HENRY STARLING, CHRONOWERX,
S.E.T.I. LAB & RAIN ROBINSON

HENRY STARLING, FOUNDER & C.E.O. OF CHRONOWERX Page 1   left: Chronowerx's portrait in chalks of its founder, commissioned from the artists' academy "Janet's Star Trek Voyager Site". The justly unknown artist graduated with a PSP from Jasc.

Starling camping in the High Sierras, 1967 fish tattoo on left forearm in 1996, now a successful company C.E.O., Starling receives a telephone call in his office; he is standing in front of a large world map, as Chronowerx is an international organisation; the map screens a view down into the workshop laboratory where the stolen timeship Aeon is stored, [Future's End]

Henry Starling is a computer technology pioneer on 20th-century Earth. He was born approximately 1949 judging by his appearance in 1996, as his date of birth is not mentioned in [Future's End], and grew to 6 foot 4 inches (1.93 metres). (Age and height derived from information about actor Ed Begley Jnr!). Nothing is known of his parentage, birth or his childhood. But he must have been something of a rebel as by age 20 he had become what is often termed a "hippy", and one of his activities, undertaken alone, is camping in such majestic locations as the High Sierras in California. By that time he also acquired a fish-shaped tattoo on his left forearm. Starling later became responsible (in a way unknown to his contemporaries) for a large number of major revolutionary technological breakthroughs in the computer and electronics industry. Nothing is known of his personal life, for instance it is not known if Starling is married or involved in any romantic relationship. click to enlarge Map 7: High Sierras the young Starling looks up on hearing a commotion in the sky, and discovers a crashed starship from the 29th century He founded the company called Chronowerx Corporation. Its headquarters is an elegant skyscraper building in downtown Los Angeles, California, on the west coast of the United States of America. The building was actually the Transit building but with the Chronowerx logo added in post-production by the visual effects department.

click to enlarge Map 5: Los Angeles: some places appearing in or mentioned in [Future's End] LOS ANGELES is a city on the Pacific coast of southern USA federal state of California, the second-largest city in the USA, and one of the largest built-up areas in the world with a population in 1990 of about 3,485,400. Los Angeles was founded in 1781, developing after the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the discovery of oil in 1894. It has become a major commercial, industrial and urban complex in the 20th century. Its metropolitan area has expanded to include towns such as Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Santa Monica and Redondo Beach. Major industries include aircraft, oil refining, and entertainment (film and TV). It is also a cultural and tourist centre. (Los Angeles, the city in the Bio-Bio region of central Chile, to the south of Concepcion, should not be confused with this, the better-known, Los Angeles in California.) Incidentally, Ed Begley Jnr. who plays Henry Starling, was born in Los Angeles.

Starling has channelled his products through this increasingly successful international computer company, of which he is and remains the Chief Executive Officer until his premature death in 1996. He developed the first isograted circuit in 1969. The isograted circuit enabled computer chip technology to manufacture numerous electronic circuit components as a single unit, and it was therefore a key development in the dawn of Earth's computer age in the 20th century, leading eventually to the establishment of the Internet. Starling tells Captain Janeway that without him, there would be no Internet or barcode readers or laptop computers.

At the time of Starling's death in 1996, Chronowerx was barely two weeks away from launching the HyperPro PC computer system, with the only hold-up being the expected rectification of a substandard microchip component manufactured by a rival and inferior company (whose head, Jim, has an uncomfortable meeting with Starling about it).

above left: Starling places the offending computer chip on the table. above right: Starling tells Jim what he thinks of his product. left: the discomfited Jim Starling: "It's crap. The component density is too low, the voltage variance is out of spec and I don't even like the colour." Jim: "But Mr Starling-" Starling: "We've less than six months before we introduce the HyperPro PC and with a chip like this driving it we'll have to change the name to Edsel. I gave your company this contract because you're the best in the business, next to us of course. Go home, Jim, lose some sleep over this. I want a full report middle of next week."

Starling's innovative and extraordinary advances in computer technology has led to him acquiring wealth and fame. The paper-based hard-copy periodical published in this period has featured him presumably numerous times, and has pictured him on its cover at least once, in the December 1995 issue. That issue features a cover story about computer pioneer Henry Starling.

Starling has even met a President of the United States, namely President Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), the 37th president. Nixon met Starling in 1970, and a photograph of the event is on Starling's desk. The photograph in the picture is shown right, from Encyclopaedia.

It is not generally realised by the inhabitants of Earth's 20th and 21st centuries that in fact Starling had, in 1967, accidentally discovered the wreckage of the Aeon, a 29th century Federation timeship piloted by Captain Braxton that had crashed in the High Sierras. Starling was camping nearby, heard the crash and saw the aftermath (Encyclopaedia says he "observed the landing" but in the aired episode he hears the terrible sound and goes to look). Starling salvaged the Aeon before Braxton, who had escaped the crash by an emergency beam-out, was able to reach it. Starling cannibalised the Aeon's advanced 29th century technology and employed it as the basis for his remarkable breakthroughs. His company name, Chronowerx, was named with a secret punlike nod to how he acquired his technology, and he even adopts the Federation logo as the company logo for Chronowerx.

Chronowerx symbol and logo name as displayed on the outside of the Chronowerx headquarters building in Los Angeles, [Future's End] right: logo as displayed inside Starling's office in the headquarters buildings, [Future's End]

the Aeon in the Chronowerks workship/lab ("Chronowerks" is likely wordplay), [Future's End]

It is also not generally realised by the aforementioned inhabitants, nor at this time known by Starling himself, that he will be the cause of a cataclysmic explosion in the 29th century which will, as mentioned above, destroy Earth's solar system and kill billions of people. For, after cannibalising the Aeon as much as possible while leaving intact certain systems essential for flight and its transportation system, Starling decides that, to maintain his prestigious and lucrative world-leading position, he has to use the timeship to travel to the 29th century and illegally acquire more technology, enough to start the next ten computer revolutions. "...to get more technology"

click to enlarge  the Timeship Aeon, thanks to Ex Astris Scientia for the scan which is from TOSTFF

click to enlarge the Timeship Aeon; I did not do this scan; believe thanks to Ex Astris Scientia; believe scan is from TOSTFF if not then ST:M

newspaper clipping with a picture of Henry Starling that Captain Braxton shows to Janeway and Chakotay, [Future's End] Braxton: "Starling. Henry Starling, C.E.O. Chronowerx Industries. Philanthropist, entrepreneur, outstanding citizen, ha! When I crashed in the year 1967 I made an emergency beam-out but he found my ship before I did in some remote mountain range. Ah, I've been following this corrupt little man ever since, tracking his movements. He's become too powerful. I can't get close to him. Of course, you can't accomplish anything in this wretched century. Nobody here listens!"

Starling has spent much of his life in fear that someone from the future would return to his time to reclaim the timeship. He has prepared for this eventuality by taking various measures. However, one measure he fails to take is to discover if the timeship's original pilot (Braxton) survived the crash and to locate him by using 29th century technology to track any subspace readings still traceable on Braxton. Braxton is nowhere as fortunate as Starling, as he ends up as a homeless vagrant. Braxton's reduced circumstances mean that he is unable to get close to the rich and powerful Starling. When Janeway and Chakotay find Braxton after tracing his subspace readings, he informs them that if someone, by implication Starling, were to fly the Aeon into the future without precisely recalibrating the temporal matrix then that could cause the kind of explosion that he witnessed in the 29th century. No matter how much a genius this Starling might be, he is not a trained pilot from the 29th century, and without the exact calibration, that ship will rip the time-space continuum apart, so that the instant he jumps to the 29th century, there will no longer be a 29th century, not for Earth anyway, as the entire solar system will be destroyed. "...the entire solar system will be destroyed."

Griffith Observatory, [Future's End] UFO detected by S.E.T.I. lab equipment and displayed on Rain Robinson's computer, [Future's End] part of the S.E.T.I. greeting Rain sends to the UFO (which Voyager receives but does not reply to), [Future's End] Dunbar fires at Rain, missing her but destroying the truck that Paris and Tuvok arrived in, [Future's End]

Starling has, however, taken other measures against the likelihood that visitors from the future will attempt to seize the timeship. These measures include storing the timeship Aeon in a workshop laboratory adjacent to his office, surrounding the Aeon with a forcefield. He has employed a man called Dunbar as his Security Chief. Dunbar reports direct to Starling, who is the only person he has confided in about the nature of the Aeon, though Starling has done so out of necessity, and equipped him with the Aeon's hand-weapon, a subatomic disruptor (no doubt a smaller version of the shipboard weapon that the Aeon employed, under Braxton's control, against USS Voyager). An important measure taken by Starling is his funding, using his enormous accumulated wealth, of a S.E.T.I. project. S.E.T.I., which are the initials of "search for extra-terrestrial intelligence", is a massive scientific research programme which utilises powerful radio telescopes set up to detect radio signals from any extrasolar civilisations. A key concept in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is a mathematical concept known as the Drake Equation, formulated by Earth astronomer Dr Frank Drake. The Drake Equation is the 20th century Earth scientific concept for estimating the number of technologically sophisticated civilisations in the galaxy. Based on the persuasive equation, a number of wealthy individuals such as Henry Starling and film mogul Steven Spielberg (a lesser-known figure than Starling, and who is not mentioned in [Future's End]) have funded S.E.T.I. research. Starling, with a lot personally at stake, funds a S.E.T.I. laboratory at Griffith Observatory situated in the Hollywood Hills. Starling and the Observatory employ an astronomer named Rain Robinson. A copy of the Drake Equation is posted on the wall of the laboratory where she works. Starling has given her a particular gamma emission frequency profile with instructions to inform him immediately should she ever detect it. When she does detect such gamma emissions in orbit above the Earth, she telephones the project's funder, Starling. But although she wants to contact NASA with the important news, he orders her to continue tracking it and not to take any action while he investigates although he has no intention of doing so. However, Rain transmits the standard S.E.T.I. greeting in the direction of the gamma emissions' source and, overcome with excitement at the enormous significance of her discovery, she e-mails a friend at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who contacted his professor at CalTech. Starling takes quick action to suppress Rain Robinson's discovery. He is forced to make an official rejection of her findings. Considering Rain to be a liability, he despatches Dunbar to collect the data (in the end, he is unable to collect or erase her computer data as Tuvok has done so shortly beforehand but he would have been able to collect or destroy the computer print-outs). Starling also instructs Dunbar to murder Rain Robinson but she is rescued in the nick of time by Tom Paris and Tuvok. Dunbar's exchange of phaser fire with Tuvok confirms to Dunbar, and thus to Starling, that visitors from the future have definitely arrived.