I don't own Independence Day or The Expanse.
In this continuity, Resurgence never happened.
X
Into Space.
The ex-United States President Thomas Whitmore took a deep breath as he stood leaning heavily on his walking cane, cursing old age, but he was amazed by the sheer size of the massive scale of the event occurring in front of him from a safe distance. The desert around Area 51 had been transformed, going from a top-secret US military secret to a well-known research centre, and a launch platform for the mission. This was the moment many had been waiting for.
Ever since the ID4 invasion, the terrible attack where the human race was attacked by a highly advanced alien race which wanted them, their planet and its resources to drain until the human race was extinct, along with all forms of life on the planet and the Earth was a dead planet, humanity had barely managed to win the war which left all the cities on the planet destroyed, destroying countries works of art, literature, music, and history and culture as the aliens worked to destroy all trace of the human race from the face of the planet, Area 51 and places like it had been repurposed and made public for the study and research into alien technology while scientists and engineers worked to improve and develop human technology while taking what was learnt about the technology of the aliens and understand it to make developments into human science.
Whitmore and the surviving leaders of the United Nations and everyone else had focused hard on rebuilding Earth. Populations of cities were moved to the countryside, so cities could be rebuilt as the years passed, and many scientists completed the job Oakham and his predecessors in Area 51 set out to do to study the aliens' technology from the fighter which crashed in Roswell in 1946, which had been impossible since the technology of the ship had been virtually impossible to study; it wasn't until the Mothership appeared in 1994, the technology re-powered back up and the ship became active again, and in the aftermath of the attack there was enough powered alien technology for them to work with to make experiments.
The studies into alien technology inspired advances in robotics, which led to the creation of exoskeletons which made the reconstruction of the cities much easier and less problematic. New energy sources which tapped into fusion and later cold fusion rendered all other previous forms of power obsolete although they still made use of nuclear power, and old-fashioned cars and lorries were slowly phased out as the planet's pollution was brought down. Earth's atmosphere and water and land suffered tremendous damage because of the invasion, nobody wanted to make it worse by focusing on rebuilding the fossil fuel industries, but after the invasion, such fuel sources were the last thing on anyone's minds since the aliens had left behind enough power sources which were cleaner, more efficient, and less hazardous.
But while this was going on, Whitmore had been suffering nightmares; a residual effect of the painful telepathic rape of the alien inside the Area 51 surgery as it was trapped smashed into his mind. The nightmares showed scenes of alien worlds which were so quick and fleeting that he needed a hypnotherapist to help him understand them, and they had caused his work to suffer.
Whitmore was left horrified by the scenes caused by the residual telepathic visions, and it was only thanks to the hypnotherapists that everyone discovered how lucky they had come out of the invasion, and once it was made public since those petty little rules about secrecy were no longer valid since so many of those secrets had caused more problems and harm than they had needed.
Everyone discovered the aliens were nomadic and there were many more motherships. All ships were commanded by a Queen, who governed the rest like insects in a terrible colony. One mind, one species, one invincible spaceship. Their mindset alone meant it was impossible for them to even consider making peace with aliens. They were governed by a hunger beyond comprehension, a hunger that had already made them destroy their own world, exhausting its resources in generations before they built vast ships for traversing interstellar space after discovering the secrets to faster-than-light travel.
As they left their world in vast motherships, the aliens travelled to neighbouring worlds, conquering and stripping them down while tearing all resources away and leaving behind a dead planet orbiting a star that had been left behind. The aliens were not above trickery, as Earth had discovered following the revelation the aliens were behind the Roswell crash. The surviving alien of the crash had telepathically communicated with the human staff, trying to convince them of their peaceful intentions. Sadly not everyone was convinced; Doctor Wells was shown the aliens' homeworld, that they were scientists like Wells was, but Wells wasn't convinced as he remembered the bio-mechanical suits and a heavy jungle world was transformed into a barren lifeless wasteland; he believed the suits would have been better suited to an alien species who were native to that world, with strong arms and grappling tentacles, rather than the fragile aliens within.
The Roswell alien realised it had made a mistake, and it tried to convince Wells that the jungle world was the one they originated from, but Wells hadn't seen any hint of the planet being the visitor's world; there was no sign of higher technology like what would be needed by a culture to create ships capable of crossing the interstellar void. And there was nothing that indicated the aliens had created the 'bio-mechanical' suits since he saw them swing through the branches like the great apes on Earth.
There was no sign of technology.
There was no sign of spaceships, and there was no sign that underneath the swinging alien creatures were even interested in developing science.
Chilled by this revelation, Wells concluded the alien was lying, that they were conquerors and plunderers and they had attacked that jungle world and tore it to pieces before leaving it as a wasteland. They had taken everything to manufacture new tools, ships, and weapons while stripping the environment of food and other resources, like water. Even the aliens who swung from tree to tree were used as bio-mechanical suits, something that sickened Wells.
The scientist argued his case, but nobody listened to him when he stressed strongly that an invasion was coming, but nobody listened. Wells refused to give up when more UFOs were detected and seen, and he argued the story should be made public. Wells was dismissed as a crackpot alarmist instead of a scientist, and he became erratic enough that Nimziki had him fired and he was eventually put into a mental institution where he would die.
When he was put under hypnosis, Whitemore was able to find out what the aliens thought of humans, of life in general.
Toxic thoughts of disgust, loathing, contempt, a xenophobia that defied all kinds of racial hate found on Earth. To the aliens, all other life was inferior and had to be exterminated for their own use. Peace with aliens was seen as an impossibility.
In recorded interviews which were shown to governments all over the world for them all to know what the threat was, Whitmore described the attacks on other worlds.
He saw the jungle world where the natives who were the basis of the bio-mechanical suits came from. Their world had been one of the first, and despite the desperate struggle, the natives lost because they were not advanced enough, and they believed they would live a life of slavery without knowing the horrifying truth. Their bodies were gutted and filleted and their skins were modified and repurposed as they were fitted with the technology.
A world of a tech level of the 1800s, entering its industrial age with smoke rising in the air from burned coal and oil as the planet's technology accelerated and airships crossed high snowcapped mountains next to valleys and industrial cities before the invaders arrived. They used primitive gunpowder cannons, but they were defeated.
Twin ocean worlds where the waters were strip-mined of all life and minerals and plants, the corals bleached of all life and the waters used for quenching the aliens' thirst; two worlds where there were large ocean-going fish and mammals - alien whales - and the invaders hunted them down brutally to extinction before they cracked the worlds open and looted them for their mineral wealth.
A desert world where an underground civilisation of people like moles thrived in the dirt so they could escape the high UV radiation, but had created a small but highly advanced civilisation.
Another jungle world where there were massive dinosaur-like creatures, whose bodies were torn apart and used for meat while their planet was colonised and stripped to the bones.
An advanced world which fought in space before being defeated, and the survivors of the planet were punished for their resistance and their cities were destroyed and wrecked, and the survivors were slaughtered while their bodies were used for food and the planet was stripped bare.
And on and on it went.
When Whitmore was finished, he stressed that there were likely other invaders out there in the galaxy, and they needed to be prepared. They had gotten lucky once, they could easily lose that luck again. Only by expanding and getting ready they could survive and fight these invaders; luckily for Whitmore, everyone had gotten the wake-up call of the invasion, and they began making plans to get out into the solar system and beyond, using the aliens' technology to make advances in power and space exploration hardware, and focusing on new weapons and defence technology to match the aliens in battle. However, they would need to keep making expansions in the technologies so they would survive.
On top of that, the last battle had been a last-ditch attempt to save themselves. Anything could have gone terribly wrong - if the aliens had come with more than one ship, they could have easily adapted to the virus once they had analysed it, and they would have launched a stronger attack.
It was obvious by now the other aliens were telepathic and connected together to a vast hive mind. They knew what had happened to their ship and people, they would be back.
And they wouldn't make the same mistakes as their predecessors.
After fusion power was cracked - using a combination of new science developed by scientists who wanted to use whatever of their knowledge had survived and using observations based on the power of the aliens and whatever technology was scavenged from surviving pieces of technology - the first fusion drive rockets were launched for a return to the moon, and exploration vessels were sent into the solar system.
Humanity's knowledge of the solar system, of the universe, grew and now it was set to grow further. The Epstein drive was the newest fusion drive model and was said to be more powerful in tests, and it had been proven. They had new ships that would reach past Mars in half the time, and reach the Oort cloud.
Area 51 was one of many shipyards around the planet. Each one was going to be launching the fleet of ships, all 300,000 ships and they would be heading for Venus, the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and beyond.
"Dad?" Patricia's voice made him turn. Whitmore smiled at his daughter, proud of how far she had come. She was part of the new Global Earth Defence Forces, and they would soon be heading into space to construct the space stations and begin fortifying the solar system, and she had become a great pilot already.
"Hello munchkin," Whitmore smiled, it grew when he saw her nose wrinkle at the nickname.
"This is it," Patricia smiled back, recovering.
"It is indeed," he said before the countdown reached zero, and the ships lifted off of the ground where they shot into space.
"Dad, when do you think they'll be back?" Patricia whispered.
Whitmore sighed. "I don't know, but I hope we'll be ready by that point."