It is the seventh decade of the twenty-first century, our future and Star Trek‘s past. Only an act of great heroism can save a dying civilization. A global nuclear war, the Third World War, instigated by the bellicose Eastern Coalition (ECON), has taken place in the fifties. We are ten years into its aftermath. Bombings of all major cities, except San Francisco and Paris, have caused massive destruction. The few survivors, scattered mostly in rural areas of intemperate climate in the extreme North or South, struggle amid sqallid conditions. Formerly populated regions are either contaminated by radiation or ruled by factional drug lords. There is insufficient food, only makeshift shelter in huts and tents, scant medicine, and no hospitals. Individuals are haunted by memories of the devastation they witnessed during the war, and the death of loved ones. Suicides and states of hopelessness and depression are common. Distrust and random violence are the norm in human relations.
Just prior to the outbreak of war, university science faculties had been buzzing with news about potential breakthroughs in the superstring and supersymmetry branches of hypergeometric particle physics. These advances might lead to an implementable warplike rupture of the spacetime continuum, and astonishing real world applications. Based on M-theory postulates about multidimensional hyperspace, an hypothesis regarding quantum excitations provoked at discontinuous subatomic mass-energy extremes during matter-antimatter integration was put forth. If proved correct, the theory could be applied during regulated plasma recooling of a nuclear reactor’s fissionable material, leading to the managed release of hyperpliable stringlike particles. These generated particles could be harnessed into a controllable rocketry technology that would finally enable breaking the formidable barrier of the speed of light.
In the post-nuclear holocaust environment, an eccentric physicist named Zefram Cochrane, played by James Cromwell, pursues the high-velocity space travel application of the superstring warp drive theory. Promised lucrative financial rewards by the Indonesian Space Agency if successful, Cochrane works in an abandoned Titan missile complex in Billings, Montana. The former military installation is teeming with unlaunched ballistic missiles with attached ICBM nuclear warheads. Working in a single silo with a single Titan missile, Cochrane disables the missile’s warhead and attaches a cockpit to it. He retrofits its booster capability with more powerful fuel and oxidizer to attain escape velocity from terrestrial gravity. He constructs a device to divert the flow of reactor fuel from the nuclear core to a warp drive engine.
Zefram Cochrane’s work progresses slowly. He is often distracted by his other main interests: drinking cheap booze and listening to loud twentieth century rock’n’roll music. But he is kept on track by the encouragement of Lily Sloane, played by Alfre Woodard, a materials scavenger and former advanced physics student, who assists him on the project. At 11:15 AM on April 5, 2063, the spaceship Phoenix, with Zefram Cochrane at the helm, lifts off from Billings and begins its historical first flight from Earth of a warp speed-capable craft. Emboldened by the moonshine flowing through his veins, and the sounds of Steppenwolf’s Magic Carpet Ride blasting in his ears, Cochrane ascends towards the stars and his rendezvous with destiny. “Prepare for first-stage shutdown… let’s bring the warp core on line… plasma injectors… nacelles charged and ready… Engage… Speed: twenty thousand kilometers per second… approaching light speed.” Do it for us all, Dr. Cochrane! Go, Zef, go! Make it so!
I like to dream, yes yes
Right between the sound machine
On a cloud of sound I drift in the night
Anyplace she goes is right
Goes far, flies near
To the stars away from here
Well, you don’t know what
We can find
Why don’t you come with me little girl
On a magic carpet ride
You don’t know what
We can see
Why don’t you tell your dreams to me
Fantasy will set you free
Close your eyes girl
Look inside girl
Let the sound take you away
Within minutes after achieving acceleration beyond the speed of light, thePhoenix is detected by the monitoring sensors of an alien survey team’s spaceship. The Vulcan ship happens to be passing close to our solar system at the moment of warp engagement. The Vulcans knew previously of the existence of our life-sustaining planet, but considered human civilization too primitive and insignificant to be bothered with. But the invention of warp speed technology is the sign of a species sufficiently advanced to be worthy of interstellar attention. The Vulcans do not hesitate a femtosecond in making their decision to land on Earth to meet the pilot of thePhoenix.
The Vulcan spaceship touches down in Billings the very same day as the warp launch. “Live long and prosper,” says the Vulcan leader with dignity to the original heroic scientist upon emerging from his survey ship. Although Zefram Cochrane does not have the manual dexterity to flash the Vulcan salute, First Contact between humans and the non-hostile extraterrestrial Other is established.
After this momentous event follows the rebuilding of cities; an economic, technological, cultural, and political Renaissance on Earth; an era of peace and multicultural cooperation; the seminal founding of the United Federation of Planets; and the birth of the venerable Star Trek mediaverse.
With Star Trek: First Contact(1996), Paramount Pictures raises the stakes in competing for financial and cultural mega-dividends from its prized recombinant science fiction commodities. It is a strategic media product at the forefront of contemporary techno-culture’s high-resolution images and reverse grand narratives. To accomplish the passing of the Star Trekindustry’s movie franchise torch to The Next Generation, two basic strategies are employed. First, the Jonathan Frakes-directed film assimilates the stylized cyber-aesthetic of “postmodernist” science fiction cinema, previously absent in the warmed-over Original Series movies. Second, First Contact, which mainly takes place in the twenty-first century, forcefully presents a powerful, mythic narrative of the prehistory or origin of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries Star Trek universe.
Astounding special visual effects and Borg Effects are produced by Industrial Light & Magic, Pacific Ocean Post, and other Hollywood digital studio companies. The film uses leading-edge computer graphics and composited animatronics to exhibit dazzling pictorial imagery. There are exquisite details of the Enterprise NCC-1701-E and Borg ship interiors; the opening of the time travel vortex; and depth replication of the cranial organic tissue of the Borg Queen, played by Alice Krige. The shoot-’em-up of the Federation-Borg battles is reminiscent of the best of Doom-style video games and Star Wars. The Borg ship’s turned-out exterior and metalware surfaces resemble the fractal, electronic circuitry patterns of the urban and corporate landscape in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the quintessential cyberpunk film of the 1980s. The digitized upgrade of the Borg drones, in contrast to how they look on The Next Generation television series, emphasizes a fluid blending or uninterrupted bidirectional metamorphosis between humanoid and machine. The impure horror motifs and technological-organic union design innovations of H.R. Giger paintings; and the aesthetic of the shape-shifting and transgendered cyborg in films like Alien (1979) and the Alien series are incorporated. (Scott Bukatmann, Terminal Identity, 1993) Borg drones are equipped with an improved nanotechnology device that they insert via tactile contact into the bodies of members of species whom they assimilate into the hive collective. All these refinements are carried over to Voyager. The victim of the talon injection is taken over by an Artificial Life neural ganglion, which executes the morph reprogramming from autonomous individual to Borg doormat. “Beneath the tender skin of his neck, the assimilation device gave birth to a hundred tiny black serpents that lengthened rapidly, branching out like a fine, dark network of veins. Simultaneously, his temples began to pulse, then stretch taut as something metal pushed against the skin.” (J.M. Dillard, Star Trek: First Contact, the novel, 1997) Spasmodic, interstitial existence at the borders among human, software, circuitry, molten, and monstrosity is the real fascination of Becoming-Borg. The seduction of amorphous, malleable posthuman experience, beyond distinct definitions of human and non-human, surpasses the Evil Empire theme of forced “dehumanization,” or the sentimental saga of becoming human Seven of Nine. Cyborg captivation outflanks Borg captivity, which serves only as rationalization or alibi. The antiquated badder-than-bad guys plot or grand narrative of history is a subterfuge for concealing the reverse grand narrative of futurity at work.
To get Captain Jean-Luc Picard and The Next Generation crew into the movie business, to set them up as the new recombinant model, to at last replace The Original Series generation, the Star Trek producers must raise the flag of a founding, seminal moment. They must establish a strong reference that will finally get Picard and Data out from under the shadow of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. This epic, original moment is the invention of warp – or faster-than-light – speed technology and First Contact with the extraterrestrial Other in the twenty-first century. But the magisterial moment is an overdetermined and overinscribed “event.” It is so significant as a future for us, who are contemporarily involved in a desperate search for First Contact with the non-hostile extraterrestrial Other (to make up for the drastic loss of real otherness on our native planet). The privileged origin of the “proper name,” as symptom, opportunistically does multiple duty and serves many masters. Suspicions grow about the true nature of an allegedly authoritative origin when we disentangle the web of attachments where the supposedly sovereign “origin” stands in a subordinate relation to narratives. Human historical events, when not doubled up (or overdetermined) by layers of retroactive simulation, are occurrences with a large measure of contingency. The participants or actors in these events had existential or psychobiographical choice. They were free agents. They might have opted to do something other than what they did. But in First Contact, Zefram Cochrane has no choice. Thanks to the chronotechnology of non-Möbius time travel, Cochrane’s actions are frozen into the ossified museum of history as absolute necessity.
Zefram Cochrane’s deeds are canonized and reified by all the monuments, shrines, commemorations, and mausoleums built in his honor. The consequences of the momentous “event” are too weighty for its outcome to be left to the uncertainty of a real human struggle. The majestic non-event instead plays its obligatory part in a “teleological” drama. But the futuristic grand narrative insists so much on the event’s having taken place that it begins to cause turbulent temporal phenomena like retroactivity, reversal, and Groundhog Day-like recurrence.
The Borg time travel to the past to prevent the inaugural warp speed flight; the meeting of humans and Vulcans; the founding of the United Federation of Planets; and the existence of the Enterprise-E and Star Trek. Zefram Cochrane is simulated and doubled up by the Borg’s time travel to eliminate him and thePhoenix in the service of their cosmological program. Cochrane is simulated and doubled up by the Enterprise-E crew’s time travel to interactively ensure the enactment of the “event.” He is simulated and doubled up by the prodigious search of the viewers and millennial culture for the technology of faster-than-light speed and First Contact with the alien Other.
Zefram Cochrane is coaxed to performance by the empathic Betazoid social work of Counsellor Deanna Troi. He is coaxed to performance by the warp drive know-how of the Enterprise-E team of engineers led by Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge, who get to work repairing the Phoenix after the Borg attack it. When all else fails, Cochrane is coaxed to performance by the hand phaser set-to-stun brute force of Commander and Régisseur William Riker (Jonathan Frakes).
While conversing with Cochrane, Troi’s face lights up at the thought of how wonderfully united humanity is going to be after First Contact. La Forge points out the patch of grass where the twenty meter-tall marble statue of Cochrane is going to be erected. He relates gushingly that, as a young man, he attended Zefram Cochrane High School.
Zef says that he does not want to be a statue. He runs away from the ship repair site in an inebriated panic. Riker shoots Cochrane as he runs towards the woods. The Enterprise-E crew members’ celebrity hero worship flips into disappointed contempt for a common drunkard. They sedate him, sober him up, and strap him down into his hero aviator’s pilot seat. La Forge and Riker go along as back-seat drivers on the historic warp speed flight to make sure everything goes as “it really happened.” Troi operates the control tower. Back on the ground in Billings after the flight, La Forge and Riker prod Cochrane into stepping forward to meet the Vulcan surveyors. How Cochrane gets back so expeditiously to Montana after splashdown of his ship is not explained. Presumably with transporter or time travel assistance from the Enterprise-E!
The epic Big Bang of April 5, 2063 is the crucial past historical origination for the Star Trek era and the crucial future projectable resolution for our era.
There is a second kind of light speed that is of great significance today. It is the speed of light of electromagnetic waves in the interactive multimedia networks; in cybernetic relays of telecommunications, television, the Internet, and digital computers; in the probe-sensor feedback loops of neural-direct and neural-extending biotechnologies. We are “living at the wall of light speed” (Virilio). The human species is undergoing processes of posthuman transformation “just below” this limit-speed. With regard to outer space travel, Einstein said that “strange things” would happen to an individual’s frame of reference – to his energy, mass, and time – as he approached the limit-speed. Living under the limit-speed of the omnipresent networks, we lose our geophysical orientation of spacetime and our human perspective. Multifarious “strange things” happen. When the technologies cannot go any faster, then they become technologies of disappearance. The transmutation continues on another level.Living under the speed of “non-stop” entertainment, we agitate ourselves to million-channel surfing, instant sports gaming, speed-dating, and inattention. Living just under the speed of super-computational “intelligence,” we swallow knowledge pharmaceuticals, brainpower supplements, memory wetware implants, and input-output perceptual devices of every kind. Living just below the speed of real-time markets and the global circulation of money, we engage 24/7 in transactions and wagers via/with mobile phones, wearable computing, and software agents. Like the Scalosians in The Original Seriesepisode Wink of an Eye – whose hyper-acceleration to invisible cybernetic-metabolic speed was caused by the radioactive fallout from a volcanic eruption – we surpass the frame of reference of our species. The Scalosians are so fast that they disappear. We hyper-invigorate and hyper-excite ourselves to live at metabolic rates contemporaneous with the limit-speed technologies.