Friday, April 27, 2012

My Zombie Apocalypse Team, Part A: Timeline

[Story fragment here, explanation here.]

Before the dawn of Civilization – Volturi founded.

1090 Hassan Sabah founded the Order of Assassins or Hashishim. This is the earliest organization to which the Illuminati can trace their lineage.

1118 – The Templars are founded.

1307 – Templars arrested across Europe.

1312 – Templars officially dissolved, surviving members go underground, forming a long lived conspiracy group.

1776 – Adam Weishaupt starts the modern Illuminati from scratch in Bavaria.  (Thomas Jefferson will independently do the same thing in America a few years later.)  This organization will survive unbroken until the secret war of the 2030s.

1901 – Edward Cullen born.

1918 – Edward Cullen vampirified.

1936 – Cullen clan moves to a town near Forks Washington, makes a treaty with the local werewolves.

1940 – Illuminati begins using smallpox vaccinations to collect genetic data on the population, this data will later be used in the breeding program to create a subject compatible with nano augmentation.

1950s – The Illuminati found two new branches: The Bilderberg Group and Majestic Twelve (MJ12).

1953 - Model year of Bella's truck.

1980s – Original Echelon system created.

1987 – Bella Swan born.

1989 – Bella's parents separate, Bella's mother takes her to California.

1993 – Bella and her mother move to Phoenix, Arizona.
   Estimated birthyear of Tsukasa's player.

2003 – Bella stops visting her father in Forks.
   The Cullen clan moves to Forks

2005 – Bella Swan moves to Forks, gets truck, becomes disillusioned with her story, goes on a long drive, meets an alien, becomes a traveler of time and space.

2006 – A genius named Harald Hoerwick creates a game called Fragment, which is picked up by the CC corporation.

2007 – Fragment, renamed The World, released to the public as a MMORPG.

2010 – Tsukasa becomes trapped in (the platonic ideal of) an online game called The World. Six months of (the platonic ideal) of the internet from this year were linked to the period from, roughly, mid Octoober 2051 to mid April 2052.

2012 – Increased instability resulting from Bella's attempt to cross the 2010-2052 barrier resulted in a handful of internet users, notably facebook users, from this year being bodily transported into 2051 on the leading edge of the anomaly.

2018 – Paul Denton is born, the most successful product of an Illuminati breeding program intended to create people compatible with nano augmentation.

2020s – Mechanical augmentation becomes widespread.

2023 – Paul Denton found to be compatible with nano augmentation. He is cloned. Clones will be experimented on for the next 26 years.

2028 – Testing on the first Paul Denton clones has some promising signs, the decision is made to create a clone in the same womb as Paul.

2029 – JC Denton, a clone of Paul implanted in Paul's mother, is born.

2030 – AIDS is cured
   The entire west coast of the United States is devastated by an almost unbelievably large earthquake.

2031-2032 – Midpoint of the anomaly. Entities from the (platonic ideal of the) internet began to materialize at this point, but before 2051 their impact was largely irrelevant.

2031-2035 – Several secessionists groups spring up throughout the United States, civil war breaks out. Mexico invades with assistance from Russia, the US teeters on the brink of collapse, but eventually stabilizes. MJ12 (led by Bob Page), believing that the Illuminati's non-response to these events is a sign of weakness, rebels and, by 2035, overthrows the Illuminati.

2035 – The biological parents of Paul and JC Denton are murdered by MJ12, because Bob Page believes that they are a bad influence on the brothers. The brothers are adopted by MJ12 employees. Paul heads off to college. JC is sent to a Swiss boarding school.

By the end of the 2030s the global population was reduced to 2 billion via a series of plagues. Vampires, immune to the plagues, were forced to adapt to a sudden reduction in their food supply. With the human population reduced to a fraction of its former size, but the vampire population unchanged, grazing patterns were altered. Some simply made use of the chaos to grab meals they assumed no one would miss, but others, particularly those who depended on tourists, were forced to abandon their old ways and look for better pastures.

The resulting instability caused a series of minor squabbles and wars between vampires, the casualties from which reduced the size of the vampire population to one more in line with the human population. As a result the existence of vampires did not become public knowledge, but in areas where battles took place it was a poorly kept secret.

2040 – Paul Denton joins UNATCO, the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition.

2042 – The NSF, originally the Northwest Secessionist Forces, is re-founded as the National Secessionist Forces. Most separatist groups in the US unite under its flag.
   Believing that the nano augmentation project is a waste of resources, and mechanical augmentation too clunky and conspicuous, MJ12 scientist Arthur Donovan begins to look for other means of human augmentation, investigating claims of individuals with superhuman strength and subhuman compassion.

2043 – Arthur Donovan's research brings a coven of vampires to his attention. He will spend the next three years chasing them.

2045 – Leon Woods, founder of the NSF, dies in an infamous last stand. So the story goes. But rumors abound that a ghostly white apparition of the Washington native was seen some days after the battle. Tales that he sparkled are assumed to be the result of inebriation.

2046 – The Upper West Side bombing takes place. The grid zoning laws are passed in response, sections of New York are walled off so that travel between blocks can be controlled via checkpoints.
   The Ambrosia project begins.

2047 – The Aquinas project, an effort to route all electronic communications through a single hub controlled by MJ12, begins.
   MJ12 first encounters reference to a highly advanced AI that existed in Japan almost four decades earlier.  It is hoped that information on this AI can help them combat Daedalus, a rogue AI MJ12 created that doesn't like their worldview very much.
   Arthur Donovan's team captures Edward Cullen. Research begins on how to give others Cullen's strength and durability.
   JC Denton graduates from the Swiss school.

2048 – Advancements from the Cullen research are incorporated into the physiopharmaceutical augmentation project, specifically the Series L agents. Initially it was believed that the only downside was the pale white skin and red eyes that the augmention resulted in. However when the first agents stepped from the artificial light of the lab into sunlight, Series L was declared a failure. The exact words of the assessing scientist were, “Let us never speak of this again.” Subsequent series would remove the strange reaction to sunlight. The albinism and red eyes would persist.

2049 – Nano augmentation perfected. Most Denton clones were destroyed.
   In the shattered remains of California, the first recorded case of a “sparkling zombie” was observed. Subsequent research indicates that it was the result of a vampire beginning to feed on an infected individual and then leaving in disgust because she “didn't like the taste.”

2050 – Paul Denton becomes UNATCO's first nano augmented agent.
   MJ12 is able to trace references to the Japanese AI to a game called The World, created by the CC corporation.

2051 – UNATCO bombs the Statue of Liberty as part of a successful ploy to use a terrorist attack on the US to make the US a member nation. UNATCO is rechartered, and Liberty Island is donated to it as a headquarters.
   The adoptive parents of Paul and JC Denton are murdered when they object to JC being recruited
   JC Denton joins UNATCO.
   The first significant, if relatively small, wave of the zombie outbreak begins, though it largely goes unnoticed as sick incoherent bitey people are nothing new to the world.
   Characters (notably Tsukasa), items, and monsters from the 2010 online game The World, begin appearing in reality as a result of the anomaly that will be started in the next year.
   The Templars are declared a terrorist group and (mostly) slaughtered. Zombies present during the operation infect several interpol and UNATCO members. These individuals are then sent to various MJ12 labs for study. This is MJ12's first contact with zombies.
   The Voluturi are declared a terrorist group and slaughtered. This occurs without incident. The bodies of the Voluturi are sent to various MJ12 labs for study.
   A group of MJ12 scientists under the leadership of Gary Savage quit their jobs at Area 51, steal everything in their labs smaller than a paperclip, blow up everything larger, and found the group X-51. They are, naturally, branded a terrorist group. They are not yet slaughtered.
   The Gray Death, an nano-tech virus, is unleashed upon the world. MJ12, which released it, is also the only entity with a vaccine, Ambrosia, which they use for political leverage.
   Beth Duclare, a former Illuminati leader, is assassinated.
   Bella Swan's attempt to push through the anomaly creates temporal instability throughout the entire period from 2010 to 2052 and results in her becoming stranded here. It also results in several people being pulled from near one side of the anomaly (circa 2012) to this point in time.
   Walton Simons, second in command of MJ12, is appointed to be head of FEMA.

2052 – A global coalition of resistance groups attempt to steal barrels of the Ambrosia, the vaccine for the Gray Death, so that it can be sent back to Hong Kong to be analyzed by the resistance scientist Tracer Tong.
   UNATCO plans a global raid on resistance groups to crush the resistance once and for all.
   JC Denton becomes an active duty agent.
   MJ12's attempts to retrieve information about the Japanese AI by accessing archives from 2010 results in them linking not the the archives themselves, but to the ideal of the archives, which, being timeless, is the same as it was in 2010. This, and an unfortunate incident involving Coca Cola, a control panel, and a fusion power generator, creates the anomaly.
   The second wave of zombies arise, in much greater numbers than the first. They come from two sources.  The first is that the anomaly didn't limit itself to The World, but also managed to bring in some contamination from a Capcom game. The second is that MJ12 base security really, really sucks, and several of the zombies they had been experimenting on escaped.
   Several vaccines to the zombification are developed, both by the resistance and the conspiracy groups, but none see widespread distribution.
   Order breaks down across the world. In the US, UNATCO and NSF troops find themselves fighting side by side against zombie hordes. Bob Page's plans for apotheosis will have to wait.
   DVL begins small, but overt, tests of her power over the earth.
   Bella Swan, attempting to return to her home time of 2005, encounters the anomaly. She attempts to force her way through it, becoming stranded in 2051.

-

[Previously: General Thoughts on getting the team together][Next: Story, Part 2]

1 comment: