huge force. Every time your force exceeds a stability rating on the terrain, we just send some snow loose, bound completely by physics and just let it roll down the mountain. It’s 100% organic. It won't happen in the same place twice. That was the goal for avalanches and everything else in the game."

As far as motion and Kinect support goes, don't hold your breath. "[We're] getting asked that a lot," Batty says with a chuckle. "Motion controls have a great place in gaming and I fully believe that as a designer, if you are going to support motion features in your game, you have to build and guide your game around [that device]. We even got that advice from Microsoft. I got to see Kinect before it was announced and they said to us that they just didn’t want us to simply throw Kinect onto our games. If you’re going to make a game on Kinect then they wanted us to consciously decide to build the game around it. At that point we were already well into development and we had already had a ton of risk embedded into our product so we were happy to stick with just the basics."

Also, don't expect any split-screen hijinks to make an appearance either. "That was a tough call to make," Batty admits. "We’re putting so much of our time into online now and to be honest with you, local split-screen is a super expensive feature to build. Not only would you have to make the whole world incredible, but you’d have to make it look incredible……twice. We looked at two player and when we weighed it up against some of the things we wanted to do with online we decided that we would go ahead and push multiplayer for the connected generation. Losing two player was a sad day for me."



Climb E'ry Mountain, Conquer E'ry Slope
Expect to explore just about every famous mountain range on the planet thanks to some creative use of NASA satellite imaging, which is something that SSX's Art Director Jeff Coates is exceptionally proud of. "We really wanted to give you the ability in the game to explore the world. There are nine different regions, 27 different peaks and over 100 different runs. They go from Antarctica to Africa to Alaska to the Himalayas to Siberia and on and on," he says. "The team started with topographical data that they got from a NASA site and that became the foundation for our tracks. So we take that topographical data and run it through a proprietary software we have called Mountain Man, which gets the data into our game engine and we build onto that the over-the-top SSX experience. Obviously we exaggerate some of the actual landscapes quite a bit so that it's more fun to play, but the topographical data is the basis for everything. And every region has its own feel and look that is very specific to what that region actually looks like."

Making its debut in the series is the virtually untouched mountains of New Zealand, something that caught the eye of Coates after seeing those sweeping visual shots during the Lord of the Rings trilogy. "New Zealand definitely features in the game. It’s an amazing region with breathtaking natural environment. It has quite possibly the largest set piece created in SSX, a massive concrete dam spillway that sits right at the center of the mountain. You can go into the dam where you can ride through the pipes or air over top of it presenting you with an amazing view. New Zealand is also home to the white-out deadly descent where you have to navigate down the mountain when you literally can’t see more than a few feet in front of you," he says.

Continuing the popular trend of catchy musical scores, expect the same bee-bop goodness you'd expect to come along on an SSX title. "It's a wonderful way to get exposure," Batty says. "If you get a song in a million selling video game [title], you'll get a lot of people listening to your music. SSX is one of those games that has a strong heritage of having awesome soundtracks. If you look at the SSX 3 soundtrack (including Felix Da Housecat, Queens of the Stone Age, N.E.R.D, etc.)...we would [Really] have had to pay for those artists today....... There's a lot of really great bands in there that became really huge. We knew we had some big shoes to fill, we're lucky, our audio producer Freddie Ouano, who came over from Fight Night, super talented guy and has his finger on the pulse of music. We even have some custom composed music for this game. Amon Tobin composed some songs for our game. That's a pretty cool thing, and I think music is part of the experience."

With all this coming to a head soon, one has to worry if SSX will maintain its easy going learning curve or opt out for a more sophisticated design? Well, according to Coates, yes and no. "You don't have to be a snowboarder to really enjoy it," he admits. "It's a fun, across-the-board type of an experience that I think anyone can enjoy. And the difficulty of it is layered. I'm not the best player on the development team by any stretch, but I can pick it up and pretty quickly start doing some of those crazy tricks. But then I can watch someone else play.....and [they do] all sorts of tricks that I haven't even seen before. That layer of complexity is actually really cool."

Todd Batty agrees, noting that the fantasy and the reality of snowboarding are two completely different things for him as well. "There's some days I [can] play the game for hours on end, and I'm driving home, and I come over a little hill, I can picture myself jumping off of it...[but]...I think if I [did that] right now, I’d probably kill myself," he jokes.

SSX is set to hit the slopes February 28, 2012.

Ki Adi Munki: Alright guys come on, we're gonna miss the Phantom Menace 3D!!



Jabba The Hatt: I call shotgun!!



Darth Stasher: aww...



R2-2WasteD:(muffled) Guys....seriously.....I can't breathe in this thing.



MartaB64: Wait, where the hell is Bofus?

**muffled** I'm not going.

Kamikaz-E-I-E-I-O: It's not that bad Bo. Come on! What'd he dress up as? Boba Fett? The Emperor?



R2-2WasteD:(muffled) Guys? Air holes please?!

**muffled** Nnno. Nnnnno. I'm not. Going.



Darth Stasher: I TOLD you he wouldn't do it.



Jabba the Hatt: Wouldn't do what?



MartaB64: Yeah, see Bofus lost a Super Bowl bet. So he has to go dressed as--

**muffled** Shut. UP!

Ki Adi Munki: Seriously, the car's running guys, we're gonna be late!!



R2-2WasteD: (muffled) Guys, I'm....starting to black out here.....



Kamikaz-E-I-E-I-O: Wait....you guys didn't make him dress up like---



MartaB64: .....hehehehheh....yyyyep.

**muffled voice**.....yes.



StorMtrooBer: oh guys...that's just seven kinds of wrong.

**muffled voice** screw you guys, I'm not going.

Darth Stasher: ......would you do it for a Scooby Snack?

**muffled voice**................maybe.



Darth Stasher: .....would you do it for.....TWO Scooby Snacks?

**muffled voice**........I guess.



StorMtrooBer: I can't watch....



R2-2WasteD: *muffled*...I can't breathe.....

**muffled** Alright, I'm coming out. No one laugh.



Jabba The Hatt: This is gonna be awesome.....