the doctor becomes suspicious of monarch and soon learns that the urbankan does not plan on peaceful co-existence. instead, he has developed a toxin to wipe out humanity, which will be unleashed before the urbankans disembark. he also learns that the humans aboard are not descendants of the original abductees, but are the original people taken from earth and converted into androids, like the three urbankans walking around on board (monarch's actual status, whether partly cybernetic or completely organic, is not stated explicitly). monarch describes the era prior to his conversion of urbankan life forms into cyborgs as the "flesh-time". the four leaders of the peoples have been given additional circuits to help them reason, but this facility can be taken away, as bigon learns when he rebels against monarch, and his neural circuit is removed and placed in a container for one hundred years. he explained to the doctor that monarch strip-mined and destroyed urbanka in a quest for minerals to improve the ship, and now plans to do the same to earth. monarch believes that if he can move the ship faster than the speed of light, he can pilot it back to the beginning of time and discover himself as god.