In the future, we'll all be eating Malaysian food.
Y3K is the brainchild of Nathan Bax and the basis behind Tech Infantry Seasons 6 & 7. The basic idea is that the Earth Federation is destroyed by the Caal and is replaced by the Holy Terran Empire, led by Emperor Vin Dane. Each of the worlds in the HTE are ruled by Houses, aristocratic families, who try to gain supremacy over each other without invoking the wrath of the Emperor and his Imperial Fleet, who held the monopoly on space travel thanks to the elimination of jumpgates and gravity drives. The Emperor supports this chaotic infighting because it produces "starsouls," which Vin Dane needs for... well, it was never really made clear.
When Bax first proposed this to the prospective players, he said that he was setting the TI universe a thousand years into the future (hence the name "Y3K"). Marcus Johnston thought this was a fun idea and started working on a novel project that he called "Heresy." If the twenty pages he wrote isn't around anymore, it's no great loss to anyone but the writer. Marcus imagined it would invoke hybrid characters, weird organic technology, and—no surprise—a visit from Lwan Eddington.
Season 5 probably involved the events listed for 3045, in which Fialla Spencer appears, with Felix Straden, the last Horadrim alive. They re-form the Tech Infantry and ally with the survivng aliens to bring about the Terran Uprising. Whether this ever happened in Season 5 or whether it was just planned and abandoned is uncertain, because even the storyteller doesn't remember by this point. Either way, the uprising failed because 150 years later we get...
Season 6: Marcus remembers being somewhat disappointed that the White Wolf game mechanics hadn't changed at all. He played a Haythorn Zhant, a serial killer turned pacifist—which didn't help, since he had to shoot everyone anyway. Chris Yarwood played a political character named Ronin. This was after Season 4.3 and his successful portrayal of master manipulator Andrea Treschi, so it was a little embarrassing when Chris couldn't think on his feet, and ended up killing a key contact by accident.
Anyway, the plot was that Ce'Nedra Riva, head of House Riva, was being forced by the Emperor to marry Murgo Van Thrull, head of House Mallorean. Turns out that Mordred is the real power behind House Mallorean, this forced marriage was intended to thwart the Emperor, and the characters had to save Ce'Nedra before she could be married. Well, we messed up the campaign so much that we lost the girl, which meant having to restart the game in...
Season 7: Same story, five years later, with new characters. This time a shadowy figure tries to use us to overthrow the Emperor, a shadowy figure who later turns out to be Lwan Eddington. He dies, and just for good measure, so does Mordred. It was pretty obvious by this point that Bax had soured of the TI concept and wanted to play something else... but let's face it, TI keeps coming back for more!
Behind the Scenes
As some of you might guess Nathan was reading the Dune novels, specifically the prequel house books written by Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert. To quote Nathan Bax, "I always liked the house system portrayed within, and for some reason I'm always up for a tyrannical religous figure. By this point I had been away from the game for a while and was looking to shake it up, trully not realizing a new generation of players liked it the way it was. I never put the time into the Y3K game that I put into the first couple seasons of TI, and I cannot disagree with Martin's statement on it not making a lot of sense. Later on I was stealing names from David Edding's Belegariad series. I will admit that often when I write games, I steal ideas from things I know no one else has read or seen and do new spins on them. I'm really bad about it for character names. My current gaming character is named Feyd, in reference to Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen."