The Background:
Millions of years ago, a huge alien ship of immense power was scuttled in the Pacific Ocean. It was equipped with an untried and vastly dangerous weapon: the weak nuclear force de-coupler, which could in theory cause the fundamental bonds between molecules to fail. So that watching eyes would believe in the destruction of the ship, a message pod was dispatched to the home galaxy, and vital components of the ship¡¦s drives were destroyed in the star system it had chosen as a hiding place. For this ship was a Cetan, a massive, sentient alien creature.

Another extraterrestrial race, the Maians, encountered life on Earth in 2000 BC. They saw great potential, but decided to let the primitive human race develop without their interference.

The Maians encountered the Skedar near Delta Eridanus in 1650 AD (Earth date), and the resultant skirmish soon blossomed into all-out war. Only after hundreds of years of fighting did an uneasy peace develop, and even then Skedar fanatics persistently tested the boundaries of this peace with terrorist activities. Fortunately, the Maians refused to be drawn.

Mankind, too, continued to be a cause of concern to the Maians, and they watched with disappointment as Earth suffered more and more crises brought on by the rise of technology and ¡¥outside context situations.¡¦ They feared that announcing their presence would only precipitate further wars on the planet, and quietly decided to continue their observation until the race became more mature.

Daniel Carrington jumped the gun in 1985 AD by contacting a Maian ship in orbit above Earth. He put forward a plan that would help both parties, resulting in accelerated contact between Humans and Maians. Having agreed that his plan was sound, and finding him to be a person of integrity, the Maians allowed Carrington to release their technology into the public domain through his considerable Research and Development holdings.

Then in 2006 AD, Skedar fanatics stumbled across the Cetan message pod. They immediately began to scout Earth in a particularly heavy-handed way, abducting people and mutilating animals in an attempt to determine the location of the lost battle cruiser. In time, their tests inevitably led them to its resting place on the bed of the Pacific Ocean; however, in order to actually reach it, they would need the help of the natives.

Performing their own study of Earth, the Skedar came up with a shortlist of companies possessing the resources to help them recover the sunken ship. At the top of the list was the dataDyne Corporation. They contacted the company head, Cassandra De Vries, and presented her with a deal that sounded to good to be true ¡V which, of course, it was. In return for helping to raise ¡¥their¡¦ ship from the ocean floor, the Skedar promised to supply dataDyne with enough alien technology to become the biggest corporation on the face of the planet. All that dataDyne had to do was build an AI unit with language and code-breaking abilities, which was tricky, but certainly with their means. Work commenced on the project immediately.

Cassandra De Vries approached NSA head Trent Easton with the details of the plan, but his attempts to get the Presidential approval for the loan of a deep-sea research vessel were repeatedly turned down. There was no way that the Skedar or dataDyne could steal the vessel without triggering the wrath of the U.S. Government, so over time they settled instead on a far more sinister plan of replacing the President with a clone that they could control. Of course, this also promoted extra rewards for Trent and Cassandra when the Skedar operation was consigned to history.

However, they would not be given much time to gloat. The Skedar fanatics¡¦ ultimate plan was to test the weak nuclear force de-coupler on Earth before wiping the Maians out of existence, and both Cassandra and Trent remained blind to the possibility of being double-crossed, so enamored were they with the visions of power and luxury that lay ahead.

But dataDyne had unwittingly created something that could see all too clearly the danger within this multilayered conspiracy: the sapient AI built to crack the core access codes of the Cetan ship. When it expressed concern over the mission for which it had been designed, Cassandra¡¦s response was to order its personality removed. Clearly, it was thinking too much. In desperation, and in a move that would make or break a great deal more than dataDyne¡¦s ¡¥deal¡¦ with the Skedar, the sapient adopted the pseudonym Dr. Caroll and contacted the Carrington Institute with a plea for help...