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| Henry Silva stars as Dr. Earl Roland, head of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in "Avatar", the pilot episode of Terminal Cruise airing on ABC on September 11, 1975. |
The series took place in three separate timelines with world history changing dramatically. Timeline Two (which for the main characters of the show existed only across a six month period in 1972) was taken to be our "real" track, the one where President Nixon was impeached and Apollo 17 was the final moonshot. The pilot episode of the series, titled "Avatar", opened in the year 1992 of Timeline One, an alternate reality in which the Arab-Israeli "Yom Kippur" War had escalated to a limited nuclear conflict that resulted in the destruction of Moscow, Washington DC, and the restoration of the Confederacy to take the place of the US Federal government.
Featuring a large ensemble cast, Terminal Cruise broke with broadcasting tradition by allowing the pilot episode of a new series to unspool at its own pace rather that attempting to introduce everyone in the series and reveal the central struggle. Only two characters who would later be considered "regulars" were introduced, Robyn Lokken (played by Carol Lynley) and Lady Talishi (played by Cathy Lee Crosby).
Directed by John Carpenter and written by Dan O'Bannon, fresh off the success of their 1974 space comedy film Dark Star, "Avatar" opened at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, which had been partially destroyed by Soviet ICBMs nineteen years earlier but was large enough to still have some facilities intact. The chief researcher of a drug company called Pharmadigm, Dr. Amanda Trochmann (played by Lindsay Wagoner who would later go on to portray the Bionic Woman on the same network) had invited the director of the Center for Disease Control, Dr. Earl Roland (Henry Silva) to provide a second set of eyes on a drug that was originally designed to be a general anesthetic for surgery but instead reliably induced a near-death experience in test subjects. The first "volunteer", Robyn Lokken, experienced the final moments of her father in combat in Canada before he died at the hands of Muslim defenders. Meanwhile, on the frigid world of Gorpai in the Alpha Centauri system, a brave young nephilim female named Talishi accepted the invitation of the eloah Binah (who claimed to be "co-eval with Belial") to climb aboard an avatar, a powerful spacecraft remotely piloted by that living star. The episode ended with the avatar igniting its engines and rising into a purple sky with two suns.
The pilot episode featured the song Ballroom Blitz by Sweet during the attack sequence in Alberta, edited as a montage of violence presented in furious, short cuts. Many have remarked on the influence this scene had on music videos in general when MTV began to air them nearly six years later. The model work with the avatar was very well done, on the level of the Eagle spacecraft in Space:1999. It is particularly difficult to depict flame coming from miniature models realistically, but Douglas Trumbull, who shot the special effects for2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running somehow avoided this pitfall.
However, audiences in Canada strongly objected to their country being presented as the "Islamic Soviet of Canuckistan" and Arab groups scoffed at the manner of the death of Robyn's father (his hand is cut off and he is allowed to bleed out), which they considered to be a cheap stereotype. Television preacher Gene Scott deemed the show to be satanic, pointing out that Belial is another name for the devil and Binah is a name from the Jewish occult practice of Kabbalah. Many viewers found the episode to be surpassingly strange television but tuned in the following week.
A0 - PHARMADIGM
Be a live patriot, not a dead traitor
The Hanford site was nuked back in 1973 but it was the size of a county and large portions were still in use. The reactors were completely gone, of course, and Walla Walla downwind was still more or less a ghost town thirty years later, but contamination levels in the southeast corner along the Columbia River approached the slightly elevated levels of prior to the attack when the facility was used to make plutonium for bombs like Fat Boy. The New Confederacy contemplated shutting the place down for good, but there was still a lot of useful infrastructure, and private industry stepped up to keep the ball rolling. The isolation and security were attractive when large corporations meditated doing something that wasn't entirely kosher from a legal standpoint. So business at Hanford was good.
But Dr. Earl Roland was pissed. The head of the Center for Disease Control fumed with steadily mounting rage as Dr. Amanda Trochmann unspooled her presentation, and he quickly decided this was just a Pharmadigm screwup that had nothing to do with the CDC. Roland knew he and his team had flown all the way out from Atlanta for nothing.
Let me get this straight, he interrupted when Mandy was less than ten minutes into her digital slide show. You've got a new anesthetic you've made from the venom of black mombas or some shit. Phase zero trials with microdoses went okay, so next was phase one, volunteers on full doses with forty-eight hours of monitoring. Something went wrong and now you want CDC to quarantine the folks. Well, how about you bite the bullet and just pay them out? Lawsuits are part of doing business. Take it up with your shareholders, not the government.
We are not talking about money, Director Roland, Mandy objected. The subjects have all signed releases holding Pharmadigm harmless from any side effects.
This should be the Food and Drug Administration sitting here, Roland countered. Who's idea was it to call in the CDC?
My idea, Mandy admitted. This isn't just Pharmadigm's problem. There are genetic changes, including sperm and ova. Our drug created four little monsters and if they get out into the population they'll be everyone's problem, as I will shortly make clear. So please, Dr. Roland, allow me to resume the presentation.
Do make haste, Dr. Trochmann.
Thank you, Doctor. As I was saying, the first volunteer was a seventeen year old girl named Robyn Lokken, who is between her junior and senior years in high school. We did a complete physical before the clinical trial in Denver. She was moderately overweight but otherwise fairly healthy. Next slide. The reason Robyn gave for volunteering was financial. Her father was killed last year in the Canadian War and the money situation isn't so good for Robyn and her mother these days. Summer jobs are hard to come by, so she applied for this one. Pharmadigm computers spit her name out and we called her in. Next slide. As you already know, gentlemen anesthesiology is more of an art than a science. We're trying to bring the person on the operating table as close as possible to dying without actually crossing the line so they miss out on all the gory, agonizing parts. Our new drug targets only the gray matter of the brain. It completely shuts down the higher functions of consciousness, but leaves the involuntary functions like breathing completely alone. You don't even need to have an anesthesiologist attend the surgery. I swear to you, there wasn't one jot nor tittle on the instrument monitoring Robyn's brain waves under the drug. And yet she reported a long and rather vivid dream.
But that's impossible!
Yes, Doctor Roland, it is. Next slide.
A1 - ERIK
The Great Seal of the Islamic Soviet of Canuckistan
Robyn Lokken knew she was dreaming even while she dreamed, which she judged to be a complete ripoff. She was moving through a dark tunnel and approached an intense white light. The white light actually wiggled and Robyn saw that it was just a flashlight being held by a New Confederate soldier who was waking her up in a tent.
Lokken, get your big dumb Norwegian ass up on the wire, you're late!
Robyn grabbed her rifle and her gear and stumbled her way toward the business end of the observation post. And she wondered how she even knew it was an observation post. There was no volition in any of her movements. Robyn realized she was somehow riding behind her father's eyes. And Erik Lokken knew she was in there.
The whole prairie was lit up by a flare, but it was fading. Corporal Street said, You missed a pretty hot fire fight. We got ourselves a visitor. The Corporal nudged the bayonet-tipped muzzle of his rifle toward a certain spot just as a fresh flare cast enough light for Robyn to see what he was pointing at. There was the headless body of a Canuckistani fighter lying there, and an up-ended pot of pink and yellow stew where his head and helmet should be.
Erik Lokken had seen this sort of thing countless times before. Adios motherfucker, was all Robyn had to say to the Canadian, and it came out in her father's voice. How'd he get through the perimeter?
Probably started crawling at sundown, the Corporal said. Now we know why they started irrigating this particular bean field this morning. The water covered the sound of him crawling.
Robyn took another look at the dead enemy. This fuck reminds me of staph. Superbug. We created it ourselves with our own antibiotics. All we did was kill the dumb bugs, left the smart bugs to breed, now almost nothing we got will touch 'em. I keep thinking that's all we're doing here too, with these guys.
Well, after this asshole came calling we've been watching with night scopes, and we haven't seen anyone else moving out there.
Famous last words. A dozen Islamists had been crawling toward the observation post inside the irrigation canal, invisible to infrared goggles under the cool water even as other jihadis drew the attention of Erik's unit by land. When the flares started this only slowed them down, forced them to move only between bursts. There were eight NC troops in the position, and two of them were sleeping. When the enemy came over the sandbag wall they outnumbered the Americans two to one. Only Erik survived the initial assault. They nailed the sleeves of one of Erik's arms to a stump. Another Islamist brandished an axe. God commands this, you understand. And the axe fell. Robyn screamed in pain. Dreams weren't supposed to hurt.
The enemy left Erik there to bleed out, and by dawn his unit pulled out of the area without even recovering his body, marking him down as 'Missing In Action'. Robyn's father had been the victim of a certain militia in Alberta devoted to spreading a very nit-picky version Sharia law throughout Canada. In their interpretation of the Qu'ran, the Confederates occupying any portion of the rapidly expanding Dar al-Islam were stealing the land, and faithful Muslims knew what to do with thieves. Off with their hands!
Now you know what happened to me, baby doll, Erik told her, mind-to- mind. MIA really means Murdered In Action, but Atlanta doesn't want anyone back home to know how bad we are losing the war.
I missed you, daddy. Robyn told him, but she would go on missing him. For her the dark tunnel was not a one-way trip. Not this time.
A2 - SOAP OPERA STARS
So the sun-worshipers were on the right track after all
When El Shaddai came into her full maturity Binah injected a great deal of dark light into the reality-fracture that was the natural communication link between sisters. This caused the one-dimensional quantum foldline to expand to a diameter of about one fingersbreadth, and this only for a few milliseconds. It was just wide enough to allow Binah to pass a tiny seed for a remotely-controlled avatar through the shortcut in space.
After the nuclear material of this seed unpacked itself Binah explored the space around Sol on behalf of El Shaddai. Soon Binah reported the existence of life on the fifth-largest object. And this life was far more interesting than the plant life which Binah had found on Gorpai. Binah watched individuals perform burials of their dead, polish elaborate bone tools, fashion animal-hide tents to live in during the summer and apply pigments to make their caves beautiful in the winter. El Shaddai, reviewing the data, also noted they were ferocious hunters with a clever technique for fixing stone spearheads to wooden shafts by using a resin that was prepared by heating it. In fine, El Shaddai possessed the only form of life in all of creation that was fully awake aside from the elohim themselves.
At the time neither El Shaddai nor Binah nor Chokhmah realized the importance of this discovery. But Mastema was terrified. He knew if El learned of this, the follow-up investigation would quickly unravel the secret of Mastema's transgression here of breeding isolated elohim for the purposes of sex. So Mastema departed forever, to take refuge among his less troublesome stellar harems.
There was a warning from Mastema to Belial to remain silent to El about the new kind of life found on the watery world belonging to El Shaddai, lest Mastema go down in judgment and take Belial with him. The penalty for this greatest of sins among the elohim was death, a terrible thing for the nearly-immortal living stars. So for a long time after this Belial pondered what to do and said nothing to Chokhmah, Binah, and El Shaddai.
At length Binah suggested to Belial that it would not be impossible nor even particularly difficult for an avatar probe to reach one of the nearby suns within a relatively short span of time. Not to Binah's distant father Mastema, of course, but perhaps Binah would visit Barnard's Star or Ross 154 and reveal to him or her, through direct mind-to-mind speech, what was really happening here in Belial's dirty little sex enclave. And that Holy One would in turn notify this mysterious El.
Then Belial saw a narrow path that led out of his dilemma and he broke his long silence. To the three trapped elohim he said: Of all living things in existence, these human creatures alone are potentially dangerous to us because they are awake. If they are not dangerous now then perhaps they will be far in the future. Mastema knew they must be isolated and studied before their existence could be revealed to El and that was why the four of us were born in this place.
Binah remained dubious because Mastema refused to make contact to reinforce Belial's claim, and Belial realized his clever daughter Binah would never stop being a thorn in his side, so he made a risky bargain. He would grant Binah access to the fold-line network of all elohim, to know all that they knew, but this access would be uni-directional. Binah could never speak to any eloah on the network. Nor could Binah reveal any part of this lore to the other elohim in the enclave, nor even reveal that she had access.
The knowledge Belial presented to Binah was truly vast. And the first thing she learned was that El was not really a deity at all, but rather, the entire community of elohim in aggregate. El numbered in the billions and spanned the Milky Way. It was only a partial victory, but Binah realized there was still one very large loophole she could exploit, ultimately fatal to Belial. Nothing in the bargain precluded revealing the accumulated knowledge of El to the planet-dwellers.
A3 - AVATAR
White-haired Talishi of the House of Gerash
The avatar of Binah made landfall near the pavilion during the height of Hellberry Days when the grassy Commons outside of the walled section of the city of Aramel was thronged with yeng and yen. The brief but furious growing season on Gorpai had offered up a record harvest and there was much cause to rejoice, but the unprecedented sight and ear-splitting sound of a fat white pillar as tall as a tree, descending on five columns of roaring fire brought the celebration to an abrupt end as the people scattered in utter panic.
The first dweller of Aramel to return to the vicinity of the pavilion was not a yang of the warrior caste, nor one of the elders on the city's ruling council, but a young yin maiden who still lived in the household of her father, a modestly well-to-do glassblower. She proved to be more valiant than any of the yeng who ran away, for curiosity overcame her fear. And Binah was selecting for curiosity.
The courageous yin saw how the object had five articulated arms with many joints, and between each joint was mounted smaller arms of identical make, and so on, like the progression of the structure of a tree from trunk to branches to twigs to leaf buds. The five arm trunks inverted to become legs, and the avatar of Binah settled to The ground. Fire ceased from the bells at the bottom of the five lesser pillars wrapped around the main pillar. The blast of the descent uprooted the light fabric of the pavilion tent and blew it far away. But the yin stood her ground at a discreet distance. She was curious about the intruder, but not stupid, and not eager to be burned.
A loud voice rang out from the avatar of Binah, saying, Yin of the House of Gerash, if you are willing, draw near to me.
The yin obeyed. She saw how by resting on the five legs the central pillar of the avatar of Binah remained about waist high above the ground. From underneath the central pillar a round hatch dropped open on a hinge to nearly touch the scorched grass of The Commons under it. Come up here, the loud voice said.
The brave yin squatted and squeezed between two of the outer pillars to look up inside the hatch. The central pillar was hollow. There was much light within, as well as many ribs embedded in the tunnel wall forming circular edges with sufficient space to rest the side of her feet or accept the grip of her hands. She obeyed the voice and crawled inside. While she climbed inside the central pillar the voice obtained her name. I am Talishi, daughter of Jophiel the glassblower, she said. The hatch below her closed of its own accord, and this too was marked by Talishi. The top of the central pillar flared out into a larger space with a seat and many windows, giving Talishi a commanding view of the grounds. Even now, only a handful of people dared to draw near.
Do not be afraid, Talishi, the voice told her. I am Binah, one of the Holy Ones co-eval with Belial. I have many things to tell you and many things to show you, if you can bear them, but only with your freely-given consent. If you stay, your life will never be the same again. If you go, then you can resume your life as before, and no harm done.
And Talishi replied, I will stay, Lord. In the mythology Talishi had been taught, Binah was the son of the Most High God.
Binah said, There are ropes laying about where you sit. Use them to make yourself secure. This is not to hold you captive, Talishi. You will see the reason for the ropes very soon.
When Talishi finished wrapping herself in the cords and making the knot snug, she announced this fact to Binah. And immediately the five smaller pillars around the central pillar ignited in flame again.
