Ikarran

Ikarran
Life-form Type	Bipedal Humanoids
Homeworld	Ikarra VII
Extinct	Circa 13th Century

“

"You and the rest, you forgot the first rule of the fanatic: when you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy!"

– Jeffrey Sinclair

The Ikarrans were an ancient, advanced race which had organic technology, tools made of living material. By the thirteenth century on Earth, they were a dead race, destroyed by their own weapons. The bioweapons were programmed to eliminate anything "impure" and only obey "pure Ikarrans" in an attempt to destroy alien invaders, but the "pure Ikarran" parameters were set in a fashion that made them impossible for Ikarrans themselves to meet. Their home planet, Ikarra VII, is long since dead - a vast desert is all that is left.

History

Over their long history, the Ikarrans were invaded by over a half dozen different alien races. Each invasion was more deadly than the previous, creating extreme losses of life. During the last invasion, the Ikarrans employed recently discovered left over Shadow tech to create organic warriors to protect them. The warriors were actually sentient artifacts that bonded themselves to a host to create powerful, living weapons capable of both independent thought and able to adapt to new situations. Rather than create an entirely new synthetic personality, they programmed them with the personality of the lead researcher, Tu'lar. The machines were also programmed to kill anything except for "pure Ikarrans." A coalition of religious fanatics and military extremists - which operated the government - defined the parameters for a "pure Ikarran," but based it on ideology rather than biology.

Tu'lar, the head developer of the organic warrior devices, on a viewscreen

Twelve of these devices were built, and eleven of them were released when another invasion came. When the last invading race was destroyed, the machines began to kill every single Ikarran since no Ikarran fit the nonsensical, fascistic description of a "pure Ikarran" programmed into them. When everyone was dead, the machines were destroyed through centuries of neglect--all save the last device.

The last of the organic weapons, bonded to a human, on Babylon 5

In 2258, Vance Hendricks, working for IPX, discovered the last remaining device. He and his partner Nelson Drake smuggled it to Earth Alliance station Babylon 5. There it bonded with Drake, transforming him into one of the organic warriors that nearly led to the station's destruction. Commander Jeffrey Sinclair was able to confront the warrior and force it to realize that Ikarra VII was nothing but a ghost world.

The warrior, realizing the fact than he was fighting a futile war, took out his device, returning Nelson to his original state and putting an end to the crisis.

Notes

In The Babylon 5 Scriptbooks of J. Michael Straczynski Volume 1, in his introduction to the story, Straczynski confirms that the Ikarrans used left over Shadow tech to create the warriors.