Marcus on the Brink of Forever is a WIP by troper Skylark 2. It follows the adventures of 7-year-old Marcus, who wakes up from what was supposed to be a short cryogenic sleep to find that more than three thousand years have passed and he has been revived on a spaceship (The Brink Of Forever) orbiting Venus.
There, he is befriended by the telepathic twins Rowan and Uras, who help him adjust to their drastically different way of life. He also meets a colorful assortment of other children with special traits, including Sairah the shapeshifter, the sexless Anfri, and Awen, who can photosynthesise; among other things. But even though his new life feels utopic, sooner or later Marcus will have to face his troubled past.
This work provides examples of:
- Amazing Technicolor Population: Sometimes the genetic engineers like to have a bit of fun with this when designing kids, Awen is green for a example.
- Designer Babies: Ubiquitous in the civilized universe, but it's a cultural cornerstone of ship society, they get creative with it. By the mid mid Twenty First Century, embryo selection was very common among the rich, Marcus' parents being products of it.
- Emergency Transformation: Marcus' body didn't survive cryo very well, so his consciousness was transferred to a new body.
- Fantastic Racism: Matrons are a bit irrational regarding organics raising children.
- Future Imperfect: All the Wallace & Gromit shorts have survived, but everyone assumes they're the only surviving episodes of a larger TV series. Additionally, the Doctor is thought to have been part of British folklore.
- Generation Ship: What the ship started out as before discovering FTL, that was two thousand years ago.
- LEGO Genetics: Averted, its much easier to just quick grow a body from a zygote with the modifications you want and just transfer into that.
- A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Marcus' first attempt to communicate psychically with Rowan and Uras doesn't go well. And he just went a bit funny, everyone else who's tried it tends to end up feeling sick for a while.
- No Blood Ties: Most children on the ship are created out of genomes built from scratch, and are raised by a sort of Artificial Intelligence (the polite term for them on the ship is "Constructed Conciousness") known as Matrons.
- Starfish A Liens: Titan for example is now inhabited by flying, methane breathing hermaphrodites.
- 20 Minutes in the Future: When Marcus hails from (2053 to be precise).
- Twin Telepathy: Rowan and Uras (although they aren't technically twins).
