Full name: James Burke
Species: Gallifreyan
Date of birth: Uncalculated on Standard Calendar
Place of birth: Gallifrey
Height: 5'9"
Weight: 150 lbs.
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Grey
Adjusted Wolfe-DeKok Intelligence Index: 275

Babylon Foundation member since: July 12, 2391
Title: Archivist and Integrationist
Test of Light administered: October 7, 2395
Other special qualifications/certifications:

- Honors Graduate, Prydonian Academy of Time, Gallifrey
- Time and Relative Dimension in Space Master Operator
- MA, English, Jesus College, Oxford, Earth
- Ph.D., Galactic History, Hotohori University, Tomodachi
- Starship master's certificate, Empire of Salusia
- Wedge Defense Force Able Non-Combatant Training
- WDF Small Craft Pilot
- WDF Fixed-Configuration Starfighter Pilot
- International Police Organization Tactical Division Data Systems Security Specialist

Notes: When founding WDF commander MegaZone and his executive officer, Commander Benjamin D. "Gryphon" Hutchins, selected James Burke as one of the public figures of late-twentieth-century Earth to be approached for clandestine WDF recruitment in 1993 as part of Project Hero, they knew him only as a scholar and broadcaster. They thought his programs had shown the kind of agile, keen mind that would adapt well to the prospect of space travel in those pre-Contact days, and further, they gambled that he possessed the kind of empirical curiosity which would motivate him to take the opportunity to see what was out there if it were offered to him.

As it happened, they were right - a lot more right than they expected to be. As with many of the Project Hero contacts, the Burke meeting went wrong from the start, plagued by the sudden appearance of a GENOM Corporation hit squad. As such, MegaZone's carefully rehearsed, bring-him-into-it-gradually speech went by the wayside in favor of a hastily blurted, "Look, we're from outer space - well, actually, we're from the States, but we work in outer space now - would you like to come back with us to our ship?"

The inexperienced WDF captain's subsequent mental cursing of himself was interrupted by his utter amazement when Burke replied pleasantly, "Actually, boys, I think you'd better come along in mine before those chaps catch up to you."

Which was how MegaZone and Gryphon discovered that their favorite television personality was, in fact, a much more experienced space traveler than they were, being a several-hundred-year-old, fully-accredited Gallifreyan Time Lord. GENOM files discovered following the War of Corporate Occupation show that the squad sent after the Wedge Defenders that day never did figure out how the two of them and their elderly-looking civilian contact gave their pursuers the slip.

Burke, an acquaintance of WDF patron and fellow time traveler Edison Bell, joined the Wedge Defense Force as a non-combatant (though he did take up starfighter piloting as a convenience measure, since fighters were much more plentiful, and thus easier to borrow for personal trips, than smallcraft in the WDF's Golden Age). He served as an archivist and information specialist as well as the Force's official historian, and produced documentary programs for the Wedge Broadcasting System on a dizzying array of topics.

As a Time Lord, Burke could have escaped the chaos, disorder, and Wedge Defender hunts of the 2300s through the simple expedient of stepping into his TARDIS and skipping them. Instead, he became a sort of galactic nomad, disappearing from public life but not from the cosmos. He traveled here and there, sometimes accompanied by various people thrown into his acquaintance by chance, sometimes alone, bearing witness to a dark time in the galaxy's history. When Gryphon's name was cleared in 2388, Burke was among the first of the old Wedge Defenders to reappear and settle in what became New Avalon, though he did not rejoin the WDF.

In 2391, following the Twilight Incident, MegaZone began planning the Babylon Foundation. His first recruit for that organization's loose confederation of directors was Burke. The Time Lord was one of the few people in the galaxy who could understand the complex web of interrelated factors from which the newly-fledged Chaos-Walker was predicting the need for the Foundation in the first place.

James Burke appears to be a human in his hundred-thirties or so, just past middle age but quite fit. He is not human, however, as a cursory medical scan will show. He possesses all the usual attributes of a Gallifreyan Time Lord, including a double heart and bypass respiratory system which give him much greater stamina than an equivalent regular human. He gives the general impression of being exactly what he is - a scholar and academic.

Being a Time Lord, of course, he's much more than that. Burke possesses a high-order relative-dimensional craft called a TARDIS, which permits him, with certain limitations too complex for the scope of this document, to travel in both space and time. He is an expert in this machine's use and maintenance, and it is his TARDIS which gives him the ability to appear and disappear seemingly at will, virtually anywhere in the galaxy. (It also means that the wonderfully detailed historical re-enactment sequences in many of his documentaries aren't re-enactments at all!)

Along with his extensive knowledge of time, space, dimensional dynamics, and block transfer mathematics, Burke is a master of an intellectual discipline called historical integration (or sometimes "integratics"). Integrationists believe that the future of a civilization can be predicted with some reliability through the examination and contemplation of its past and present trends, and in a society as large and complex as that of the present-day galaxy, the practice verges upon Chaos-Walking itself.

Though apparently elderly and quite non-violent, James Burke is not a helpless egghead, as many would-be aggressors have learned to their grief over the centuries. In addition to his WDF non-combatant self-defense training, Burke possesses considerable expertise as a swordsman.

Present assignment: James Burke serves as the Babylon Foundation's archivist, historian, and integrationist. He answers to no one and comes and goes at will. As seems to be his custom whether he intends it or not, he has lately been traveling with a young disciple; the current one is a girl from Tomodachi named Hiroe Ogawa, who was once acquainted with Kaitlyn Hutchins and who seems possessed of a thirst for knowledge and adventure which is beyond any mortal agent's power to slake.

Hiroe Ogawa
(Apologies for the poor image quality - it's a security camera frame,
and the only image of her I could find anywhere! Ask James to come
in sometime so we can get a better one. -V-)

End of Text Data Extraction Search
thank you for using the
Babylon Project Galactic Database

I may recover the ability to breathe without shattering helplessly some time next week.

I see Zoner's Connections videos haven't gone to waste at all :)

Oh, and I don't know if you intended it or not, but the concept of integratics sounds an aweful lot like Asimov's "Psychohistory", albeit in a bit more stomachable form...

Offsides

I have looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked also back into me.
Neither of us liked what we saw.
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

There's a certain amout of genius involved in expressing so much hilarity in so few words.

I could just *see* it. Brilliant.

Meagen
- who doesn't even know this guy, and still finds it funny

Much shattering ensues...

Gryphon, thank you kindly for the first true laugh I've had since I discovered the whole Rachie thing this morning. Coming through my tears, but a laugh, nonetheless.