1995 - Combine invade Nihilianth's home-world (where the Vortigaunts live). The Vortigaunts fight, but ultimately have to retreat to the border world of Xen where they expect to be destroyed.
Xen is like a crossing point within the universe (multiverse) and can be used to cross dimensions - a 'dimensional transit bottleneck' and 'nothing is native to Xen' (M Laidlaw) it is an area of continual contention, full of creatures from all over the universe who have been willingly or unwillingly transported there.
The Combine attempt to hybridize the dominant species of any planet they find, in Xen's case, this is the Vortigaunts, to create soldiers who are adapted to the planet's environment armed with Combine technology and weapons. This is what they will attempt to do on Earth.
While Nihilianth and the Vortigaunts are fighting on Xen, Gordon Freeman is studying for his doctorate at MIT, and at Black Mesa Research Facility experiments in teleportation are taking place under the direction of Eli Vance, Arne Magnusson and Isaac Kleiner. Crystals and animals are taken from Xen for analysis.
Black Mesa's rivals for research money is Aperture Science who are also developing portal technology. Aperture Science own a research ship called The Borealis. One day, after running an experiment, The The Borealis disappears completely off the face of the earth, taking everyone on board with it.
Glados an AI at one of the main Aperture Science facilities) is made operational.
2000 - The Resonance cascade triggered by Gman.
The Gman seems apparently acting independently of the needs of human or Combine, brings a specific test sample to be used in the test chamber at Black Mesa Research Facility. The true origin or nature of the sample is hidden by a system crash before the experiment, to prevent communication taking place between the scientists.
The sample causes a resonance cascade which rips open a portal between Earth and Xen. The Vortigaunts use the rip as an escape route. Headcrabs and other creatures also use the connection practically by accident. The military are sent into Black Mesa to deal with the catastrophe and this includes the elimination of all the scientists who were 'guilty' of causing the dimensional breach.
The rip in the space time causes the Combine to become aware of Earth.
Gordon Freeman is caught up in the resonance cascade, but because of his hazardous material's suit survives and is able to fight his way through Black Mesa to join up with the scientists at the Lambda laboratory. Freeman is sent to Xen by the scientists and told to kill the being in charge of the Vortigaunts - Nihilianth.
Meanwhile, back on Earth - Black Mesa is destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Several survivors remain from the original science team. One of them is Wallace Breen who was Black Mesa's former administrator, Barney Calhoun (security guard), Dr Isaac Kleiner, Arne Magnusson, Dr Eli Vance and his daughter, Alex Vance.
After Gordon destroys Nihilianth the Gman offers Gordon a choice; death or to work for him...Gordon choses to live and the Gman puts him into stasis, to wait until the Gman decides to call upon his services.
2004 - The Portal Storms.
The portal storms seem to be an effect from the resonance cascade and the rift between Earth and Xen. The portal storms occur all over the world, causing temporary, but chaotic inter-dimensional pathways between Earth and Xen. Aliens of all types teleport randomly through. People leave their homes and make for the cities which are protected by soldiers and fences, to escape the head crabs and zombies, and the vast networks of tunnels that are being made through the Earth's crust by ant lions.
2010 - The Combine begin to invade, using the portal storms to get them to Earth where they can use humans to create Combine soldiers, and continue to enslave the Vortigaunts. They force the portal storm wider so that they can invade faster. They teleport drop ships, soldiers and striders from Combine off-world locations. They begin to combine the DNA from the dominant species (humans) with Combine technology. They create a massive tower - the Citadel - in City 17 where they create 'combines' as well as their weapons, the Citadel is the Combine control center. There may well be secondary 'Citadels' in other cities.
As the humans fight against the Combine they form alliances with the Vortigaunts, united by a common enemy.
Wallace Breen is appointed ruler of the Earth by the Combine. It is unknown how or why he was selected for this role, but Wallace Breen seems to see the Combine as a way forwards, that human augmentation is a step towards humanity becoming 'trans-human'.. Breen's first act is to surrender Earth to the combine after the Seven Hours War after most of the major population centers have been destroyed. The Combine consider Breen useful because he is a specimen from the dominant species and they believe people will listen to him. Breen declares that the combine have arrived for 'good', to bring humanity immortality, and that loss of life is inevitable and justified in this transitional period.
Survivors try to move out of the cities to avoid capture, resistance fighters try to regroup in the countryside. Breen calls the rebel fighters, 'short sighted trouble makers'. The cities that still stand lose their names and are now called 'City 1, or city 2...City 17 etc. They are under the rule of the Combine.
All the scientists from Aperture Science have been killed by Glados.
2011 - Wallace Breen broadcasts Combine proper-gander from his room at the top of the Citadel in City 17. Huge television screens are placed in city centers, the content of all other media is censored and controlled . Breen asks people not to cause friction between Earth and the Combine during this transition period, as mankind becomes integrated with the combine. He believes that to gain from this union, mankind will have to sacrifice a lot, but that the ends justify the means because he believes that the union will be beneficial. He tries to convert the rest of the world to his view point. He believes that after the portal storms people will believe in anything that can give them hope.
Meanwhile the Combine Overwatch 'protect' the citizens from the aliens (the headcrabs and zombies) so humans continue to stay in the cities even as the Overwatch brutality towards humanity increases.
Breen's next task is to smooth the way towards a massive Combine invasion by eliminating any remaining resistance. Raids by the 'civil protection force' send suspected resistance fighters to be converted into 'stalkers' (human slaves) and the Overwatch continue to attempt the re-enslavement of the Vortigaunts. But the ultimate goal is to turn all humans into mindless slaves..Important prisoners are taken to Nova Prospekt, where they are interrogated and experimented on. The Combine want to gather as much information from Earth's population before they destroy it.
The Combine instigate 'a suppression field' to prevent the birth of more human beings. The Suppression field blocks the absorption from food, of specific protein chains needed for the development of a fetus. They also put a chemical in the water to make people forget the past so that they will be more compliant with Breen and the Combine; forgetting why they hate them, and how life used to be better than this!
Finally the Combine begin to drain the oceans as they start to change Earth in preparation for new residents.
2020 - Gordon is brought out of stasis by the Gman and Wallace Breen makes the capture of Gordon Freeman a top priority for the Combine Overwatch. Freeman sparks the revolution by overthrowing the Combine at Nova Prospekt. City 17 erupts into violence as the rebellion begins. Combine soldiers flood the streets, Vortigaunt refugees fight with the resistance.
Ultimately Gordon de-stabilizes the citadel in City 17 taking down the Combine's communication and control center and the combine forces are fractured and leaderless.
The Gman puts Gordon back into stasis and is about to take Alex, when the Vortigaunts take Alex and place her outside in front of the citadel, they pull Gordon out of stasis and transport him to a location close to Alex. The Vortigaunts have blocked the Gman's intentions..
The Combine have lost communication with their leaders and are trying to create a high energy super-portal which will let them send a packet of information with the location of Earth contained within it, back to their home-world, asking for a second invasion force.
Theory: The Vortigaunts saved Gordon and Alex so that they could shut down the reactor in the Citadel so that the people and Vortigaunts in City 17 could be saved. The Gman did not want this; he wanted the transmission to be a distraction and the Combine invasion to take place as soon as possible, so that his forces could destroy the Combine's home world. The destruction of humanity and the Vortigaunts being less important than ridding the universe of the Combine. Meanwhile the Vortigaunts care more about preserving the lives of the people and Vortigaunts, than of winning the war.
Nevertheless, the Combine do evacuate their pods and do manage to send the transmission. City 17 is destroyed and the Combine are waiting for the opening of another super-portal on the other-side.
Alex and Gordon get two transit packages from the citadel; the first package has the coordinates needed for the Combine to send troops to Earth...but the second package contains blue prints and coordinates for the location of the missing Borealis. This ship is said to contain extremely advanced portal technology.
Despite a terrific battle against striders, Black Mesa manage to launch a rocket, which, working with satellites launched at the time of the resonance cascade, cause the shut down of the super-portal.
The Combine are in a weak position for the first time...
But the Combine advisers are still roaming the countryside, feeding on the minds of the rebels.
As Elli Vance is killed, his dying words is that Gordon and Alex destroy The Borealis ..
Information from: https://youtu.be/uxBnxvQXWy0
Dearest Playa,
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 Epistle 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 science 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 Alex Vanced, that we should continue on as her father had wished. We had the Antarctic coordinates, transmitted by Eli's long-time assistant, Dr. Judith Mossman, which we believed to mark the location of the lost research ship, the 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 resistance's success. Either way, the arguments were moot until we found the vessel. Therefore, immediately after the service for Dr. Vance, Alex and I boarded a seaplane and set off for the Antarctic; 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 recurent, 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, Alex and I soon realized that what we were actually seeing was the research ship, The 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 ship was located, but instead for where it was predicted to arrive. The ship 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 ( Advisor) 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. Alex 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 Alex’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 Alex, as might be imagined. Alex blamed Jerry for her father's death…news of which, Judith was devastated to hear for the first time. Judith tried to convince Alex 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 his peers–by all of us–as a traitor. I was convinced; Alex 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 ship fully into our plane of existence.
We skirmished with Combine soldiers protecting their 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. Alex 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 research ship 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 Nine Hour Armageddon, 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: Antarctica. 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 Nine Hour Armageddon and the present day Antarctic; 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 Antarctic 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. Alex 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 stiuation, 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 Alex reminded me had sworn she would honor his father'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 Alex argued. Judith overpowered Alex and was preparing to shut off the Bootstrap Device to settle the ship on the ice. Then I heard a shot, and Judith fell. Alex had decided for all of us, or her weapon had. With Dr. Mossman dead, we were committed to the suicide plunge. Grimly, Alex 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, Mr. X. For once he appeared not to me, but to Alex Vance. Alex had not seen the Gman since childhood, but she recognized him instantly. “Come along with me now, we’ve places to do and things to be,” said Mr. X, and Alex 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 research ship 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 have 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. Expect no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final epistle.
Yours in infinite finality,
Gordon Freeman, Ph.D.
(source: http://www.marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/)
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