Mission Genesis -- Show Info

This is the story of Reb and Yuna in the year 2695 AD, and how, at a young age, they came to be in charge of the space ark DEEPWATER, along with four other young crewmates.

Mission Genesis follows the story of how these young humans came to be the guardians of the survival of the human species, and how they carry out their mission to repopulate planet earth, which no longer harbors any human life.




THE STORY OF MISSION GENESIS




The future crew members of Deepwater - Yuna (NICOLE DEBOER), Reb (GORDON MICHAEL WOOLVETT) and the others - rest in their chrysalis capsules, slowly growing, maturing, and being programmed until the appointed time, years away at a mature age, when they will be ready to emerge and take command of the ship.

Unfortunately, Deepwater cannot wait that long; it is under attack by an alien ship; it needs a human crew. The onboard control system will need to wake Reb and Yuna now. When Reb and Yuna exit their capsules they face an emergency situation for which they have no time to prepare. They are subject to a mysterious predator.

If they are lucky enough to defeat the immediate threat, they will need every bit of energy, skill, teamwork and luck they can muster to navigate a safe route back on course for planet earth.

Yuna and Reb will need the close co-operation of their four crewmates - Bren (JASON CADIEUX), Gret (KELLI TAYLOR), Lise (SARA SAHR) and Zak (CRAIG KIRKWOOD) - in order to stay alive and accomplish their first mission.

The other crew members are as individualistic as Reb and Yuna. Getting these disparate personalities to work together as a team is a difficult task. However, each of them realizes that he or she cannot survive without the others.

A biomass computer was installed on Deepwater to look after the mission tasks while the crew was in cryo sleep. The biomass computer, Gen (JULIE KHANER) projects a human hologram of itself to communicate with the crew. She was placed onboard to not only control the ship, but to also generate and nurture life - in this case the six human beings who will provide the crew for the final stage of Deepwater's mission.

Built from living cells, biomass computers were cybernetic dreams, but unlike the human brain, computers are not comfortable with ambiguity, not creative enough in problem solving. Gen is programmed to have emotion and to be intuitive. She tends to "feel" that a certain course of action, or decision is a right one, rather than following a logical pattern of deduction expected from a computer. Therefore Gen and the crew must work together to ensure the success of the mission.

In spite of their desperate situation, and the dangers that they face, a tone of optimism guides the Deepwater Black mission. The circumstances that assembled this crew and put them in space may seem bleak, but the mission is about hope. Yuna, Reb and the others carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, and bravely face the unknown.




BACKSTORY




Humans had conquered space, had developed intergalactic travel, built infinitely sophisticated and advanced computers, but could not escape the folly of their achievements. Somehow, somewhere, society had accidentally invented a virus that was unstoppable - that wiped out the race.

There had been warnings, cautions and hints throughout the twentieth century. Then towards the end of the twenty-first century, it happened. A death-threatening virus, began to ravage the human population of earth.

On Mars, Jupiter, the asteroids and beyond, where human colonies had been established to avoid the advancing menace, extreme militant precautions were put into effect. Virus free colonies were established in these bleak years, but the plague proved unstoppable. Ultimately it found its way to these space colonies and the end began.

But a group of hand picked scientists on Araxes, a terraformed colony on Mars, saw a glimmer of hope, if not for themselves, at least for the survival of the human species. Because of long years of combat with the virus, scientists had in their possession an array of developed technologies: sophisticated techniques of incubation, of gene reproduction, of non-sexual replication, huge selections of gene samples, like sperm banks, representing the whole variety of human population.

A group of scientists banded together, and with multi-nation support, launched a project named Deepwater Black. The objective of the project was to assemble a gene bank which could be encapsulated on a space ship and set to cruise through space until Earth had cleansed itself. When the time was right, the ship would return to earth and re-establish the race. They developed a proprietary scientific software, their "Life Formulas", which could turn the gene stock into human life. It would require a human team to run the software program.

Scientists and engineers battled the ticking clock to build the ship Deepwater and to install the precious gene bank in its midsection. In the early design stages of the project, the scientific team faced two seemingly unsolvable problems.

First the ship had to travel in an ellipse through space for at least a half a millennium to assure that the virus would be completely erased from Earth and the solar system. Second, the Gene Bank would be designed as a self-contained shuttle that could pass through atmosphere and land on Earth. But who would care for the precious genetic stock once the shuttle had landed? And who would be there to incubate the new human gene samples and complete the Deepwater project of repopulating the earth?

It was evident to this team that in order to assure success, they would have to put human beings aboard Deepwater.

Deepwater was preprogrammed to make it through the ellipse, however; if Deepwater somehow went into an uncharted location it would require a trained human crew to navigate the vessel back on course towards earth. Faced with a desperate need, and limited time, the scientists came up with a brilliant solution. Individual human gene samples would be placed in life-capsules aboard the ship, and during the voyage, would be grown until they were adults.

While growing slowly in a state of hibernation, this crew would be subject to a "cultivation process", an educational preprogramming by a biomass computer. They would receive large masses of data, intellectual abilities, and unique skills: for example, navigational, medical or genetic engineering knowledge. They would also be enhanced with some special abilities, provided by recent genetic advances, to complement each other.

However, there was one flaw that scientists could do very little about. Research on genetically enhanced individuals grown this way in the past had shown that such individuals are subject to brief moments of Genetic Memory Recall (nicknamed "prexing", for pre-existing). In these involuntary moments, the subjects experience flashbacks of memory from the life of the person whose sample they were grown from. They could find themselves visualizing life on earth in the 20th Century, or life on a terra-formed space colony in the 21st Century depending on who the genetic sample was taken from and where and when the donor had lived.

The ship was launched from Mars in 2157, and began its lonely journey, carrying in its cargo the last hope of the human race.


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