Toorop

About Babylon AD
summary from emcity.com
The hero of our story, Hugo Cornelius Toorop, is a French-Dutch mercenary. He started out in the business in Bosnia in the late 20th Century. Discovering that he had a liking for soldiering, he moved on from the Balkans to Central Asia where for the past decade or so he has been embroiled with various factions in what has become known as the Chinese Civil War. When the group of tribal freedom fighters who are currently paying him gets badly betrayed and massacred he is forced to flee to one of his few friends in the region, Colonel Romanenko, the Russian Secret Service chief in Kazakhstan who has been his principal arms supplier of late.
Toorop is an interesting character, as much given to reading about war as fighting, and determined to make sure his men get properly trained so that they have a chance of living more than a few months. He likes to sing and recite poetry to the corpses of men he has killed, and he is prone to philosophical thoughts such as this:
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War was probably the easiest thing to do, but it was the most difficult to succeed in.
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Romanenko, meanwhile, has his own problems. With his primary munitions customer at least temporarily out of the game, he needs to find a new faction to keep Moscow happy. More to the point, he has lost his immediate source of revenue. Russian Secret Service operatives are expected to supplement their income. This drives him into the arms of Anton Gorsky, one of the more ambitious bosses in the Siberian mafia. Gorsky has a job he needs doing, for which Toorop might be the ideal agent. He has a piece of merchandise that he needs transported to Canada and kept safe for a few months. Naturally Gorsky won’t say much about the merchandise. All that Romanenko and Toorop are to be told is that it comes in the form of a Canadian girl called Marie Zorn. Romanenko, on the other hand, is well aware that the chances of himself and Toorop coming out of this job with a profit depend heavily on their knowing a little more about what they have got themselves into.
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Give a horse to whomever speaks the truth, says the Afghan proverb, he will need it to flee.
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The truth, of course, has a way of coming out. It isn’t long before Romanenko discovers that Gorsky has links with an illicit biotech clinic in the Chingiz Mountains. Then Toorop, now safely in Montreal, discovers that Marie is pregnant. It doesn’t take too many brain cells to work out that whatever is in her womb is not exactly human, perhaps not even remotely so. What is worse, a couple of odd religious sects, each with their own heavily-armed gang of biker thugs, have taken an interest in affairs. Soon things take a distinct turn for the worse.
From then on Gorsky and Romanenko are scrambling desperately to get back in control of the situation. Marie is on her own, with only the voices in her head (or perhaps her womb) for guidance. And Toorop, last seen with a messy red stump where his right hand used to be, is missing in action. In fact he has fallen in with a loose confederation of transhumanists. These are people whose interests include artificial intelligence, cyborgization, extreme neurosurgery, psychotropic drugs and shamanic magic. They are people who think it a fascinating intellectual challenge to try to program their robots to take on some of the more interesting human characteristics such as transvestism. They might just be useful allies, which is just as well because Toorop is fast coming to the conclusion that he, and the rest of humanity, might have far more to fear from Marie Zorn than from any bunch of criminal thugs.
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Babylon AD teaser
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Just for the records - this space is closely related to VinXperience ;) Silsin
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First English trailer for Babylon AD