After Action Report: Contact

Everyone in the Wing Commander movie club agrees: Contact is a great film! It was especially nice to introduce it to one of our younger members so we could make sure it wasn't just our increasingly-old-man memories playing tricks on us. But it turns out it still has a message that resonates today… and we were more than a little sad seeing such a well done representation of a world that at least considers investing in science.

Contact is one of several movies that was used to 'temp track' developing cuts of the 1999 Wing Commander movie. We covered the track itself in the intro post so I thought it would be fun to run through one of Wing Commander's famous 'first contact' scenarios. No, not the Kilrathi; we've already covered the "Iason incident" pretty extensively. No, I'm talking about the Double Helix, a race often discussed but never actually seen. The original Claw Marks' Comm Relay section includes this article (by the late, great Aaron Allston) intended to give flavor for the newly created universe:

News From Earth (Sol III)

(New York, North American States, Terran News Services) - On 2654.080, representatives of the Committee for Interaction with Alien Intelligences announced contact with a new alien race. CIAI spokesman Iola Jonson made the following statement: "The CIAI regularly launches unmanned probes to uncharted jumpspheres; these probes contain our most sophisticated translation and interpretation equipment. Eight days ago, Probe Number H227 reappeared in a Terran jump-point carrying data and artifacts from a species we are currently referring to as the Double Helix.

From the information we have so far been able to interpret from H227's records, the Double Helix are a sentient race possessing space travel, and we are not ruling out the possibility they possess FTL drive technology. Physically, they appear to be carbon-based arthropods which communicate through scents and pheromones. Their name is derived from the double-helix shape of their spacecraft."

World Science Federation officials believe this to be the most significant contact with an alien species since the discovery of the Kilrathi, and hope that contact will remain friendly.

Note that the 1994 update to Claw Marks used in Super Wing Commander and Wing Commander for the SegaCD changes 'arthropod' to 'anthropoid' leaving much question as to whether the Double Helix are big lobsters or big monkeys. Maybe a little of both!

We don't hear much about the Double Helix again until the penultimate main series game, Wing Commander Prophecy. The ICIS manual's Nonhuman Historical Analysis article mentions them in such a way that it seems the Confederation of 2681 (27 years after their discovery in Claw Marks) now knows a fair amount about the Double Helix.

Likewise a superficial examination of Firekkan history shows contact with nothing similar, nor does the Double-Helix civilization (unsurprising, since the Double-Helix has very little concept of history in the human sense).

So how did we go from a probe with artifacts to understanding that the Double Helix don't have a concept of history? The Secret Ops fiction answers that question… and the story is a bit darker than Contact! Episode 3 features an e-mail thread called POSSIBLE SITUATION between Zero, Casey and Spyder where Zero brings up the Double Helix:

WITH THE KILRATHI WE HAD KNOWN MECHANICAL SYSTEMS THAT FUNCTIONED PRETTY MUCH LIKE OUR OWN, BUT THIS IS LIKE TRYING TO ANALYZE DOUBLE-HELIX INFO-STREAMS WITHOUT THE CORRECT HARMONIC FILTERS. THESE SHIPS ARE ORGANIC IN NATURE, HOW THEY FUNCION, OR WHAT THEIR STRUCTURAL MAKEUP IS IN ANY GIVEN STATE IS STILL UP FOR SPECULATION.

Spyder replies with the full story of how the scientist that attempted the contact ended up frying their brain:

THE DOUBLE-HELIX EXAMPLE IS A VALID ONE. WHEN DR. JUSTIN…WHAT WAS HIS NAME, KLIEN, KLING…ANYWAY…WHEN HE FIRST ATTEMPTED DIRECT COMMUNICATION THROUGH MODIFIED HOLO-LINK TRANSMISSIONS AND ENDED UP HAVING HIS CEREBELLUM FRIED BY A KEYED STREAM OF (LATER TERMED)FRENELI-COMPLEX HARMONIC SAMPLES, I'M SURE HE THOUGHT HE WAS PREPARED FOR ANYTHING. WHAT THE DOUBLE-HELIX ONLY INTENDED AS A WARM HELLO TURNED OUT TO BE A DIGITAL ICEPICK TO THE BRAIN.

It's not clear why everyone is screaming at each other, but all these little mentions together does show us the full story of the Double Helix, from the discovery of their spacecraft with a probe to the tragic first contact to the Confederation learning about how their society works! One final point of trivia, the Double Helix ALMOST appeared… in Warren Spector's original plan for what became System Shock (then called Alien Commander) the Double Helix played the villain… so in a real way, they're the direct ancestors of SHODAN!