The Gene Roddenberry's of our generation?

by: Nathan - posted: 10/24/2008 7:54:00 PM

Check it out! You may not have heard of Beyond Protocol or the team of the same name behind this MMORTS. However if you dare to visit their SITE  you might stumble across some very interesting works of fiction. Many of the stories behind entire worlds are documented by the community of fans. But don't just take my word for it hit the jump for a sample of what fellow fiction fans are cooking up.

Done already eh? So, what’d you think about Schaeffer and his “we are not alone” theory? I bet they never mentioned that at the academy! There’s never been any evidence to prove it one way or the other, and considering how much has happened since then, I doubt there ever will be. That is, unless we suddenly spot some little green men screaming, we did it! Anyways, here’s the second one. When I said I needed to dig these out, I wasn’t kiddin. Still haven’t found the rest… Sure I could have you read the digital versions, but those things’ve been copied, erased, recovered, translated and retranslated so many times, I don’t trust em. Hard copies may be a dying art form, but I think real pages add to that “connection” the elders are looking for. Enjoy…

Excerpts from the personal log of Captain Halidaes Jones

October 29th, 362 TE
We have about 49 hours before we reach orbit above this planet we are all eager to call our new home. I find I’m reliving many old memories. Some lost in time, some suppressed, and others torn away by the struggles of life in space. Now, with the possibility of life on solid ground, to see things I have only dreamed about, like oceans and sunsets, it is as if my life until now has only been a pretense to this moment. Even something as simple as writing the date conjures memories, memories of my childhood and my great grandfather.

I couldn’t have been much more than a 6 year old twig of a girl sitting beside her oldest living relative. I called him “greatpa” but everyone else called him “Admiral.” I didn’t know until much later what that meant. He was a stout and silent man, but it seemed as though his eyes could see beyond the stars, and know what was waiting for us out there. I had just learned about the calendar and how to write the date, my teacher told me that “TE” had been decided on generations ago. So I asked the Admiral what it meant. He told me about what had happened to earth, and how those that could, left, and then humanity was scattered to space. There was some kind of meeting on Neptune about a new calendar, and he sat in as a cadet. They coined the phrase “Terra Exeunt”, loosely meaning “when they left earth” but decided to keep the old monthly calendar as a reminder. I couldn’t fathom all that he told me, the magnitude, the tragedy and the need to be press on, but looking at it from a distance, this new world; somehow it feels as though we’re putting an end to the past and carving a new future.

November 1st, 362 TE
We have finally landed! Here we are on this beautiful and untouched planet. I couldn’t help but be completely awestruck as the first few colonial buildings went up. Hours later, the construction and expeditionary teams were bathed in a gorgeous sunset over an enormous blue ocean, the likes of which, not even my dreams could rival. The reaction seemed to be the same for all that saw it. Many of us are the fifth generation of our family on that ship, putting us seven or eight generations from the survivors of earth. I don’t think that any of us believed our elders stories of earth, and I don’t think we could have!

There are, as was expected, some who refuse to leave the ship for now, but I don’t think their loved ones will allow them to play the recluse for much longer. We have months of long range data, but after only two days on this planet, I feel like I’ve experienced an entirely new life, separate from the cold generational ship that brought me here. Most will want to share this experience with their whole family. Maybe it’s just because I’m the Captain, but I feel like all of the five thousand plus souls on board that ship are my family, and once the surveys and expeditionary teams are done, I’ll make every effort to get everyone off of that dark and cramped ship!

February 10th, 363 TE
Colonization of the planet we now call Avoid is going well. I can’t believe that name stuck... I used it once offhandedly and nearly a month later, they were holding general elections to make that the official name of the system. When I brought it up, it was something corny like “we came here to avoid the clutches of the void.” Eric Furrows, my second in command, told me how lyric it was because apparently “a-something” can mean “not-something”, like “asymmetric”, so, this planet is “not a void”, it’s an “Avoid”… At the time I wasn’t in the mood for an English lesson, but apparently it was not wasted on the populous.

February 16th, 363 TE
Today was a great day! We finally completed and fired up the planet wide hyperband monitoring system, a technology created on Neptune to help communicate across the stars. It uses some kind of inverse tachyon beam to communicate at greater distances, and with less lag than normal light. Kathy Duncan, my technical advisor has tried to explain it several times, along with the reasons we couldn’t use it in space… Twittering on with jargon… I just don’t care as long as it finally works! When we turned it on we were picking up transmissions from all around the celestial neighborhood: Cursa, Dremsho and Grumium are just three off of the top of my head that we were able to communicate with. It looks like the other colonial ships were a success as well! Once again humanity is out of the shadows and populating the Galaxy!

May 27th, 363 TE
I suppose I’ve been too excited to notice it until now, but apparently for the past few months, there have been rumors flying about Pluto. It’s common knowledge that it left orbit centuries ago, but what I haven’t heard until recently is that the astronomers and scientists say it’s not where it should be, based on all of the data collected after The Nova. Chatter on the hyperbands and local news stations tend to be variations of three scenarios. Some say the tiny planet was completely destroyed somehow. I’ve heard: by a comet, another planet, or the inhabitants. Others say that it went too far into deep space for any of our instruments to pick it up, but that’s a lackluster story that I only get from the scientists and skeptics. And last, my favorite version, some say it’s now a giant ship, technologically superior to the rest of humanity, but whether it’s a paradise, or a slave colony is up to the story teller. As far as I’m concerned, these are all just unfounded rumors and I’m just hoping for peace and unity for the time being!

-Halidaes Jones, 301 - 406 TE