Help!! A question or two...

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

Uhm... Help? Am currently writing for the darkangel_bb and I am having no luck finding any good answer to a few questions I have. So maybe you can help??

1) How do the X5's age? Do they age slower than humans because of their physical enhancement? Or do they age like humans?
2) How do X5's get created? We know X5's are forced to breed (that's how Alec and Max meet after all :P), so does that mean every X5 has a "mother"? If so, who raises the babies until they're old enough to be trained?

Thank you!!!!! <3

Comments

[poisontaster]

The breeding program was only instituted after Max & Co destroyed Manticore's genetic laboratory. Prior to that point, Manticore was using cloning.

ETA: Specifically, cloning embryos that were then carried to term by normal human surrogates. So, they do have a mother in that sense, but the mother and the clone don't share any genetic material.

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much!! :)

Okay, so timeline-wise, Alec & Ben were cloned and birthed by a normal human woman (who was taken captive at some point? Did she volunteer? Any idea if she had to continuously carry children?). They didn't start the breeding program until after Max destroyed the GenLab *mental note: look into that timeline vs Alec* Any idea on who raises the babies until they were kids and old enough to train? The birth mothers?

[poisontaster]

I forget what episode it is, but I seem to remember that Max meets her surrogate at some point and it seemed like they were volunteers...but that's coming from my unreliable memory and it's been a couple years since I've done a thorough rewatch. If they were volunteers, I doubt they were continuously carrying children...but you could probably bend that if you really needed/wanted to for your story. I have no recollection who raises the children, though they might have mentioned it when the surrogates came up, IDK.

In the S2 opener, IIRC, is where Renfro announces that, because Max destroyed the GenLab, they had to institute the breeding program. I don't recall how much time passed between the end of S1 and the open of S2, but it had been a while. This would, however, have been after Alex got out of PsyOps for The Berrisford Agenda.

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I need to get details about that, but if they were volunteers and they liked how everything went down (haven't found any proof of anyone actually fitting this bill) they might have been carrying constantly, but it's more probable it were all one time deals.

I don't remember the end of S01 very well, but S01 starts when Max is about 19 or 20 (in 2018 or 2019) and S02 starts when she's about 22 (in 2021). So it can't have been that much time in between. With Pollo Loco halfway in S01, Alec would have been at PsyOps for the Berrisford Agenda before that.

Just settings things in order on my head :P

Thanks so much!!

[poisontaster]

Again, I'm coming from an unreliable memory, but it seemed to me that the surrogates didn't KNOW what was going on or for what purpose they were carrying children. I'm not 100% sure on that, but that's what my memory is telling me. Which would make the argument that a surrogate would only be used once and never again, for increased security/secrecy.

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

I like that. I seem to remember something from the Eyes Only Dossier that would support that notion. Doesn't mean it would be unknown to all surrogates (maybe the first ones did know until it went wrong some time? *bunny*), but certainly at later times. I imagine security would be tight. I Like!

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

I forgot about the volunteering mothers, getting a lob of money to carry a child... Got that one, thanks! :)

[duh-i-read.livejournal.com]

I donno if aging is ever really addressed in the show aside from Max and the other escapees seemed to have grown up at a comparable rate as their peers. Depending on what your trying to write, I think an argument could be made that X5's are either going to age slower as they get older or all that hyped up cloned genetics will cause them all to have shorter then average lifespans.

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

Okay, clear on that :P Basically, we have no proof they age as humans do, but also no proof they don't. Artistic freedom it is ;) Thank you!!!

[linderhill.livejournal.com]

from what I remember the X5's age like normal humans. If its different, it was never explained to my knowledge. All of the Manticore series were test tube babies were implanted in surrogate mothers who were basically either terminated or re-implanted depending on how successful they were or how much trouble they gave the to the Manticore personnel. Early in the first season Max was asking about the woman that carried her when she found the technician that helped hide her when she was escaping. They only began the breeding program because Max and co. destroyed the gene bank towards the end of the first season.

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

...in surrogate mothers who were basically either terminated or re-implanted depending on how successful they were or how much trouble they gave the to the Manticore personnel...
I like that notion, thanks!

[mdlaw.livejournal.com]

Some of the mistakes had accelerated aging though. I don't remember what episode, but when Max was a captive she was taken to see another clone of herself dying from accelerated aging. It's a known genetic anomaly, but I don't remember what it was called. m

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I remember that. Renfro asks Max if she got any treatment on the outside to prevents her from happening that to herself. Hmmm... Artistic freedom says I can use it both *beams* Thanks!

[mandraco.livejournal.com]

I also get the feeling that although the women knew they were surrogates, they didn't know that they were carrying genetically engineered super soldiers, given the secrecy of the project. I think if they knew, Manticore would either have to keep them captive forever (which doesn't seem cost effective so they'd probably force them to continuously carry children until they couldn't anymore), or kill them. But, considering Max's mother wasn't killed even after she tried to run away with Max, I doubt the latter.

Max doesn't ever actually meet her surrogate mother, but she appears in flashback in an early season one episode. *goes to check* It's episode two, Heat. That's basically where all the information about surrogates and mothers comes from, I think. I haven't read the Eyes Only Dossier.

I'm pretty sure no mention is ever made of who raises the babies until they're old enough to be trained. Considering they start walking at six months (although I have no idea where I got that idea from), the age at which they'd start to be trained is probably earlier than a regular kid would start school.

And with Alec's timeline: he would have gone to Psy-Ops for the Berrisford Agenda and because of Ben's craziness pretty close together. I get the feeling they sent Alec to Psy-Ops at about the time that they realised it was Ben, which would have been before Pollo Loco. I don't think they would have waited to recapture Ben before sending Alec for testing/brainwashing.

I think it's about four months between the beginning of S2 and the end of S1. I'm pretty sure that's mentioned in the first episode of S2.

And the rapid aging is called progeria.

Hope that helps... and that you didn't already know this by the time I got here.

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

...It's episode two, Heat. That's basically where all the information about surrogates and mothers comes from...
I forgot about that episode! I really need to re-watch all episodes before I really start writing 0_o

Thanks so much for everything, you are awesome! *clings*

[mandraco.livejournal.com]

Glad I could help. =)

I pretty much forgot about half of season one, since I haven't seen most of it since it aired (ten years ago, yikes!). I have to admit to only recently rewatching season two for Alec. And for some reason Max's mother keeps trying to make herself a character in my fanfics (for some reason, my head thinks her name is Joanne and that she looks like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2), so I had to go back for that ep.

[voldy06.livejournal.com]

Okay, take this with a big grain of salt, but I once read somewhere that originally Renfro's storyline was supposed to be quite different and that she actually experimented on Tinga because she wanted to find out how to use the X5's slow aging for herself. I'm not sure how true this is, but we never do find out what exactly Renfro was doing with Tinga, so I guess it's at least a possibility.

Anyway, in my headcanon I've always imagined that X5 would age slower than humans because I found it weird that Manticore would spend so much time and money investing in super soldiers who would only be usable for maybe 30 years. Besides, the progeria always seemed to me as a hint that Mantiore had indeed messed with their aging process in some way.

[tattooeddevil.livejournal.com]

Woah, where did you read that? I love that storyline! It is definitely a possibility! Hmmmm, interesting... Thank you!!

[peaceful-sands.livejournal.com]

Just a thought about the aging process - Max's unit escape in '09 when Max is about 10, so if she is about 20 in Season 1 at that stage her aging must be about normal. Given that they had so many different X series models, there's nothing to say they didn't try improving aging at some point.

[randomstasis.livejournal.com]

One more thing about raising the babies; Although the surrogates were volunteers not necessarily aware of the program behind the implanted embryos, just like the donors, Manticore needed to monitor all their experiments pretty closely, since they had such a high incidence of failure and so many genetic tampering-induced medical problems, like the seizures induced by nutritional deficiencies. They couldn't allow the babies to be born offsite, without Manticore's personnel to handle it. If they ended up with odd looking babies- Furry, Desert-adapted, etc. they'd need to be able to hide that from even the mothers, and raise the kids onsite.and if I remember right, after the birth Max's mother tried to take her away from the facility?
The indoctrination program had to control the kid's socialization closely too. And the older transgenics needed to take classes in basic social skills and language, felt like outside Manticore was dirty and contaminating, so that suggests they were raised there.
So, since they had to monitor constantly and already had to have creche/nursery facilities for the nonhuman types, they'd probably have raised all of them at Manticore.

[healer-twilight.livejournal.com]

Er, kinda late reply here, and other people seem to have answered your questions pretty well... I'd just like to offer up a couple links to some nice streaming sites where you can find a lot of the DA eps for free. The video quality is a lot better than some of the other video sites out there. I figured you might like to go check out what was said for yourself!

www.free-tv-video-online.me/

http://tubeplus.com/

I'm pretty sure the episode that talks about the mothers is on one or both of them. Hope this helps you out!