Adventure Seed: The SS John Franklin.

the-ss-john-franklin-google-docs

The SS John Franklin

Two days ago, the government of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati surreptitiously reported to Great Britain’s GCHQ the appearance of a ‘derelict aircraft carrier’ in Kiribati territorial waters.  This report first amused, then alarmed the British intelligence community: amused because no ships that large had been reported missing by any country’s navy, and alarmed because the Kiribati government promptly sent video proof that an enormous, armed, yet abandoned sea vessel was drifting in their waters anyway. The British immediately sent a team to investigate the derelict: it took a day and a half to get there.  It’s unclear exactly when the team became a joint US/UK task force, but by the time they got there Americans were present; and it was probably just as well, because the ship (the SS John Franklin) had American registry.  

…Sort of. The ship’s papers – actual papers; there isn’t an electronic device on the ship – all have the right dates on them, but half of the forms and certificates don’t even exist and the other half are either archaic, or distorted, or both.  Also: the American flags found onboard all have 58 stars on them.  And, just to make the situation absolutely unsubtle: the charts found onboard show a North Atlantic where Great Britain is connected to Normandy and where the iceberg line is somewhere around the 30th parallel. So far, nobody has found any actual political maps onboard, although some of the place names on the sea charts are suggestive.

As for the John Franklin itself: it is not actually an aircraft carrier, although at 1,200 feet it is longer than the USS John F. Kennedy.  And, as noted before, the entire ship is analog: it’s wired for electricity and operates on oil power, but there isn’t even a vacuum tube on-board, let alone a transistor.  Even the radio is a spark-gap transmitter, albeit one of incredible sophistication and power.  That’s pretty much the best way to describe the ship, which on first glance looks to be a heavily-armed person/cargo carrier: the technology involved looks like somebody started with the mid-Victorian era’s state of the art and advanced it for a century and a half without ever incorporating modern electronics.

And then there’s all the blood.  Something tangled with the John Franklin: the ship appears (from the ship’s record) to have had a crew of about 1,500, and there isn’t even a recognizable corpse aboard.  There are, however, a number of shattered doors, gouges torn in decks, and the remains of what appears to be at least one hasty barricade in the ship’s interior.  It was at this point that the survey team hit the panic button that summons the US Navy and your team: the government of Kiribati is even now being quietly informed that it may become necessary to evacuate their entire nation before the area becomes an impromptu nuclear test site.  This would be extremely awkward, so it would be best if your team figured out where the John Franklin came from, whether anything else came through with it, and whether we can stop more things from coming through the same way, yes?