To fight the future, we turn to the past
X-COM: Resurrection
is an XCOM: Enemy Unknown fanfic that is almost a crossover with our own history. Facing the alien threat, XCOM resurrects great warriors from Earth's history.
Not to be confused with official Interquel novel XCOM 2: Resurrection.
The story contains examples of:
- Action Girl: All the female warriors.
- Artistic License – Religion: Pope Francis seems... Surprisingly receptive to the fact that mankind has invented technology that can cheat death. Considering the Roman Catholic Church's stance on human cloning, realistically, they would be extremely opposed to the idea of resurrecting historical figures, to say the very least.
- Back from the Dead: All of the warriors.
- Crack Fic: Even though the story tries its hardest to be serious, its premise alone still lands it firmly in this territory.
- Dead Fic: Hasn't updated since 2013 with just two chapters.
- Deus ex Machina: The entire story is built on these. How on earth did XCOM resurrect Joan of Arc, someone who was burned to death, had her dead body burned twice more, and her ashes cast into a river? How did they resurrect Genghis Khan, whose burial site remains undiscovered even to this day? How did they resurrect Nikola Tesla (died at 86) and Simo Häyhä (died at 96) and make them young again? It's probably why even the
author himself admitted that he "won't be going into detail on the resurrection tech".- One possibility is that the historical characters weren't resurrected at all, but plucked from their own time through Time Travel, though that theory raises far more questions than it answers.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: To varying degrees.
- All but averted for Simo Häyhä, who died in 2002. He even still has a working e-mail!
- For Want Of A Nail: Aside from the development of the (unexplained) resurrection tech, the story also diverges from canon in that the one survivor from the first squad was crippled, which is why she doesn't participate in the fighting. Instead, she becomes the commander.
- Mundane Object Amazement: The one thing that convinces Jeanne that technology is good? Modern agriculture.
- Averted for a lot of the technology around the base - the warriors were given memories of modern soldiers, so they're familiar with its functions, even if they still think it's really cool.
- My Greatest Failure: Bradford views the first mission (the tutorial) as this, given that he lost three quarters of his squad, and the Sole Survivor was crippled.
- Story-Breaker Power: Even if you ignore the whole "raising the dead" technology, the memory grafting technology that XCOM has in this story alone would be an absolute game changer in the war against the aliens. The ability to share memories between soldiers would allow even fresh recruits to have the same tactical knowledge as battle hardened veterans, which would be a tremendous advantage for XCOM. Of course, this possibility was never even hinted at in the story.
- Transferable Memory: The reason why the historical characters know how to operate modern weapons. XCOM scientists grafted the memories of modern soldiers into their brains.
- Voodoo Shark: The Transferable Memory aspect of the story is largely unexplored, and mostly serves to Handwave how fast the historical characters learned to use modern weapons. But it raises the question: why did XCOM bother with raising the historical characters in the first place when they could have just resurrected the soldiers that died fighting the aliens, scanned their brains, and implanted their knowledge about the aliens into every other XCOM recruit?
