ALIEN - CONTRACTED: A Remodeled Timeline of an Alternate Future's Past

The official timelines from both the Free League Publishing ALIEN RPG as well as the timeline that is based on - that of the WEYLAND-YUTANI REPORT book - are... Weird. First of all, they focus a lot on Weyland-Yutani, its founder, and the various breakthroughs and achievements of the company and its near-mythical, apparently infallible father. That made the universe of ALIEN/S seem very small. I decided to complicate things.

First of all, ALIEN - CONTRACTED's past is not our present. History didn't play out for us as it did in that world. Instead, history took a different path beginning roughly at the time the original two movies were released. After all, that universe is very much born of the socio-political environment of the Thatcher/Reagan era. I thought it would make for a more interesting backdrop if the Soviet Union did not collapse in the ALIEN/S timeline, and if the west went much harder in an unfettered free-market capitalist direction at the same time. Out of this comes a third world war, and a nightmare world of completely unleashed corporate capitalism without restraints in which the alien entities that are international corporations successfully take over most of the world.

This timeline is meant to be mostly an addition to the official timelines presented in the Free League Publishing materials. Where it contradicts official materials, those canonical materials should be read as corporate propaganda. I'm also not adding much to the timeline after the events of the first movie - and I'm neither adding the dates of the Covenant mission nor of the Prometheus project. Whether or not those are canonical I leave up to the individual reader.

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1980s: Rand Doctrine goes into effect in the U.S.

Public money no longer funds any kind of private research. Government subsidies of any kind are declared illegal. All research and development is left entirely to the private sector.

The Soviet Union teeters on the brink of collapse. Reforms of the system are slowly taking hold.

 

1990s: A decade of stagnation. The Soviet Union reforms itself into a slow mode of recovery. The Cold War continues to slowly burn. Most new innovations in the western world come from weapons production funded by government contracts with private corporations. Western cultural production stagnates significantly without state subsidies. The United States takes the Rand Doctrine international through the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund.

 

2000s: With the West in decline and the Eastern Bloc in slow ascend, war looms on the horizon. Soviet agents are suspected to further unrest against the effects of the globalized Rand Doctrine in most Western nation-states. Violent uprisings rock several South American countries that overthrow right-wing governments in favor of Soviet-friendly ones. A score of countries in the Western Hemisphere elect left-wing leaders. The United States quickly intervenes militarily. The Soviet Union sends support for the entrenched newly-elected left-wing governments.

 

Similar dynamics begin to play out in South-East Asia.

 

2011: Weyland Corporation founded in Britain.

 

2014: Soviet supply convoys sunk by American blockades of Venezuelan ports, begin the Third World War.

 

2019: Out of the ashes of several limited but severe nuclear exchanges a new world order emerges. The Soviet Union and the United States are each badly damaged from the war. Britain, Japan, China, and a collection of South American states that form a new transnational coalition coalesce into new great powers. The true winners of the war are the large corporate conglomerates that sold weapons to all sides.

 

2020s: The world rebuilds from the war. The new Great Powers solidify. While the war and the following nuclear winter killed billions, the devastation to the landscape made large stretches of Earth uninhabitable. Even with the losses from the war, Earth's habitable zones are harshly overpopulated. Corporations, harvesting more money than they know what to do with, begin to explore extra-terrestrial options. This becomes especially alluring for reasons of taxation. Corporations that are headquartered on their own space stations or off-world base cannot be effectively taxed. The failing nation-state governments lack enforcement mechanisms to counter the corporate evasion of responsibility.

 

2021: Atmosphere seeding begins on the Moon, in the hopes of creating a breathable atmosphere on Earth's satellite.

 

2025: The Soviet Union's science divisions develop breakthroughs in gravity manipulation technology. Both the western nations as well as the Soviet Union engages in a new space race. Western public-private partnerships invest heavily in the research of terraforming technologies in the hope of undoing the damages of industrial overproduction and nuclear war.

 

2027: Western spies steal the blueprints for Soviet gravity manipulation technology.

 

2028: The Soviet Union establishes a permanent moon base. The lunar surface becomes a site of constant skirmishes between corporate sponsored raiders and Soviet kosmonauts.

 

2031: Built upon appropriated Soviet technology, the Heliades becomes the first successful FTL space exploration vessel, serving the Weyland Corporation.

 

2030s: Gravity manipulation technology quickly becomes commonplace in the space industry. Lifting people and material out of Earth's gravity well becomes a comparatively pedestrian endeavor. Lunar atmosphere seeding fails. The corporations blame Soviet sabotage. Terraforming attempts begin on Mars, and several moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

 

2039: Japan and the United Kingdom establish permanent settlements on Mars, and Titan. The off-world colonies soon explode in population. The Soviet Unions also begins to build settlements on Mars. Western corporations protests that the Soviets benefit from corporate-sponsored terraforming. Weyland successfully terraforms the first extrasolar planet.

 

2040s: The Weyland corporation has its first break through in synthetic sentience. Within years the company begins to produce robot workers. The fifth generation David series becomes the first near-sapient series of androids.

 

2042: Corporate and Soviet space forces clash in the asteroid belt over mining rights. Permanent mining colonies are established by Western and Soviet powers in the Belt, and on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. The Weyland Corporation begins terraforming efforts on Earth to undo damages of global warming and reduce the aftereffects of World War III.

 

2043: Yutani Industries takes over Wakashima Systems, the global leader in atmosphere control research.

 

2047: The Weyland Corporation encounters the first Soviet-made war beast when Weyland commandos attempt to overtake a Soviet research outpost on Mars.

 

2066: Permanent extrasolar colonies are established in the Outer Rim Territories. Weyland's attempt at terraforming Earth has disastrous consequences, rendering swaths of land around the equator permanently uninhabitable. Corporations quietly drop any future attempts to alter Earth's broken climate system.

 

2088: In response to a refugee stream of biblical proportions that started with the failed terraforming projects two decades earlier, the Three World Empire forms out of Japan, the United Kingdom, and a plethora of other nation-states.

 

2103: The remnant countries of North, South, and Central America form the United Americas. Most of Earth's nation-states have now consolidated into mega-blocks that oversee large areas of land that are either overcrowded, or uninhabitable. The United Americas and the Three World Empire maintain the Rand Doctrine as an important organizing principle.

 

2110: China, the Soviet Union, and other Comintern nations form the Union of Progressive Peoples (UPP). Earth's nation-states continue to decline in power and importance. Only the UPP member states resist a complete takeover by corporate powers - for the time being.

 

2122: The Nostromo Incident