The XCOM (Extraterrestrial Combat) Project was never expected to be necessary.
Formed as a clandestine international task force, its stated mission goal was to prepare for the possibility of attack from extraterrestrials. It cleared away the complexities of politics, proprietary knowledge, and patents to allow the free research of cutting edge science and technology, and undertook to train an elite fighting force for global response to alien threats that might arise.
But the aliens never came, and the research bore only limited fruit, much of which couldn’t even be used in the world outside XCOM. The Council of Nations funding the project shrank, budget and resources dwindled, and the project soon became a convenient place to offload troublemakers, weirdos, and other inconvenient problems. Its staff became a skeleton crew, its core mission a joke, and its command assignment a career dead end. Only a handful of diehard advocates on the Council kept the project from being entirely scrapped and its assets sold off to the highest bidder.
Now, of course, the aliens are here, and this idealistic, atrophied dream is the only force capable of immediate global response.
Link to personnel roster(s).
Hosted and narrated by:
JPL (Prester)
Completed 01/01/24.
Scenes played: 39
License: Community License
