Bounty hunting in the 23rd century in nothing like a trek to the stars.
On a new show we’re looking at here on Fusion Patrol, we join the dysfunctional crew of the spacecraft, Trans-Utopian, a luxury liner re-purposed into a a bounty hunter’s ship. That bounty hunter is Dante Montana, man of few words, his co-worker Lucretia Scott, woman with a secret agenda, Percy Montana, child in desperate need of a military academy in New Mexico and Caravaggio, the ship’s AI computer.
Also joining Eugene on this journey is co-host, Kenneth from the Sundry Thoughts blog.
This time: There’s something big happening to humanity.
3,000,000 years ago, a thing in space approaches the Earth. Like an egg, it cracks and spews on the planet. This will probably be important later on.
In the year 2285 a plot is brewing. A beautiful women solicits a prominent scientist into a little bathroom sex, at the climax of the act instead of shouting, “oh yeah, baby that’s the spot” she screams “You will never suppress the divinity cluster!” and then she explodes. Literally. In a ball of fire, killing the scientist. Well, at least he died on the job.
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Meanwhile, the spacecraft Trans-utopia is returning to dock around the moon. Due to the relativistic speeds of its flight, it has been away four years, but only three weeks by their internal time scale. On board, Captain Dante Montana, his niece Percy Montana, Lucretia Scott and the ship’s eccentric anthropomorphic computer interface, Caravaggio.
Montana is having a meeting with an old friend, a stereotype of a Scotsman known as McDuff. That meeting consists of punching each other and then drinking – the traditional, stereotypical Scott’s greeting. McDuff needs money and he’s dying of inoperable brain cancer. Montana, a bounty hunter, offers him a job on his crew.
Lucretia meets with a man named Darius, her father, and he gives her an assignment. She must track down a scientist named Eccleston. Eccleston had been researching a series of 4 “alien” genes discovered in the human genome – and when we say alien, we mean alien – as in extraterrestrial. Eccleston claimed he knew what it was all about, then went on the run. He is on the moon and they must recover him.
Darius appears to a part of a powerful, but not necessarily unified, cabal known as the Orchard. Darius wants Eccleston alive. Others want him dead.
While Montana gets his assignment via Lucretia, McDuff is also accepting a commission to locate Eccleston, and McDuff gets there first, but Eccleston is super-human, and is able to inject McDuff with something that will kill him unless Montana helps Eccleston escape the station.
He has them go to Earth, and somehow he’s able to get them there at problematically fast speeds.
In the ruins of Los Angeles, Eccleston makes a broadcast to… everyone? Telling of the transcendence of man through the Divinity Cluster, but the Orchard cuts him off before he can finish the message. As the team fight off the Orchard’s security forces, Eccleston transforms into… something else… but not before curing McDuff of his brain cancer.
For double-crossing them, Montana kicks McDuff off the ship.
