Marc Laidlaw, the writer of
Half-Life,
Half-Life 2 and
Episode One and
Two of the same franchise,
has (cheekily) revealed where the story
would have gone in the Episode Three that Valve were planning in 2007.
His original blog entry "creatively" reinterprets some of the names and concepts in the
Half-Life franchise to (mildly) disguise what he is saying. However, I have penetrated his confusing veil and revealed the true story as follows:
Dearest
Player,
I hope this letter finds you
well. I can hear your complaint already, “Gordon Freeman, we have not heard
from you in ages!” Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the
greatest of them being I’ve been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach
you by the usual means. This was the case until eighteen months ago, when I
experienced a critical change in my circumstances, and was redeposited on these
shores. In the time since, I have been able to think occasionally about how
best to describe the intervening years, my years of silence. I do first
apologize for the wait, and that done, hasten to finally explain (albeit
briefly, quickly, and in very little detail) events following those described
in my previous letter (referred to herewith as Episode 2).
To begin with, as you may recall
from the closing paragraphs of my previous missive, the death of Eli Vance
shook us all. The Resistance team was traumatized, unable to be sure how much
of our plan might be compromised, and whether it made any sense to go on at all
as we had intended. And yet, once Eli had been buried, we found the strength
and courage to regroup. It was the strong belief of her brave daughter, Alyx Vance,
that we should continue on as her father had wished. We had the Arctic
coordinates, transmitted by Eli’s long-time assistant, Dr. Judith Mossman,
which we believed to mark the location of the lost luxury liner Borealis. Eli had felt strongly that the
Borealis should be destroyed rather
than allow it to fall into the hands of the Combine. Others on our team
disagreed, believing that the Borealis
might hold the secret to the revolution’s success. Either way, the arguments
were moot until we found the vessel. Therefore, immediately after the service
for Dr. Vance, Alyx and I boarded a seaplane and set off for the Arctic; a much
larger support team, mainly militia, was to follow by separate transport.
It is still unclear to me exactly
what brought down our little aircraft. The following hours spent traversing the
frigid waste in a blizzard are also a jumbled blur, ill-remembered and poorly
defined. The next thing I clearly recall is our final approach to the
coordinates Dr. Mossman has provided, and where we expected to find the Borealis. What we found instead was a
complex fortified installation, showing all the hallmarks of sinister Combine
technology. It surrounded a large open field of ice. Of the Borealis itself there was no sign…or not
at first. But as we stealthily infiltrated the Combine installation, we noticed
a recurrent, strangely coherent auroral effect–as of a vast hologram fading in
and out of view. This bizarre phenomenon initially seemed an effect caused by
an immense Combine lensing system, Alyx and I soon realized that what we were
actually seeing was the luxury liner Borealis
itself, phasing in and out of existence at the focus of the Combine devices.
The aliens had erected their compound to study and seize the ship whenever it
materialized. What Dr. Mossman had provided were not coordinates for where the
sub was located, but instead for where it was predicted to arrive. The liner
was oscillating in and out of our reality, its pulses were gradually steadying,
but there was no guarantee it would settle into place for long–or at all. We
determined that we must put ourselves into position to board it at the instant
it became completely physical.
At this point we were briefly
detained–not captured by the Combine, as we feared at first, but by minions of
our former nemesis, the conniving and duplicitous Wallace Breen. Dr. Breen was
not as we had last seen him –which is to say, he was not dead. At some point,
the Combine had saved out an earlier version of his consciousness, and upon his
physical demise, they had imprinted the back-up personality into a biological
blank resembling an enormous slug. The Breen-Slug, despite occupying a position
of relative power in the Combine hierarchy, seemed nervous and frightened of me
in particular. Wallace did not know how his previous incarnation, the original
Dr. Breen, had died. He knew only that I was responsible. Therefore, the slug
treated us with great caution. Still, he soon confessed (never able to keep
quiet for long) that he was himself a prisoner of the Combine. He took no
pleasure from his current grotesque existence, and pleaded with us to end his
life. Alyx believed that a quick death was more than Wallace Breen deserved,
but for my part, I felt a modicum of pity and compassion. Out of Alyx’s sight,
I might have done something to hasten the slug’s demise before we proceeded.
Not far from where we had been
detained by Dr. Breen, we found Judith Mossman being held in a Combine
interrogation cell. Things were tense between Judith and Alyx, as might be
imagined. Alyx blamed Judith for her father’s death…news of which, Judith was
devastated to hear for the first time. Judith tried to convince Alyx that she
had been a double agent serving the Resistance all along, doing only what Eli
had asked of her, even though she knew it meant she risked being seen by her
peers–by all of us–as a traitor. I was convinced; Alyx less so. But from a
pragmatic point of view, we depended on Dr. Mossman; for along with the Borealis coordinates, she possessed
resonance keys which would be necessary to bring the liner fully into our plane
of existence.
We skirmished with Combine
soldiers protecting a Combine research post, then Dr. Mossman attuned the Borealis to precisely the frequencies
needed to bring it into (brief) coherence. In the short time available to us,
we scrambled aboard the ship, with an unknown number of Combine agents close
behind. The ship cohered for only a short time, and then its oscillations
resumed. It was too late for our own military support, which arrived and joined
the Combine forces in battle just as we rebounded between universes, once again
unmoored.
What happened next is even harder
to explain. Alyx Vance, Dr. Mossman and myself sought control of the ship–its
power source, its control room, its navigation center. The liner’s history
proved nonlinear. Years before, during the Combine invasion, various members of
an earlier science team, working in the hull of a dry-docked liner situated at
the Tocsin Island Research Base in Lake Huron, had assembled what they called
the Bootstrap Device. If it worked as intended, it would emit a field large
enough to surround the ship. This field would then itself travel
instantaneously to any chosen destination without having to cover the
intervening space. There was no need for entry or exit portals, or any other
devices; it was entirely self-contained. Unfortunately, the device had never
been tested. As the Combine pushed Earth into the Seven Hour War, the aliens
seized control of our most important research facilities. The staff of the Borealis, with no other wish than to
keep the ship out of Combine hands, acted in desperation. The switched on the
field and flung the Borealis toward
the most distant destination they could target: the Arctic. What they did not
realize was that the Bootstrap Device travelled in time as well as space. Nor
was it limited to one time or one location. The Borealis, and the moment of its activation, were stretched across
space and time, between the nearly forgotten Lake Huron of the Seven Hour War and
the present-day Arctic; it was pulled taut as an elastic band, vibrating,
except where at certain points along its length one could find still points,
like the harmonic spots along a vibrating guitar string. One of these harmonics
was where we boarded, but the string ran forward and back, in both time and
space, and we were soon pulled in every direction ourselves.
Time grew confused. Looking from
the bridge, we could see the drydocks of Tocsin Island at the moment of
teleportation, just as the Combine forces closed in from land, sea and air. At
the same time, we could see the Arctic wastelands, where our friends were
fighting to make their way to the protean Borealis;
and in addition, glimpses of other worlds, somewhere in the future perhaps, or
even in the past. Alyx grew convinced we were seeing one of the Combine’s
central staging areas for invading other worlds–such as our own. We meanwhile
fought a running battle throughout the ship, pursued by Combine forces. We
struggled to understand our situation, and to agree on our course of action.
Could we alter the course of the Borealis?
Should we run it aground in the Antarctic, giving our peers the chance to study
it? Should we destroy it with all hands aboard, our own included? It was
impossible to hold a coherent thought, given the baffling and paradoxical
timeloops, which passed through the ship like bubbles. I felt I was going mad,
that we all were, confronting myriad versions of ourselves, in that ship that
was half ghost-ship, half nightmare funhouse.
What it came down to, at last,
was a choice. Judith Mossman argued, reasonably, that we should save the Borealis and deliver it to the
resistance, that our intelligent peers might study and harness its power. But Alyx
reminded me that she had sworn she would honour his mother’s demand that we
destroy the ship. She hatched a plan to set the Borealis to self-destruct, while riding it into the heart of the Combine’s
invasion nexus. Judith and Alyx argued. Judith overpowered Alyx and secured the
Borealis command area, preparing to
shut off the Bootstrap Device and settle the ship on the ice. Then I heard a
shot, and Judith fell. Alyx had decided for all of us, or her weapon had. With
Dr. Mossman dead, we were committed to the suicide plunge. Grimly, Alyx and I
armed the Borealis, creating a
time-travelling missile, and steered it for the heart of the Combine’s command
center.
At this point, as you will no
doubt be unsurprised to hear, a Certain Sinister Figure appeared, in the form
of that sneering trickster, the G-Man. For once he appeared not to me,
but to Alyx Vance. Alyx had not seen the cryptical schoolmarm since childhood,
but she recognized him instantly. “Come along with me now, we’ve places to do
and things to be,” said G-Man, and Alyx acquiesced. She followed the strange
grey man out of the Borealis, out of
our reality. For me, there was no convenient door held open; only a snicker and
a sideways glance. I was left alone, riding the weaponized luxury liner into
the heart of a Combine world. An immense light blazed. I caught a cosmic view
of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere. The vastness of the Combine’s power,
the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness. I saw
everything. Mainly I saw how the Borealis,
our most powerful weapon, would register as less than a fizzling matchhead as
it blew itself apart. And what remained of me would be even less than that.
Just then, as you have surely
already foreseen, the Vortigaunts parted their own checkered curtains of
reality, reached in as they had on prior occasions, plucked me out, and set me
aside. I barely got to see the fireworks begin.
And here we are. I spoke of my
return to this shore. It has been a circuitous path to lands I once knew, and
surprising to see how much the terrain has changed. Enough time has passed that
few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we
hoped to accomplish. At this point, the resistance will have failed or
succeeded, no thanks to me. Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the
wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team,
though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know
better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Except
no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final Episode.
Half-Life 2: Episode 3 was effectively cancelled this decade in favour of a full
Half-Life 3, although Valve has shown little appetite in continuing the series. Instead, fans have revisited the series through
Black Mesa, a superb remake of
Half-Life with modern technology, and I daresay more than a few modders will be reading this outline, looking at their copy of the Source Engine code and saying, "Right..."
