THE DARK follows the adventures of the crew of the Recluse as they fight to take back their corner of the universe from aliens and worse -- designer humanity.
THE DARK keeps physics in mind at all times...no transporters, no artificial gravity. Space is stress, tactics, and tension - battleships bending long arcs of momentum, testing the limits of ship and crew...though the ship is eel slick and nearly invisible, the crew of the Recluse live among the pipes and cables of a spacecraft as cramped as a submarine. For them, each brush with the aliens costs a week of white knuckles and a month of flashbacks.
Delivery
THE DARK is a three-year journey into uncharted territory. It will be available online in weekly, 12-minute episodes and in print as a bi-monthly, full color comic book by ALCHEMICAL PRESS.
Real science fiction
THE DARK is unlike anything you've seen before. It is a leading wave on the new tide of webcasting.
November 9, 2006 Photograph by G.M.B. Chomichuk | Posted by mason
Background
Space is dark ... silent ... lethal.
Ships stay quiet when they can and when they can't, it's because they're too damned big. Either way, no spotlights shining on white hulls, no
glowing nacelles. Nobody hails anybody. Space is an unlit sea and everything
swimming in it is hungry. Planet systems mean resources and, unless
someone says otherwise, they're there for the taking.
It has been decades since the last independent nation on Earth was absorbed
by the Community of Aligned Nations (aka. Generica). The solar system
has been colonized, more or less, and things are going swimmingly for
the genetically optimized citizens of Generica, until, that is, aliens
arrive to obliterate most everything.
Mysterious aliens; no one has actually seen them, just their massive,
all-devouring ships, and no two of which are alike. There has been no
communication either, and Generica's increasingly desperate pleas to
negotiate go unanswered. It's war, and for humans, it's going very badly
indeed. In the unlit labyrinth of the asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter, three old ships from a long-defunct independent republic drop
out of deep-freeze and begin waging their own kind of war against the
aliens. Crewed by misfits, genetically randomized (normal folk), the
Widow, Wolf and the Recluse begin an unrelenting campaign using stealth
tactics, snatching small victories where great navies find only destruction.
Like the hunter subs of the first cold war, they lurk in the dark, communicating
with no one (not even, no especially not, Generica), with no base to
call their own, and each operating with fierce independence.
This is the story of one of those ships: The Recluse. Damn near invisible
in space, powered by a throbbing fusion reactor, and inhabited by a
crew for whom cabin-fever is a way of life. Each crewmember is a study
in paranoia, neuroses and just plain weirdness. These men and women
are our heroes.
November 9, 2006 Posted by mason
