#psicorps

Anybody else a fan of Babylon 5? Or is it just me? I’m rewatching it (since the last time I watched it was when I was ten or so and like 90% of it flew right over my head) and then I got this idea. 

*if you’ve never seen Babylon 5 this probably makes no sense sorry

Anyway, here’s an AU I’ll probably never write, but was too good to pass up. 

So Perry and Heinz are both P12 telepaths, right? Perry is a Psicop and he’s one of the best. He’s more of an empath than a telepath, given that he doesn’t really use human (or alien) language, instead relying on emotional and pictoral communication. He’s still really good at his job tho.

Heinz is...incompetent, and also mislabeled as a P9 or something, so he’s a high level scientist for the Corps instead of being a Psicop. 

At least, until he goes rogue. Then Perry is assigned to go find him and bring him back. Dead or alive, he’s got critical information and blackmail, yadda yadda yadda. Simple assignment for a Psicop.

So Perry goes to hunt him down, following him all the way to Babylon 5. 

On Babylon 5, they have this conflict where Perry realizes that maybe the Corps isn’t all good like he was led to believe (for example, Heinz tells him that he and Charlene were forced to have Vanessa, who turns out to be normal and is promptly taken away from them, never to be seen again) and he starts empathizing with Heinz going rogue. 

Basically, he starts questioning everything he knows. 

(At this point, he’s also fallen for Heinz. Heinz figures this out, being on the same level as Perry and as such being able to read his thoughts, and confronts him about it. Perry, who thought Heinz was really a P9, is surprised, but he confesses. Heinz absolutely feels the same way.)

But with Psicorps breathing down his neck, and with Ferb being a latent telepath as well, he really has no choice. So he basically lets Heinz go, saying that he’ll follow him if he can get Ferb away too. 

In the show’s style of writing, it would probably end with either only Ferb being able to get away, or just Heinz escaping and never hearing from Perry again. 

I’ve always known that sooner or later, the day would come where I would have to make a leap in the project because there would be some canon hole that I couldn’t directly fill with citations. One day, I would have to write a section based on circumstantial evidence and those hard to explain “gut feelings” (by which I mean something far more than a “hunch”).

Here’s what I’ve got:

1. We know the Corps is already involved in EarthGov’s plan to roll out the “mind wipe” machines, because they’re writing into law that special court telepaths have to conduct “before and after” scans on prisoners sentenced to it. That means the director (Johnston) is well on-board with this.

2. We know that Johnston hates telepaths, killed most of the leadership of the Corps and many cadre primers, and later sold telepath prisoners to the Shadows as “weapons parts”. He is one of the biggest baddies in a batch of Big Baddies.

3. We know that normal defendants and prisoners have rights (like a trial, for one) while telepaths have none. And since Johnston, as the (mundane) director of the Corps (appointed for life) can have anyone killed for any reason or none at all, telepaths only get whatever “rights” he wants them to have, which basically means “nothing”. That’s how he can sell people to the Shadows and no one back on Earth (who isn’t closely involved) even knows about it.

4. We also know the senators who oversee the Corps are chummy with Johnston, and that this oversight committee grew out of the Committee on Technology and Privacy.

5. Ergo, who is overseeing (or at least involved in) the development and roll-out of this “mind wipe” device? This same committee.

6. And since normals have rights, it would make so much more sense for this device to be tested on telepath prisoners. No one would even know or care that EarthGov did this to them - if no one even cares when law-abiding telepaths are killed, no one’s going to care what happens to these people. If this technology didn’t drop out of the sky from the aliens, it had to be tested on people, and who else?

7. Then, if telepaths object to being part of this - to torturing their own people - hey, we just kill them, too! (And they do object, and do get killed until the survivors are terrorized into obedience, as with the Shadow conspiracy.)

8. And then the EA Senate can bill this new device as “humanitarian”! and get all the credit for being “civilized”!

9. Meanwhile, we continue to show how evil Johnston is, and foreshadow what he does to telepath prisoners later.

PsiCop Alfred Bester Babylon 5 Custom Funko

I remember when they first announced that Walter Koenig would be playing a role on Babylon 5 I thought “oh that’s just a gimmick”.  Little did I know I’d come to think of him more with this character than I did with Star Trek.  I now always think Chekov is up to something.  He uses a Galen Erso funko from Rogue One with some of his uniform details carved off and then clay added to reshape.  His head is Anders from Workaholics.

So Rey wakes up in a spaceship, in a room with a cute guy dressed in all black, wearing black leather gloves, and they have a Force Bond, and all he wants is to get in her head.

It’s probably not possible, but I’d like a little Psi Corps badge emoji for my new Twitter profile.