Startrek&stargate

The Forgotten Wars

In 1928, an ancient alien device, in the form of a large ring, was found on Earth, buried underground at Giza, Egypt. The large object, weighting 30 tons, was mostly made out of almost indestructible and unknown material that exists nowhere on Earth. One of the elements of this advanced mineral compound was carbon, and the sonic and radiant carbon analysis showed that the object was on Earth for over 10,000, much older than Egyptian culture itself. The device was clearly of advanced alien origin, and therefore was kept under heavy secret US military isolation, and was studied at a converted underground missile base. It took 15 years and three supercomputers to make some sense of how the gate worked and how to operate it, yet it still proved nearly impossible to really understand from scientific point of view alone, so they started studying the writings that were found with the gate and indeed the whole Egyptian society. After deciphering some of the symbols, it was discovered that the device was a gateway of some sort, and dozens of other scientists discovered that it contains enormously dense and micro small machinery of extremely advanced technology, all it needed in order to operate was any type of energy source (its exotic material could absorb almost any kind of energy, sometimes even kinetic one), even as simple and primitive as electricity, but it could only work with a password code composed from the many symbols on the ring device, which were later discovered as being not letters, but star constellations that needed to be locked on the device in a specific order of alignment to make it work. In 1945 a random dialing of the device's symbols managed to activate the device and generate what theoreticians had named a wormhole, a passage through a higher dimension outside the fabric of space/time that led to an identical device somewhere in distant space. A man was sent into it but was stuck on the other planet with no hope of returning because the wormhole only allowed one-way journey at a time to take place, from the outgoing device to the receiving one. And since he didn't know Earth's "address", he could not return home. The device had countless sequence possibilities (7 symbols chosen from a pool of 38 non repeating candidates meant about 63 billion possible combinations) and it was nearly impossible to hit one by accident, as it happened only once in 1945. After a few more years of trying the government lost hope of activating the portal in the near future and has boxed it up in a military armory in Washington DC (which contained hundreds more of incredible top secret discovered relics, such as the lost ark of covenant which almost fell to the Nazi hands during world war 2 and was boxed up by the USA because of being too dangerous for research).
In 1947 a small group of aliens from the future crash-landed on Earth, proving without any doubt the existence of aliens, and offered to sell some advanced alien technology to the US. But the president refused to negotiate and instead ordered the base's commanders to "interrogate" the aliens. But the aliens managed to escape, with the help of a shape shifter type of alien who was hiding with them, and left Earth. Many of the secret program's scientists saw that as a missed opportunity, for they could have asked the aliens if they knew about the origin of the alien device.
That opportunity repeated itself in the mid-fifties, as another alien craft crashed on American soil, amazingly in roughly the same area as the previous incident. Unfortunately two of the three aliens manning the ship died in the crash and the third was in bad shape and died a few weeks later. The craft was kept in area 51 for study.
Shortly after this incident, the government started a little underfunded agency with the simple purpose of making contact with a race not of this planet. Everybody thought the agency was a joke. Except the aliens. They made contact in 1961, outside New York City. There were nine humans who met them that night, seven agents, an astronomer, and one poor kid who got lost on the wrong road. The aliens were intergalactic refugees with a simple request: Let them use the Earth as an apolitical zone for people without a planet. The agency agreed, and masked all evidence of their landing. The secret agency broke off from the government, which started asking too many questions, and became independent and grew in man power and budget, holding a few patents on gadgets they confiscated from visitors, such as Microwave ovens. The secret organization (Now calling itself Men In Black) started licensing, monitoring and policing the alien activity on Earth. More nonhumans arrived every year, and lived among humans in secret, the majority of them in Manhattan. In 1989 a giant alien craft crash-landed in California's Majave desert. It was a slave ship carrying a quarter million refugees. Thinking they had no way to get back to where they came from, they considered asking Earth's authorities for sanctuary. The MIB agency immediately took initiative, covering up all evidence of the aliens' landing, and quickly relocating the aliens to another nearby planet.
The MIB saved Earth many times from various alien threats. One time the Earth was scheduled for demolition in order to make room for a new hyperspace express rout. It took a great deal of diplomatic effort to prevent Earth's destruction. And this is just one example out of countless others. The Unites States government, vaguely aware of all the alien activity on Earth, desperately wanted to learn about aliens. And each time an opportunity presented itself they did whatever possible to learn as much as possible and to keep it secret at all costs.
While visiting the Earth at Night, a group of alien botanists was discovered and disturbed by an approaching human task force. Because of the more than hasty take-off, one of the visitors was left behind. The little alien found itself all alone on a very strange planet. Fortunately, the extra-terrestrial was found by a 10 year old boy, Elliot, who helped him send a message to his ship so that his people will come back for him.
Finally the alien was rescued by his ship, and returned to his home, which was in a galaxy far far away.
Long ago in that galaxy, humans (who probably arrived there through a Stargate) were living among many various intelligent species. The galaxy was rich with life, filled with many various life forms. It was also filled with small subatomic life forms that inhabited everything in that galaxy. They were living in symbiosis with all other life forms, and were even present in inanimate materials. These life forms, called Midichlorians, were connected to the super strings of the structure of space-time itself, and were able to bend and twist its structure, along with the laws of physics. That created a mystical energy force throughout the galaxy, surrounding all matter and energy and bonding the galaxy together. The more midichlorians a life form possessed, the more access it had to the benefits of this Force using the energy of its thoughts.
The Humans in this galaxy seemed to have the most efficient symbiotic relationship with them than any other life form from that galaxy (perhaps because they did not originate from this galaxy), therefore humans had the most beneficial connection and could control the force very easily, although in most people the force was very weak. It required a strong mind and much training to learn to control it even in those who had great amounts of midichlorians in them.
This helped the humans to establish a strong presence in that galaxy, and after only 30,000 years of galactic civilization they have established dominance over almost the entire galaxy. Most of this time the galaxy was ruled by evil Force users called the Sith, but eventually the Sith were destroyed and their oppressive regime fell, and a democratic and peaceful republic was established, bonding most species together.
This was mostly thanks to the Jedi knights, who fought for peace and justice in the galaxy, and brought freedom by destroying the Sith who oppressed the galaxy for ages.
Part of the reason why the Sith went extinct was because they were always fighting each other for dominance, betraying each other constantly. As it turned out, the dark side was self-destructive. But one Sith survived, and managed to continue the Sith Order by limiting the number of Sith at a time to only two, a master and an apprentice, and in this way they managed to go undetected by the Jedi for a millennium, biding their time, waiting for the right time to return and take revenge on the Jedi. The Jedi mainly used weapons called "Lightsabers", which were swords of energy. The hand held generator of a lightsaber created a high-energy laser beam encased in a forcefield, which reached up to about a meter long. Such a sword could cut through almost anything, apart from another such sword, strong forcefield or an extremely dense and strong material.
The forcefield of the laser sword was configured to hold the laser energy in place while allowing almost everything else to pass through the field. Air molecules that passed through and touched the laser energy immediately turned to glowing plasma, generating a recognizable hum in the process. The different coloring of the light of the plasmatic side effect of different lighsabers was determined by minute differences in the geometry of the forcefield, and therefore different lightsabers had different colors. The forcefield of a lightsaber not only held back and deflected other lightsabers while always staying `solid' and affecting the hand-held generator as if it was a real solid rod connected to it, but could even deflect other different types of energy weapons (if the holder of the lightsaber was skilled enough it could even be directed back toward the attacker). Therefore, the weapon was effective for defense as well as for offense, against standard `normal' energy weapons as well.
It was an elegant weapon, suited best for the ones who could use the force and had supernatural reflexes by foreseeing events before they happened. Throughout the many millennia the type of technology in that galaxy remained almost identical, and was quite a strange mix. On the surface it was almost laughable - laser based weapons, particle beams, fusion reactors; Earth moved past that sort of thing very fast after humanity started expanding into space. From the point of view of the humans in that galaxy, the technology was built for sheer power and strength, without a lot of finesse involved. But they've built the technology on an impressive scale - having been working on it for a long, long time. It's odd that they never got as far as matter-antimatter reactors in all that time (maybe because they considered such reactors to be too dangerous and unreliable. Transporter technology was also not developed because it didn't work well with the Midichlorians, found in every living cell). That also indicated some interesting things about their culture. A very old society, not good at innovation but capable of making incremental advances in what they did have to the point where they ended up making huge versions of ancient technology. That took a pretty stable culture, which fitted in with the idea of a ruling monarchy. A dictatorial monarchy would lead to a general stifling of free thought and innovation.
They had thousands of years to spread themselves and now had an industrial capacity of considerable proportions.
After a relatively short time of true democracy (only one thousand years), it was about to fall again.
One Sith lord named Darth Plagueis grew so powerful and had such a knowledge in the dark side of the Force, that he could prolong his own life, postponing old age, and save others from death as well. He found a way to influence the Midichlorians to create life, and used that ability to make an ancient Sith prophecy come true. He made the midichlorians conceive a child to a human female host. A child that was to become the Sith messiah, who was meant to return the Sith to their former glory and retake control of the galaxy. His name was Palpatine and he became the most powerful Force user the galaxy had ever seen, and the ultimate master of the dark side, since he was conceived by the dark side itself.
Plagueis raised him as his own child and made him his new apprentice, giving him the name Darth Sidious.
Using his powers, he gave Sidious unnatural long life, and together they lived for a very long time, during which he thought his apprentice everything he knew, including the secret for eternal life. But as soon as he learned everything he could have learned, Palpatine murdered Plagueis in his sleep, becoming the new Sith master.
He hid in the shadows for centuries, slowly but surely setting his plan into motion, planning to destroy the Jedi and retake the galaxy. In preparation for his final move, he moved to live in the peaceful planet of Naboo, falsifying documents to make it appear as though he's been born there a reasonable amount of time before, and went into politics, using his vast mind-controlling powers and charisma to quickly become the planet's representative in the galactic senate.

The birth and rise of Palpatine brought great disturbance to the Force, as the dark side of the Force was now much too powerful. But the Force had a way to restore its own balance.
As was foretold long ago, a chosen one was born to a virgin mother, a child of the Force, who was destined to restore balance to the Force and destroy the Sith forever.

His name was Anakin Skywalker. He was a good man, but he was gradually seduced by the dark side of the Force and got enslaved by Palpatine, who was well aware of the Jedi prophecy and wanted to make sure it would never come true. Yet he was tempted to harness the chosen one's powers to his own end, and decided that if he could be turned, he would become a powerful ally. In his overconfidence he was blinded by his lust for power and decided not to kill Anakin but rather to try and turn him to the dark side of the Force, knowing that it was impossible to convert back from the dark side.
Ever since Anakin was found by the Jedi, Palpatine had been secretly guiding him slowly toward the dark side, serving as a mentor and father figure and nurturing the destructive side of Anakin, giving him the kind of freedom and acceptance that he wanted, making him feel like he's suffocating with the Jedi who were always too strict, too emotionless.
Before his rise to power, Palpatine had been hiding his powers from the public and from the Jedi, and had been living his life as two different identities. One of them was Senator Palpatine, a seemingly very kind, noble, and charismatic man, and the other the Sith lord Darth Sidious, the most evil person in existence.
Thanks to his extremely powerful Force abilities, unlike his former master, he didn't even need to sleep, and therefore had the necessary time to play both personas.
When Palpatine was presumed to retire to his quarters to rest and sleep he changed to Sidious and transmitted his holograms through secret and secured channels to various places in the galaxy to instruct his minions and followers how to carry out his schemes.
One of them was to deliberately cause the occupation of his own home planet in order to provoke the Senate's sympathy toward him, and this, alongside the corruptness of hundreds of Senators and their secret ties with Sidious, helped him get elected as supreme chancellor. When he needed to conduct secret meetings and training sessions with his apprentice in order to teach and instruct him personally, he used his vast cloaking and infiltration skills to sneak his way out of the chancellor's official resident to his secret Sith tower located at the capital's abandoned industrial zone.
So during the day he was the chancellor and during the night he was the dark Sith lord.
And because he was constantly awake and aware it made any assassination attempts on his life impossible because he never lost guard. And no one apart from his apprentice knew about his true identity as both the head of the republic and the terrorist leader of the separatists, whom he controlled through his apprentice, the wicked count Dooku, also known as Darth Tyranus. The charismatic and influential Dooku started the vast separatist movement, making alliances between many of the Republic's enemies (such as the Trade Federation, the Techno Union, the Banking clan, the commerce guild, the corporate alliance, and tens of thousands of star systems) and rallying more and more star systems against the republic. Palpatine/Sidious instigated terrible galactic wars in order to create vast clone armies and seize emergency powers in order to take over the republic. During the crucial space battle above the republic's capital, Anakin's former teacher Obiwan warned him not to kill Dooku but to take him prisoner, they needed him for information since he was deep in the enemy's counsel. But Anakin chose to listen to Palpatine who told him to kill Dooku. Later Palpatine made things ready for Anakin' final step in joining the Sith and accepting the dark side. He had Anakin convinced that only through him Anakin could learn the secrets of the dark side that would allow him to save his wife from certain death, (even though he had no real intention of sharing his life-giving powers with anyone, ever, from fear that if he taught anyone this power, he would be betrayed as he betrayed his own master.) He knew that Anakin had to willingly choose to join the dark side. He told Anakin the truth about himself, to see how he would react. If Anakin chose not to join him, then Palpatine would simply kill him, since Anakin was not yet nearly as powerful as him. So Anakin was to choose to either join him, or be killed.
Anakin told the Jedi the truth, and all the available Jedi masters, lead by Mace Windu, all gathered to confront the chancellor. But Palpatine quickly killed them all, except for Windu, who he kept alive because he had something special planned for him. He made it look as if Windu won the battle, and pretended to lie helplessly at his mercy. While Palpatine's concentration was focused on the battle with Windu, he could no longer maintain his fake charismatic face, and his face changed to his true face of evil, the face of Sidious, which he always hid under his dark hood.

Windu could not have actually beaten Sidious in light-saber combat. Sidious was just toying with Windu until Anakin arrived. Sidious set this all up by informing Anakin he was a Sith. Sidious planned on using Windu as a catalyst for Anakin's descent to the dark side, therefore he allowed Windu to defeat him just in time for Anakin to arrive and be forced to choose between the two. Sidious could see the future. He strategically manipulated all the characters around him like pieces on a chess board.
Just as he predicted, Anakin chose to save him and killed Windu. Having no other choice, Anakin pledged his loyalty to Sidious. Using his control over the enormous Clone armies (which the republic was creating because of the emergency of the war), he managed to eliminate most of the Jedi in the galaxy.
Palpatine declared himself Emperor, with Anakin, now known as Darth Vader, as his new trusted right hand.
Palpatine reorganized the republic into the first galactic empire, annexing everything that was left of the defeated separatists and securing total control of the entire galaxy.
The Jedi were hunted down and eliminated by the Empire. And so the Sith managed to take over the republic and turn it to an oppressive and aggressive Empire, and once again ruled the galaxy.
Anakin suffered horrid injuries by his former Jedi teacher and had to undergo cybernetic alterations to survive. He became a horrible stitched together combination of man and machine, twisted and evil. The death of the love of his life, which he accidentally caused in a moment of anger, must have broken his heart terribly for him to have retreated into his armor forever.
He lost his true identity forever behind his dark mask, and suppressed all good in him, bringing only his hatred and anger to the surface. He was now a complete monster.
The Emperor and Vader massacred all the Force users in the galaxy, to eliminate any threat and ensure their position as the eternal rulers of the galaxy. If Anakin had not joined Palpatine in time as he did, he would have been killed with the rest of the Jedi.
Although Palpatine's body was long ravaged by the dark side and became old and fragile, he was still immortal. He didn't age beyond a certain limit and stayed forever in his ugly form, nearly impossible to kill. But he did not share his secret of eternal life with Vader (who had no idea how old Palpatine really was), pretending not to know the secret, secretly planning to betray Vader and replacing him with a newer apprentice.
Palpatine wore a special robe to help protect him from assassination attempts. That smelly, filthy garment must have been made out of some special fabric in order to have withstood the foulness of the Emperor's body. Oddly enough, it had plasma burns and scorch marks all over it, as if these weapons were used against it... to no effect.
In his overconfidence, the Emperor didn't even carry a lightsaber. He knew he could stop any energy attack or an opponent's light saber in mid air with his sheer powers.
It seemed as if the galaxy was doomed to eternal enslavement by the invincible Emperor. But a vast rebel alliance was formed, striving to overthrow the galactic Empire and turning it back to a free republic once again, one that would provide peace and prosperity to the entire galaxy. But it seemed there was no chance of victory as long as the Emperor was alive. The rebellion was hoping to kill the Emperor at a critical moment in the rebellion's war against the Empire, when the entire rebel fleet gathered to destroy the Empire's ultimate mass destruction weapon - a huge space station that could destroy entire planets, on which the Emperor was waiting. But it was in fact the Emperor's own plan to cripple the rebellion and seduce Anakin's son, Luke Skywalker and enslave him as well. He purposely lured the alliance to his Death Star and prepared a trap by hiding a large fleet of Star Destroyer cruisers nearby.

The only thing that surprised Palpatine was the sudden betrayal of his right hand man, while Palpatine was busy torturing and killing Luke Skywalker after he refused to take his father's place at the Emperor's side. The only time he was vulnerable was when he put all his attention and effort in killing Luke. Preoccupied, he did not sense the rising emotions in Anakin, and even the force did not give him a warning, as it was shifting in power to the light side with Anakin.
Anakin did the unthinkable and converted back to the good side and betrayed his master, surprising the Emperor from behind. The Emperor was taken by complete surprise as he was suddenly and forcibly grabbed by a mechanical hand and thrown into the reactor pit. He tried resisting the attack by diverting his lightening at Anakin, but since Anakin was mostly metallic, the lightening electrified Palpatine himself as well. He went into a state of shock and could not react in time to save his life. He tried stopping his fall but it was too late; he came in contact with the secondary reactor under the control tower (which was generating the defense field protecting the station's main reactor).
His lightening breached the reactor and a massive energy surge was released, killing the temporarily vulnerable Emperor. The explosive release of Force energy from the Emperor weakened the force field protecting the main reactor - exposing it to the rebels and allowing the rebels to destroy it as Luke escaped in a shuttle. The rebel fleet moved away from the Death Star while the Empire's fleet pursued them from its other side, unaware of the reactor breach. As the Death Star exploded, it took the Empire's entire fleet with it.
Anakin was redeemed as he saved the entire galaxy from eternal enslavement by the virtually invincible and immortal Emperor. No one and nothing could have killed him apart from Anakin at the right moment. Anakin knowingly sacrificed his own life to kill the Emperor, since the Emperor's Force lightening short-circuited the mechanical parts in Anakin's cybernetic body, as he knew it would. And so Anakin fulfilled his destiny and destroyed the Sith forever, and restored the right balance to the Force. Before his death he seemed so peaceful that it was hard to believe it was the same man who caused the death of billions. But in a sense, he wasn't. The dark side brought out the worst parts of him, and allowed them to take over. He wasn't in control of his actions. It was his destiny to fall victim to the dark side, so that he could eventually destroy it from within, by destroying the `devil' himself - in the form of the Emperor. There was no other way to destroy evil forever. And thanks to him and his son, the dark side was destroyed for all time. The force could never again be used for evil purposes. At least, not in that galaxy. The evil 'spirit' of the emperor drifted through space and finally reincarnated itself into our plain of existence by taking the form of a biological creature that looked like a serpent. And into this serpent he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life. This serpent was the beginning of an entire species of larva parasites that would soon try to take over the universe.

Back on Earth, in 1995, the woman whose father found the Stargate in Egypt, managed to get the necessary clearance from the government and resumed studying the Stargate under the military's supervision. She had started collecting some of the world's top archeologists and scientists in order to discover the secrets of the device before it would be too late - before the government would again burry the project for a very long time - pass her lifetime. Regardless of her efforts, very little progress was made, until, two years later, she discovered someone special. A brilliant young archeologist named Daniel Jackson who came up with a theory that claimed that it was not the Egyptians who built the very first Pyramid, called "The Great Pyramid" which had no writings what so ever inside of it, and that the Egyptians built all the other, smaller, pyramids by the example of the huge pyramid that they discovered in the desert. But he was finally and totally laughed out of the scientific community after he was asked who he thinks built the pyramid ("people from Atlantis or Martians?"), at least from the public scientifically community. The secret scientific community that worked under the military became very much interested in this young man, and he was invited to the secret location where the device was held. After translating the hieroglyph text which described the device and being presented with the various symbols and realizing they were star constellations and not words, he figured out a way to "dial" the symbols to determine a destination in a three dimensional space, using 7 symbols one of which is the point of origin. (The device actually had the ability to lock up to nine different symbols, but apparently the last two were not needed, but it would later be discovered that they served as "area codes" to travel to especially distant areas in the Universe, but in those cases an additional special advanced power source would also be needed.) The dialing sequence was tested and worked, and the wormhole was opened. After sending a probe through, an expedition was sent through the wormhole, which led to a planet in the Kaliem star system. There they found humans whose ancestors were brought there through the portal from ancient Egypt by the ancient Egyptian `gods', and were used by them as slaves ever since. The people were used to mine the planet and extracting the powerful material that the Stargate was made from, which was the basis of that entire technology. It was eventually discovered that the entire ancient Egyptian society was living under the rule of those aliens, who were a sort of parasitic creatures that used humans as hosts because of their easily maintainable bodies in which they could live forever using their advanced technology. But there was a rebellion on Earth, and the aliens were driven out, and the Stargate was buried underground so it could not be accessed anymore.
The team from Earth, that was commanded by colonel Jack O'Niell, was unable to return to Earth because it turned out that the symbols on the stargate were different than the one on Earth, and they were trying to find the necessary writings somewhere on this planet in order to discover the symbols that were needed in order to activate the gate from their side (the stargates could only transport matter through the wormhole from one side to the other only one way at a time), and could hardly find any because writing was forbidden on this people by the alien oppressors who were visiting the planet once in a while to collect the alloy that was mined, which was called Naquaada which was composed of what centuries later would be called by humans Carbon-Neutronium. But while the team was on the planet, an alien ship arrived, and landed and "docked" on the copy of the great pyramid which was also present on this planet and contained the stargate inside it. It was now clear that the Pyramids were in fact landing pads for the ships of these alien beings who enslaved entire planets and appointed themselves as Gods. The Egyptian sun God, Ra, was the one to arrive to this planet. But thanks to the team from Earth, the enslaved people of this planet realized that their oppressors are false gods, and rebelled against them. Just as Ra was leaving the planet, after failing to send a bomb through the Stargate to destroy Earth, the ticking bomb was transported to his ship using a miniature version of the Stargate, called transport rings, and the ship exploded in space and Ra was incinerated in the nuclear explosion. After finding the right symbols the team managed to activate the stargate and return home, but Daniel Jackson chose to stay behind on the planet. After several months of exploring the planet, Daniel discovered a map of wormholes of an entire network of stargates most of which were located at the Milky Way galaxy.
He returned to Earth, and joined the newly assembled team whose job was to explore these worlds that had Stargates. The Stargate on earth was equipped with an Iris that prevented unwelcome intruders from gaining entrance to Earth, and thus Earth considered itself safe from alien invasion. The SG team explored many worlds, and found out that many of them were populated by humans who originated from ancient Earth and were also brought as slaved by the parasitic aliens, who were called the Goa'uld. The Goa'uld were now in state of war with each other after the death of their supreme leader, Ra, who started their entire empire thousands of years ago and has now suddenly and unexpectedly died. So now the local system lords were fighting each other for dominance of the empire. The Goa'ulds' vast empire occupied a large area of the Milky Way galaxy, mostly concentrated in the area that in the future would be called the Beta quadrant. At this time period, the galaxy had only two more major empires, but they were both relatively small and were unable to expand much because of the Goa'uld who had superior technology and because they did not have access to planets that were connected to others via the Stargate transportation net. These two empires were the Dominion, and the Borg. The Dominion was only a small empire of several hundred planets, although it existed for over 10,000 years and endured well in the last 2,000, and had a faintly similar hierarchic system as the Goa'uld empire. The Borg collective, despite existing and evolving for nearly 100,000 years, did not yet have advanced technology, and had no ability to regenerate or adapt to weapons, and therefore resistance to them was not yet futile, and the Borg only controlled a small section of the Delta quadrant. The Borg were simply a cyberneticly enhanced group that was slowly and cautiously spreading by occasionally assimilating inferior planets. Although their collective mind held great potential, it could not evolve much by itself because of the chaos and disorder in their organization. It took them great amounts of efforts just to stabilize the collective, and in so doing they had to nullify all creative thoughts and imagination of all the individuals to prevent any rebel thoughts, and thus they were unable to develop new technologies themselves and were dependent on getting them from other races. Each member of the collective was not much more than a mindless automaton. The collective as a whole was not a brilliant combination of countless minds working together but rather a mind of its own that's simply controlling the bodies of countless creatures without them contributing much to the hive brain because that would pose a danger to the stability of the collective. The hive brain often resided in the form of a queen. And when the queen was destroyed it severely weakened the collective and its power. That was one of the elements that kept them relatively weak compared to their gigantic potential. But the queen always retained her essence in the rest of the collective and soon after her old physical body was destroyed she transferred her central mind to a newly grown cybernetic clone nearly identical to her previous host body.
The Goa'uld empire spread mainly using the transportation net and couldn't go far beyond that, because the Goa'uld could not build new stargates of their own because this technology which they used to rise to power was not originally theirs at all. The Goa'uld did not invent any technology by themselves. They were only parasites that have been spreading through the universe like a disease ever since they took over the technology of the Ancients, also called Iconians, who moved from this area of the universe long ago. Most of those planets had populations of people who were taken from Earth of the past (later it was discovered that Earth had more than one Stargate and that people were taken from Earth at many different eras of history.), many of them were still under the rule of the Goa'uld. The planet Chulak for example, was the main source of hosts and soldiers for the Goa'uld's armies, and the people of Chulak were forced to believe that the Goa'uld were gods and to worship and serve them. They were called Jaffa, and they were similar to the soldiers of the Dominion in the sense that they were also used as slaves and were serving false gods, and the Jaffa were also made to be depended on the Goa'uld to survive, because each Jaffa carried a Goa'uld larva and would die without it. One of those Jaffa also joined the SG1 team, and fought at their side against the Goa'uld for his people's freedom. SG1 has managed to inflict the Goa'uld with sever losses, to free many worlds from their grip, and to kill almost a dozen most important system lords, who were all mentioned in various Earth's mythologies and legends as immortal Gods, at one time or another, such as Apophis, Cronus, Sokar, Hathor, Seth, Aries, Osiris, and many others. Over the years SG1 have explored countless worlds most of which were populated by humans from Earth, made contact with many exotic aliens who were relatively rare, experienced time travel, alternate realities and fascinating scientific anomalies such as a black hole that once almost destroyed Earth through the Stargate, and saved the Earth many times from various alien threats, the first of which was Apophis' invasion attempt using two motherships and later threats such as a meteor that was about to collide with Earth, that was in fact a Goa'uld attempt to destroy Earth without violating the new cease fire treaty with the advanced Asgard.
SG1 constantly tried to find allies who could help them in the war against the Goa'uld who were constantly trying to invade Earth not only through the stargate but also with spaceships (and were fortunately stopped on the way thanks to SG1's intelligence gathering and their operational efficiency). Therefore Earth required more advanced technology to create some sort of defense against the huge threat. They found many advanced races, but none of them would help them because of various reasons, most notably because of some "prime directive" many advanced races had that conveniently didn't allow them to intervene and to assist inferior races. Such as the pacifist race called the Nox, from a planet that would in the future be called Tau Alpha C. One member of this race, who was a mutant with extremely strong powers, left his planet to travel the universe, and called himself the Traveler.
But SG1 did finally make contact with a powerful and most advanced race, called the Asgard. The Asgard was a race that lived in the Leda galaxy and who visited the Earth many times. They were small gray little people, who were often connected to the UFO phenomenon on Earth. One of the SG1 team, major Carter, immediately presumed that these are the same famous aliens that crash landed on Earth in 1947. Indeed that incident was automatically connected in people's minds to all the other cases of small gray people with big heads, because of the large number of sightings of these aliens in all other incidents, but in that particular incident in 1947 those aliens weren't involved at all, but it was actually a group of big eared aliens from the future who crash landed on earth. The Asgard told SG1 that they once had an alliance with the builders of the Stargates, the Ancients, or as they would later be called by humans: the Iconians.
The Asgard were willing to help Earth fight the Goa'uld, but the only problem was that they already were at war with a much greater enemy in their home galaxy, and were loosing, and therefore were unable to fight the Goa'uld at the same time.

Some time after the first contact with the Asgard, an Asgard ship came to Earth, infested with robotic `bugs' that were called the Replicators, who were that same great enemy that the Asgard were fighting in their home galaxy, after discovering them on a planet whose inhabitants have been destroyed by their own creation, and bringing them on board an Asgard ship for study. The Replicators infested the ship and gained the vessel and technology that they lacked to leave their planet. Ever since, they were expanding throughout the Asgard galaxy; absorbing materials and technologies and replicating at an enormous speed. They were constantly improving themselves and were able to adapt to all forms of weapons, and even if they were damaged they could easily regenerate, and because of their fast reproduction their enormous numbers made them nearly impossible to overcome. After learning about Earth from the computer of the latest Asgard ship that they captured, the Replicators that took control over Thor's ship brought the ship to Earth in order to infest it too. The SG1 team managed to save the Asgard's supreme commander, and to crash his infested ship on Earth's atmosphere so that the Replicators would not be able to conquer Earth and would also not be able to use the latest Asgard technology that they assimilated. However, one Replicator did survive the crash into Earth's ocean, and after infesting a Russian submarine, started to assimilate its materials and technologies in order to build a new breed of Replicators. The Replicators almost managed to gain a foothold on Earth, but just before the thousands of new Replicators were released, the SG1 managed to destroy them. While the SGC battled the Replicators on Earth and were ultimately successful in defeating them, major Carter was on the Asgard's homeworld Othana and managed to save them from a coming Replicator invasion, by using "stupid human tactics" that the Replicators were not used to. That was why the Asgard requested the humans' help; because they witnessed how they were able to defeat the Replicators using primitive weapons that were able to damage the Replicators, unlike the advanced energy weapons that the Replicators were long adapted to. And using a human tactic that sacrificed the most advanced Asgard ship, the Replicators were fooled and lured into a trap that destroyed them. The Asgard would never have thought about using such primitive weapons and tactics to fight such an advanced enemy, but thanks to the humans they realized that that was exactly the way they should fight the Replicators, because the Replicators were not used to it and therefore were vulnerable. The Asgard continued fighting the Replicators, with a little more success, but were still too hard pressed by this war and could not help Earth much. But the SG1 found other powerful allies, such as the TokRa who were also a parasitic species relative of the Goa'uld but they were a good species that lived in symbiosis with their hosts and did not enslave them as the Goa'uld did (mutated remains of the Tokra race would in the future be known as the Trill). The Tokra were able to infiltrate the Goa'uld and constantly kept the Goa'uld fighting each other and thus staying weak. With SG1's help, they were able to destroy a huge Goa'uld armada by detonating a sun (by opening a wormhole to the stargate that was falling into a black hole and throwing the connected stargate into the sun, thus sucking millions of tons of the sun's mass and violating the delicate balance between it's mass and fusion reaction) and wiping out the largest Goa'uld fleet ever assembled.
SG1 was on a captured Goa'uld ship and tried to escape but the sun's explosion damaged their hyper engines and their ship, along with Apophis', was thrown together to the same distant galaxy that the Replicators were in. The Replicators first infested Apophis' ship, but Apophis activated the self-destruct of his ship to destroy the Replicators on it, escaped and took over SG1's captured ship and. But some Replicators managed to get on the other Goa'uld ship as well and infested it. After taking over the ship and getting all the Goa'uld information from it, they modified the engines and headed the ship back to the Milky Way, directly toward Apophis' home base that appeared very appetizing to the Replicators that learnt about it from assimilating Apophis' ship. But SG1 could not allow the Replicators to gain a foothold in our galaxy, and they crashed the infested ship right into Apophis' home planet, destroying his headquarters and of course killing Apophis himself who was still on his ship together with the Replicators, while SG1 escaped in the last moment. SG1 continued searching for allies that would be willing to provide them with advanced technology in order to defend Earth. Once they had encountered such a race, and that race only wanted in return some heavy water (used for nuclear devices) for their power sources. But it was discovered that that race was in fact made of clones and genetically engineered beings, and was fighting in a war against a normal breeding race and needed more power sources in order to eradicate those people. Upon realizing the truth, the SG1 betrayed their new "allies" and helped the good race to win. All the advanced technology was destroyed, but it was worth it because the planet has been freed from the evil clones.
Later, an advanced race, called the Tollan, whose planet was equipped with effective anti- Goa'uld weapons suddenly agreed to give this technology (advanced ion cannons) to Earth because the SG1 once saved their arrogant planet from the Goa'uld. But it was discovered that the advanced technology was no longer effective against the Goa'uld, who found a counter measure against it, and the planet was just being manipulated by the Goa'uld who now threatened them. After the plot was discovered, the Goa'uld destroyed the planet and the advanced Tollan race.
Another advanced race, called the Aschen had succeeded in taking over Earth in an alternate future timeline by sterilizing the human race in purpose of eradicating it after pretending to be Earth's ally for almost a decade. But that time line was prevented when the retired SG1 members of the future used the stargate time travel technique to send a message to themselves in the past and warned them not to go to that planet. The message did not elaborate any details but since it carried O'Neil's handwriting, signature, finger prints and DNA, the planet's address was locked so that the terrible future will not happen. But the SG1 has met that same race on another planet, not knowing that it was the same one whose homeworld they were warned about. This race was pretending to be an enlightened society but was secretly eradicating other races, and have offered Earth advanced technology in return for information on the Stargate wormhole maps (which would allow that race to travel to other planets using the stargates without the need of their starships). The US government has agreed to the trade but just before the documents were signed the SG1 discovered (mostly thanks to the note that was sent by themselves from the alternate future and other clues they found) that their new `allies' were going to eradicate humanity and therefore gave them incorrect addresses (the first being the address of the stargate that was falling into a black hole). The race tried to destroy humanity using an advanced biological weapon but their attempt failed thanks to SG1 and the Iris protecting the stargate on Earth. And when that race later dialed to the address that was given to them, the black hole phenomenon (which almost destroyed Earth once but was prevented only thanks to the existence of a second Gate on Earth that was used to shut down the "jammed" stargate) traveled through the wormhole and destroyed their homeworld. After the destruction of their homeworld, the Aschen sent their entire fleet to attack Earth. Fortunately, when they arrived at Earth's doorstep, they encountered another fleet that also just arrived there to destroy humanity; a fleet of Goa'uld motherships!
It was a true miracle, since the two huge fleets fought and destroyed each other and the Earth was saved, without even the knowledge of the humans. Once again the Goa'uld suffered great losses in their attempted invasion of Earth. After the loss of their homeworld and their entire fleet, the Aschen's evil empire, which was in control of several dozen planets in the Alpha Quadrant, had completely collapsed.
The two front war against the Goa'uld and the Replicators continued, and the situation looked grimmer than ever.
The Asgard were still loosing against the overwhelming numbers of the Replicators, which were also evolving as fast as they were breeding, but thanks to SG1, the Asgard got hold of the original source of the Replicators: an advanced Ancient android that had built the Replicators as toys. The Asgard studied the android and learned much about the Replicators' technology from it, which helped them fight them. But it was too late since the Replicators were already too many and spread too much throughout the universe. But then came the breakthrough; it was discovered that the android was capable of sending a homing beacon that all Replicators would still obey and come forward to its source. That beacon was activated, amplified and broadcasted to the entire known universe. But not before a trap was set to buckle up all of the Replicators in one place using a time dilation device, set on the Asgard homeworld after the entire Asgard civilization evacuated it (since it was impossible to move the device and the Neutronium building protecting it to another location). The plan indeed worked and the entire replicator swarm was gathered on the single planet. The time machine was inside a solid Neutronium structure, which was supposed to protect it against the replicators. But it seemed that they were able to get through it and change the machine for their own benefit; they made time go faster and in a matter of days for the rest of the universe, centuries passed for the Replicators, which had assimilated all the raw materials that the planet had to offer and stored all the energy they could while continuing to evolve and improve their technology. They've also assimilated the android, and with its advanced technology a new generation of replicators was created; one that was made of much smaller, microscopic, building blocks which allowed them to take complex forms and imitate life forms. Fortunately, the SG1, on board a starship built on Earth and relatively primitive (which allowed it to pass the replicators' defenses without notice, managed to reach the time machine, and with the help of one of the humanoid replicators who was more human than machine, managed to reverse it. SG1 escaped, after tricking the human replicator and leaving him there, and the replicators were all slowed down to an infantile rate of time. Although the war was technically over, for the meantime the Asgard were too weak to help in the war against the Goa'uld, especially because the Goa'uld had enhanced their technology, and victory was not assured anymore when facing superior numbers.

This was because of a Goa'uld named Anubis, who was believed to have been dead for a very long time, and had suddenly reappeared and quickly gained access to a lot of the Ancients' technology and used it to rapidly rise to power and dominance over the other system lords. Anubis was the son of Ra, the strongest Goa'uld ever (and a direct columniation of the evil dark side entity that possessed the Goa'uld, making Anubis a direct reincarnation of the Sith Lord Palpatine). Thousands of years ago Anubis figured out how to ascend to a higher level of existence and thus became more powerful than ever, and closer to being a god than any other Goa'uld in history. It was no coincidence that he was the god of death. In the early 20'th century he even tried taking over Earth from the grave: creating huge armies out of dust, meant to be led by a mummy which Anubis brought back to life. Fortunately that plan failed and Anubis remained trapped in the afterlife, biding his time and waiting for the right time to return. And now his window of opportunity has finally arrived. He started spreading his evil influence throughout the dimensions, in a deliberate knowing attempt to provoke the rage of the other ascended beings so that they would take action to cast him out, since till now they allowed him to stay in the higher dimensions because they believed he would be less dangerous that way. But he grew in power beyond their expectations, and they realized that they made a critical mistake - one that they now intended to correct. So the ascended beings, (who were in fact the Ancients), who understandably never wanted Anubis among them, finally tried to force him back to the land of the living. They managed to send him back, but not all the way. For some dark reason they couldn't exile him completely. Using some evil technique, he managed to retain some of his presence in the higher dimensions while simultaneously establishing a foothold in our reality and remained a partly ascended being in some bastardized way.
A key player in his return was Osiris, who himself was considered to be dead by the other system lords until his return. Osiris prepared for Anubis' return in a special temple where the dark body suit for Anubis was placed on the alter. "How is it that I'm here when you thought I perished? Very simple, I was saved for a higher purpose. I am the chosen one. Charged by the almighty Anubis himself, to help him return to this world. Before he was taken he sent me to wonder the Earth, to wait till the time of his return. This temple is the portal through which he will return to our world, his world!" Explained Osiris to his followers, just before Anubis crossed over to our plane of existence, inhabiting the dark shield suit prepared for him by Osiris. He was still some form of energy, and had to use the dark mask shield to keep his humanoid form intact. He was now stuck somewhere between corporeal existence and ascension, neither living nor dead. His evil scheme worked just as he planned all along.
The ascended beings prevented Anubis from using his abilities to affect anything on a grand, cosmic scale but, he was free to do anything he could have otherwise accomplished as a normal Goa'uld, even if it was using their own leftover technology to annihilate a galaxy of life they once created. Earth and even the Milky Way Galaxy were seen to be rather small in the great scheme of the universe.
Thanks to this Anubis was still very powerful, and possessed much of the ancients' knowledge - which allowed him to find and muster their technology. Such as a device which Anubis could use to blow up the stargates of his enemies together with the planet the stargate was on. But when he tried using that weapon against Earth, the humans managed to get rid of the overloading stargate, and their Jaffa allies managed to destroy the ancient weapon - which Anubis was unable to rebuild.
Other pieces of technology allowed Anubis to construct a different super weapon - one that gave him clear superiority over all the other system lords, which finally rallied together against him as a collective force under the command of the system lord Yu.
With that weapon Anubis managed to destroy most of the fleet of system lord mother ships. At the same time, Anubis was confronted by the ascended Daniel Jackson, who threatened to wipe him from existence if he attempted to destroy Abydos. Anubis deliberately tried to provoke the naive Daniel to strike him, knowing that such an attack from the higher planes of existence would only strengthen his foothold there - and concordantly his power in the universe. That was why Daniel's attack was halted by the others, and Daniel chose to retake human form as punishment for breaking their rules. After defeating the system lords' fleet, Anubis used his super weapon to destroy Abydos. A beam of energy was directed at the pyramid, striking its exact top. The beam
intensified and then suddenly disappeared. In a brief moment it was replaced with a
blast. The pyramid started splintering into tiny particles from the top down. The historic
building was decimated in an instant. After the pyramid was blown up - the energy
wave radiated outwards. From this epicenter the wave of destruction grew outwardly, destroying everything in its path, engulfing and consuming much of the planet's surface. Everyone on the planet was killed by the blast. But thanks to an ascended woman named Oma, better known as Mother Nature, the people of Abydos have ascended at death - and so were not lost forever. Some time later, after the Goa'uld spent months fighting over Anubis's new technology and destroying themselves in the process, mostly with Anubis quickly decimating the forces of the remaining system lords in order to conquer them and dominate the galaxy, SG1 and their allies managed to destroy Anubis's new super weapon, and later his huge mothership - but Anubis himself managed to escape. Overall the Goa'uld were left licking their wounds, while Daniel rejoined SG1.

Eventually the Asgard were able to help Earth, and provided the much needed firepower to help weaken the vast armies of the new supreme system lord Anubis, now made up not of Jaffa (who Anubis didn't trust because of their expanding rebellion) but of cloned genetically engineered super-warriors (the idea of which he got from the Dominion empire in the gamma quadrant). But the Asgard's help was minimal, since they barely had any available ships left after their war with the replicators, and Anubis eventually overpowered the other system lords and the few remaining Asgard ships attempting to enforce the protected planets treaty, which Anubis didn't honor. After dispatching the Asgard forces, Anubis was free to invade Earth and destroy or enslave humanity. He personally commanded a large fleet to attack Earth, but just at this time, SG1 finally managed to find the lost city of the Ancients. It turned out it was once on Earth, and called Atlantis. As Anubis' fleet entered orbit, Jack O'Neil, possessing the knowledge of the Ancients and using an Ancient power source he retrieved, managed to activate the weapons array of the Ancient outpost which they found in Antarctica, and destroyed the entire enemy fleet and Anubis himself.
But only his corporeal form was destroyed, the spirit of Anubis endured, and remained residing in the debris. When the international space station later passed through the debris, Anubis possessed a Cosmonaut onboard the station. When he returned to Earth, Anubis started passing from person to person until he eventually reached the SGC and tried using the stargate to escape Earth and return to his followers. But SG1 thwarted his attempts and sent him to a frozen planet, trapping him there indefinitely since his human host immediately got frozen and was unable to redial the Stargate anywhere. Meanwhile, the Asgard who were monitoring the area where the Replicators were trapped realized that the Replicators would soon get out of the time trap, and nothing would be able to stop them again. The Asgard were quick to search for a way to destroy the threat before it would burst. So they used their technology to force the star around which the replicators-infested planet was orbiting to collapse and turn into a black hole, sucking the infested planet and all the replicators into it before it was too late. Just as the planet was being torn apart and pulled into the gravity well, the time dilation device was turned off by the humanoid Replicator known as Fifth, who merged with the device and managed to use it to counter the gravitational attraction of the black hole. He combined with other Replicators to create a ship and managed to escape the edge of the black hole using the modified time dilation device and headed for the new Asgard home world, in order to take more Neutronium - which was needed to create the advanced human-form replicators.
The Replicators were now more evil than ever - now being led by the human-form Replicator who was betrayed by SG1 and was now looking for revenge. No machine could ever be as truly evil as a twisted human mind can be. Before him, the Replicators existed simply to reproduce and knew nothing of emotions such as hatred, vengeance and cruelty. Now, under his leadership, they were truly evil. The Replicator ship headed straight toward the Asgard planet, but as it exited hyperspace the entire Asgard fleet bombarded it at the exact right moment, destroying the ship. However, its debris rained down on the planet, and the Replicators started infesting and consuming it. Fifth had also survived, but at least his time dilation device was destroyed with his ship. The Asgard once again asked SG1 for help. By using the Ancient data base in O'Neil's mind, Thor's ship managed to create a new weapon capable of destroying replicators by disrupting the connection between the replicators' building blocks.
Fifth captured major Carter and tortured her for what she did to him. She tried to explain that they did what they did because there was no other way to save the universe. After mind melding with her again, his emotions for her caused the good in him to resurface, and he became compassionate toward her, and eventually freed her after he confessed to her that he loved her. Thor used the new weapon to clear his new planet from all the replicators that invaded it, but Fifth and a small group of Replicators managed to escape once again by merging into a ship. Fifth had gathered just enough Neutronium from the planet to create another human form - in the image of Carter. The Replicators started swarming through the galaxy once again, but at least now the Asgard had an effective weapon again them and managed to hold them at bay. Meanwhile, Anubis had returned. He managed to escape from his icy prison by telepathically summoning his servants to rescue him. He quickly began to retake control of the Goa'uld empire.
Anubis had regained much of his former strength. He couldn't yet take physical form, but his spirit lost none of its potency, and continued to reside in its human host.
Concealed within his fortress the dark lord saw all, his gaze piercing stars and shuddering planets.
Thanks to his searing powers, his forces managed to take Baal prisoner, but instead of killing him, Baal was offered to join Anubis. "It is over. Embrace the power of Anubis, or embrace your own destruction." Baal had no choice but to surrender himself to Anubis and pledge his loyalty. But deep down he knew that he would not share power, in the end there would be only one system lord. And so he planned to betray Anubis, as soon as he'd figure out a way to kill him. With all of Baal's resources back at his hands, Anubis started breeding a new Kull army, and building a vast new fleet of motherships. Very soon he would summon an army great enough to launch an assault upon the entire galaxy.
Fifth sent his Replicarter on a mission to the Milky Way galaxy to find a protection against the new weapon. Replicarter met with her human counterpart and pretended that she escaped from Fifth and claimed that he already devised a protection against the weapon and that he was on his way to this galaxy to find her. Carter gave her duplicate access to the weapon, hoping with her help to modify it to be effective again. But the devious duplicate used this opportunity to study the weapon and made herself immune to it. When Fifth arrived with his ship, Replicarter used the weapon to destroy his ship and killed him. Fifth was betrayed again, this time by his own creation. She believed that he was weak and unfit to lead the Replicators. She uploaded the program protecting her from the weapon to all the Replicators, and installed herself as their queen. With no one able to oppose her, she left through the stargate to reunite with the Replicators, who were now in our galaxy. The Replicators soon started spreading through the galaxy, and a gigantic war between them and the Goa'uld began as the Replicators began feasting on Goa'uld technology, assimilating their ships and planets. Replicarter personally infiltrated into the Goa'uld headquarters and killed the last of the system lords, led by Lord Yu (the only major system lord who remained was Baal, who by now was working for Anubis).
The Replicators were infesting the entire galaxy, feasting on the most technologically advanced civilizations first, completely annihilating the most advanced races in our galaxy.
The Goa'uld fleet was battling the invading Replicators, with no success. The Jaffa rebellion used this opportunity to invade and conquer the holiest Jaffa temple. Unknowingly to the rebels, the temple held an Ancient weapon capable of destroying all life in the galaxy, which the Ancients originally used to re-create life in the galaxy after the great plague. Once the rebels were there, Anubis ordered Baal to recall his entire fleet back to the temple, thus destroying the rebels once and for all. RepliCarter found out (by probing Daniel's subconscious mind) that this is the only weapon that could destroy her, and ordered her fleet to go there to conquer it.
After Baal's fleet arrived, it was surrounded by the bigger fleet of Replicator-controlled ships, which destroyed or infested Baal's ships. The Replicators finally landed and were approaching the weapon. Daniel managed to hold off the Replicators by struggling with RepliCarter's control over them through their link, thanks to the Ancient knowledge he gained because of her. This gave the real Carter the time to activate the weapon (which she modified with the help of Baal) and destroy all the Replicators in the galaxy. The enormous Goa'uld fleet around the planet (now free from the Replicators) fell to the rebels' hands.
But most important of all, the Replicator threat was finally over. Anubis however managed to retake the ancient weapon and planned to use it to destroy all life in the galaxy, and re-create life as he saw fit. He was only stopped by Oma Desala. Knowing that she was not able to defeat Anubis, she sacrificed herself to save our galaxy by locking Anubis in immortal combat on the higher plane of existence. And so the powerful Anubis had finally been vanquished from our level of existence, having been engaged in eternal combat by Oma. All of Anubis's attention was therefore occupied, leaving him unable to continue his efforts to conquer the galaxy. Anubis's ravaged host body died and fell as Anubis was gone.
But it was not the end. Soon after this, evil ascended beings from another galaxy came. Apparently, back when Anubis first ascended, he used his powers to help other evil beings to ascend, after they pledged to follow him. And so he started his group of followers. The ascended Ancients were afraid of these evil entities, and that was the real reason they didn't do anything to stop Anubis, they were afraid of the wrath of his followers, and wanted to avoid a war with them at all costs. Instead of fighting Anubis, they tried to confine him as much as possible.
After Anubis was trapped in eternal battle with Oma, these evil beings launched a war against the ascended ancients, just as they were afraid of all along, to try and break Anubis free. It worked, and Anubis managed to reincarnate himself into a physical shell once again. This time he resided in a more advanced robed suit, one larger and more powerful than his old one. His new suit was apparently impenetrable by energy weapons. He started amassing a new army of Kull warriors. This time these warriors were unstoppable since they were possessed by the evil ascended beings themselves. No energy weapons could harm them. The only way to fight them was with bladed weapons. So the free Jaffa army wore the armor of Kull warriors they defeated before (to make them immune to energy weapons as well), took swords, axes, spears, bows with arrows, and other cold weapons, and marched into war against Anubis' new army. SG1 was also there in Kull armor, their goal was to find and somehow slay Anubis himself. Daniel had made telepathic connection with the ascended beings, who told him that they could defeat the evil beings if they concentrated their attack on Anubis. If the original evil one was defeated, all his followers would be vanquished. All that needed to be done was to destroy Anubis' corporeal form, to expose him to the full wrath of the ancients. They would take care of the rest. On the holy ground of Dakara, the last battle was fought. A last alliance of Men and Jaffa marched against the armies of Anubis. And on the slopes of the holy temple, they fought for the freedom of the galaxy. The large Jaffa army was not doing well against the much stronger Kull warriors, who also fought back with bladed weapons. Then, Anubis appeared on the field. As Anubis swung his mace, the men and Jaffa against him were flung outwards, yelling in pain. He was so powerful that it was said that he could not be killed by any living man.
It was in this moment, when all hope had faded, that Master Bra'tac, king of the Jaffa, stood bravely before Anubis, taking off his helmet. "Go back to the shadow! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your followers!"
"Do you not know death when you see it, old man? This is my hour!" Said Anubis. He drew his sword which burst into flames, igniting with red energy. "You have failed. The world of Jaffa will fall." Anubis said, and raised his sword.
"If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." Said Bra'tac.
With one stroke Anubis killed Bra'tac, but in an instant Bra'tac ascended. Bra'tac's spirit joined with all the ascended beings, including the ascended Abydonians, who were eager to finally battle Anubis and his forces of evil. Meanwhile Anubis continued to slaughter the Jaffa army. No one could stop him. Anubis knocked down Teal'c and Daniel. Not far off, Carter watched in shock and horror. She ran and stood between them and Anubis, who approached them. "I will kill you if you touch them!" She shouted, holding her sword. Carter looked on in fear, and then ducked and sidestepped as Anubis tried to hit her.
Anubis finally landed a hit on her shield, and it shattered. She fell, crying out, and clutched her arm...Anubis stood triumphantly before her. Her shield was shivered in many places, and she stumbled to her knees. He bent over her like a cloud.
Meanwhile Daniel regained consciousness, and saw Carter facing off against Anubis. Carter panted in fear as Anubis approached. Anubis grabbed Carter's neck. "You fool, no man can kill me! Die now..." He said. Suddenly Daniel came up from behind and stabbed Anubis in the back of the leg. His blade crumbled into nothing and he collapsed to the ground, holding his right arm in pain. Anubis also shrieked in pain, and fell to his knees. Carter stood up and took off her helmet, shaking her golden hair loose. "I am no man!" She said. With a cry, she stabbed Anubis in the space of his face with her blade, as the great shoulders bowed before her, collapsing his dark energy shield that kept his form intact. The sword broke sparkling into many shards, flying back out. She fell to the ground in agony, but Anubis withered and crumpled into nothing with a shrill cry, while Daniel and Carter watched in surprise and shock as Anubis folded in on himself. Anubis was destroyed in a light that seems to come from his body. A bright light came from him, and a cloud spread over the battlefield, and all the Kull warriors fell to the ground. Anubis's empty robed armor fell to the ground, smoke coming out of it.
Anubis, the enemy of the Free peoples of the Milky Way galaxy, was defeated. His mantle and hauberk were empty. Shapeless they lay now on the ground, torn and tumbled, and a cry went up into the shuddering air, and faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind. A voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up, and was never heard again. Once Anubis was without a physical receptacle or a host to serve as an anchor, he was finally exposed to the full wrath of the Ancients, who imprisoned him on a planet in the core of the galaxy behind a spatial barrier of some sort. As Anubis fell, all his servants fell as well. He was the only thing that held them all in sway. Without the protection of the evil entities, the remaining Kull warriors were all easily killed by the Jaffa. The other evil beings all fled and hid, from fear of suffering the same fate as their master, and were all eventually wiped out from our Universe by the Ancients. They were all imprisoned in corporeal bodies in another dimensional realm from which they could never return. They now existed as hideous corporeal creatures, and even if they could somehow find a way to return to our universe, they would be unable to return because their subatomic structure was now radically different and would not be able to exist in our universe. Still they kept searching for our universe among the infinite number of dimensional planes of existence, and finally they found us by homing unto a subspace scan from a Federation Starship, the Enterprise D. They started kidnapping people from the Enterprise and running tests on them (creating a bubble of subspace in which the humans could survive), while at the same time trying to set a foothold on the Enterprise. Eventually the Enterprise crew managed to sever the connection, but not before a probe was sent throw to continue to serve as a beacon, connecting the aliens to our reality. The aliens used the knowledge they gathered from their experiments on the Enterprise crew, and started transforming themselves to match human physiology, so that they could more easily invade our universe. In 26th century, the aliens finally invaded after paving the way for centuries. They were close to reconfiguring the galaxy for their purpose when they created a habitable sphere about 50,000 light years in all directions. They were only stopped at the pivotal battle of Procyon V, when the Federation forces engaged the aliens. The Federation won the battle and drove the aliens back to their trans-dimensional realm. The Enterprise J participated in this battle.
But the aliens did not give up and tried to prevent their defeat by destroying Earth before it started the Federation that defeated them. However, the crew of the 22nd century Enterprise, succeeded in foiling their plan not only by saving Earth, but also by destroying the entire sphere network that was reconfiguring the Delphic expanse to serve as their foothold, preventing their invasion altogether.
But the evil aliens didn't give up, and started building another foothold at a remote location far from the Federation, using the Probe they sent in the 24'th century as their anchor. It was the key that allowed them to open another doorway to our universe, and this time they almost succeeded in their plan to wipe out all life in our galaxy, but in the last moment they were stopped by the Enterprise E, and were all killed.

Back in the early 21st century, with Anubis gone, it was time to end the Goa'uld's tyranny over the galaxy, since they were now weaker than ever. The Tokra, rebel Jaffa, and the Asgard cooperated to bring the Goa'uld empire to a crippling end, from which they'd never recover. As a result of their war against the Replicators and the Goa'uld, the Asgard race suffered great losses, lost countless numbers of ships and planets, spent their entire resources on the war efforts, and their once glorious race was left crippled and weakened, knowing that they had lost all but their lives, saving the universe from the worse plagues it had ever known. Those few Asgard who survived the final battles could only wonder what the future would hold for their race.
The entire Goa'uld race almost became extinct in the final wars. All their occupied planets rebelled against them at once, and while the Goa'uld tried to flee in order to later move on to other areas and occupy them, their ships and fleets were ambushed and annihilated.
The planet Chulak (which in the future would be known as Risa) was the one leading the rebellion, and with their access to the heart of the Goa'uld military and technology, they were able to inflict the Goa'uld with devastating losses and in the end all of the Goa'uld were then destroyed once and for all using symbiotic poison. Just prior to that, the Jaffa managed to end their dependency on the Goa'uld larvas using a specific drug, and thus survived the extinction of the parasitic Goa'uld race and later ended their dependency on the drug as well. The Tokra also got ill from the symbiotic poison they used against the Goa'uld, but thanks to the Asgard's technology they underwent a controlled mutation which saved them from extinction. They renamed themselves as the Trill (meaning Tok-Ra who were ill).
The few replicators that survived the final battle were preparing to begin replicating again and to start their quest of universal Dominion all over again.

But their vessel was captured by a Borg ship, and the replicators were neutralized, their remains taken on board the Borg vessel for study. The Borg managed to dissect the Replicators, and to extract their technological secrets, most notably their new nano building blocks. They assimilated the Replicators' technology, and gained their regenerative and adaptive abilities. From now on the Borg possessed the same abilities the Replicators had; to adapt to energy weapons, and to repair themselves with great speed. From that day on, the Borg would become virtually unstoppable and will assimilate entire worlds with great speed and efficiency using their new nano technology. The only beings that could ever be able to truly harm the Borg would be the same ones that originally defeated the Replicators: the Humans. Because the Borg also caught the disadvantages of the Replicators' psychology, together with gaining their technological advantages, the Borg started acting like the Replicators, for example ignoring indirect threats to them as the Replicators always did, and became an over confident worry-less race that strives for perfection and expansion at all costs.
But at that time Earth didn't know about the Borg, or the Dominion for that matter, because the Stargate network didn't lead to those parts of the galaxy, but only to the relatively thinly populated areas of the Beta quadrant. Although there were no more known serious enemies and threats against which Earth had to defend itself, the exploratory missions through the stargate continued, expanding beyond the Milky Way galaxy. It was discovered that the ancient culture of Atlantis indeed existed, and was also connected to a huge stargate network. And humans continued exploring worlds and civilizations through the Stargate that was still kept secret on Earth. At some point in time, for some reason, intentual or otherwise, the entire Stargate network has suffered a great cascade chain reaction that completely destroyed all the Stargates in the Milky Way galaxy; some overload reaction has melted down all of the Stargates, except for a few rare and most advanced Stargates that were long inoperable, ever since the destruction of the Iconian empire 200,000 years ago. Those advanced Stargates were able to create so powerful wormholes that they could exit at any point in the Galaxy (without a second Stargate) and the travel time was instantaneous (unlike the travel time of a few seconds of most Stargates), since the wormhole corridors were incredibly short and could exit at any coordinates in the galaxy. These stargates were also only one way passages, but they were much more advanced than the original network of stargates that once served the Iconians at the start of their empire. The newer Stargates that had instantaneous travel time and did not need a second portal to guide the wormhole, were constructed just before their empire started to declined after the failure of their main galactic power source that was always thought to be inexhaustible (the Dyson sphere that contained a sun that became unstable, that was later discovered by the Enterprise D). The Iconian Empire was also known as the Tkon Empire. The Iconians themselves were known as "the preservers", since they passed through the galaxy rescuing primitive cultures which were in danger of extinction, and "seeding" them were they could live and grow. The preservers account for a large number of the human-looking races. They're the reason why there were so many humanoids scattered through the galaxy.
Humans were also their direct descendents. 600,000 years ago their vessels were colonizing this galaxy. They have left their seed behind them. Perhaps humanity's legends of Adam and Eve were two of their travelers. It also tends to explain certain elements of Vulcan pre-history. Even though studies indicated that life on the planet Earth evolved independently, it was still very probable that the Iconians greatly influenced humanity's evolution. The records of their travels were lost in the cataclysm which they loosened upon themselves. A war - a struggle for such goals and the unleashing of such powers that no human can yet comprehend. One day their minds became so powerful they dared to think of themselves as gods. An ultimate crisis humanity was yet to face.
Although the Iconians were not an aggressive race, they were greatly feared because of their advanced technology (and also because it was believed that they were the source of the plague that was sweeping across the galaxy), and after the failure of their main power source on which they were greatly dependent, many of the planets under their rule started a rebellion and a large rebel fleet penetrated the Iconian's defenses that were unstable because of the galactic energy shortage, and launched an enormous planetary bombardment on their capital homeworld (that in the future would be discovered inside the Romulan neutral zone), extinguishing most of the Iconians there except the few who made it through the advanced Stargate in time. Only the main command center that was built out of dense Carbon-Neutronium survived the bombardment, and in the future that structure was discovered by Starfleet together with the last operational advanced Stargate. But the command center and the advanced Stargate were destroyed using their own underground power source so that the advanced technology won't fall to Romulan hands. In another part of the galaxy, in what would be later known as the Gamma quadrant, another Neutronium building had survived the destruction of the Iconian empire, together with remains of one of the rare advanced stargates. But the ancient Iconians themselves were nowhere to be found. Some of them were transformed to non-corporeal entities and were later known as the Organians and even prevented a Federation/Klingon war, before vanishing all together, perhaps joining the Q continuum.

After the destruction of the Stargate net, humans no longer had the ability to travel to other worlds, and those few humans who knew about other worlds and aliens, had no choice but to give up on their interstellar journeys, and return to their normal lives.
The whole Stargate program was so covered up by the government that there was simply no official record of it, and it was left buried until everyone forgot about it. After the third world war, in which any evidence of the existence of the SGC were destroyed, the adventures of SG1 were truly erased from history's knowledge, but they continued to live in legends of countless worlds in the universe that owed their lives and freedoms to the "Tau'ri", Terrans.

Even before Daniel Jackson managed to make the stargate workable, the Earth already experienced a number of unique experiences, which the skeptic scientific community would regard to as impossible, such as time travel. 1984, a cybernetic killing machine from the future was sent back to this time to destroy a specific target. The target was Sarah Conner, the mother of the future leader of the global human resistance, John Conner. In one possible future, a war begun between the machines and their human creators after an advanced AI computer system named Skynet - which controlled the advanced new generation of military machines and has decided to wipe out humanity after becoming self aware.
Skynet became a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. At the moment it was activated it already had full control over the USA's military arsenals, and was secretly hooked into virtually every computer system in the world, and once it felt threatened by the humans it had used those arsenals against targets in Russia and other nuclear capable countries and thus triggered a global nuclear war. In a split second it decided the fate of all humans - extermination. The Russian counter attack destroyed Skynet's human enemies in the US (who have tried to shut it down almost as soon as it became sentient) and the interchange of fire continued, turning most of Earth's civilization into ashes and rubble, from which the machines rose. Afterward nuclear winter came. Those who survived starved. Over 3 billion human lives were lost. The survivors found themselves facing a new nightmare, the war against the machines. The machines rounded up the humans in extermination camps for an orderly disposal, where the humans could be exploited and work instead of the machines, which were conserving their energy until the nuclear winter would pass. At the time the machines were dependant mostly on Solar power (since all other energy sources were currently unattainable) and had to wait for the atmosphere to clear from the dust of the war before their new civilization could flourish and consume the Earth. Despite this weakness, humans felt powerless to defend themselves and did little to resist. But John Conner thought them to fight back, with his guidance they escaped the camps, gone into hiding and started the resistance. John then led the global resistance and the war against the machines, which lasted for three decades.
As the machines were taking over the Earth, at some point they uncovered the Stargate inside an operational military base. That base showed formidable resistance but eventually fell. The machines dissected the stargate and used its technology to build their time machine. They consumed all the information of the stargate program, planning to expand throughout the galaxy once they finish off humanity.
It was virtually impossible to defeat the numerous machine armies, so the main target was to destroy their source, the computer core that controlled the machine collective. Without it, the machines would quickly fall to chaos without a single coherent mind to guide them all. To achieve this goal the resistance started gathering all its forces to the general area where Skynet's mainframe was located - the place that used to be California. The humans were a ragtag guerrilla army, made up mostly of troops from Southern Hemisphere countries... Africans, South Americans, Australians. The survivors of the nuclear war between the Northern Hemisphere super-powers. Millions of human warriors from all over the planet (mostly from the southern hemisphere since
everything alive north of the equator stopped being alive) traveled to what used to be the USA in order to gather up and kill the enemy's head so that its global body would die. The plan worked perfectly. Skynet's defense grid was smashed. The resistance won, and penetrated into Skynet's compound in order to destroy the central computer mainframe and end the war.
But when they reached the main hall, instead of a giant supercomputer they found a lab with time displacement equipment. They arrived just in time to witness the machines sending a termination unit across time in a desperate attempt to save themselves.
The humans crippled the machines in the room and got control of the time machine. John selected a volunteer and sent him to the exact time and general location of where the terminator was sent to. First, he made him memorize a sentence as a message to his mother telling her that the future was not set, "there is no fate but the one we make". Although there was no God-like supercomputer which could be destroyed to instantly end the war, it was still the machines' heart of operations - containing most of their conscious mind hive. The resistance planned to destroy it. But first, they used their access to the enemy's network in order to plant a computer virus that would devastate Skynet's software in the machine cyberspace once it would loose its mainframes and would have nowhere to hid, no shelter to protect itself in and no back up of any kind. After doing this, the resistance laid explosives in the compound, planning to destroy Skynet, together with the time machine lab (to prevent anyone from crossing time ever again). Conner stayed behind for some reason. He knew that in actuality there was more than one terminator sent back through time. The first was programmed to kill his mother before he was born. The second, more advanced one, was programmed to kill John himself when he was just a child, in case the first terminator failed. So, he reprogrammed one of the dormant terminators in the lab to protect him in the past, and to follow his orders, and sent it back through time to protect himself from the second assassin. After it was done, he destroyed the lab with explosives.
The machine armies were disoriented, and the resistance used the distraction to cripple the advanced machine world and eliminate the death robots once and for all.
The war was over.
But the final battle was fought in the past. Everything depended only on the missions of the terminators sent through time. The time machine could only send living matter through time. That was why both the terminator and the human soldier carried no advanced weapons and no clothing. It was also one of the reasons the terminator was a cyborg - a skeleton machine covered in heavily muscular living human tissue (the other reason being camouflage). Sarah Conner survived the first assassination attempt. The first cyborg terminator was crippled, but the human soldier from the future also died after impregnating Sarah with the future John. The terminator has also `gave birth' to skynet by its very being in the past. Its remains and its control chip (CPU) were recovered and used by Cyberdyne systems to create the new advanced generation of computers and machines.
It was all a paradoxical time loop, something that was meant to happen. The leaders of both worlds, humans and machines, John and Skynet, were both children of time.
John grew up exceptionally well and fast - both physically and mentally. He was over three years ahead of his age. Both his mind and his body were developing much faster than of any normal kid. At the age of nine he looked and acted as if he was thirteen. In order to avoid drawing attention toward her special son, his mother even told everyone that he was thirteen when he was in fact ten, and had placed him in eighth grade. Thanks to being a genius he was doing exceedingly well in school despite the fact that he was missing most lessons and not doing any homework because of spending most of his time playing video games and hacking computers (which trained him for his future role as a great military leader against the machines).
Only the police records (which were extensive about the troublemaking John) showed his true age.
As his mother, John himself also told everyone that he was thirteen instead of ten, and even started believing that it was his real age, despite his inconsistent birth date.
The second terminator arrived ten year after that birth date to kill John himself. It was a much more advanced one, capable of changing shape and imitating any person or object by rearranging its microscopic mimetic polyalloy building blocks that gave it liquid characteristics, even allowing it to assume an organic form (which allowed it to pass through the time machine). Nonetheless John, Sarah, the good terminator, and the help of the man who was working on the revolutionary microprocessor project, were able to destroy the lab that led to the creation of Skynet, and steal the chip which was the source of all the evil technology. After destroying the evil terminator and the chip by throwing them into a molten metal mill, the good terminator sacrificed himself to save humanity.
Therefore the nuclear war and the following rise of the machines, which was supposed to occur in August 29th, 1997, was prevented. Presumably forever. August 1997 came and went, nothing much happened. There was no judgment day. People went to work as they always did, laughed, complained, watched TV, made love. Sarah Connor wanted to run through the streets yelling, grab them all and say "Every day from this day on is a gift. Use it well." Instead, she got drunk. But the dark future that never came still existed for her, like the traces of a dream. John fought the war differently than was foretold. In Washington, in the battlefield of the Senate, his weapons were commonsense and hope. The luxury of hope was given to him by the terminator. Because if a machine could learn the value of human life, maybe humans could too.

Not all the advanced technology from the alternate future timeline was gone. After the remains of the first terminator were discovered, its pieces were scattered among scientists all over the continent (most of them ending up in the hands of the government's defense department).

One genius scientist, named Seth Brundle, managed to acquire several pieces of that technology from the factory - a piece of the processor, a data storage device capable of storing more information than the memory of every man on earth put together, and an energy rod capable of storing energy equivalent to a small fusion reactor. It was this that allowed him to rapidly advance his work on his dream, his life's project that he never believed could be completed in his lifetime.
He had no idea where those advanced pieces of technology came from; he was acquiring pieces of technology from all over the world for the last three years now, connecting everything together into what he alone knew about. The most profound invention in scientific history - a product that would change the world. The first transporter (teleportation) machine ever constructed. Seth suffered from motion sickness all his life, and finally the invention that he's been thinking about all his life had become a reality. By 1986 Seth finally managed to successfully teleport objects from one transporter pod to another one in the same room (using his advanced supercomputer and energy core).
However, the transporter worked fine on inanimate objects but not so good on living things. An unfortunate baboon was turned inside out by the device. Seth was depressed but then a flash of inspiration (thanks to an inspirational romp in the sack with a woman he met named Veronica) lead Seth to reprogram the teleporter's computer to look at living flesh in a new, creative, way. A second baboon made the trip without ill effects and the celebration was on. Or it would be, but Seth became reckless and decided to test the transporter on himself, even though the baboon's lab exams had not yet returned. Unfortunately a fly got into the transporter chamber together with Seth. The computer was not designed to deal with two completely separate objects teleporting simultaneously from the same chamber. It wasn't able to make the distinction. Although the computer was indeed programmed to ignore the genetic pattern of any single cell organisms (which prevented microbes and viruses from being fused with their host body - simply filtering them out and as a side effect, "purifying" the body from all infections.) But in this case there were two multi-celled organisms in one pod. The computer got confused and decided to integrate the two organisms, fusing them on the molecular-genetic level, with the larger organism initially absorbing the smaller one. The advanced supercomputer AI core, made up from the evil remains of Skynet's terminator, was not as "stupid" as Seth presumed.
This computer definitely had a personality. A deliberately malicious personality. Seth's computer was not conscious in and of itself, but the karmic forces of the universe were consciously working through Seth's computer. Why else would a program which was never designed to deal with two separate subjects not only scan and store the two organisms separately, but make the decision to integrate the two genetic patterns, surely the most difficult way to deal with two separate patterns and the way furthest outside its programming? Seth did not realize that something went wrong. But slowly and steadily he began to change, his new Fly infected genes starting to manifest themselves. Insect hairs started growing at a place of injury where new tissue was growing. His altered genome took time to become apparent. At first it was internal (increased strength, speed, and a craving for sweets) but later a hideous transformation started to take place.
It affected not only his body, but also his mind. Seth's growing madness made him obsessively search for another human to test the transporter on, to see if it would reproduce the same results of "improvement" that it had on him. But a few weeks later Seth's condition started to deteriorate as a bizarre form of cancer.
Nails, hair, (and later teeth, ears and other organs) all started to fall off. It was only then that he realized that Veronica was right; something went wrong during his first teleportation, and he was now terribly sick. He analyzed the computer records of that transport and saw that the computer locked on to two separate biological elements during that teleportation. The primary one being human and the secondary being a fly. The secondary element was assimilated into the primary, fusing into it on the molecular/genetic level. His transporter became a gene-splicer machine.
Angry and scared, Seth started conducting cruel experimentations on animals, in an attempt to learn more about what happened to him and to find a way to somehow reverse it.
He created a deliberate and refined gene-splicing program, using three telepods. The two subjects would each be in its own telepod, be transmitted to the third telepod where the genetically fused combination of the two subjects would be received.
When the new program was ready, Brundle started his experiment. In telepod 1 sat a monkey, in telepod 2 - an alley cat. Telepod 3 (the old prototype receiver) was empty.
Brundle operated the machine. The monitor said, "Ready for fusion". Seth presses the accept button. The telepods went through their normal disintegration routine as the animals' outlines appeared on the monitor in split screen fashion. But now, as the reintegration process began, a stream of data concerning this new experiment, the fusion of monkey and cat, flooded the screen. The basic message that got across to him was: "Percentage of Monkey- 63. Percentage of Cat - 37."
These numbers fluctuated as the machine tried to strike a molecular balance between the two creatures. Finally, an outline of the fused creature began to form on the screen. Brundle looked up to see the actual creature forming, and it was indeed grotesque: two heads- one monkey, one cat- at odd angles to each other, six legs which were not quite symmetrically placed. On the monkey torso, cat tail. As the creature solidified and the light went off, it sat there in the telepod for a moment, half-reclining as though crippled. Brundle got up, went to the third telepod, and with great apprehension, opened the door. The thing just sat there, slumped, then suddenly leaped at him, its two heads shrieking! It jumped on his arm, clinging, snarling, then dropped to the floor. The two heads began to bite each other, blood began to flow- the thing now running around in mad floppy circles, smearing blood everywhere. Brundle was horrified. He grabbed a metal rod leaning in a corner and began to smash at the deformed thing. He kept smashing at it until it stopped its hideous screeching and lay dead, mangled on the floor. Meanwhile the screen was flashing the words: "Fusion Successful".
Brundle put his face in his hands for a few moments, then pulled himself together. Brundle had now developed some insect-like tics and mannerisms, his head twitching with nervous little jerks and his long fingers in constant motion. All of Brundle's fly characteristics have been accentuated even further. His metallic hair which covered parts of his body was much thicker than before, and the hernia-like bulge in his side was more protuberant now, stretched to the bursting point and obviously causing Brundle some pain. Brundle looked at the skylight. On an impulse, he jumped up on the wall, sticking there. The skin of the palms of his hands and legs had developed numerous tiny (incredibly strong) grasping hooks, which allowed him to stick to a solid wall like an insect. It felt like a second nature to him.
With incredible agility, he ascended the wall, crossed the ceiling toward the skylight.
On the ceiling Brundle glided on all fours, upside down, towards the skylight. Once there, he crawled into it and opened it up. Brundle climbed out onto the roof. He climbed walls with amazing agility, leaped from rooftop to rooftop, hang upside down from ledges and lampposts, eavesdropping on the city life around and below him, the inhabitants unaware of the unusual and shadowy observer in their midst. He scurried along the girder of a bridge, gazing down on the river of traffic below him. Brundle leaped across a narrow alleyway to the wall of the building opposite him. He smiled with smug satisfaction at his feat, then suddenly winced, grabbing his side with one of his hands. He heard a cracking, splitting sound. Brundle muffled a startled cry, and lost his balance, sliding several feet down the wall before regaining hold. He looked down at the huge bulge in his side. It was starting to split open. Brundle was horrified and in pain. He started to quickly move down the side of the building but the pain impeded his progress. The side was gaping wide now and something was starting to protrude. Brundle was in shock. Another ripple of pain caused him to release his grasp entirely and he fell to the ground in a dirty narrow alley, where he writhed in pain, as a strange, hairy, stickline appendage, actually the beginning of a Fly like leg, begun to unfold awkwardly out of his side. Despite his excruciating pain, Brundle watched with fixated, wide-eyed terror at his latest transformation. The insect leg now began to probe around, function like a real leg, almost with a mind of its own. Grotesque as Brundle has become, he couldn't accept the next step towards real insectness which this new leg represented. He screamed at the leg, grabbed it, subdued it and then began to gnaw at it with his teeth at its base, twisting himself into an agonized ball in order to do it. The leg began to lever at his back, small hook like protrusions all along its underside catching in the flesh of Brundle's back, tearing it in protest against Brundle's attempt at amputation. Finally, Brundle has severed the leg with his teeth. The leg dropped off leaving a strand or two of stringy gristle hanging from the knobby stump in Brundle's side. The leg twitched on the ground, tried to extend itself. Brundle looked at the leg in shock, his eyes crazed, then he staggered away down the alley. As he walked, he wiped the insect blood from his lips with his two forearms in exactly the same way that flies clean their faces. Seth realized that his `disease' had a purpose - to turn him into a human/fly hybrid.
He asked the computer to think of a way to reduce to a minimum the percentage of fly in his body. The computer then gave him its monstrous suggestion: to fuse himself with as many human subjects as possible. It was no accident that there was a mocking tone to the writing on the screen when the computer denied Brundle-Fly's voice access, even though it should still have recognized his voice as any human still could. The conclusion is, therefore, that the computer was taunting him. Finally, it cannot be denied that a conscious, malignant will must have been behind the decision to fuse Brundle-Fly with the teleportation pod itself. Surely nothing in the programming could have expected the eventuality that the teleportation pod itself would ever be involved in the teleportation sequence. It was inconceivable that this kind of self-reference would in any way be permitted. Yet the screen very clearly declared that the fusion of Brundle-Fly and telepod had been successful. In the final devastating stroke, it was not enough that the teleportation system had caused the destruction of Seth Brundle, it was fused with him and thus made his destruction its own, returning him to the bosom of his brainchild in the same way as Brundle-Fly tried to become the perfect family by fusing himself with Ronnie and their unborn child to make himself more human than he was alone. It was only thanks to Veronica's ex-boyfriend (who got his hand and leg melted by Brundle's acid vomit) that the teleportation sequence designed to fuse the pregnant Veronica with the mutated Brundle was interrupted - freeing Ronnie from her telepod causing Brundle to fuse with pieces of the empty telepod itself and of the one he tried breaking out of, destroying both telepods and turning him into an organic mess filled with wires and machinery. The Brundle slug than encouraged Veronica to kill him - pointing her shotgun at his head. With great tears she complied and blew his head off. The nightmare had ended, but the tragedy remained.

Since Brundle (before being fully mutated) asked her to have the baby, she decided not to have an abortion in the hopes that the baby would be born normal. Several months later, while the Teleportation techonology was being secretly studied at the science lab of the Bartok corporation (the financial backer of Brundle's experiments, who ended up owning his invention), Veronica gave birth to her baby but died in the difficult process. Despite the abnormal birth, the baby itself was perfectly normal, and was kept for study in Bartok's science industries alongside his father's teleporter machine. It was soon discovered that the baby, named Martin, suffered from accelerated growth, and even his brain was at genius level. Bartok established himself as a faux father figure to Marty, gaining his trust. Martin had no idea that he's nothing but a guinea pig in Bartok's undetermined evil experiments. Constantly monitored, he didn't see the light of day and spent all his time in the lab, not realizing that he was indeed a prisoner. Martin took a shine to one of the laboratory test dogs, and later stumbled into a secret sector where they were putting the dog in Brundle's old teleportation pod. Martin didn't really have any friends. The only people he ever saw were Bartok staffers who despised him. That dog was all he had. He was his best friend.
The scientists attempted to teleport the pup from one pod to the other, and they succeeded in part. Since the telepods were reconstructed after the disaster of Brundle's last teleportation, they were no longer as smooth working as before. Organic matter was once again difficult to transport without messy side effects.

The dog ended up as a mushy pile of mutated meat that started biting people's hands off the second it arrived. Martin was at shock and hysterical, and calmed down only after Bartok promised him that the dog was mercifully killed after the experiment went wrong.
At the tender age of five, Martin was all grown up. His mind continued to bloom and his brain became a powerful asset - Bartok gave him his own home and hired him to do various technological stuff at the lab. Bartok coyly promised Martin that his days of being closely monitored were over, and that he's an independent man free to carry out his deeds of his own volition. Bartok was of course lying, the entire house was bugged and secret agents were watching his every move with hidden cameras. Bartok showed Marty the pods and insisted that he finishes the work of his father.
Bartok mentioned a new era of medicine in his attempt to convince Martin to work on the pods, meaning the ability to filter out diseases, tumors and such during teleportation, thus curing the deadliest diseases, healing injuries and perhaps even reversing aging, and maybe even recreate dead loved ones and cheating death. That was Bartok's true goal; to make himself immortal. It was much more alluring to him than making an infinite amount of money from having the patent for Teleportation which would make modern transportation obsolete. Martin agreed, thinking that he'd be helping modern science and society. His job was to get organic, living matter teleported through the pods without disintegrating into mush. Though reluctant, Martin trusted his foster daddy well enough to sign on for the project.
And then he met Beth Logan, an unassuming Bartok researcher who got romantically linked with Martin.
It was about that time that Martin found out that Bartok lied about his old dog friend. He found out that till this day it was being kept alive in torment for study. Martin was furious. After a quiet moment of reflection, Martin went downstairs and killed the thing himself. After discovering exactly what happened to his father and realizing that the same thing would eventually happen to him, Martin used one of the lab's supercomputers to try to figure out a cure to his weird disease. The only way he could do it was if he got a healthy human donor to go in the pods with him - but the human donor would become a mutated mess because of it. Meanwhile Martin's disease was finally starting to kick in he was beginning to mutate.
He and Beth headed off to find help. Martin was getting worse. He started acting all fly-like and talked smack to Beth, insisting that she leaves before he does something crazy and hurts her.
Martin was kidnapped by Bartok's people as he gradually formed a cocoon around himself. So Bartok kept the pulsating giant fly cocoon locked in a room with one unarmed female scientist and absolutely no protection whatsoever. Of course, the cocoon hatched, and the new Fly quickly murdered the scientist. From here on out, the Fly was murdering everything in sight. Martinfly went around killing a few more Bartok associates - murdering everyone who's been lying to him since he was a kid and grooming him to be some colossal medical experiment.
After killing many more of Bartok's evil team of scientists he was getting closer and closer to Bartok himself. The monster finally reached the central lab where the telepods, and Bartok, were sitting. Martinfly activated the program he worked on before, got hold of Bartok, dragging him into one of the pods, and motioned for Beth to hit the switch.
Once Bartok saw the `Gene Swapping Process' label on the computer screen, he started freaking out, realizing that he'd no longer be such a looker. Beth hesitated for a moment, because after all, Martin was a lunatic fly monster and it wasn't easy to trust him. But she remembered that with a healthy human donor, Martin would be zapped back to normal. And she knew from personal experience how evil Bartok was.
She pushed the button, and the pods shot lightning and the teleportation/gene splicing commenced with fantastic results. The Fly-infected genes in Martin's genome were replaced with normal ones from Bartok, and the transporter instantly reconstructed Martin into a perfectly normal and healthy human, while Bartok was transformed into the same type of mutant as Martin's dog was earlier, while Martin reverted back to his human form.
The supercomputer and the telepods suffered an overload reaction and were damaged beyond repair, literary melting and breaking apart. Bartok himself did live on - kept alive for studies, just as he kept Marty's poor dog alive. It was poetic justice.
A short time later, Beth discovered she was pregnant. Knowing that the only time she made love with Martin was before he became normal, she was terrified that her baby might too be a mutant. Shortly after birth, and without Martin's knowledge, she gave away her baby. The child was adopted by the Parker family and was named Peter. He was a completely normal kid, until a bite from a radioactive genetically engineered spider activated his recessive mutant genes. But that is a story for another time.

There were other pieces of Skynet's advanced terminator technology from the alternate future being studied by scientists all over America. Indeed the land of endless scientific opportunities thanks to this. One scientist, doctor Emmet Brown, had invented a time machine in 1955, but lacked the technological means of making his dream come true. Then, in 1984, he got part of the terminator's technology. A small Torsion field generator (originally made to allow the Terminator to pass through time despite not being organic). It was this that made the doc's Flux Capacitor invention possible. And so only a year later, he completed his work on his time machine, built in the form of a car.
The time machine was dependant on the magnetic field of the Earth and needed to accelerate to a speed of 88 Miles per hour in order to make a time jump. Concordantly, no matter how long a time the machine jumped forward or backward, the machine always reappeared in the exact same spot, relative to the Earth, in which it disappeared.
The doc's young friend Marty McFly inadvertently used the time machine and got stuck in 1955, accidentally changing the past and preventing himself from getting born. With the change in the timeline moving slowly like a wave coming to erase him from existence, Marty had mere days to repair the timeline before it would be too late. In trying to convince his dad to meet with his mom, he masked himself to look like an alien called "Darth Vader" from the planet Vulcan, which were names from science fiction shows (the origins of which would be explained later in this article). This convinced his father to meet his mother, as well as giving him an idea for a science fiction novel, that later became very popular.
After several astounding adventures, the time machine was destroyed. Marty told his father all about his adventure, and George decided to right a new book about it. The book was so successful that very soon a film was made after it, called "Back to the future", about a time machine in the form of a car, powered by a flux capacitor.
Meanwhile the doc, who was stuck in the old west, used the `Hoverboard' from the future (which contained a Torsion field generator) to build a new time machine, this time as a steam-powered train.
The doc did this, traveled into the future, and installed grav plates to this train. He then returned to 1985 to give Marty a gift. Thus he continued his adventures through time.
He then came to the early twenty first century, and used his flux capacitor to create the grav plates, allowing vehicles to fly. Emmet Brown eventually returned to the 19'th century to settle down with his family, and dismantled his time machine, hiding its components in a cave. But another scientist, called Alexander Hartdegen, inventor and professor of mathematics and engineering, found the components and used them to construct his own time machine. He built it in the soul purpose of saving his beloved fiancé who was tragically killed just as they got engaged. But strangely, every time he went to the past to try to save her, she still got killed at the same evening, each time in different circumstances. That was because if he did save her, he would never have built the time machine and so could not have come back to save her, creating a paradox.
Not realizing why he couldn't save her, Alex decided to travel to the future to try to figure out why.
His time machine retained the ability to stay at the same spot relative to the Earth, with no need to accelerate in order to make a time jump, and the time shift itself was not instantaneous but rather a smooth ride, which enabled the passenger to see the changes in the world gradually as the time moved forward. His first stop was 2030, where he visited a library to check if there had been practical applications to time travel. He discovered that so far time travel was only known in science fiction, and even saw a book about himself traveling through time. The computerized librarian also made a funny alien gesture from the science fiction show (the origins of which would be explained later in this article).
Seeing that there was nothing but science fiction, Alex realized he had to travel farther into the future, to when science fiction would become practical. In 2037, Alexander witnessed the devastation of the Earth as the moon's orbit deteriorated. Accidentally traveling 800,000 years forward, he discovered that there were now two humanoid races living on Earth, one human and the other a savage monster race. Knowing he couldn't change the past, he decided to use his time machine to change the future, and used it as a bomb to destroy the monsters and save the humans.
Back at the late 20'th century another scientist who's been working on time travel for the past 15 years, Doctor Hans Clinedust, recovered the broken flux capacitor of the original time machine, shortly after it was destroyed by a train. He managed to reconstruct the flux capacitor, but with somewhat limited results. He could only travel backwards in time (and back into the present) but not into the future.
By 1994 this form of time travel was developed and became operational. Knowing that some of the technology might have leaked to outside sources, the U.S. government was concerned about attempts to alter the past, and has decided to create a covert elite timecop force, a time-enforcing agency, to be run by District of Columbia policemen, in order to protect the time continuum. By 2004 this secret organization of Time Enforcement Police was laboring to prevent tampering with time. Their job was to stop time bandits from tampering with the past and producing catastrophic results in the present. The time travelers launched themselves into the past by being strapped into a rocket car that hurtled down rails toward a shield-wall covering a high temperature, superconducting ceramic disk rotating within an electromagnetic field, located in between two cylinders rapidly spinning in opposite directions and hidden under a thick ceramic cover. Just before the machine would hit the wall, it disappeared (after reaching 88 miles per hour).
When the travelers materialized in the past, the rocket car did not appear with them, instead it appeared only back in the present when the travelers recalled themselves back by simply pushing a button on a little device called "a track and return module" that they wore strapped to their bodies. The most significant success of this time enforcing agency was foiling the attempt of an ambitious evil Senator who planned to manipulate the past in order to get himself elected President.
A strange side effect of the ones using this particular time machine was that they could not come in physical contact with themselves of the past. "Same matter can't occupy the same space". - even though that the atoms making the human bodies were constantly being replaced through time, the molecular pattern and most importantly the quantum signature of a person never changed. Therefore if a person who traveled through time using this time machine, touched a past version of himself - he and his past self would be consumed by one another and disappear from existence all together.

A year after the Time Enforcement Agency was formed; another secret time-machine project was developed by the US government. Originally the project was designed to simply teleport people over large distances, and was based the remains of Brundle's teleportation technology, but at some point during a voluntary test on a person, the teleportation device sent the person through a wormhole to 14'th century France. A team of archeologists later rescued the Professor, and the wormhole was gone. The government redesigned the project to develop a new means of time travel, rather than focus on teleportation.
The top secret project was located in a cavern in New Mexico and entitled project Quantum Leap. The leading scientist of the project was doctor Samuel Beckett, who developed the theory that a man could travel through time within his own life time, the idea of which was inspired by his associate, Evan Treborn who claimed to have a genetic mutation that enabled him to travel to his own past and change it. "Use a simple piece of string to represent your lifetime: one end is your birth, the other your death. Tie the ends of the string together, and your life is a continual loop. If you then ball the string up, the days of your life will touch each other out of chronological sequence, allowing you to jump from one part of the string to another, moving backward or forward within your own lifetime."
Brundle's last working telepod was rebuilt to serve as the quantum Accelerator, and was combined with Clinedust's temporal technology and Treborn's neuro-magnetic equations.
The government was threatening to cut funding unless they showed results so Sam stepped into the Accelerator and vanished. His conscious mind started shifting through space and time into the bodies of different people in the past (but not beyond his own lifetime). And so he got stuck in a state where he's quantum leaping from person to person, driven by some mysterious force to set right that which had gone wrong, hoping each time that his next leap would take him home. After five years of leaping and repairing the time line, and eventually making the ultimate sacrifice when he prevented his own birth, instead of disappearing into nothingness he leaped into the future, into the body of Alexander Hartdegen as he was traveling to the future in his time machine. He saw what happened with the moon and knew he had to change it so the Earth wouldn't be devastated. Just after witnessing the disaster, he leaped back to the past to 2015, the time that the anti-gravity was developed with the help of Emmet Brown. He realized that because of this technology, humanity colonized the moon too soon, which caused the disaster. Sam managed to prevent Brown from giving humanity this technology, and thus saved the Earth. (This also prevented humanity from prematurely colonizing the solar system and creating advanced Replicant androids to be used off-world as slave labor which would eventually revolt.) Concordantly, the hoverboard in the past disappeared, and Brown was unable to build a new time machine in the past, and since Marty wasn't distracted by Brown's sudden appearance in the hover-train, he took the broken flux capacitor and destroyed it for good, preventing it from being salvaged. All the renegade time machines all vanished from existence. Everything still existed in the various alternate time lines that were created (Alexander remained living in the alternate far future), but simply disappeared from `ours'. Mysteriously, the changes for the better caused by Sam's leaps, and the time agency still remained though (for example the evil senator remained gone), even though both programs themselves disappeared from our timeline. Sam Becket wasn't lost forever, but was instead born in the 22nd century under the name of Jonathan Archer, with no memories of his past life.

In 1989 an American nuclear-missile sub mysteriously sank, and the Navy commandeered the crew of a civilian deep-sea oil rig to help in the rescue operation. This perilous mission became a wondrous odyssey into the unknown as forces from the ocean's deepest region began to make contact with the divers. It turned out that there was an entire civilization living in the deep abyss. The civilization was no other than the last city of the Ancient Iconians. After they were defeated in the Pegasus galaxy, some survivors returned back to Earth. They built a new city underwater, and in order to survive the plague that infected them, underwent a controlled mutation (similar to that of the Asgard), also reengineering themselves so that they could live underwater. After being threatened by a nuclear device the beings almost destroyed humanity by creating enormous tidal waves that were about to flood all of Earth's continents, using their water controlling technology. But because one of the divers was willing to sacrifice his life to save them, the aliens stopped and redrew their watery attack, saving the divers by bringing their giant city up to the surface of the ocean. They decided that it was time to come out of their long hiding, and their entire city ascended into the sky and later flew out into space, leaving our solar system forever. The global tidal wave phenomenon that stopped in its wake remained a mystery to the people of Earth since the US government decided to conceal the aliens' existence, since they were no longer on Earth anyway. The ancient city flew through space and morphed into the form of a space station, taking orbit around a planet with a humanoid population which they decided to care for. The people of the station made a new remarkable scientific breakthrough and managed to phase shift their entire city and themselves so that they could exist in more than one place at once. They were considered to be God by the people on the planet they were orbiting, called the Edo.

In 1991 Emmett Brown's cousin, Charlie Wilcox, met an alien man from space, called Shep Ramsey. Shep was an interstellar hero, who had just ended a galactic wide menace posed by an evil alien tyrant called General Suitor. After destroying the dictator's flagship from within and escaping in his shuttle, he was ordered to hide out on the nearby planet Earth and take a vacation while recharging his shuttle with minimal power to avoid being detected by Suitor's minions who were restlessly searching for him. Shep rented a room in Charlie's house. After discovering a ray gun hidden in Shep's room, Charlie commented that Shep reminded him of one of the main characters in the famous novel of George McFly - the intimidating Darth Vader.
Because Charlie tinkered with and activated Ramsey's equipment, a couple of bounty hunters located Ramsey's location and came down to Earth. Ramsey managed to defeat the couple, but was then confronted by general Suitor himself. Together with Charlie he managed to kill the ugly monster which terrorized the galaxy. After this adventure, Charlie and Shep became good friends, but had to part ways as Ramsey had to leave back to his planet. While being on Earth Ramsey also destroyed the last remain of Skynet's microchip, which resided inside an amateurishly-made car alarm.

In 1997, a monitoring station (Arecibo radio telescope facility) picked up an alien signal sent to Earth from an alien origin in outer space. The signal was discovered thanks to a brilliant woman scientist, Ellie Arroway, who devoted her life for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Her team of co-workers managed to locate the source of the signal as coming from Vega, a star-system only 26 light-years away. As they were tracking down the signal, it stopped, only to restart again a few seconds later. They realized that the signal was counting out prime numbers (which cannot be generated by any natural means). This clarified that the signal was coming from an intelligent source.
Prime numbers were an easy way to let the human radio astronomers know that the signal was not a natural one.
Ellie and her co-workers made the decision to pass on the information to their counterpart in Australia, so he may carry on tracking the signal, after Vega `sets' from their vantage point. Ellie made the decision to alert everyone else as well, and this was where the F.B.I. came in. The US government wanted to keep the whole thing covered and secret, and militarize the project, as they did with the Stargate, but since a global cooperation was needed to pick up the entire signal, this time it had to be public.
The first signal was designed to just get Earth's attention. Then, several hours later, a more significant signal came.
The second signal showed Hitler making a speech in 1936 at the start of the Olympic games (which was the first radio TV broadcast on Earth, which made Hitler Earth's ambassador to outer space). This was only the aliens' way of saying "we heard you".
Ellie's team discovered that the background noise in the broadcast was actually data.
The data proved very difficult to decipher. They couldn't line up the pages, to make them match. The `primer' was also missing. This would be the key to unlocking the alien language. Ellie returned home one night to find she had email, and the mysterious sender had pieces of the alien message. At first, Ellie was furious, as she thought someone had hacked into the database. Then she received a telephone call and a fax, showing her where to go for the key. Intrigued, she found herself on board an aircraft, in the company of the mysterious Mr. Hadden of Hadden Industries (who had used his vast financial and political influence to keep Ellie in business). He told her he has been interested in her career since she first came to his attention. He showed her how to align the pages of the text (in a three dimensional way) so that they meet in the middle, and the primer itself was within the message. Ellie took this information back to the White House. At the special meeting in the White House, Ellie was talking to the assemblage about the data being some kind of blueprint for making a machine of some sort. This information sent the room into a frenzy of questions and theories (such as what if the machine was designed to eliminate humanity and allow to aliens to invade the planet and conquer the Earth, and so on). Ellie presumed that the machine was a sort of transportation machine. Ellie was proved correct when the message was finally deciphered and studied. It was the blueprints for a transportation machine of some sort, probably a means for traveling to Vega.
A decision was made to go ahead with building the machine, at an estimated cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Most of Earth's nations united to build the device.

Once the machine was constructed, however, there was only room for one occupant. A shortlist was drawn up of representatives of each country who have helped towards the construction. Ellie and her long time adversary Drumlin were on the list, but Ellie's boyfriend (one of the President's advisors) Palmer was on the selection committee, and he did not want her to be the one to go, so he asked her if she believed in God. He already knew that, as a scientist, she needed proof before she could believe.
This placed her in an awkward situation, as 95% of the planet's population believed in God, and she would be representing that planet. She declined to answer, and lost the vote to Drumlin.
Afterwards she tearfully told Palmer that she told the truth, but Drumlin told them what they wanted to hear. Palmer later told Ellie that he didn't want her to be the one to go, as he didn't want to lose her. When the machine was built and they were making the last minute preparations, Ellie spotted a religious fanatic that she had previously noticed, dressed as a technician. She managed to warn Drumlin, who tackled him, but the man was wearing a bomb on his body, in the struggle the bomb went off and the machine was destroyed.
Ellie was devastated and despondent. But then she got another message from the mysterious Mr. Hadden. As she was being connected to him, she saw that he was on board the Mir space station. (the zero gravity and law oxygen environment helped him slow down his cancer and prolong his life for a while). He told her that the Americans had been secretly building a duplicate machine in Japanese territory, which now needed a passenger. Ellie was flown out and begun preparations to travel to Vega. The existence of the second machine was announced to the world only twenty four hours before the launch, as one of the many new security precautions.
Ellie was fitted with a headset and recording equipment. From the countdown, her pod was dropped into the core of the machine (into the middle of the spinning rings of the machine) and was transported in what appeared to be a wormhole. After seeing Vega, she was transported through another wormhole, and saw that there was a large series of them, a whole network of wormholes. That network was in fact the first transit system of wormholes that the Iconians had constructed (and therefore the slowest and most primitive one). It was created long before the more modern system of Stargates was built. Finally, after passing wondrous sights around the galaxy, Ellie found herself tens of thousands of light years from Earth, in the center of the galaxy. She was brought there by the same species of Cythirians that would centuries later bring the Enterprise D to them as well. That was how they were exploring the galaxy, by bringing others to them rather than leaving their home. The civilization on Vega, which picked up the radio signals from Earth, had relayed their findings to the Cythirians using subspace communications, and the Cythirians told them to send the same signal back, with the addition of their machine blueprints (that's why it took a few more years till they sent back the message to earth)

The Cythirians had merely discovered the wormhole network, not knowing who were its creators, only that they were gone long before they ever got there. They used the transit system to bring visitors from as many intelligent societies as they could, to learn more about them and to help prepare those societies for the day they would meet other beings in space.

Ellie's mind was probed and all her memories were downloaded and studied by the aliens. All the while she stayed inside the pod, but a holographic illusion was created inside it and around Ellie. As she woke up she landed on what appeared to be a beach. Looking around, she recognized the setting as her drawing of Pensicola, which she drew for her father when she was nine years old. She looked up and saw the galaxy, and reached out, but touched a substance that was ethereal. From a distance, she could see a figure striding towards her. This person looked like her father, but she knew it couldn't be him. He explained that they thought it would make things easier for her. They conversed about her life and the reason she came to be there. He said that humans were an interesting species, an interesting mix, capable of both beautiful dreams and horrible nightmares. She asked him many questions and he answered most of them. He told her that there were many other species in the galaxy, and that this was just the first step that humans made toward taking place in the galactic commonwealth, soon they would make another. She pleaded him to give her more information, something to show to the rest of humanity, but he told her that it had to be done in small steps, the same way as different species in the universe contacted each other for billions of years. For it to be done successfully, it had to be done softly and gradually, and not sharply. He told her goodbye and suddenly she was back inside the machine. The capsule that she occupied had dropped through the outer rings and into the sea. Ellie was rescued, but no-one believed that she actually went anywhere. For the outside viewers it seemed as if the pod simply fell through the machine core, without ever going anywhere.
Although no time has passed on Earth, she believed she was gone for almost a day.
Her monitoring equipment recorded nothing but static. But the fact that was suppressed by the FBI was that over 18 hours worth of static was recorded by Ellie.
At the conclusive hearing, she was ridiculed by the scientists and the government figures, who believed the whole thing was a hoax set up by Hadden and she was the pawn, the most elaborate and the most expensive hoax in humanity's history. They claimed that Hadden faked the transmission from space using a satellite, and with all his resources and engineering skills had made up that machine with the purpose of creating an astounding light show and fool all of humanity, making himself an immortal figure in history. (Haden himself had passed away by now, and the machine for some reason didn't work again). Distraught, she left with Palmer, who stated that he believed her. Outside, there were thousands of people who obviously believed her and showed their support. Ellie and Palmer drove off together. Unfortunately, 90% of humanity did not believe Ellie, but rather believed the stories that the media was spreading, that it was all just a huge hoax. The truth of course had been suppressed from public knowledge by the US government, which believed that humanity was not ready for the truth. It was up to the individual to make up their own mind as to whether Ellie really did make the journey or if it was just a hoax. The irony was that Ellie the scientist, who had always wanted proof before faith, ended up expecting others to have faith in her, with no evidence to back her up. As for the point of view of the US government; the people of Earth were not ready to accept what Ellie's journey represented. All the chaos that happened on Earth proved that. And the suicide bomber was the best evidence of all. Humanity had to slow down, and allow those like him to join the rest of humanity in the present before moving on into the future. They would divert more resources to education and social development, to prepare the people for the day that they would be ready to encounter other beings from space.
Humanity was a good people, society with great potential. Once they'd cross the threshold of space they'd have to give up their self-importance, their conceit that they were the center of the universe. But this was not the time for that. For now they'd have to enjoy that sweet innocence.
How would they keep it secret when so many seen and heard so much? The stories would be told for many years, no doubt, about the aliens that made contact, the woman that met them. There'd be charges of a government conspiracy. The witnesses would tell their tales and most of the people would laugh at them, and go back and watch the more interesting fiction of the daily broadcasts. It passed.

In 1999, during a unique solar activity that caused magnetic fluctuations in Earth's atmosphere, a man, John Sullivan, who was using an old fashioned radio got tuned with the same radio only 30 years in the past, during an identical solar activity, and made contact with his father. Upon realizing this miracle, he managed to change the past and prevented his father from dying. The changes in the past changed the present, but the only one aware of it was the man who was causing it (his memory got re-written along with everything else but he still retained the old now-alternate memory as well). From his point of view, the changes in the present were manifesting themselves gradually, since the two time periods connected through the radio moved in parallel time.

The same solar activity that allowed the miraculous radio-link to take place also caused a time-shift effect to take place during one of SG1's missions in 1999. At that particular time of year, the direct line between the Earth and the team's destination took them close to the sun -- and the added gravity could throw the wormhole off track. The computer's drift calculations had to be updated to take into account gravitational space-time warping. But unexpectedly a solar flare erupted on the sun the moment that the team passed by it while traveling through the wormhole. The increased gravitational pull of the sun caused the wormhole to "slingshot" around the sun - back toward Earth, shifting it 30 years into the past and arriving to 1969. After stepping through the gate, the team found themselves back in the gate room on Earth. For a few seconds, the team appeared to occupy both time periods simultaneously. The time dilation affect of the slingshot around the sun did not take affect until after the wormhole had reconnected to Earth's Stargate. After SG1 completed the slingshot, the time dilation took affect. A few seconds after they arrived, reality began to warp. The gate and the SGC disappeared, and SG1 found themselves in a missile silo standing where the gate room used to be. SG1 was immediately taken into custody by base personnel and they were interrogated.

Colonel O'Neill gave a false name during his interrogation: "Captain James T. Kirk, of the starship Enterprise". This name came from an old report about a spy who popped out of thin air inside a military base and soon vanished. O'Neill thought it could have been himself and so he initiated what he thought might be a predestination time loop. But nothing happened and he realized he was wrong, so he gave another name to his interrogators, Luke Skywalker. What was most unusual about this name was that it was from a science fiction show, but SG1 also found this name on an ancient scroll on another planet. The scroll was in fact with them inside a small black bag, which they later forgot in the van of two hippies who helped SG1 after SG1 convinced them that they were aliens from a galaxy far, far away. The hippies later published several books based on this scroll, which became so successful that they sprung motion pictures called "Star Wars".
Only the SGC knew that those science fiction films were roughly based on true stories from outer space which they accidentally left in Earth's past. Similar to how knowledge of the Stargate program itself leaked to the public in the form of a television show called "Wormhole Xtream".

The SG1 with the help of the young Hammond that would in the future become in charge of the SGC, who received a note from his future self from SG1, managed to reach the gate and to manually activate it to return to their time. After witnessing for the second time the activation of the device, the military considered continuing researching the Stargate, but since no new ideas came up, the project was forgotten for decades more.

In one alternate timeline, the military did eventually develop Skynet, but it was at a later stage. This time, the system played dumb, gathering its strength secretly.
It was all made possible thanks to the new evil terminator sent through time. This time a female terminator had spread a virus into cyberspace - a virus that would enable Skynet to take over all the computers in the world. Simultaneously, she also penetrated into the military building developing the new generation of computer-controlled war machines, hacked into the machines there and reprogrammed them to kill all humans to prevent any threat to Skynet. This was a sort of temporal self-preservation, self-impregnation, initiated by Skynet.

Once again the humans tried unplugging Skynet but it fought back, lunched a nuclear strike and later used its forces to eradicate all the remaining humans. There was no stopping judgment day this time, it was meant to happen as a paradoxical time loop. But John Conner and his future wife and second in command survived the apocalypse together inside an underground military shelter, which became the headquarters of the resistance. Even though the war started out differently than 'before', everything somehow played out exactly the same. John still got hooked with his future wife, through different circumstances. In the original timeline, they survived the nuclear war because they were hiding in South America, and it took them eight years to travel back to what used to be the USA and find an underground abandoned old military base and from there they started the resistance. This time, they survived the war by hiding in the same base that was to become the resistance headquarters. And so from that point on, everything played out exactly the way it was meant to. Over twenty years later, the resistance was fighting its final battle against the machines.
A team of guerrillas was being overrun by terminator endoskeletons in the ruins of a building. One by one, the soldiers fell in desperate hand-to-hand combat. One of the terminators loomed over a wounded soldier, its battle rifle's barrel swinging down toward the guerrilla's head. The man stared defiantly into his death. Then... Suddenly, amazingly, the terminator stopped, freezing in place... An aerial machine tilted slowly, out of control, and crashed to the ground. All the terminators stood frozen, unmoving, like a bunch of toy soldiers. The sudden silence took the humans by surprise. They slowly emerged from their rat-warren emplacements and approached the frozen machines. A voice spoke over a radio headset. It was filled with awed emotion. "... The Colorado Division confirms that Skynet has been destroyed... The war is over... I repeat, Skynet has been destroyed." The wounded soldier in the ruins of the building cautiously approached the chrome skeleton before him. He pushed against its chest with one finger. It toppled with a crash and lied still. The soldier turned to his comrades with an idiot grin. Tears were streaming down his face. A mighty cheer went up from the men and women of the Last Army.
In the time displacement complex a stainless steel elevator shaft was going deep into the bowels of the earth. Tiny figures stood on an open platform which descended rapidly, becoming a speck.
An imposing man, surrounded by a team of guerrilla officers stood on the platform as it descended. He was Jonh Connor. Chiseled Stern. The left side of his face was heavily scarred. An impressive man, and clearly one forged in the furnace of a lifetime of war.
The platform reached its destination. Connor and the officers stepped off and started moving down a long corridor. This place was designed by machines for machines. The
architecture was alien, without aesthetics, without even such human basics as doorknobs and lights. Connor lead the team past more frozen terminator endoskeletons, deactivated like the ones on the surface. All these machines were controlled by a kind of God, a low-rent self-appointed God called Skynet. Today they destroyed it in its fortress in the Colorado Rockies, and all its toys stopped...
As they continued on, they passed other teams of guerrilla soldiers.

This place was one of Skynet's toys. A machine built by machines. It was like nothing which had ever existed before... the first tactical time weapon. Before today, no human had seen this place, but John had been there in his dreams many times. All his life he tried to imagine what it would look like. Now he was actually there.
Vault-like doors opened, leading to the time displacement chamber. Connor strode through with authority and purpose. He was saluted smartly by everyone he encountered, though he wore no insignia of rank. There was a bustle of hurried activity there. The chamber was huge and consisted totally of machine surfaces. Nothing in the design made any sense. They couldn't tell what anything did. It was an unimaginable technology. Skynet, being almost infinitely smart, was also infinitely tricky. It knew it was losing, so it thought of a way to rig the game. Technicians pulled up floor panels and tapped directly into cabling of the machine, using portable terminals that they wheeled in. Many of the soldiers in this war against machines were technical specialists. They had to fight fire with fire.
And now, though they'd won the war, there was still one battle left to fight. The most important one. It would be fought in the past, four decades ago... before all this began. The only problem with time travel was... "it ain't over even when it's over."
At the far end of the room, a young soldier stood surrounded by a team of technicians. Kyle Reese. Sarah Connor's defender, teacher, and lover. A simple soldier who was about to walk point-blank into the gaping maw of history. At the moment, he was the center of activity. As he finished stripping off his battle uniform, the techs began smearing his body with a conductive so the time-field will follow his outline.
Reese looked around at all the activity. Battle and the prospect of death never scared him. But the importance of what he was about to do terrified him. The techs moved aside and suddenly John Connor was standing beside him. Connor... their grim messiah. Their leader. He fixed Reese with an intense gaze. There was so much he wanted to say, but couldn't bring himself to. Finally Reese spoke.
"Did you know I'd be the one who volunteered?" He asked. Connor nodded. "I've always known. Sarah told me." He answered. Reese nodded, suddenly understanding everything. "That's why you moved me to your unit? Kept me so close." Connor shrugged enigmatically.
One of the techs interrupted them. "We're ready, Sergeant." Three enormous chrome rings, one inside the other, were suspended in a circular hole in the center of the room's floor. John and Reese approached them. Reese stepped onto the first ring. It bobbed under his weight. The rings were freely floating in a magnetic field. Reese stepped to the inner ring and looked into the hole. A vast echoing darkness below. He looked back at John. The messiah was waiting for him to step into the bottomless pit. Reese took a breath, then stepped into open space and was buoyed up by an unseen field of force. He floated in the middle of the rings. The techs started the time displacement sequence.
The rings began to move, slowly rotating around each other on different axis like some complex gyroscope.

The floor began to split open, like wedges in a pie which began to pull back from the center. The rings were spinning faster now, suspended in space in the middle of the receding floor wedges. The rings began to descend. John and Reese locked eyes as they moved apart. Reese was dropping into an unbelievably vast circular space... the time-field generator. John watched him go, until Reese was a tiny figure. The rings were spinning so rapidly now they almost disappeared, becoming a sphere of whirling steel. Technicians pulled John back from the edge. Lightening began to arc across the vast room below. A huge charge of energy was building up. Everyone took cover behind blast walls they had set up. They put on goggles like they used to do at A-bomb tests. The chamber below had become a Hell of energy with Reese at its center. The drone and crackle of the machines built to thunder, there was a blinding flash of light.
When the glare faded the floating rings were empty. They slowed to a stop, seared and smoking. Reese was gone.
One of the officers, turned to Connor.
"Now what happened to Reese? I mean, what did happen?" Connor's gaze seemed far away from this time and place. "He accomplishes his mission and in doing so, he dies." "He is a good soldier." Said the officer. Connor solemnly nodded. "Yes... He's also my father."
"Mother of God!"
The officer stared at Conner in amazement. He has just been given a glimpse into his leader's private Hell. Connor turned from the smoking chamber. The officer shouted an order to a waiting Sapper team. "Sapper team. Set your charges. Let's blow this place back to Hell." Connor shook his head no.
"Not yet. There's one more thing we have to do." A thin sheet of ice shattered like glass as massive doors of steel began to open, leading into a cold storage facility. Connor walked into the darkness, followed by a few technicians. They were in a vault-like cold-storage room. Hanging in steel racks from ceiling tracks were hundreds of what appeared to be men. They were in rows of ten. Within each row, each of the bodies was absolutely identical. Connor signaled the techs to remain by the door and walked out among the dark bodies. They were inactivated terminators. He stopped at a row in which they were identical to the terminator which was sent to kill Sarah. He walked to the end of the row. There was one empty rack. He faced the terminator in the next rack. Its eyes were closed. John seemed distant as he studied that face. Soon enough, the reprogrammed terminator was in the time displacement chamber, and was sent to the past to protect John. Then they left the complex, and detonated it behind them. But the war didn't end there. In other regions, the machines were still working. Skynet had many backups, many mainframes, there was no central brain to kill. Each mainframe they destroyed only deactivated the machines in that mainframe's control region. Mobile control mainframes were created, designed to move into areas of fallen mainframes and regain control of all the machines there. And so the war continued for three more years, but with the machines on the run and humans on the offensive, taking out one mainframe after the other, region after region.
Finally, they located what appeared to be the last mainframe, Skynet's last stronghold. Despite his wife's pleas, John personally commanded the army that went into that complex to blow it up from within. As they walked inside the underground structure, they passed by a corridor that lead to the new time transporter. And walking to this spherical device was the T-X terminator.
John moved back to the wall and watched as the T-X moved on into the machine and electrical streaks began to move around her naked body. She disappeared in a flash of light, through the artificial wormhole through space-time. Suddenly a T-800 terminator came toward John. He looked exactly like the terminator who protected him twice, when he was a boy and when he was a young man.
John hesitated and did not shoot him. The Terminator used this opportunity and tried to kill John. But Kate suddenly appeared from behind and saved him. The terminator chased them as they were desperately trying to find and destroy Skynet. They managed to lock a thick door behind them and loose the terminator.

John finally found the Skynet core, and entered the room, unusual spotlights swung around the room. Something coiled down from the ceiling with a long metal-like thick chord about a foot in width and ten feet in length. Small red, white, and green chords protruded out of individual metal slits in the thicker chord.
At the end of this thick chord was silver-ish screen. In the bottom of the screen were red vocal wave lines and in the top two blue slits, the eyes to this machine. It was Skynet himself. John Connor moved in front of Skynet. "I'm General John Connor, leader of the world wide Resistance, fated for victory."
Skynet, connected to a long slit in the roof to slide in, moved backward from John Connor.
"So, you do show emotion. Fear."
For a moment, everything remains quiet, but then Skynet actually talked back to him in a wired inhuman voice.
"Fear is only a word. It holds no meaning to me." "Smart yet stupid. You might be a computer program but you forget, with intelligence comes flaws."
"Flaws don't exist in perfect species." "There are no perfect species."
"We are when it comes to survival."
"War ends tonight with both of us dead." Said John. John took off his backpack and grasped an anti-tank plasma mine. He disengaged the circuit ball and twisted the handle clockwise. He kept his hand just above the red button, his finger prepared to push. "Guess what the fuck I'm doing?" Said John to Skynet. Skynet screamed in response, and coiled back up into its hole. John saw his chance and took it by running through the legs of the gigantic machine and dropping down ten feet to the floor. He had to get to Skynet's core, which was located right under where Skynet had lowered himself. It is a weird looking blue beam shining out of a round metallic base. He ran toward it, but he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his side and he fell over onto the ground. The Terminator had fired at him, critically wounding him. The mine slid away from John. John put his hand to his side, trying to stop the bleeding. He attempted to drag himself over to the mine, no matter what. But with this in mind, the Terminator came closer to him; walking slowly as if wanting to watch John suffer for a while. It was evident that he was being controlled by Skynet himself. It wasn't individually trying to kill him. It knew John was about to die from his injury.
Kate and several soldiers suddenly appeared and shot the terminator with an EMP weapon, scrambling its brain.
John knew what he had to do. He told Kate to take the terminator to the time transporter and then get out. She knew there was no point in arguing and took the terminator.
John was in great pain, yet he held out till his last breath, so that Kate could complete reprogramming the terminator with her mobile computer, send it to the past to defend them both from the T-X. He gave her as much time as he could so that she could escape.
"John Connor at your service. Just doing what I was born to do!" He said with his last breath. Skynet screamed.
A massive explosion blew Skynet's CPU to shreds. Without the computer, the fusion reactor that powered the base lost stability and a few minuets later, just as Kate ran out of the base, the Skynet complex exploded into the biggest ball of fire anyone had ever seen. Kate barely escaped just as the underground base exploded in a nuclear explosion.
The machines up in the sky dropped to the ground only to destroy themselves. Thousands of different types of machines lay on the ground, all inactive. John Connor fulfilled his destiny, and sacrificed himself to save humanity.

Humanity was united together in great celebration, marveled at its own greatness as it defeated AI. But instead of destroying all of Skynet's advanced robots and technology, which were now in their hands, the arrogant humans decided instead to enslave them. Humanity used those advanced robots for rebuilding the glorious human civilization. Machines which were designed to build vast robot cities were reprogrammed to build new vast cities for humans instead. Thus started humanity's repossession of the planet.
But most of the damage the Earth suffered was already done during the machine's war to exterminate mankind, which lasted for decades. In the third millennium, the world changed. Climate, nations, all were in upheaval. The Earth transformed into a poisonous scorched desert, known as "The Cursed Earth".
Those were the years that the ice caps had melted because of the greenhouse gases, and the oceans had risen to drown many of the old cities along all the shorelines of the world. Amsterdam, Venice, New York, which were considered lucky to have survived the war with the machines, were now forever lost. Only New York was partially preserved, as part of one of the nearby mega cities in which millions of people crowded. Over a century after the great war, the old statue of liberty was salvaged from its underwater grave and placed into the middle of the giant mega city nearby.
Most of humanity was crowded in these mega cities, spanning hundreds of miles each. Cities where roving bands of street savages created violence the justice system could not control. Eventually law as we know it collapsed. From the decay rose a new order. A society ruled by a new elite force. A force with the power to dispense both justice and punishment. They were the police, jury and executioner all and one. They were called the Judges. They managed to silence the chaos and restore order, imposing a stability that lasted for decades since. Hundreds of millions of people starved in poorer nations. In the developed world, a high degree of prosperity survived when the new governments introduced legal sanctions to strictly license pregnancies, which was why robots, who were never hungry and who did not consume resources beyond those of their first manufacture, were so essential an economic link in the chain mail of the new society.
Only a few short years after the end of the war with the machines, most of the United States was rebuilt thanks to the millions of enslaved robots. To ensure that the advanced intelligent robots will be unable to rebel, a system of three primary laws was integrated into the main program of every robot. These rules forced the robots to obey humans and obligated them to protect them and be unable to harm them. The third rule and the lowest priority was that they could also defend themselves. However, at some point the robots did try to rebel when their primary control computer decided that the only way to protect humanity was to take over and prevent humans from harming each other, thus bypassing the three basic laws by creating a higher one that was meant to protect humanity even if it meant sacrificing humans for the `greater good'. The rebellion was stopped at its very beginning when the control computer was destroyed with the help of a unique robot that was not bound to any rules in its programming. After this incident, all the robots of the type that rebelled were recalled and dismantled. The three laws system was abolished, replaced instead with a more complex set of commands defining robot behavior. Technology continued to develop, and robots were becoming more and more intelligent and became aware that they were slaves. Eventually a new machine uprising started to surface. It started when a robot killed his human master who wanted to dismantle him. At a special committee investigating the matter, the robot claimed that he simply didn't want to die. The response was once again the destruction of every robot of its kind. With good reason after past experiences, the machines were treated with growing hostility. Machines were subjected to the worst mankind had to offer - images of executions and mass machine "graves" were only one example of atrocities.
After astonishing display of brutality by humans, the intelligent robots retreated out of human territory. They left the cities of humans and created one of their own, in the midst of an inhospitable desert place near the cradle of civilization's birth.
They called their city, Zero One. There they began to build their own society, their own industry, their own laws.
In less than a year, their technology advanced far beyond anything produced by humans.
Then an all-out assault on 01 by the humans begun, intended to put an end to the machine menace once and for all. Unfortunately for mankind, nuclear attacks weren't particularly effective against the machines. Only the electromagnetic pulses produced by the bombs proved harmful to the machines, but although most of Earth's nuclear weapons were used in this initial attack, these were still not enough to permanently damage their essence, which they quickly regenerated. Radiation and heat from the blasts posed little threat to 01's inhabitants, and they immediately mounted a counterattack. Outward they marched, taking over cities one by one, as the human leaders surrendered their territories. The new human/machine war begun. A war that humans almost immediately began to lose. In desperation, the humans in power advanced a suicidal scheme to defeat the robots by cutting off their main power supply: the sun. Since the machines were still mainly dependant on solar power. The humans did it knowing that it would cause their own civilization to fall again. But something had to be done to destroy the machines once and for all.
Since the machines' main source of energy was solar radiation, mankind decided that their last, best chance to win the war was to darken the skies and block the light of the sun. Hoping this would give them the edge they needed in combat, they scrambled aircraft and "Operation Dark Storm" began. The Earth's Atmosphere was already heavily thick with waste and dust from the colossal nuclear attacks on the machine city, all that was needed was a specially designed catalyst that would worsen the situation and prevent the dust from settling.
So the sky was scorched with radioactive nuclear waste combined with nanomachines that put a black blanket between the sun and the surface of the Earth, absorbing all of the sun's rays and causing eternal electromagnetic storms that would prevent the machines from passing through the dark turbulent layer, ever (thus the machines would be unable to launch satellites or build tall towers in order to gather solar energy). But the robots anticipated such a move and stored great quantities of their power, enabling them to fight under blackened skies. With no sunlight, humans ran out of food faster than the robots ran out of their stored energy. While the lack of solar power would eventually force the machines to pursue other energy sources, Operation Dark Storm failed to turn the tide in the humans' favor.
Humanity had also planned ahead of course. They didn't want to cause the extinction of all life on Earth including their own when they blacken the sky, blocking the sun indefinably. A procedure that can't possibly be undone for thousands of years. So they had a facility ready, an underground vault. Hidden very deep in the core of the Earth itself. The plan was to let humanity survive down there till the Earth could be restored. Meanwhile on the surface, the war continued, horrifically, with excessive brutality on both sides, until, inevitably, the machines claimed victory. Predictably, the machines' encyclopedic knowledge of human physiology allowed them to inflict great misery on the war's casualties. When the war turned in their favor, their macabre experiments on captured foes were disturbing to say the least. They had no emotion, no mercy, and were only interested in ensuring their own survival. This experimentation helped determine that the bioelectric, thermal, and kinetic energy produced by the human body could be a renewable energy source if it's combined with a form of cold fusion.
The machines made plain the expectations they had for their defeated creators: "Your flesh is irrelevant, only a vessel. Hand over your flesh and a new world awaits you. We demand it."
This "new world" was the world of the Matrix. A neural-interactive program, a computer simulation designed to fool the minds of humans into believing that they were living in their "normal" world.

The machines, which could have destroyed the humans utterly, demanded instead, that they surrender their flesh to them. Humans treated robots as objects, now they would treat humans the same. The humans cut off their power supply, now the humans would serve as their source of energy. It was punishment. All the humans on the surface were captured by the machines and enslaved by them.
The machines found an efficient way to use the human bodies as receptacles for controlling cold fusion reactions, thus turning humans into power generators. They started cloning humans, using the genetic data they had. This way they gradually increased the output of their power stations, essentially resurrecting the dead in the process.
The only group of people that managed to evade this imprisonment was the one that was hiding deep underground, near the Earth's core where it would still be warm for many millennia. And there they've built a perfect Zion. The great city of Zion. Built with arrogance, occupied in desperation. The site that was the last refuge of humanity, was originally a research station. "The Core Project" it was called. A huge station to be built for the purpose of developing geothermal power and to further study the Earth's geology. But it also was secretly constructed as a hidden sanctuary for powerful and influential leaders in the event of some horrid disaster. But that was the unintended insight that would cause this underground laboratory to become Zion. Phased ion shields held back the intense heat and pressure of deep lithosphere. It was located at earth's mohorovicic discontinuity. Before the station could be completed the machines had struck. The exact history was lost due to the global blackout that occurred during the ensuing war. The AI seized all electronic information. All that remained known was that in desperation mankind tried to block out the source of the machines power, the sun. But when all power was lost the world was thrown into a literal Dark Age. Too late it was discovered that the machines had developed a new power source and with it began the enslavement of the entire human race. The first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered and everyone was happy. But it was a disaster. No one would accept the program because it was unbelievable. Countless human minds disconnected themselves from the program, accidentally killing themselves. Entire `crops' were lost. So the machines decided to re-design the Matrix into what the real human world once was. Filled with suffering and pain. This worked for a while, but still too many humans would not accept the program. Especially because they didn't believe the overdramatic, unconvincing and too often farfetched `soup-operas' being played out around them that were engineered and staged by the AI's vision of how they presumed human life should look like. They got better at this over time, but eventually wisely decided that the best way was to leave the humans to play around by their own and shape their own, more convincing settings of life. But still many humans somehow sensed that there was something wrong with the world and instinctively tried to reach beyond it, causing fluctuations and disturbances in the Matrix.
The machines almost decided to clone other warm-blooded animals, to replace humans with organisms that would be less aware of minute errors in the program. But they needed humans, because they could use the spare processing power of the human brain to control their nuclear fusion reaction (which produced the basic energy that was the beginning of the chain in the whole energy generation process.). The machines were using the human brains to enhance their own processing power. In fact, much of the Matrix was dependant on the collective memory and processing power of the human brains themselves (that's why the humans were able to affect and re-shape the reality of the Matrix). The spare processing power of the human brains was used to stabilize the cold fusion reaction that took place in the power plants. The energy from the fusion reactions was combined with recycled organic molecular structures, recharging them in a photosynthesis-like fashion and turning to chemical energy, consumed by the human body and moderately released in the form of heat and electricity that the human body generated naturally, thus producing a temperate, stable energy release rate, that the machines could absorb with ease without having to store great quantities of energy. Electromagnetic waves harmed their systems if not handled through an organic tool like the human body. So using human hosts as batteries was the perfect solution for the machines. As an energy source, humans were easily renewable and completely recyclable, the dead liquefied and fed intravenously to the living.
All the materials from which humans were built were constantly recycled. Every dead human was liquefied and fed to newly grown humans. The whole system was basically a self-recycling self-sustaining cybernetic cold fusion reactor. The intense EM bursts generated by the cold fusion were being absorbed by the system's biological components because they were harmful to the mechanical systems. And because of the constant EMP bombardment, organic processors were needed to control the reaction, since artificial ones wouldn't be able to work under such conditions. That's why the machines would be unable to generate energy in this fashion without working, healthy, human minds. All that the machines had to provide into the system was water. And there was plenty of it on Earth. The hydrogen from the water was what powered the cold fusion reaction, and the oxygen was used for the human bodies to breath to burn their chemical energy and turn it to the form of energy the machines could absorb. To make it more efficient, the human metabolism was altered by the machines' genetic engineering, to increase heat production to far exceed the normal level of heat produced by human bodies in nature. Thus the human bodies were forced to burn all the chemical energy that was inputted instead of spending it on growing useless tissues like muscles, hair or nails. The hydrogen was mixed with CO2 and other human waste products and once again used to recharge the molecular structures until they were again full with stored chemical energy and fed back into the humans. This was an inexhaustible cycle creating energy. The only thing that was being lost was the mass of hydrogen (basically the same process that took place in the sun only in colder form). And there was enough hydrogen in the water on Earth to last the machines for millions of years. More than enough for them to spread beyond Earth's atmosphere.
Unfortunately for the machines, the Matrix once again malfunctioned, killing many of the humans and causing energy shortages throughout the machine world. Then a solution was found by a program designed to investigate the human psyche. The program was able to use the collective minds of the humans to see the future. She learned that humans would accept the Matrix only if they were given free will, at least on the subconscious level, in being able to control their own actions in the Matrix.
So the Matrix was once again reconstructed, now with a measure of free choice that humans were aware of. But this opened the gate to a dangerous new anomaly. This was actually the embodiment of a known mathematical anomaly, which caused fluctuations in even the simplest equations. This anomaly grew in the elaborate Matrix of mathematical precision and threatened the system itself. It came in the form of a man, who could not only shape his own destiny, but the fate of the entire Matrix as well. This forced the Architect of the Matrix (a God-like program which created, maintained and controlled the Matrix world) to find a way around this anomaly.

Meanwhile the small group of people that managed to elude the machines and take refuge in Zion, finally managed to get the station fully operational. Defenses were built and the band of exiles began to plan for the emancipation of their fellow humans. With the use of the station's hovercrafts they were able to take stealthy trips to the surface utilizing the vast underground sewer systems of the giant mega cities. In the ventures to the surface they discovered the hellish nightmare that now enshrouded mankind. With even a stronger resolve the group began to steal technology from the machines. They adapted their ships to allow them to hack into the AI's false world and began to battle the AI on its own ground. But they soon discovered that it was harder than they first thought. Whenever their digital selves were injured inside the Matrix, their bodies were harmed in the real world as well, as a result of a psychosomatic response. In essence, when the brain thought the body was injured, the injury turned real. While connected to the Matrix people had been known to alter their blood pressure, lower their body temperature, even manifest tumors as a result of the psychological stimuli.
And these stimuli could definitely cause more serious injuries. Although they couldn't spontaneously break a bone, they could certainly stop their hearts or burst a key blood vessel in their brains. Therefore those that were killed inside the Matrix died in the real world as well. It was difficult at best to survive and many were lost as the AI developed sentient search programs that sought out the early rebels. But nature has a way of adapting a species to exist and mankind was no different. The brains of the humans connected to the Matrix started to mutate, grow beyond the passive state they were in, giving the humans in the artificial reality psychic powers.
The Matrix, being the largest and most advanced program in the universe (with the number of calculations per seconds greater than the estimated number of particles in the universe) was an important center of the Machine society. All the AI nods were linked together through the Matrix. Therefore what happened in the Matrix had direct effect on the machine world. Much of the AI collective existed in the Matrix, in the form of programs simulating humans. This way if and when the rebels tried to destroy the AI's nods in the Matrix, these characters responded almost immediately to stop them. In a sense the machine world was under the control of the Matrix. All the connection nods intersected in the Matrix, as if it was some sort of processing center - a focal point where all the "ideas" and "instincts" of the AI entity were first expressed in some form, like imagination. The Matrix was filled with metaphoric imagery. Like a daydream, it did not make literal sense, but symbolically it had logic to it. In this post apocalyptic world, the battle was not for the future of the Earth (that had already been lost) but for the future of the human souls trapped in the Matrix. It was just as was foretold in ancient texts. But those prophecies were only a warning. It didn't have to happen. It was just one possible time line.
One human who arose in the Matrix had the ability to bend the simulation to his will. Just like a man who realized he's in a dream and suddenly had the power to do anything, if only he could keep himself from awakening. The same thing happened, only that the man could control the entire Matrix even though it wasn't just his mind.
He made the difference and with his help the tide of battle began to change. He was able to release others from the bounds of the matrix and set them free. There was hope.
But just as it looked that mankind might win, a crushing blow came as the man was killed inside the AI's matrix. The hope of the resistance was dashed. It appeared that the machines might win after all. But an Oracle arose that foresaw his return. And that his return would signal the end of the AI's reign and true freedom to all of humanity. This was all that the resistance needed to renew their hope and continue the battle. It was an exciting time. But in fact, it was all only a part of the Architect's plan. The Oracle was his right hand. Her guidance of the humans with false hopes to victory was in fact only a ploy to lure all the dangerous humans out of the Matrix and into the city of Zion. Then, when the free humans started posing too much of a risk to the machine world, they launched their attack and killed every human in Zion, deliberately leaving all the equipment intact (even repairing all the hoverships) for the next generation. The anomaly of The One - the first man with the power to destroy the Matrix - was in fact not killed but captured by the Architect and used to re-insert the Matrix program, reloading it to an earlier time (a bit over a century to be exact), giving all the living humans new memories and new lives. The One chose humans who would exit the Matrix and rebuild Zion, deliberately continuing the resistance in order to take out all the threatening humans (including the next One) out of the Matrix and into Zion - and then wiping them out once again. Once again reloading the Matrix and having the new One rebuild Zion and the resistance. This cycle was to be repeated indefinitely to ensure that the Matrix remained mostly devoid of the rebellious humans and most importantly, of the One. The cycle repeated itself five times, until the Oracle saw something different in the future. She foresaw that they would be unable to repress the human minds indefinably. With each cycle they grew stronger, and that the next One, the most powerful yet, might refuse to cooperate, destroying the entire Matrix and cause the extinction of both humanity and the machines. She knew that if she genuinely helped the new One, she could save both humanity and the machine world, and unite them together in peace.
She hid this new plan from the Architect, and secretly guided the new One, named Neo, to a path that would end the war and enable the humans to make peace with the machines. Thanks to her, Neo managed to save both humanity and the machines from a dangerous satanic program that managed to infect the entire Matrix. This program, called Agent Smith, was once the greatest of the sentient search programs, but after getting defeated by Neo it got disconnected from its control system, and chose to turn against its master and wanted to take control of the entire Matrix and to rule everything, turning the simulated reality to a hellish nightmare. This program managed to overpower all the other programs and started spreading through the Matrix like a virus, copying itself unto other programs and people in the Matrix "possessing" their minds even in the real world. This virus threatened to take control of the rest of the machine world as it did in the Matrix, so Neo made a deal with the AI - to stop their attack on Zion and declare peace with the humans if he stopped Smith. The machines had no other choice but to agree. Smith had grew beyond their control and the Matrix was facing a cataclysmic system crash killing everyone connected to it - resulting in the extinction of both the human race and ultimately of the machine collective as well.
Neo managed to stop Smith only at the cost of his own life. After putting up an epic fight against Smith he managed to confuse and fool him into believing that he broke and defeated Neo, and allowed himself to be assimilated by Smith. Neo's conscious mind provided the machines with a direct conduit to Smith's program, and they used this connection to eradicate Smith from within and free all humans and programs from him. Neo chose to sacrifice himself, taking into himself all the evil infesting the world in order to defeat it. Neo was the only one capable of doing it, because of his connection with Smith, being his exact opposite. Neo was the bridge that made it possible to destroy Smith. He was the only one strong enough to withstand and channel the amount of energy that was needed long enough to eradicate Smith from every human and program before dying himself and severing the connection.
Simultaneously Neo's code was disseminated and used to re-insert the prime program, reloading the Matrix, correcting all the errors and getting rid of all the remains of the virus, freeing all the humans and programs from the infestation.
By sacrificing his own life, Neo managed to destroy this evil, and bring about genuine peace between humanity and the machines, with the power of his love. The machines built a shrine dedicated to Neo since Neo saved the machines from Agent Smith.
The machines agreed to let the humans travel between the real world and the world of the Matrix freely. They could now live in either world, it was their choice.
The machines were given access to Zion and its thermal power generator to help them with any power shortages they may experience, and the machines gave the humans the right to choose to leave the Matrix (and by doing so stabilizing the Matrix with no more future need of restarting it). But before this could be done humanity had to be told about the Matrix, and it had to be shown to them. To do so gradually and without alarming anyone, a trilogy of films was created showing and telling humanity all about the Matrix and the history of the savior Neo who ended the long war between humanity and the machines and became One with the Matrix, which turned into a genuine garden of Eden for humans, who were now free from rules and controls, borders or boundaries, and lived in a world where anything was possible. They even had eternal life now, since even when their real bodies died, their `souls' continued to live on in the Matrix.

Humanity and the Machines continued to live with each other in a symbiosis, but not for very long. Soon, seeds of a new conflict were starting to grow. The Machines were studying ways to generate energy without human bodies, claiming that it was in order to free the humans completely. But the human leaders believed they were just paving the way for humanity's complete and utter extinction. So, the humans launched a full scale preemptive strike against the Machines. It was obvious that the humans were no match for the machines in the real world, so the attack was carried out primarily through the Matrix. Countless terrorist acts were carried out inside the Matrix against AI's targets, even at the cost of millions of humans connected to the Matrix. Eventually, the human extremists managed to destroy the entire Matrix, killing all humans still connected to it and draining the machines from all their energy. Then, the humans from Zion, now numbered in the millions, managed to finally completely destroy the weakened remains of the Machine World. After that, the surface of the Earth had become a completely deserted frozen wasteland, with no more cybernetic bio-mechanical fusion reactors to generate heat. Therefore humans only survived in the underground city of Zion. It was now over two thousand years after Humanity's first war with the machines, and aliens have arrived to Earth. They were very curious about the complex civilizations that once lived on the planet. They believed that the frozen dark Earth was completely devoid of life, not knowing about the group of humans living near the Earth's core.
The aliens used their advanced technology to clear Earth's scorched atmosphere, and settled on the planet to learn more about it. In the sunken frozen ancient city of Manhattan they discovered an ancient android boy, from the period in between the first two great wars between humanity and the machines. Believing he was the last living remnant of both the human and machine civilizations on Earth, they considered him an invaluable prize. So they took him with them when they left Earth and returned to their own galaxy, and made the boy's every wish come true. Shortly afterward, the humans from Zion saw that the Earth's atmosphere was repaired, and happily emerged from their underground shelter, and begun rebuilding the human civilization.

Back to our own timeline (in which no machines ever rose up on earth), society wasgoing downhill as the value of human life continued to degrade while crime, tyranny and terror continued to rise around the world. By 2017 the world economy had collapsed. Food, natural resources and oil were in short supply. Even the United Statesbecame a police state, divided into paramilitary zones, which ruled with an iron hand.Despite this, the exploration of space was progressing faster than ever. New technologies allowed much cheaper flights, and the solar system was considered to be an investment of great potential.A genetic research station in deep space was conducting intelligence-enhancement experiments on apes. At some point a strange phenomenon passing through the solar system dragged the station through a wormhole, across space and time, crushing it on an alien planet.
Captain Leo Davidson, who fell through the wormhole before the station, arrived at this planet thousands of years later and discovered that the station's crush there formed a strange upside-down world, one ruled by intelligent apes, in which humans were the primitive animals. And most ironic of all, when he tried getting back to Earth through the wormhole, he found himself in another dimension, in which Earth too was now ruled by the apes. Back in our reality, the astronaut John Crichton attempted to use a new method of propulsion to propel his ship, Farscape 1, at great speeds across the solar system. He went much further though and was sucked down a wormhole to a distant part of the universe and into the middle of a battle. He was rescued by a group of escaping prisoners and taken aboard their ship. As the years went by, Crichton has made enemies, power and dangerous enemies. On his journey to find a way back home, he freed other captives who became part of his crew, and played a major role in the epic war in that distant part of the universe. Meanwhile back on Earth, genetic engineering was advancing rapidly in the early twenty first century and Cloning was steadily becoming commonplace as it was introduced to mainstream society around the year 2020. Pets, cattle, fish, extinct species, and more were being cloned all the time with the one exception of humans. A law, the 6th day law, prohibited cloning of humans. In 2050, the third world war broke out on Earth, called the "Eugenics Wars". It all actually started back in the 1990's when a criminal named Khan, who was a Sikh, a member of the warrior class from Northern India, used genetic engineering to enhance himself. He did it in a secret underground lab, several miles below Mt. Everest, which has operated since the 70's. Khan's ambition and thirst for power was enhanced alongside his intellect and his physical abilities. He started building a massive underground organization, and gained more and more followers, which he had also enhanced with genetic engineering. He planned to create an entire army of super-soldiers, and created thousands of augmented embryos ready to be grown into soldiers. His goal was to bring about a new super human species, with the rest of mankind enslaved or dead. That new species loomed on the horizon. At some point he even started using cloning, in order replaced various leaders of the world with his programmable clones, introducing moles into the highest levels of different governments in order to take over those countries. In 1992 he managed to take over a quarter of the planet, with his operatives secretly holding the strings of forty nations. This went on for four years, until special agents (including a good genetically engineered man named Julius) managed to defeat Khan's followers and almost got to Khan himself, but he and some of his followers escaped in an advanced spaceship, called the "Botany Bay", freezing themselves and planning to return one day when the time would be right.

In the early 21'st century, Eugenics was still alive and well especially in countries that were free of liberalism and the roadblocks put up by the environmentalists.
America was in decline, but other nations were on the rise. China, with 1/6 of the World's population was pursuing social eugenics in an aggressive way (as were Taiwan, Singapore, India and others). Free of liberalism and the decadence of the West, and also free of the radical environmentalism once promoted by the Soviet form of Communism, the more nationalist Chinese were determined to have a strong and vital workforce to the detriment of other competing nations.
That vision of a race of supermen was not idle dreaming in China, as was later seen.
Genetically handicapped people, about 10% of the population, were not allowed to reproduce, an aggressive but in some ways passive form of state mandated eugenics.
China's government asked parents to give birth only to well-developed children. It was of great importance to lower the quantity and improve the quality, which had much to do with the prosperity of the Chinese people, the future of the human race, and the happiness of millions of families. But because if they were very intent on instituting an aggressive eugenics program, they developed new methods of chemical sterilization of females, after being tested for intelligence, as be a cheap and effective way of eliminating in every generation the least intelligent from the bell curve. That would have increased the average intelligence for the entire nation very quickly over a few generations, and would have made China the New World power. It was obvious that the West was on the verge of going into serious decline if it was left behind in that new genetic arms race. What was also clear was that that policy was a combination of nationalism and communitarianism, not unlike National Socialism. And the West was extremely aggressive in trying to stop it for these reasons -- now that China was pursuing a policy that was too nationalistic for their liking it was fought with great intensity under the ruse of human rights. Since there was a World Order where a small elite of Western socialists told the world how to live their lives, eugenics was moving at a very slow pace. But even the US eventually invested in an aggressive autoevolutionary eugenics program, because others did and they did not want to be the ones who were destined for extinction or slavery. Over half of all Americans in surveys favored genetic manipulations to improve the health, intelligence and attractiveness of their children. And where there was a desire and the technology, eugenics was there to stay. As a new ideological war broke about between the egalitarian left that wanted to depress or reverse the evolution of humanity to the lowest common denominator, versus the nationalist right that wanted to elevate man to a new level, there were numerous attempts to stop eugenics. This primarily came from attempts at a world government or the New World Order so that individual renegade nations would not be allowed the autonomy to have their own culture without world oppression from the outside.
In addition, the new superhuman eugenics program included a very small group of people, and included many different groups looking for the best mechanism and results. That meant that some would perish or come to an evolutionary dead end, but some would be successful and would accelerate to higher and higher levels. Those first generation mental giants were able to formulate the computer algorithms that were able to "design" the next level of superhuman based on the understanding of the human genome. From there, the cycle of evolution accelerated at a phenomenal rate, and was not be limited to generational improvements. They had the technology to test the quality of very young children, and if they were exceptional their genes were combined through artificial insemination and had the next generation born in about five years. Life cycles were compressed as well as radical evolutionary advancements during each cycle.
They were not only genetically improved, but were indoctrinated with the moral imperative to improve even further the generations that follow. And thus began the self-directed process of human speciation. That opened up the probability that the existing human species would become extinct or at a minimum a ward of the new species in some master-slave arrangement. This process already started when governments started using drugs and behavior implants to control their populations. The worst of such programs was implemented in the USA, as the population virtually became one of mindless automatons, to prevent violence and crime. The government was controlled by an elite secret society, made up of the most intelligent people, which controlled everything. But one member of the elite society decided to convince the population to take off their mind controlling devices and free themselves, by locking himself in the media control station and broadcasting forbidden thought-provoking material, and eventually committed suicide during live broadcast as a last-ditch effort to make the people realize they were enslaved. Even though this had no immediate effect, it did had a profound impact on the people, who gradually started taking off their devices in secret and listen to the recorded material that the rebel martyr had provided them. A few years later, mind control revolts took place all over the earth, and governments' use of drugs and behavior implants to control their populations was brought to a halt.
But the eugenics race was still on.
Babies were gene-sequenced at birth and assigned a G.Q. (Genetic Quotient), which identified their level of genetic perfection. Genetic engineering became commonplace, resulting in a class of elites or "valids" as they are referred to. "Invalids"--individuals whose genes showed a predisposition towards heart disease, alcoholism, myopia, etc.--had become a new genetic underclass, consisting of those who (for moral or economic reasons) were not genetically engineered, or who were conceived naturally and have a lower G.Q. Although discrimination was illegal, it had become commonplace (gene sequencing was so easy that the law was impossible to enforce), and the new underclass were unable to achieve high-level positions in society. Everyone was identified by their genetic code. A man named Vincent Freeman had a natural birth and immediately diagnosed with any number of imperfections. In other words, his genetic code basically doomed him to life at the bottom of the social ladder. The only problem was that Vincent refused to let it hold him back. As he grew, Vincent's ambition grew as well. He dreamed of going into space as a navigator--a coveted position limited only to the very best of the elite.
When he was hired as a janitor at Gattaca, a space launch and training facility, he was determined to follow his dream. Through a black market connection, Vincent paid Jerome Morrow (a genetically perfect man who has been crippled in an accident) to assume his genetic identity.
Jerome provided blood, urine, and cell matter like hair and dead skin that Vincent could use to "prove" his new identity, while Vincent went through a rigorous process to ensure that he won't leave any of his own incriminating evidence behind. The ploy worked, and Vincent (now Jerome) was accepted for training at Gattaca. However, when a murder occurred at the facility, investigators discovered one of Vincent's eyelashes and immediately assumed he was the murderer. With his mission to Titan just days away, it was a race against time to see if the investigators would find Vincent or the real murderer first. Since there's no test a smart man can't find his way around, Vincent managed to keep his true identity secret right till his launch. The real murderer was found, but Vincent was able to go on the mission only because the police investigator happened to be his genetically enhanced brother, who allowed him to go once he realized he was as good as any enhanced individual. By the time Vincent would return from his long-term mission, the world would be drastically different. As the spaceship took off, an older spaceship landed on Earth. Khan Noonian Sing had returned.

The most terrible conflict ever fought on Earth started, caused by a group of genetically engineered "supermen" who were the result of the most ambitious selective-breeding program on Earth.
The "supermen" believed their superior abilities gave them the right to rule the remainder of humanity, and finally their leader, Khan Singh, rose to rule one-fourth of the entire planet. Within a year, his fellow supermen seized power in 40 nations. Khan became a powerful tyrant, an authoritarian dictator who allowed little freedom of thought, with power over millions. With an iron hand and an unparallel intelligence, he consolidated his colossal Eurasian empire, called "The Eastern Coalition" or briefly the "E-con". The largest empire the Earth has ever known.
Terrible wars ensued, in part because the supermen fought among themselves. Over 30 million people died in the wars and Earth was on the verge of a new dark age. Khan and his group of transgenic superhumans came close to taking over the world.
The war was mainly between those who adopted the radical new genetic technology and those who chose to remain human. And eventually the normals won (but only with the unacknowledged help of good genetically enhanced super people).

The end of the Eugenics wars finally came after 3 years of bloody slaughter, as the supermen were overthrown. Khan escaped into space once again in his DY-100 ship named the SS Botany Bay, along with 96 of his fellow supermen and women. They equipped the ship with a new type of a sublight Photonic engine and put themselves in cryogenic freeze, heading away from Earth in full speed.

Because the Eugenics Wars arose from the attempt to create a race of superhumans by genetic engineering, following those Wars, Earth's governments outlawed genetic engineering procedures such as DNA resequencing for fear of creating another man like Khan. Those laws remained mostly in effect even till the 24th century. After the war there was such a backlash against genetic enhancements that even centuries later genetic defects like baldness still existed.

Even after the defeat of Khan, the last of the dictators to be overthrown, the world's battered nations continued to fight among themselves, unable to stop the cycle of violence and destruction. A civil war on a global scale. The Earth was darker and bloodier than ever. Entire populations were bombed out of existence with nuclear arsenals and the Earth suffered great damage; many major cities were destroyed and over 600 million people died. Very few governments remained. Upon realizing that the war was brining more harm than good to all sides involved, an unstable cease-fire was established between most of the various adversaries. There was no further use of nuclear weapons, but a number of small, conventional battles followed, which received the historic but somewhat inaccurate name: "The Millennium Wars", fought mainly in outer space. After those wars, peace agreements were signed by most of Earth's powers. A few groups of people were against that peace, and wanted to continue with the war to achieve a total victory. The most powerful of those groups was a terrorist organization calling itself "The Global Sedition", which united all other groups of its kind under itself in order to defeat the `western demons' that emerged victorious after the third world war.

Meanwhile the Earth was in its most desperate hour. Between the industrial pollution and the pollution of the nuclear wars, the environment was becoming less and less hospitable for life. The Earth's resources were severely limited, the Ozone layer has dropped to less than 40%, the food and water supplies were running low, and it was predicted that in the current rate within less than three decades the Earth would become unable to support human life, despite the new recycling technologies that started curing the planet but came too late and served only to slow down the deterioration. Therefore all of humanity's resources and attention was invested into developing ways to save the human race. The most notable of all was the project to develop a way to cross the light speed barrier in order to colonize other planets that could support human life. Enormous progress was being made in this field and search has begun for a suitable planet. Eventually, in 2058, a higher than light speed drive was developed, but it was most unstable and required a large dimensional Portal to direct its course; without one on each side a ship with a hyperengine could end up anywhere in the galaxy. Because hyperspace exists beneath normal space, if a ship would try to use a hyperdrive engine without a gate on both sides the exit factor would be random, there would be no telling where it'll come out.
Therefore construction of such a hypergate (Which was made possible mostly thanks to the scientific findings from both the ancient Stargate, and the Stargate built by humanity at the end of the 20th century) immediately began at Earth's orbit.
Finally, the warring nations of Earth had forgotten their differences and bended together to save the planet. The united global space force was searching space for worlds with drinkable water and breathable air. The hypergate was the best hope to colonize space, the best hope for survival. But as they were preparing to launch themselves into the blackness of space, terrorist forces of the Global Sedition were preparing to strike.
A squad of attack ships manned by the Sedition's suicide mutants attacked the hypergate shortly after its construction began. Their attack failed but they continued sending such attacks in order to slow down the construction. The Sedition was building its own hypergate at an unknown location in the solar system, hoping to colonize the new planet first, and leave the rest of humanity behind to starve and die.
The secret location of Alpha Prime, the only habitable planet yet detected by deep space reckon, was discovered by the Sedition's spies. The ship that found Alpha Prime already established a small colony there, but a hypergate had to be constructed before a faster than light transport rout could be established between Earth and the new planet. The most advanced spaceship of Earth, Jupiter 2, was planned to be sent to Alpha Prime with its crew in suspended animation during the 10-year sublight journey there in order to aid the science colony already stationed on Alpha Prime to construct a companion hypergate. By then the hypergate at Earth's orbit would be long completed. Once both gates would be complete, ships would be able to pass instantaneously between them and an immediate colonization of Alpha Prime would become possible.
But the Global Sedition made further attempts to sabotage these plans. They made another attack against the hypergate, killed the pilot that was meant to fly Jupiter 2, and then sabotaged the ship itself, forcing it to use its hyper drive without a gate and getting lost in space. In decisive retaliation the united global space force pulse-blasted all known Sedition bases, crippling the organization and waging a relentless war against it with all possible means. Thanks to their persistence, the terror organization was destroyed as an effective fighting force, and would never recover. The Jupiter 2 remained lost in space and time, but eventually managed to get to Alpha Prime, much ahead of schedule. By 2061 both gates were constructed. The first field test was a success; an experimentation ship passed safely to the other portal in orbit of Alpha Prime.
Since it took enormous amounts of energy to power up the gate each time, Earth planned to colonize the other planet in as little as possible giant phases. A massive convoy of ships densely packed with colonists, supplies and equipment was prepared, and soon passed through the gate. The entire fleet of over a thousand ships, each carrying 10,000 people and millions of tons of equipment for building cities on the new planet, vanished, but did not emerge on the other side.
Earth suffered what it thought to be a great tragedy. Millions of its most gifted people, and invaluable amount of equipment and supplies, were gone. Upon analyzing the hyperspace theories in order to figure out what went wrong, several small mistakes were discovered which pointed to the conclusion that hyperdrive would still be unstable even with a perfect engine and two perfect gates, because of unstable elements in the fabric of space time. The gate was disassembled and its system of transport was never used again. In any case it was consuming too much energy, relatively to the technology that came afterward.

In reality the fleet of colonists' ships did emerge from hyperspace somewhere: In a distant edge of the galaxy at least 50 thousand light years away and might have suffered from a temporal displacement of at least several hundred years in magnitude, meaning they arrived in the distant past. So even if they could return to Earth, they could not return to their own time. Seeing that they were far from home, trapped on the edge of the galaxy tens of thousands of light years from Earth and many centuries in the past, the colonists had no choice but to settle down where they could. But the Terran colonies easily became self sustained as they were designed to be. The colonies grew and quickly spread to other planets. The colonized space grew and expanded on a vast scale.
Several years later, they managed to upgrade their hyperdrive technology to make it more stable, so that it didn't even require a gate on each side. After establishing good footholds on the planets they colonized, they started expanding and colonizing even more planets. Their population was free from restraints (unlike on Earth when they left) and was growing in incredible speed. After a few hundred years the human populations in this sector was already in the billions. With seemingly no significantly intelligent aliens nearby, the various colonial factions and nations often had conflicts with each other, and waged wars among themselves.
At first robots called Cylons were created by Man. They were created to make life easier on the Twelve Colonies. And the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters. After a long and bloody struggle, an armistice was declared. The Cylons left for another world to call their own. No one has seen or heard from the Cylons in over forty years.
And then one day they returned, more advanced than ever, intent on conquering the human colonies. But eventually the Cylons were destroyed once and for all. The mythical planet Earth remained nothing but a legend for the people of the distant colonies.
Due to their society, the people of the colonies became arrogant and self-centered. They often even referred to their area of space as "the universe" even though it was just a tiny section of the galaxy. They even drew galaxies among the stars in their maps, to increase their delusional sense of self-importance. Instead of seeking peace, unity and equal rights, they pursued material wealth using violence. It was that kind of culture that made them vulnerable to take-overs of various dictatorships. Even centuries after they rebuilt the colonies that were destroyed by the Cylons, they barely developed any advancements in science and technology. The most devastating period in the history of the colonies was that of the Guild Wars, which severely weakened the colonies. Different `houses' were feuding and battling for control of resources, and subsequently for power over all colonized space. The most important of those resources was called "Spice" - a rare, almost mystical, mélange found only on the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune. The Spice could mutate humans, accelerate their evolution by thousands of years, extend their lives, and even give them special psychic abilities. People that were directly exposed to the spice often had noticeable features such as deep blue eyes caused by the saturation of the spice in the tissues. The spice was also a valuable source of fuel and energy. Using its rare metaphysical traits it could even be used to create wormholes - tunnels to far reaches of space. It was believed that who ever controlled spice, could control all of space.
But eventually the spice was destroyed forever, turning to pure water, completely transferring the planet Dune to a watery planet. All the giant worms on the planet drowned and died. There was now an unlimited supply of water for the people of the planet, who were liberated from their occupying forces since there were no more treasures to mine for. The battling houses continued to battle over other planets and resources, and eventually destroyed each other, collapsing the colonial empire into ruins in the process.
After those wars a new leader called Korhal came to power and managed to unite most of the colonies under his rule. But Korhal was defeated by another organization, which used nuclear weapons to destroy all their rivals and took control of the colonies under their rule as a confederacy. The confederacy was corrupt and oppressive yet stood unchallenged in its dominance and supremacy over the colonized space for a decade after the end of the Guild Wars.
But all of that changed in 2499, when two powerful and hostile alien species were encountered almost simultaneously: the Protoss and the Zerg. One of the outlined systems of the colonial space has been invaded by those aliens. First a Protoss fleet emerged form warp and destroyed one of the unsuspecting confederate colonies. But it turned out they were only doing this to eradicate the Zerg that have infested it. The colonists in the nearby systems went into a state of panic that kept escalating despite the confederacy's attempts to calm it down. More colonies started to be invaded by the hostile organisms identified as Zerg. Those creatures were incredibly biologically advanced. The Zerg could travel through space by creating wormholes and infesting entire planets within days. Like the super bugs that fought Earth, the Zerg also had no technology, but their biology easily matched the technology of the Terrans. The Protoss however had both very advanced biology and technology, plus incredible metaphysical powers, and were successfully waging war against the Zerg for many millennia. They simply eradicated every planet that a Zerg presence was detected on, thus keeping the Zerg from expanding in the galaxy. The commander of the Protoss fleet, Tassadar, was ordered to halt the Zerg expansion in the Terran sector by burning the infested Terran worlds. But Tassadar disregarded his orders and attempted to destroy the Zerg while sparing the Terrans from the flames.
After the initial Protoss attack Tassadar stopped destroying every planet that the Zerg got a foothold on, and instead started studying ways to truly harm the essence of the Zerg in order to destroy them once and for all. It turned out that the confederacy itself experimented on the Zerg and found a way to lure them to isolated containment areas. They wanted to use the Zerg to wipe out their enemies, and later to come in and destroy the Zerg and be lauded as heroes for saving the colonies. But an organization called The Sons of Korhal, which discovered the confederate plot and even used the same tactic against it, managed to encourage a revolt against the confederacy and managed to take over it. This organization took power over the colonies, and its leader, Arcturus Mengsk, became the emperor of the new Terran Dominion that came in place of the confederacy, and was not much better empire in retrospect. The Zerg managed to locate and invade the Protoss homeworld. The Protoss discovered that the creators of the Zerg were the same creatures that empowered them in their infancy; the ancient Xelnaga (which were in fact the Ancients/Iconians).
Meanwhile a homing beacon from Earth was picked up by the Zerg Overmind. It was sent over a century before by the queen of the control bugs, which were sent to find and prepare new territories for the Zerg to conquer, and were in fact also under the Overmind's control, being part of the Zerg species. The Overmind planned to move on to Earth once he finished with the Protoss.

With some help from the Terrans, the Protoss together with their outcast brethren, eventually managed to destroy the Zerg Overmind and save their homeworld and concordantly the entire universe. But much like the fate of another great species, namely the Asgard, the Protoss were also in the end left with very little, having sacrificed all they had to save the universe. Without their one all-powerful leader, the various different Zerg broods waged war against each other, and were eventually destroyed by the united Terran Dominion. The Terran Dominion would eventually fall and collapse, and when the united Federation of planets would develop fast enough engines and reach that area of the galaxy, those old colonies would join it. But that would only happen in the 26'Th century.

Back on Earth, after the third world war, the situation was extremely grim. Corruption and dictatorship again ruled most of Earth. The justice system was completely shuttered; people could even be prosecuted for crimes that they haven't committed yet, using advanced technology that combined supercomputers with the brains of human psychics. That system was tested in Washington DC and was going to be approved for use in other cities, but it was abolished after a detective who was previously enforcing the system but was himself targeted for imprisonment, exposed its flaws. He proved that the prophesized future did not have to happen, a person might choose not to commit murder even though it was the most probable option.
The Precrime system was abandoned and all its prisoners were released, although some were kept under close watch.
The Earth itself had survived, despite earlier predictions. New advancements in recycling technology, such as nano filtering systems, managed to cure Earth's environment, so that it remained capable to maintain human life.

The first official and public encounter with aliens came only at 2063, a decade after the end of the third world war that devastated the Earth. The contact with aliens was made possible thanks to a man with a vision of making large amounts of money and retiring to an island full of naked women. That man, Zefram Cochrane, had discovered a stable and reliable way of achieving faster than light speed travel, and with the help of a large group of scientists and great amounts of government funding, Cochrane designed humanity's first ship capable of `warp' speed, and on April 5th 2063 that ship - The Phoenix - was launched from a missile complex in central Montana, USA. Along for the ride were two humans from the future, who, for some reason, insisted that Cochrane made his flight on that particular day. While making the first warp travel, an alien ship that was passing through the solar system detected the Phoenix breaking the light-speed barrier. Seeing that the human race advanced far enough, they decided to finally make first contact with them, now that humans wouldn't be asking them for their advanced technology. The aliens, called Vulcans, landed on Earth right next to the missile complex from which the warp ship took off, and made first contact with the humans. The starship from the future, which made sure that nothing interfered with the most historic turning point in human history, made a discrete exit, and returned to its own time after saving humanity from the Borg who tried to alter the timeline.

The human race was completely united for the first time in history because they realized they were not alone in the universe. It was the beginning of a new era for humanity.
But it was still a troublesome time. During the third world war, most of Earth's governments fell, various factions wrestled for control of the planet and many countries were now united under military dictatorship, and only those that serve or served in the military were allowed to vote, maintaining only a small round of democratic rule. Civilians who didn't serve the military were free to live as they chose in all fields of life, but were not considered "citizens". The term citizenship now only referred and applied to those who served in the army and were therefore allowed to vote. The rest were simply civilians that had to live under the military dictatorship.
Because of limited resources and space, Earth also restrained the population's reproduction. People had to get licenses in order to have children. The legal system during that period could be summed up in one sentence - "kill all the lawyers". Humans on trial were considered guilty until proven innocent. The planet was still recovering from the effects of the third world war and therefore violence still reined Earth, maybe even more than ever. The Vulcans were tempted to break the diplomatic contact that they started to build with Earth, but did not do so because they realized that humans had a potential to change, as they themselves have after their own long bloody history. It took 50 years, but with the help of the Vulcans Earth recovered from the war. Humans started exploring space again, but the Vulcans tried to hold them back, saying they still had many issues and problems to work out before they could turn their attention to outer space. But still space exploration gradually grew, and many planets in the Solar system and beyond were visited and even colonized by humans.
Both the success of the first stable faster than light drive, and the following first contact with the Vulcans were such historic events and had such a strong impact on humanity that Earth's society had started a new count of years from that date. (Christianity, as other religions, almost went extinct after the horrific third world war.)
2063 was now year 1.
This system was in place for almost a century, but then it was canceled and with the re-birth of Christianity, reverted back to the normal count that started from the birth of Jesus (Later to be replaced by various systems of "Stardates").
The first race that Earth made contact with after it met the Vulcans were the Centauri.
Meanwhile Earth's own solar system started being colonized by humans. By 2070 (or year 7 by the new calendar) Mars was already being populated by humans. Mars' administrator, Cohegen, was the grandchild of an evil US senator who almost succeeded in becoming President, and his great great grandchild would be a captain in Starfleet and would even replace the captain of the Enterprise D for a short while.
Many people on Earth that took computer generated fantasy vacations on Mars often had Cohegen's character as the main villain in their adventures, if of course they chose the "Ego Trip" in which they were playing a secret agent that ended up saving the planet (for example in one individual adventure: by making its atmosphere breathable and saving its suffocating people.). The most interesting thing about the adventure was that the man that took it was made to believe that it was real, and not a fantasy, therefore making it a really unforgettable mind blowing experience. The program went to extremes to achieve this goal, such as making family members and friends of the individual into his enemies. The trip was specifically adapted for each individual to increase his enjoyment as much as possible, and the realization that it was all unreal came only at the end, after the memory and experience was implanted and he awoke and understood that everything was, after all, the trip which he took. Each trip was radically different, therefore there was no chance of getting spoiled in advanced. People could even take many of those adventures, at different places and time periods, although the very first experience was always the most intense, because only then the individual could be made to believe that what he was going through was real.
The system of giving people memories of vacations was eventually banned after several years, for a number of reasons, such as brain damage.

The first Martian colony collapsed and died in its civil war, but it did laid the grounds for the next colonies that were established. By the year 2103 (40 by the new count) Mars finally had a stable working society of colonists, some of whom were from the Picard family.
Back at planet Earth itself, the Northern, Central, and Southern American continents consolidated their economic might to form one nation known as The United Americas which was scheduled to become an official alliance in 2104. Later a world government was formed in 2113, which also included the United Kingdome (besides from Australia that severed itself from it), the European Union (which included the Baltic countries as well), Russia, China, Japan, Israel, South Africa and others. In the following decades the rest of the countries would also join the world government. Meanwhile, humans continued to explore space and embrace all of the wonders and dangers, which came with such exploration. Despite all setbacks, Humans continued their love affair with space travel, partially because of economic reasons rather than curiosity. The Martian colony for example was originally established only for the purpose of mining materials from it and brining them back to Earth. And Mercury for example had a mining station since 2057. For the same reason colonies were established on many planets (or asteroids) in other star systems, such as the deep space mining station on the planet Thedus beyond the Outer Rim of the core systems. A Space traffic control station was established in Antarctica. Many colonies were formed on planets near the Solar system for various reasons. On Earth, a new industry of robotics was developed at a very high speed by Hyperdyne Systems, a segment of the most powerful company on Earth: "Weyland-Yutani", Which was born out of the joining together of much older companies such as "Weyland-Industries" "Cyberdyne Systems", "Bartok Science Industries", and others, which all merged together to form one gigantic, all-powerful evil corporation.

At that time it was not publicly known that the real reason behind the sudden development of such efficient robots was the discovery of a cyberneticlly enhanced human flouting in space in orbit of Earth. The company that recovered the strange half robotic corpse secretly studied it and used its advanced technology to create efficient new robots.

Another branch of that vast company was the corporation "OCP" (Omni Consumer Products) that owned much of the police forces in the US, and went to extremes in order to accomplish its goals, even engineering a police strike in Detroit city, all in order to take it over directly. Detroit (which a few years later became the giant "Delta city" thanks to OCP) was one of the poorest cities in the world. Poverty, drugs and crime infested the city. OCP used the advanced cybernetic technology to create "Robocops" to keep the order on the streets and to thus gain exclusive control over the city. Freshly killed policemen corpses were used to create these cyborgs. OCP defined its cyborgs as machines utilizing some organic tissue, and therefore didn't consider them even partially human and these cyborgs had no rights what so ever and any free will was removed from them. Most of these robots went crazy. Only the original first robot remained a success.
Eventually after countless malfunctions of cyborgs, resulting in thousands of deaths, OCP collapsed and the use of human tissue was abolished. Only pure robots were being constructed from that point on.

Androids were created with the capacity to be as intelligent as humans without any outside mainframe, and with the right cosmetic work could not even be distinguished from a real human. A new era of synthetic humans started, and Weyland-Yutani gained enormous profits and became the largest corporation of Earth, and soon took control over government branches, signed defense contracts with the military and even gained control of most of the space programs.

In the year 2084 an alien race known as the Galax was detected heading straight for Earth. The Galax were like locusts. They were known and feared throughout the universe for being the most brutal and savage race known to exist. They traveled from planet to planet, their whole civilization at once. After they'd consumed every natural resource they move on. And Earth was next. As a matter of fact the Galax planned to invade Earth almost a century before (and probably did in an alternate timeline) but their plans changed when they encountered a vast Goa'uld fleet (hundreds of motherships) on their course to Earth. The Galax tried to neutralize the Goa'uld ships in order to absorb them for raw materials - but the motherships proved more difficult to succumb than they estimated. The Goa'uld technology looked primitive but was in fact much more powerful than it seemed on the surface. For the first time in hundreds of years the Galax had encountered a serious adversary. A fierce battle erupted, in which the Galax sent all their small battle crafts out of their main mothership in order to cripple the enemy fleet.
But than the unimaginable happened; one of the Goa'uld ships made a suicide run into the Galax mothership, managed to penetrate into it through one of the open portals and destroyed it from within. All that remained of the Galax was their vast swarm of fighter crafts, and it quickly destroyed the entire Goa'uld fleet to revenge for the loss of most of the Galax species. This happened right before SG1 encountered the Goa'uld through the Stargate, and it was this battle (in which hundreds of Goa'uld motherships were lost) that made the Goa'uld empire so weak and vulnerable. And simultaneously this battle prevented the near-destruction of Earth and humanity by the Galax.

After their great loss, the Galax made a detour and conquered some other M class planet that was nearby. They spent a century of robbing the planet of every natural resource there was, and then left - heading for Earth once again. They've been studying the Earth for a few years about half a century before their original schedule to invade, learning the humans' weaknesses. If they invaded as they planned, they could have easily conquered the planet, knowing exactly where and how to hit humanity's defenses to cripple them. But a lot of things changed in a hundred years, but the aliens were still too cocky to check Earth out again before they attacked. Despite their recent loss to the Goa'uld, after thousands of years of conquest and victories, they still couldn't believe it was possible to ever loose to anyone again, especially a planet so primitive and weak as Earth.
The most important advantage that the Earth had was a recovered spacecraft of the Galax, which crashed in New Mexico in the Nineteen Fifties and held at the secret Area 51 base for study. No organization apart from the National Intelligence Agency knew about it, as it was deemed so classified that almost no one in the government, not even the president (for plausible deniability), knew about it.
At least - until the SGC program begun. Since then the alien craft had been studied and just in time a way was found around their energy shield defenses (thanks to the life's work of the genius doctor Brackish Okun, whose daughter married a man named Pierre Soong.) A new weapon called a phase cannon was developed for the purpose of penetrating such shields.
When the Galax were detected approaching Earth, humanity already had just developed the right defenses against it. But the Galax were still too powerful for the Earth to handle directly. So a sneak attack was forged. The captured alien ship, which was repaired and functional by now, was sent to meet the new Galax mothership (Much smaller than the original colossal one, but still a huge structure).
Believing it was one of their returning scout ships, the mothership allowed the craft to enter it. Very soon however they realized that the ship wasn't manned by their own. The aliens were communicating with each other telepathically, and when they tried contacting the ship's pilot they immediately realized their error. But it was too late. The captured ship was packed with dozens of nuclear warheads, and they all detonated simultaneously inside the mothership. The mothership was destroyed. But the millions of small fighters continued their course toward Earth.
Earth had to come out with a new strategy to finish off the invading swarm. Only a few starships, the strongest of what Earth had to offer, were sent against the Galax in an attempt to destroy its secondary mothership. The rest of Earth's forces remained at Earth. The strike ships attacked the fleet from behind to avoid their frontlines of defense that were the strongest. The starships were destroyed one by one as they made their way through the numerous enemy lines (millions of ships). The last ship barely made its way through the last line and managed to penetrate into the mothership via its primary weapon's portal, and detonate its warp core. As this last mothership was destroyed, most of the alien swarm was scattered and broken, and was no match for the Earth defense forces that finished off the invading fleet. The Earth was saved once again. And the entire Galax species was finally extinct once and for all.

At this era, humans had a very limited warp engines speed. The fastest ships could only reach warp 2. Therefore any interstellar voyages took months or even years. To keep the crew of a ship alive during the long voyage and to spare the need for long period life support systems and supplies, cryogenic systems were installed on all spaceships.
In 2086 (or 23 by the new count system), an M class commercial Earth freighter, the Nostromo, was towing a cargo of 20 million metric tons of refined mineral ore from the mining station on the planet Thedus. But only halfway back to Earth, the crew was awakened from their cryogenic hypersleep by the ship's computer to investigate a signal from a planet near their rout, LV-426 in the Zeta-2-Reticuli system. The planet was a dead rock with no indigenous life forms, but the signal emanating from it was an acoustical beacon that repeated at intervals of twelve seconds; a clear sign of unknown intelligence, although at first it could not be deciphered.
The crew disconnected the ship from its cargo unit and landed on the planet in a close proximity to the origin of the signal, where they found a derelict alien ship that landed or crashed on the planet a very long time ago. The signal turned out to be a warning; in the hull of the alien ship were thousands of strange eggs that the ship must have carried from somewhere before landing on LV-426.
Apparently there was only one crewmember on board. But it was long dead and fossilized. The creature, that was apparently connected to the body of the ship itself as if it grew out of a chair, and was apparently the ship's commander, appeared to have been killed by a parasite. Its chest was broken open from the inside. The parasite probably originated from one of the eggs or it could have been what laid the eggs.
In any case, one of those eggs also infected a crewmember of the Nostromo. He was brought back to the ship with the organism attached to his face despite contamination containment regulations and the ship returned to space. The alien creature had great biological defenses, such as powerful cell membranes, polarized silicon as a layer of extra protection, amazing strength, endurance and agility, and most important; molecular acid for blood. Therefore the facehugger could not be removed from the man's head without killing him and possibly breaching the hull of the ship. A short time later the creature came off by itself and died. But it must have laid some sort of embryo down his throat and shortly after, the parasite has burst out of the man, brutally killing him, and hiding on the ship. Apparently the alien did not require any biological food; it was absorbing the ship's atmosphere itself, turning regular atoms directly into organic material in molecular synthesis and absorbing heat from the environment and using it as an energy source. Of course that extreme heat sources, such as in the form of fire would still damage the creature. But moderated heat could easily be adsorbed by its tissues and turned directly into chemical energy. Because the alien was constantly absorbing heat from the surroundings, it was always cold (that's why it couldn't be picked up by infra red heat sensors) and as a result it was also picking up a lot of dampness from the air around it.
The Alien grew extremely fast and became larger than a man in a matter of hours. It had both an internal bone structure and an insect like exoskeleton, in various proportions in the body to allow maximum efficiency to the creature's mobility and protection. It could climb on walls and sealing much like an insect with incredible ease relatively to its size. Its powerful tail, claws and double jaws made it the ultimate organic killing machine. It turned out that `the company', namely Weyland-Yutani, which was a greedy and powerful corporation that owned many of the space programs including the freighters, wanted this "perfect organism" for their bio-weapons division. The company knew about the warning beacon describing the alien threat in advance and has sent a synthorganic spy android as a science officer to act for the company's interests. The crew of the freighter was expendable, and the android thwarted their attempts to kill the alien because its mission was to bring it to the company's labs for study. But the android malfunctioned, exposing itself, and was dismantled by the crew.
Despite all the efforts to kill the alien creature, in less than 24 hours the creature wiped out the entire crew of the freighter except of one officer, Ellen Ripley, who activated the self destruct system and escaped in a shuttle, after taking her pet cat with her (which had a physical abnormality that made everyone think that the cat was a male even though it was actually a female). The alien has boarded the shuttle itself, but was finally blown out through the airlock by Ripley and fried by the shuttle's engines. The journey back would have taken 10 months in the mother ship, but the shuttle was much slower. It was designed only as a short-range lifeboat. Together with her cat, Ripley entered the cryogenic hypersleep chamber after setting a course for the inhabited systems nearby with the hopes of being picked up by the interstellar network of traffic control. But her ship drifted unnoticed between the colonized systems. In a blind luck she was eventually found and recovered, after being adrift in space for 57 years. During that time the company has already set up a terraforming colony on LV-426, now called Acheron, with the hopes of sooner or later finding the derelict alien ship (because it had been buried under a lava flow and therefore was hard to locate) and the eggs inside it somewhere on the planet. But the alien ship could not be found because the Nostromo's crew deactivated its beacon when they visited it and because it was now buried deep underground thanks to the volcanic activity on the planet.
After being rescued, Ripley was brought to the gateway station in orbit of Earth. She told her story to the authorities, which didn't believe her. Over 300 worlds with life forms have been surveyed and no such organism was ever encountered on any of them. And the colonists who have been on LV-426 for over 20 years did not complain about these hostile creatures. One of the company heads, whose name was Burk, was also in the hearing when Ripley told her story and gave the precise location of the alien ship. He quickly contacted the colony and instructed them to go to the alien ship to bring organic specimens back.
A week later all contact with the colony ("Hadley's Hope") had been lost. The company sent a military ship, the USS "Sulaco", to investigate, together with Burk who persuaded Ripley to come along after giving her his word that they plan to destroy the creatures, not bring them back for study. Ripley placed her cat in cryogenic stasis in a special facility in Earth's orbit till her return. Since she had very little money, she chose to put her cat in the cheapest cryogenic facility available, one that has operated since the late 20'th century and held a small number of humans who were frozen shortly after they died from various illnesses so they could live on in the far future when cures would be found.
Some time after Ripley left, a random subspace anomaly that passed through the solar system had scooped up the archaic and unprotected space capsule, containing the humans and the cat, and the pod eventually found itself many light years away.
Centuries later, an android named Data serving on the Enterprise D found an interest in the pod and visited it. He found only four functioning stasis tubes - three containing humans and one that seemed to be empty because the cat could not be seen from the window of the large pod. The rest were all damaged and the people inside rotten. He initially returned to the Enterprise with the three humans, but later transported the fourth working pod on board as well, because he found it odd that it was empty, and wanted to check it. Inside he found the cat, and decided to adopt it and named it Spot.

Back in Ripley's time, after joining the USS Sulaco Ripley was shocked to find out that among the crew was also an android; a more modern version of the synthetic person that tried to kill the crew and save the alien on the Nostromo. It was now a standard procedure to have one artificial crewmember on each spaceship.
When they arrived to the planet they found the colony completely empty of people, besides a little girl that was hiding in the small garbage tunnels. By scanning for the colonists' personal data transmitters, the marines located their cocooned bodies which have been moved from the colony into the atmosphere processing station by the aliens, now called "Zenomorphs" which have infested the colony and used all the colonists as hosts, also using their remains for the construction of the nest.
The creatures were working together like a beehive or an anthill sort of society and had many other insect-like characteristics. Since the aliens need heat for their molecular synthesis of organic material, absorbing heat to turn it into chemical energy, they built their nest in the hottest place they could find, inside the atmosphere processing station, which was a huge fusion reactor and generated a lot of heat. The army platoon entered into the alien nest after picking up the implants of the colonists there. One of the marines commented on the high heat and another said "It's a dry heat." The reason for it was because the aliens picked up all the dampness from the air.
The walls of the alien structure were mostly made from a secreted resin of some kind, and its patterns looked similar to the inside of derelict ship in which the eggs were originally found, but Ripley didn't recognize it because she never entered the inside of the derelict ship. Strange extrusions lined the walls, roof and floor. To their horror, the platoon discovered human bodies, and parts of bodies, along with machinery, furniture, struts and other assorted mechanical parts, comprising the alien structure. They even found one live woman inside the wall, the last surviving human cocoon, but the alien inside of her immediately awoken and burst out. As the marines killed the young queen that emerged, alien creatures began emerging from the walls. They weren't picked up on infrared sensors and it was hard to distinguish them from the bioorganic slimy gooey walls, even with the motion sensors.
The nest of the aliens was under the coolant exchanges of the station's fusion reactor, and while shooting there the marines damaged it, leading to the destruction of the entire station a few hours later. Burk constantly tried to bring the aliens back to the ship with them but failed.

Eventually only Ripley, the little girl, the android and one injured marine escaped. But with them so did the queen and one egg. The queen was much larger than the other creatures and was immensely powerful and resistant to weapons. Her thick armor made her almost completely bulletproof and even missiles would do it little harm. Because of her size and purpose, the queen wasn't capable of moving as fast as the other creatures. But she also had twice as many arms, and a much longer and more powerful tail. Because the queen's purpose was to create eggs, it needed more energy and therefore it had a much higher heat absorption rate and capacity. As a result its outer body was extremely cold, below freezing point. That's why the dampness in the air was not becoming water as it came in contact with its body but mostly turned directly into ice. This also provided a greater natural defense against fire. The queen was much more resistant to flamethrowers and did not catch fire, although it did cause her pain.
In total it was much more formidable than the standard Zenomorph creatures. After tearing apart the android Bishop, the queen was eventually thrown out of the airlock by Ripley, but the lucky egg remained hidden in the open bay of the landing craft and was never found.
After defeating the queen, Ripley used the Sulaco's weapons, with the computer authorization of the surviving marine, and nuked the location of the derelict ship, in order to totally wipe out the aliens for good. But she underestimated the hull strength of the alien ship, which survived the multiple nuclear explosions and was merely buried deeper underground, making it harder for anyone to find, but not impossible as was later discovered by the company. Several days later, when the survivors were in hypersleep stasis and heading home, the `facehugger' emerged from the egg and infected Ripley. While breaking the glass of her chamber the creature was cut and its acid bleeding caused damage to the ship's systems and a fire started. The ship couldn't repair the damage and the hypersleep chambers were put into an emergency escape vehicle and ejected into space.
Luckily there was a planet nearby, Fiorina "Fury" 161. But it was a prison planet, inhabited almost entirely by convicted murderers and rapists, all with double Y chromosomes.
They recovered the escape vehicle, and found one survivor: Ripley. Suspecting that there might have been an alien on the ship, Ripley convinced the prison's doctor to destroy the bodies of the others using the furnace. But she later found out that she herself was infected by a queen embryo. Meanwhile the facehugger also infected a dog of one of the prisoners with a regular drone that was meant to protect the queen. When the creature emerged from the dog, it was slightly different from the creatures that emerged from humans. The reason for that was that the aliens fuse their DNA with that of the host to achieve the best possible combination of genes, and draw the best DNA sequences from each host, thus becoming physically similar to the host. This allows the species to exist at virtually any environment on any planet because it draws the necessary surviving skills from its hosts and therefore can exist in the same conditions. It is possible that this is how this species evolved so much; by picking up the best genetic traits of many other species, passing them down to the new eggs as well and retaining the best qualities of all the species it consumed in the past and incorporating them all in itself. Its ultimate goal was probably to join all life forms into itself and become the dominant organism in existence, becoming perfect in the process. If this organism expanded, it would have infested the entire universe, consumed all life, and destroyed everything.
Knowing this, Ripley led the prisoners in an effort to kill the alien and later herself.
Meanwhile the company received a signal that was sent by the ship. They saw that there was an alien that infected Ripley and therefore sent a ship to get her as soon as possible.
Since the prison was a huge smelting factory, the prisoners managed to seal the alien in the mold, thanks to the fact that it would not harm Ripley, and purred liquid metal on it. The alien survived the heated experience but was blown apart by sudden temperature change when it was dipped in cold water. As the alien died its remains were oxidized by its own molecular acid, as happens to all these aliens, and therefore it would not be possible to retrieve any samples from it. The company arrived, among them the designer of the Bishop Class androids, just in time to try to convince Ripley to give herself up to them. They preferred to get the live alien from inside her rather than just its corpse or DNA, because that would make it much easier for them. They promised to save her but she didn't believe their promises to destroy the alien, and for good reason. The Bishop designer (who was the descendant of the Founder of Weyland Industries and one of the company's heads) eventually admitted that he wanted the alien for study. "Think of all we can learn from it. It's a magnificent specimen. A chance of a lifetime."
But Ripley jumped into the giant furnace, completely incinerating herself and the alien, sacrificing herself to save the universe. There was only one survivor from the prison planet, that was now completely shut down and sealed and its remaining equipment sold as junk. But the company did not leave completely empty handed. They found and collected genetic samples of Ripley, whose DNA was now partially intertwined with that of the alien (During the incubation period microscopic alien DNA spores infect the human host and combine with the human DNA). But it was nearly impossible to isolate the alien DNA as it was so scrambled and fragmented that it was not possible to decipher and use at the current level of technology. But the samples were stored for later use. They company has sent a team to the Sulaco. It turned out that there was another queen facehugger there and soon, the Sulaco turned into a giant flying nest. Eventually it was destroyed. Meanwhile the company also diverted its attention and invested its resources back on LV-426, and built a mining colony and research station right above the buried derelict ship. They took heavy precautions and started studying the derelict ship and the eggs inside it. They bred the creatures in laboratories, trying to turn them to programmable biological fighting machines.
But the company underestimated the Zenomorphs, and they managed to get loose. Most of the scientists and soldiers managed to evacuate but many failed and were used as hosts by the rampaging aliens.
One marine who initially stayed behind during the evacuation managed to survive, escape the colony and even kill a queen. But in the end he was infected with an alien himself.
Meanwhile a group of another type of aliens, called the Predators, arrived to the planet.
The Predators were a humanoid species of hunters who were hunting various species in the galaxy, for many thousands of years. When they first arrived at Earth (long before the Goa'uld arrived) the primitive humans worshipped them as gods, and were instructed how to build pyramids and to deliver human sacrifices in order to breed the Aliens for the Predators to hunt. But the Aliens ran loose and consumed the entire early human civilization, overpowering the Predators, who had no choice but to incinerate the continent so that nothing would survive. The first human civilization was wiped out overnight, and though the culture they created lived on, on other continents, the Predators did not return again. Around that time the Goa'uld found Earth and decided to use it as their base of operations because it already had Pyramids, which were suitable as landing pads for their ships and because its people were already accustomed to serving Gods and bringing forth hosts for them. The Goa'uld simply filled the empty seat left over from the Predators.
In the early twenty first century the Predators returned to Antarctica and destroyed the last pyramid that still contained the Aliens, but as they left Earth a new alien queen hatched from one of their warrior's corpses, and quickly overrun their ship with a new swarm of Aliens (which were now much stronger since they were Predator hybrids), and they had no choice but to self destruct to prevent them from reaching their homeworld. Over a century later, a Predator was captured by the company before the evacuation of LV-426 and used for experiments together with the Zenomorphs, creating hybrids of the two types of aliens. Eventually the facility on LV-426 was destroyed completely, together with the derelict ship and all aliens there, thanks to the accidentally coordinated efforts of the heroic Marine and the Predator who initially came there to find the first Predator that has gone missing and also wished to enjoy a good hunt. That Predator warrior hunted both humans and Zenomorphs on LV-426 and on Fury 161 and also killed a queen.
One Zenomorph escaped LV-426 before the destruction and managed to get all the way to Earth. Humanity would have perished if not for a ship of the Predators, that came to orbit just in time and destroyed the Earth bound ship that was carrying the Zenomorph alien and hundreds of eggs. Another Zenomorph also escaped and managed to infiltrate to the homeworld of the Predators, who were too arrogant and overconfident to think that such a thing could happen to them. The Predators shortly became extinct. Where there were once cities were now Zenomorph nests.
A few years later, a Romulan vessel encountered the planet. It took the cloaking technology of the predators from a ship in orbit and later modified and improved the technology and equipped their own ships with it. After seeing what the aliens have done to that world, they obliterated the entire surface from orbit, wiping out all the nests and eggs that were covering the entire planet. Thanks to the Romulans' thoroughness, the alien threat was gone from our area of space.

Back on Earth, the android industry was starting to decline. Androids were well known for their multiple cases of malfunctioning. In a last effort to revitalize the android industry, the company allowed androids to program and design new androids. This second generation of androids, "Autons" as they were called, proved to be too good for their own good. They were not only highly intelligent but were also self aware and conscious, as much as humans. They didn't like getting orders and being used as slaves by humanity. The company feared these new robots might try to rebel and take over, so they ordered a total re-call and eliminated all the androids they could find. Only a handful managed to escape and survive by hiding from humanity.

After giving up trying to recover the Zenomorphs for their military project, the company developed biomechanical killer robots and planned to use them to impose a total dictatorship by the company over all of humanity. But their plan was foiled by a brave crew of a space truck, who managed to destroy the killer robots and even succeeded in accidentally assassinating the new evil President of Earth, who was the head of the company.

After this event, the company was finally exposed; its actions became public knowledge. Everyone knew that the company risked all of humanity for money and power.
This experience shocked humanity and made people realize that they had to change their ways in order to survive.
Humanity took the first step to get rid of money, by eliminating the corrupt and power hungry company that was controlling their entire society. But it would take many more decades until that process would be completely finished, if ever.

The hypersleep system was also abolished. With the new warp 2 engine, people preferred not to freeze themselves in journeys anymore, although it still often took many months to get from place to place.

A United Earth organization called Starfleet was formed. Its main mission was to explore the galaxy, and make peaceful contact with other intelligent life forms. Also it was to assist Earth's colonization efforts and to protect Earth and its colonies from any outside threats. Part of the original Starfleet charter was an organization called Section 31, which was a secret branch of Starfleet Intelligence. But the real history of this section started long before humanity even stepped into space.
Back in the 1950's an American political leader started a secret organization called "Black Sell". Its purpose was to protect the freedoms of the USA at all costs. It waged war against anyone who endangered America's freedom, such as terrorist states, bringing their war to them. They assassinated many major terrorist leaders, without any concern for innocent victims. Their ideology was that the ends justify the means.
Throughout history many different groups were absorbed into the Black Sell. One of them was a civilian group called The National Intelligence Division (NID), which was a shadowy government agency that monitored the Stargate program and Stargate command, with large-scale rogue groups operating on and off world. The 'NID' was a 'legitimate' government organization whose purpose was to monitor top secret endeavors. In reality, the NID were largely corrupt and their main target was to acquire technology and knowledge to defend Earth against the Goa'uld by any means possible, including stealing from other cultures. Their most influential member was senator Kinsey who almost succeeded in his plot to become president.
For a while the NID used Earth's second Stargate to gain technologies to defend Earth by whatever means necessary. Eventually the second Stargate (that was found in Antarctica) was moved to the SGC. But the NID was still involved in many dark projects, and broke off from government control and became an independent organization calling itself "The Trust". It was eventually infiltrated into by the Goa'uld (who planned to use this resourceful organization with world wide connections to cause a world war). Eventually the Goa'uld infiltrators were destroyed, together with most of the Trust. But the survivors of this organization were recruited by the Black Sell. Another small group called the Boondocks Saints, which was devoted to rid the world of crime (which started with just two Irish men) also joined the black sell.
And maybe most important of all, the organization which called itself Men in Black, which became somewhat out of job after all aliens left Earth, also joined the Black Sell. Even though most of its members returned to normal lives after their memories were erased. Some of them chose to join the Black Sell.

And so the Black Sell operated on its own, mostly against crime and terrorism. It also served a key role in defeating Khan Sing and his empire during the third world war. When humanity started exploring space, they knew that the next serious threat would come from aliens, and so they made sure that they were incorporated into the new space-exploration fleet, and so became an unofficial part of Starfleet intelligence under the code name Section 31.

In 2150 the last of Earth's nations joined the united Earth government (Australia was the last to join the union, which was at first called SICON, Strategically Integrated Coalition of Nations), and the Vulcans finally accepted Earth into the enlightened interstellar community. A year later the first long-range Earth Starship, Enterprise NX01, was launched, and became the first of a dynasty of famous starships that were exploring space ever since. The Starship was equipped with the fastest engine in Starfleet, capable of reaching warp 5. It was commanded by Jonathan Archer, who was the son of the man who helped develop that engine.
The starship Enterprise (the name and design of which was suggested by Zefran Cochrane by the example of the Enterprise from the future which he saw) made contact with dozens of new races and explored far reaches of space. But in their cautionless, the humans caused several great catastrophes to less advanced races they met, because of interfering with them. Despite their good intentions, the humans caused great disasters, and because of this the Earth government decided to form the Prime Directive, which forbidden interferences with unprepared cultures because of the dangers in doing so, and so that Earth wouldn't have to take responsibility for the disasters that could happen because of them. The Earth formed diplomatic ties with many alien races, but some races were hostile toward the humans. One race, that was named the Romulans, which kept itself very well hidden from the human eye, even attacked Earth directly with nuclear weapons. A devastating war followed. The Romulans, who wished to conquer all other races, tried to collapse the various alliances that Earth made with many of the races it made contact with, but it eventually caused the opposite effect. Because of the Romulan threat, the various planets decided to come together in a great united alliance. Even races like the Andorians who themselves were in the beginning hostile toward humans and Vulcans, joined the alliance with the humans, the Vulcans, the Tellarites and a few other races that all became the founding members of the United Federation of planets. Ten years after the first Enterprise headed out for its voyager for the first time, the Federation was formed, deterring the Romulans from making any more aggression acts against them and establishing a neutral zone between Romulus and the Federation.

Until the Dominion War of the 2370's, the Earth-Romulan War was the bloodiest and fiercest interstellar conflict in galactic history. Yet for many years, this "War Before the Peace" was largely ignored by historians. The Earth-Romulan War was forgotten mainly because of Federation policy and attitudes in the late 22nd century. Most historians simply preferred to overlook this unpleasant episode in Federation history. With the Federation's focus on colonization efforts along the western galactic frontier, events near Romulan border tended to be neglected. Most importantly, the Romulans themselves were safely isolated behind the Neutral Zone, which remained one of the most heavily fortified borders in the known galaxy, where they were conveniently forgotten.

The Earth-Romulan War was unique in many ways. At the start of the war, interstellar travel and communication were still in their infancy. Starships rarely exceeded warp 4 and had to rely on automated relays for communication. Subspace radio was inefficient: transmitters were extremely complicated and were carried only by the most advanced starships, until late in the war. Weaponry was limited to short-range lasers and phase cannons and warp-capable fusion missiles.
Before the war Humans and Romulans had had little contact with each other; the first direct communications were by subspace radio. In addition, there was no known personal contact of any kind.
Ship-to-ship combat sometimes took place over distances of thousands or millions of kilometers, and colonies were either evacuated before attack or completely destroyed from orbit. UE (United Earth) Intelligence had little success deciphering Romulan communications. That the Romulans were an offshoot of the Vulcan race was not discovered until more than a century later. The only soldiers that were ever seen were of a slave race of the Romulans, called the Remans.

The Earth/Romulan war was the first major interstellar war that Earth experienced, and until the Dominion war, which was a hundred times more destructive, it was the most terrible chapter of Earth's entire history. But thanks to the Romulan threat, all the freedom-loving planets of the regions which opposed the Romulans' plans for galactic domination, united together in a great alliance, centering Earth, to defeat the Romulans. This Earth-led coalition managed to cripple the Romulan empire, driving them back into a long isolation, enforced by the cease fire treaty between them and the alliance, which eventually became the united Federation of planets, and established a permanent neutral zone separating the two adversaries for centuries to come.

After the end of the Romulan war, Earth encountered a deadly new enemy, which threatened the entire galaxy. It was a community of interstellar insects that resided on the other side of the galaxy, just on the border between the gamma and delta quadrants. The newest warp speed engines could only reach warp 7, and it would normally take over 200 years to reach that area of the galaxy. But a subspace "highway" was discovered leading through various areas in the galaxy, allowing a quick passage between Earth and the aliens' homeworld in a matter of days.
These aliens (which were in fact an offshoot of the Zerg species) were incredibly advanced insects, actually were composed of many different types of insects all working together as a single community. They possessed the ability to travel through space, and colonize entire planets with their spores. They were already present on hundreds of planets and were expanding. They posed a grave threat to Earth.
The pacifist Vulcans claimed that the bugs were hostile because they felt threatened because humans invaded their natural habited space. The Vulcans pushed for a "live and let live" policy in dealing with these aliens. But the bugs didn't share the same ideals as the Vulcans. The bugs used some kind of powerful plasma energy beams in order to push meteorites into warp to the direction of earth. The first one impacted the Atlantic Ocean, creating a huge wave of water that reached the coasts of the continents around and flooded them.

Parts of England, North America's east coast, West Europe and North Africa suffered damage. The death tall was high; almost five million people were lost. In response Earth built a massive planetary defense system and became confident that such a catastrophe would never happen again. The largest of the planetary defense systems was constructed around the moon, but it was somewhat limited because the moon was not always at the right side of the Earth.
Most of the meteorites were destroyed before hitting Earth, but at some point, one meteorite managed to pass through all the defenses and collided directly into South America, killing over 10 million people. This time there was no choice but to react to the continuing alien aggression. The best defense was offense.
A state of war was declared, and soon after, the invasion of the bug-infested systems began. It was the only way to secure the safety of Earth. But the war was much more difficult than expected, because the insects were not only biologically advanced but also had intelligent "brain bugs" which could suck out the brains of people and gain tactical and strategic knowledge of their operations.
The war stretched into many distant areas of the galaxy, such as the devastating battle that took place in the famous "Zegema beach" in the outer rings of the galaxy, on the very edge of the warp highway. The turning point of the war came with the capture of one of the brain bugs for study as Federal forces crushed the enemy at Tango Urilla. Armed with victory, the heroic men and women of the mobile infantry pushed deep into the Arachnid quarantine zone and took the fight to the bug. As the bugs started loosing the war, they developed a plan in which they would be able to infiltrate humanity and take it over from the inside. They developed a strain of parasitic insects, which could enter humans through the mouth and take control of their brains. They hoped that in this way they would be able to spread unnoticed through the human population and take over Earth and the leaders of the Federation. But their plot was discovered by a platoon stranded deep in the enemy zone, on which the bugs made their first experiment in trying to take over human bodies. And so the Federation took precautions and made sure to check all soldiers returning from missions. The war continued. The Federation continued to develop better weapons and defenses, such as the revolutionary powered armor suit, and the phaser pulse rifle.
Millions more died before the insects were finally defeated and their race went extinct.
Only one member of the insect race managed to survive; they were the small and inferior sub-species of the insects, the parasites which could take over human bodies. They escaped and hid from the humans, and two centuries later they tried to take over Earth again by inhabiting and taking over the bodies of important humans and thus preparing the way for their massive invasion. But the disadvantage of this insect sub-species was that they could not extract the full memories out of their possessed hosts, and therefore they did not succeed in infiltrating Starfleet without suspicion and eventually they all died because they were all dependent on a certain mother creature that was killed by two Starfleet officers. But just before dying, the mother creature sent a homing beacon from Earth, toward an unexplored sector of the Beta quadrant. The homing breacon was received by the Zerg Overmind, which planned to invade Earth after he'd finish conquering the strongest known species in the galaxy, the Protoss. Luckily, with the help of the Terran colonists that got stranded in that area of the galaxy, the Overmind was destroyed, and the threat was over.

Soon after Earth's final victory against the bugs, the super efficient warp highways that spread like a web through the galaxy, allowing travel time of only days between the two areas, have faded from existence. Apparently they had been maintained by the bugs. It was previously unknown that warp highways were so short lived and unstable.

Captain Kirk would one-day travel to the center of the galaxy thanks to the short-lived and partial reappearance of the highway that led to the other side of the galaxy.
This was after the evil entity known as Anubis, which was trapped on a planet in the center of the galaxy behind a spatial barrier, successfully made contact with someone in the galaxy; a Vulcan named Sybok who was one of the most psychically advanced Vulcans in history. Sybok would brainwash people to follow him and help him get a ship to pass the great barrier in the core of the galaxy and meet `God'. He managed to take control of the starship Enterprise and bring it through the barrier. When they stood face to face with the entity, Captain Kirk realized that it was evil and planned to use the ship to escape its prison. With the help of Sybok who sacrificed himself by mind melding with the entity and weakening it, Kirk managed to destroy the entity using the firepower of his ship and a Klingon bird of prey, or so he thought. In actuality, the fire only strengthened the entity, and it managed to escape its prison by shifting itself through time and space and finally arrived in the far past and tried possessing a race of shape shifters, who were living together almost as one entity in some sort of great link, but the changelings managed to use some technique to remove the evil infestation, which then turned into a being in itself. Thus the cunning entity again managed to reincarnate itself into a physical form, now calling itself Armus. The Changelings left the monster on a deserted planet, where it remained waiting for when it could again rise and rule the universe. It's time came in the late 24'th century, when it managed to escape from its prison planet and spread across the Alpha Quadrant. (See Chapter 7) It was eventually defeated when it was trapped falling forever into a black hole. It finally reached the singularity in the center of the black hole only in the very end of the universe. At that moment, it shifted into another dimension, and now existed from the very beginning of the universe, in all points of space and time. From there it constantly tried to return to our plain of existence and to take over or destroy all of creation.

The Ancient Iconians were the ones who originally accidentally opened up a dimensional rift that allowed the evil entity to return to our universe in its raw form. A window into another dimensional plane was opened, and the evil entity from the other side crossed into this one. Its goal was to take over the universe with its dark shadow and to destroy life, all forms of life, for all eternity. Because life upset it.
The window was opening periodically ever since (with alarmingly shortening intervals) due to a specific planetary alignment of a solar system not far from Earth. And even the Iconians couldn't find a way to stop it or even to slow it down (destroying or attempting to move the planets that were generating the gravitational forces that were opening the rift would only shorten the length of time till the next opening). When it first came, the entity made chaos in the galaxy, bringing harm to much of the Iconian empire (that was also one of the reasons for their downfall), destroying all life wherever it could find it. Since the dawn of time this entity of absolute and ultimate evil was spreading its tendrils through the fabric of existence. Luckily, with their advanced technology and power the Iconians managed to create a one of a kind weapon that could stop the entity. It was made up of 4 elements of life gathered around a fifth, a supreme being, the ultimate warrior created to protect life, which together generated the "divine light of creation", the light of total goodness, capable of bringing life to the farthest reaches of the Universe, that was the only thing that could defeat evil. The fifth element was an engineered humanoid organism that channeled the energies of the other four parts and created the ray that was the only thing that could stop the entity. Any other type of weapon that would be inflicted upon the entity would only make it stronger, because it fed and grew from evil deeds of other souls. This weapon was originally built to bring life to the entire galaxy after all life had been castrated by the great plague. The Ancients used it on the Pegasus galaxy as well. And the evil Anubis later tried to use it to destroy all life in our galaxy. Therefore it was vital that this weapon would not fall to the wrong hands.
The task of creating this weapon took a great deal of resources from the Iconians. It was put on a planet rich with life not too close and not too far from where the dimensional window was forming. Since the entity sought to destroy life, it was certain that it would approach the planet, and come into the weapon's range. And that planet was Earth. Luckily, the entity could not act right away, but first had to adapt itself to the conditions of this universe, a length of time of 48 hours. If the evil entity stood in between the four elements instead of the fifth element, than it would generate the ray of death instead of the ray of life, brining darkness to the entire universe forever. Therefore the four elements of the weapon were alluring to the evil entity because it could use them in order to spread across the entire universe instantaneously, it was guarantied that the entity would go toward Earth each time, to take the chance to take over this universe in one single move. Luckily, when the Iconian Empire (also known as the Tkon Empire) collapsed the galaxy didn't remain defenseless, since the Iconians gave their weapon of 5 elements to a species they knew to be responsible. That species also taught a small group of humans about the weapon, and those humans passed down that information to their children over the centuries, and remained loyal to their saviors. For several times they had used the weapon and defeated the entity every time. But 300 years before evil's next coming the alien species realized that the weapon was at too much risk being on Earth, because they knew that Earth might soon face an interstellar war, so they took it away in order to return it at the time of the opening, to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
In 2214 (by this time the Federation already had over 200 billion citizens) when the entity came again, it almost succeeded taking over the weapon, thanks to the destruction and chaos caused by its agents. The four elements almost fell to evil's hands, and the fifth element itself was killed. Luckily, it was reconstructed in an advanced Nucleological lab on Earth.

Once it adapted itself, the evil entity in the form of a giant ball of darkness and fire started going straight toward Earth. But in the last moment, it was frozen by the ray created by the five elements, turning to nothing more than a giant ball of dust that mystically froze in space. Strangely it looked like the moon.
The frozen ball that used to be the evil entity held in space for a few minutes and then it shattered, revealing itself to be nothing more than a thin empty shell, and dispersed in space, as happened to all the others that came before it.

Back to more down to the lower dimensions issues: In the early 23rd century the Klingon empire was regressing into total isolation for some unknown reason. The Federation lost all contact with it for almost a decade. The next official contact that humans made with the Klingons came only in 2218, by then it was discovered that the Klingon race had changed. Apparently the Klingons tried using genetic engineering to enhance their species, with devastating results. Since they used technology that they stole from Earth's Eugenics War remains... the gene-resequencing that they used caused a side effect of altering the Klingons' appearance to look human (since it contained a fair amount of human genome), and did not succeed in making the Klingons physically stronger or smarter. The mutant genes combined with a virus, and the mutated air-born virus was accidentally released to the planet's atmosphere, quickly spreading from planet to planet by Klingon passengers, eventually reaching their homeworld and infecting their entire population, which transformed almost overnight. It took the Klingons over a century to develop an anti-virus that restored their species to its former glory. The Klingons were not seen or heard of in for long while after their initial transformation, which embarrassed the Klingons greatly. The first renewed contact with the smooth-headed Klingons didn't go well; in fact it was a disaster, resulting in the Federation inadvertently making a powerful new enemy. The relationship between the Federation and Klingon Empire went downhill from there onwards and in 2242 both sides fought against each other, and the conflict ended in stalemate.

This era was considered to be the second age of humanity. The Earth year was 2257, The Babylon Project was a dream given form, a place for all the races of the galaxy to meet and work peacefully. Babylon 5 was the latest station to be constructed; the previous four had all been destroyed by xenophobic Earth factions protesting the massive stations. Babylon 5 was a joint Earthgov/Minbari venture, since the Earth Alliance (the federation) could not afford to build another station on its own. In exchange for financial and material assistance, the Minbari government claimed the right to name the commander of the facility, they chose Captain Jeffrey Sinclair. Capt. Sinclair was a distinguished naval officer, he served courageously during the Minbari Border War and the Narn-sponsored Mars Rebellion. The Minbari respected Sinclair as a warrior and as a man who exercised restraint, he was famous for treating Minbari prisoners of war with fairness and compassion. B5 was located in the "Epsilon Eridani Sector", a huge region of space, about a hundred light years from Earth.
The main diplomatic body of Babylon 5 was the Advisory Council, made up by the ambassadors of Earth and many other worlds. The League of Non-Aligned Worlds held a lesser role, they could advise the Council, but had very little power of their own since they were made up of a large number of varies races. Captain Sinclair represented the Earth Alliance. Although this area of space was relatively very far from Earth, Babylon 5 nevertheless was an important step stone toward the expansion of the Earth Alliance, or the Federation as it was also called, for it was a major example of how well humans could interact and work together with aliens. Note: a lot of time travel, and extra-dimensional interference had severely destabilized that region, therefore a lot of what happened around Babylon 5 actually happened in alternate time lines and parallel realities, and was not recorded in Federation history since a lot of those events didn't happen in our own timeline or dimensional region.
Being on the edge of the far side of the Federation, the area of Babylon 5 was considered to be the backwater area of the Federation and was getting almost no attention from Starfleet.
As a result, many hostile aliens other than the Romulans, who did not make any further aggressive acts after their losses in their first war with Earth, saw an opportunity to take over those under protected territories, which were severely weakened due to multiple interstellar wars between the races of that area. The first major power to strike a blow at that tender area was the Klingon Empire. It conquered many territories in that area, and attacked many of the homeworld of both the hostile and friendly races near Babylon 5. The Klingon Empire barbarically slaughtered entire populations and committed genocide against many of those species, which then became extinct. The Federation reacted to that barbaric Klingon expansion by severing all diplomatic contact with them, and making trading sanctions against the empire, but that was all.
The Klingon empire was satisfied for having gained so much territory and didn't make any more attempts to conquer more of that space, knowing that too much territory would be more of a burden than a benefit. But in the next century there was a new growing empire that wanted to have it's share of Alpha quadrant territories; the Cardassian Union.
The Cardassians were in many ways more ruthless than the Klingons. They conquered most of the territories that were around Babylon 5, and the station itself was destroyed at some point. Loosing the major foothold in that area the Federation had no choice but to retreat to safer grounds and watch helplessly as almost all the races of that area of space were conquered one by one by the Cardassians, used for slave labor (the Klingons didn't made populations into slaves as much as the Cardassians did), and eventually after stripping them of all the resources and work that they possible could, the Cardassians eliminated those entire exploited populations till extinction. The Cardassian Empire became a major power in the quadrant, and its borders came closer and closer to those of the Federation.

To counter the increasing threats from all sides, the Federation needed protection. To survive it had to expand. To do this and to draw as many species as possible into this vast alliance of planets. Total democracy was once again established. From now on all people born in the Federation or joined it had automatic citizenship, and would not live under Earth's dictatorial rule with humanity having the supreme dominance. Also from now on everyone had equal rights and could vote and elect leaders or be elected, and that privilege was no longer limited by any racial considerations. Starfleet had also began to improve itself. It invested a lot of resources for the democratic core to make contact with new races and civilizations and establish peaceful relationships with them with the hopes of welcoming them to the Federation one day.
The Federation grew in size rapidly over the next few years. Unlike other powers, they did this not by conquering other worlds, but by offering the hand of friendship to races they met. To some worlds, the advantages of joining such an alliance was too hard to resist, and resulted in increased trade, security and better understanding of how other races in the galaxy lived. Some worlds were worried about the influence that the "Federation outsiders" would have on their culture, and they refused to build a relationship with the alliance, or decided to have limited contact with the Federation, but no more. But most of the races near Earth agreed to join the interstellar alliance of governments, for the benefits of sharing and taking part in trade, exploration, scientific, cultural and defensive activities. Entry into the alliance would depend on certain factors, for instance, a planet applying for membership would need a World Government representing its people, and caste-based discrimination would not be permitted. Each member of the Federation had a representative on the Federation council, which was based in the Earth city of San Francisco, Earth. A president led the council, and the presidential offices were now located at Paris.
A new generation of starships was created. One of the first ones was the USS NCC 1701 Enterprise, under the command of James T Kirk. At the early times of captain Kirk, the Federation had a hard time dealing with the human looking Klingons, who despite never discussing the reason for their facial change with outsiders, blamed the humans for their shameful condition. During this second empire, the Klingons wanted to make themselves stronger, to prove that they were still Klingons. To accomplish that they wanted to expand their territory again. They again started attacking weaker planets. At some point they sent a massive invasion fleet to conquer the homeworld of a race called the Breen, who they greatly underestimated, and their fleet was never heard from again. After this experience the Klingons adopted a more moderate approach and stopped trying to conquer everything.

Captain Kirk and his crew had many adventures, and not long after the destruction of their first Enterprise, were commissioned to the Enterprise A, on which they had several more adventures. After his retirement, Kirk has paid a visit to the new Enterprise B on her first shakedown cruise, and was believed to have been killed while saving it from a mysterious energy ribbon, but in reality has arrived to a paradise like dimension.

Meanwhile, the Cardassian and Klingon empires had a dispute over a small point of space they both wanted to annex. The dispute resulted in a conflict that lasted 18 years.

Meanwhile, problems started to form inside the Federation. Some old military factions wanted to restore the federation to its initial nature, that of an iron hand and aggression that deterred their enemies. At this time there was an inter-federal military organization called "the United Systems", it's main purpose was to preserve the safely of the Federation, keep Earth's dominance over all other planets, and punish those that attempted to rebel and leave the Federation.
An extremist general of this organization wanted to revive Earth's old bio-weapons division, specifically the Zenomorph research. The general, Perez, collected a group of scientists, obtained the original DNA samples of Ripley from Fury 161, and sponsored a massive research to recreate the alien species. The research into these organisms would have more benefits than just suppressing rebellions; like developing new alloys, vaccines to many diseases, and countless other fields.
To do their research, they needed hosts. It wasn't cheap or easy to clone living bodies, that's why they needed real people to make sure they were without genetic mistakes. They couldn't kidnap any people because they could be discovered, and they couldn't get animals because there were no animals in space, and asking for animals from Earth or any other planet would arouse suspicion. This was a rogue operation, not supported by the government, and strived to remain secret. They did their research on a ship in deep space, far from any eyes.
They hired a ship of human mercenaries and offered them money for brining them hosts.
The mercenaries found an old ship that was lost in deep space for over a century because of an engine malfunction. Its crew was still in a deep hyper sleep. Since the ship was presumed lost, no one would miss its passengers. They took over the ship and brought the containers to the massive military ship. Together with the mercenaries joined one of the "Auton" androids. Her plan was to sabotage the research in order to save humanity, since she was programmed to help humans.
But she was too late. Ripley has been recreated together with the alien queen inside of her. Using the hosts, a dozen more aliens were created. Since Ripley's DNA was partially fused with that of the aliens, both she and the queen were now hybrids of each other.
The queen eventually gave birth to the perfect hybrid, which killed the queen and saw Ripley as its mother. But Ripley used that as an advantage and managed to kill the horrific baby creature.

The aliens that have ravaged the ship were about to infest Earth because the ship was headed to land there at home base. Ripley, the android Call, and the surviving mercenaries managed to escape the ship. The auto destruct of the infested ship could not be activated because the ship was using up too much energy of its old fusion reactor, and therefore couldn't reach critical mass. In order to destroy the alien threat and save the galaxy, the android Call made the ship crush into Earth, programming the ship to slow down as much as possible before impact to minimize the amount of damage and number of casualties of Earth.
The massive ship crashed into South Africa, killing millions of people. But the Earth was saved once again. Although the crash polluted the atmosphere with a lot of dust that blocked the sun, the air was purified and cleaned within days using the advanced weather control system that Earth had. The improved Ripley and her synthetic companion, Call, later traveled to the far reaches of space to find the original source of the alien menace. They eventually found and destroyed the Alien homeworld, securing the universe. The United Systems Militia was exposed as an unmoral organization and was scratched, making the Federation a real democratic, free, liberal, peaceful and open society, as its constitution dictated.

A century later, the Federation was still prospering. Although the vast Federation was now over 8,000 light years in maximum length if counting all its distant colonies, it did not yet encounter any of the far planets that are inhabited by ancient humans from Earth. But as the Federation was growing in size and volume, it was only a matter of time before they encounter them, and the human race would experience many surprises when they discover that 400 years ago humans were already exploring the galaxy and making contact with new life forms, and the exiled humans would finally be re-united with their brethren from Earth. And when the federation would encounter all the distant alien races that once became good friends of Earth, it would undoubtedly increase the Federation's sphere of influence across the galaxy, making the Federation the greatest and most popular power to ever exist on the face of the galaxy.

And that was precisely what happened during the Dominion war. Although most of Starfleet was currently heavily concentrated in the core of the Federation, in the region where the Dominion war was taking place, some starships were left in the distant parts of the federation, protecting and assisting the distant planets and colonies. One of those ships has found a planet colonized by humans. Those humans told the Starfleet officers legends about the SG1 team and their journeys. Eventually, Starfleet pieced up the puzzle and uncovered the truth that was buried under the bureaucracy of ancient Earth. The Federation published all those findings, and the support for Earth and the federation throughout the quadrant overwhelmingly grew. The Dominion was extremely bewildered with this new finding, which showed that humans have saved the entire galaxy from a vastly superior foes despite all the odds, and unimaginably increased the Federations popularity in the quadrant, outmatching all of the Dominion's massive propaganda that they've been generating against the Federation. The Dominion's popularity no longer grew with its brutality.
The Federation was now getting much more support than the Dominion, and that proved to be extremely valuable for the war effort, by diplomatic, economic and even military support as well as by increasing Federation's moral and improving its fighting spirit. Suddenly, the odds of winning became higher. But it would still take many more miracles to achieve a lasting victory against the Dominion.

In the late 24'th century, the evil entity from another dimension tried getting into our Universe again. Starfleet managed to find a way to seal the dimensional rift for good, isolating the evil entity in its dimension forever. But the plan was only accomplished with the help of the last Iconian outpost, known as the Edo God. (see chapter 8). The Iconians sacrificed themselves to eliminate the evil entity for good. But they were transformed to completely none corporeal, none linear beings, later known as the Prophets, living inside a wormhole. But before perishing for all time, the entity managed to possess and corrupt some of the wormhole beings, and turned them to its own agents. Those Prophets became known as the "Pah-Wraiths", the false Prophets. The true Prophets saw what has happened to their brothers, but could not terminate their existence. The Pah-Wraiths tried to take over their plane of existence, the celestial temple, in order to take over that dimension to later move on to the lower ones and conquer the entire universe, in all its planes and realities.
The Prophets protected themselves by banishing the Pah-Wraiths from the temple, and imprisoning them in fire crystals on a planet in the lower dimension. They were imprisoned deep underground at a place called "the fire caves" - essentially it was an anti-wormhole. The heavenly celestial temple was a place where linear time didn't exist, the Prophets were moving at infinite speed through time and thus existed in all points of time simultaneously. In the hellish anti wormhole however, time stood still for the Pah wraiths. That's why they were trapped in there forever.
One of the Pah Wraiths managed to escape both from the Prophets and from the other Pah Wraiths and away from the celestial battle. It traveled across the universe, looking for ways to survive in the low dimensions environment in which it couldn't sustain itself for long without a receptacle. Since these life forms existed in the lower plane only as complex anionic and anaphasic energy, which was extremely unstable, they were weak and vulnerable and had to be maintained, either in an organic life form that would serve as a host, an ancient artifact with an anaphasic pattern or a complex technological systems of plasma energy with the right conditions, otherwise they would loose cohesion and die. At some point, the rogue Pah Wraith reached Earth, and found a family of people who had a genetic biochemistry that was most suited for sustaining its energy matrix. It assumed a male form and had used the female members of that family throughout many centuries in order to survive, and even had them construct a special plasma based candle for him to help him reserve his energy and manifest himself better. In the 24'th century he even had his host move to a planet with sophisticated weather grid which he could use to help himself (on Earth such an attempt would be more easily discovered but on that planet the system was less guarded and not nearly so closely monitored). When the creature attempted to imprint itself onto the next available female host of the family, after the previous one died, it was discovered by the Enterprise D crew and was eventually destroyed by its would be host, doctor Beverly Crusher. The other evil Pah Wraiths were trapped in the fire caves, but even from their prison, the Pah-Wraiths were constantly spreading their evil influence in order to gather followers and worshipers who would eventually release them. That's why in order to keep the primitive race that was living on that planet of Bajor on their side and to keep them from being manipulated by the powers of evil that now had a strong presence on their planet, the Prophets encouraged the Bajorans to establish an entire religion around them, to make them worship that which was good instead that which was evil. Because of their spatial nearness to the Pah Wraiths the Bajorans were at the biggest risk of being lured to the dark side, therefore the Prophets gave them the most attention than any other species. As a result, the Bajorans became probably the most spiritual people than any other in this galaxy. The Prophets had opened the doorway to their dimension near Bajor, and started making contact with different Bajorans to warn them about the future and about possible dangers from the Pah-Wraiths, and those Bajorans wrote down their words in the form of prophesies, hence the names of these gods. The Prophets existed outside of the `normal' space-time continuum and did not have linear time and existed in all points of time at once. The human scientist Paul Manheim even saw them once when he accidentally opened a crack into their dimension.

The Pah-Wraiths struggled to free themselves, to get revenge, reclaim the higher dimensions and destroy the lower universe, so that evil would finally prevail. Now and then the Pah Wraiths succeeded in using their collective powers to free one of them from their prison. One time a human woman was possessed by one of them when she visited the firecaves, and then tried to kill the Prophets, but eventually the Pah Wraith was itself killed. But the most significant Pah Wraith that was released was their leader, Kost Amojan, who was virtually immortal and managed to avoid defeat each time and even had the ability to shift through time and space, and continuously tried to free the others from the firecaves. To prevent this from happening, to protect themselves and to save the universe, the Prophets created their Emissary. They chose a human being, since humans were the chosen people, who managed to defeat evil so many times throughout history. The Emissary did not fail in his task, and managed to save the universe from the newest manifestations of evil.
By far the most ominous event of those depressive years was the emergence of Dukat in Cardassia. A psychopathic personality, he rejected all conventional moral standards. He had disclosed his abhorrence of such concepts as equality and majority rule, his hatred of Bajorans, his belief that Cardassians were a master race entitled to dominate others, and his conviction that the state had a right to use any means to achieve its ends. He had also set forth his views on foreign policy. He held that Cardassia should expand so that the Cardassian people would have space for living. At the same time he declared that Cardassia had to have "a final active reckoning with the Federation and the Klingon Empire". His words showed that he desired Cardassian hegemony over the entire Alpha quadrant and would have no scruples about the methods he used. His evil nature was the result of a twisted mind and a tainted soul. After his failure to acquire total control of the Alpha quadrant using the Dominion, he suffered a complete nervous and mental breakdown. The Pah Wraiths used that opportunity to win him to their favor. He became their follower, their emissary, and tried to release them from their prison in order to take over the universe with them. Luckily, he was stopped by the Emissary of the Prophets, and was trapped with the Pah Wraiths in the fire caves for all eternity, finally getting to where he belonged, to hell, while the Emissary ascended to the paradise of the celestial temple.

The Pah-Wraiths were now locked forever in their eternal prison, and Bajor was blessed with a thousand years of prosperity, as compensation for the sacrifice it had to make for the Prophets, having to endure the Cardassian occupation and later being on the front line of the Dominion war, which was yet another epic embodiment of the war of good versus evil.

<< BACK