Story Seed - Specimen

Image Source: http://jbrown67.deviantart.com/art/Blood-Donor-480607957

Teams Fomor, Gorgon, and Oni advanced leapfrog style deeper into the complex. Above the Balor was now in low orbit, her guns energized, and auto tracking. Team Daeva was completing the data-mining begun by Fomor while team Yaoguai was leading a raid of the installations primary control complex. The Balor's guns had already ensured that no further communication between this installation and the other six on planet would occur, likewise the planet's ansible had been taken out by a high energy neutron beam shortly after it attempted to beam a large data packet off world. How much data succeeded in getting through would depend on compression ratios, but that was a concern for the analysts.

Fomor, Gorgon, and Oni had located an entire sector of the installation that was not on the schematics held in the complex's open computer core, nor the records held by the Ascendancy. Thus far they had met with heavy resistance. The security forces of Consolidated Extrasolar Mining were normally well trained and outfitted, but by comparison these troops were almost equal to the Ascendancy's own.

Almost.

Fomor 2 had been wounded during the first incursion, after which the Balor had dispatched Gorgon and Oni to provide additional breaching force. The three teams had quickly dealt with the initial guardian force and pushed into the covert area. Now, nearly four hours later they were battle weary. Three of the hellion-class troopers had been left at various points of the complex with injuries too great to continue onward, and another five were operating with minor injuries that would need tending after the last pockets of resistance were cleared out.

Gorgon 4 adjusted her scanner and then nodded to Gorgon 1, Fomor 1, and Oni 2, holding up a single finger. Her instruments indicated only a single occupant in the room beyond, and according to the Balor's deep surface scans this was the last area of the installation. Well guarded relief ran through the expressions of the remaining hellions; barring incredibly advanced shielding that was concealing still more unknown areas of the complex they would be done shortly and able to transfer local command and control to Ascendancy standard forces.

Oni 4 and Fomor 3 advanced to the door and quickly made short work of slicing into the electronic systems and freeing the door mechanism. Activating the servo pneumatics, the twin doors sllide aside and the three teams quickly advanced inward, weapons at the ready, expecting one last, brief, firefight.

Instead they found a large lab cluttered with all manner of equipment unlike anything they had seen before. Some of the technology looked vaguely familiar in the way of something based on the familiar but more advanced might appear, but other pieces were wholly alien. However it was not the alien equipment that shocked the hellions as they entered but the alien itself. Hanging from its limbs in a framework, and connected by tubing and wires to various machines was a small creature unlike any they had seen before. It was perhaps two thirds their size, almost devoid of hair, with skin that was pale, so pale that it was only shades away from white.

The creature was gaunt with narrow limbs that ended in hands with five (five!) fingers, while its feet also had five toes, but they were seemingly underdeveloped and almost atrophied; certainly the creature could not grasp much with its feet, even if it did have an extra finger and toe on each limb. It appeared unconscious, or insensate, and the team carefully advanced, verifying that there were no booby traps, improvised or otherwise, and that the only possible threat in the room was the currently helpless creature.  Fomor 1 moved to what seemed to be a primary control console and studied the screens and readouts alongside Fomor 6. After a brief discussion he radioed the Balor, "Fomor 1 to Balor. The complex is under our control. We have located what appears to be an illegal xenobiology lab. There is a single specimen and it appears that the creature yet lives. Reccommend you dispatch medical and xeno-science teams immediately to categorize and disposition the subject identified as a ... human."

Nuts & Bolts #39 - Time and Again Part 3 - What will be, will have had been

Image Source: http://saretta1.deviantart.com/art/Time-Freeze-70324619.

Welcome back intrepid temporal agents! Unless you plan to risk paradox you might want to go back and check out Part 1 and Part 2, before moving forward, but then again maybe you don't care about the consequences ...

Time will catch up to you

I noted during the first week that sometimes time travel itself isn't instantaneous. That's an important feature in some instances, especially if it also relates to the propagation of changes and the effects of paradox. Sometimes it takes a while for a change to catch up to the time traveler. Maybe whatever they did isn't irreparable, like in Back to the Future where Marty has a chance to make sure is parents fall in love before the changes catch up and paradox erases him.

Of course once he fixes things he is restored instantly, but the argument could be made that that's either movie logic, or the result of the paradox effect being undone. If you liked you could easily have a group of time travelers need an extended recovery period during which they are still under partial effect of their paradox or other edits.

Einstein said that time was relative to the observer. That the faster you go the greater the discontinuity between the time you experience and the time measured by an outside observer. The speeds required a more than we can reach for any appreciable difference (though not for measurable effect, we've done that), but these theories may apply to how long before time "catches up" with the traveler. This would likely be an absolute value so if you travel a year into the past it'll take a year for any changes to catch up to you. Go back far enough and you won't live long enough to suffer the consequences.

Alternately any changes wrought by the traveler might catch up with him at about the same speed that time travel takes. So if moving between time is instant then any changes would be too. Likewise if it took an hour to travel 100 years maybe you have a grace period before your murder of a distant direct ancestor wipes you out.

Alternately though things might be interesting to play with that dynamic. Instant time travel combined with changes that have to "catch up" to the future might allow for interesting temporal chases between past, present, and future. The opposite might also be interesting as it would underscore the importance of being careful with your changes. Step wrong and *poof* you never existed.

It's all relative..

So what about the non-time traveler? If I go back and change something will anybody in the here and now know about it? Will the change occur to them without being noticed? Will they experience some kind of wave of edits? Or maybe that is what causes us to have deja vu?

Usually the answer to most of those is "no." The non-time traveller is simply adjusted along with everybody and everything else to fit the new sequence of events. This is the normal state, and it means that when coming back to the present the time traveler will be in a situation where they have to carefully figure out the more subtle changes or ask somebody and risk looking like a lunatic.

There are exceptions though. Those who have traveled time in the previously are sometimes granted a form of immunity, or an ability to sense changes even if they don't specifically have the knowledge of both realities. If it is the former they may remember how things are "supposed to be," while if its the latter they will know that something "isn't right," but not what. These are good ways for GMs to have time travel capable PCs start an adventure. They know somebody else has been altering events and they have to fix them. One way they are likely to know (with a little research) what was changed and needs to be repaired, the other way they may just have a sense that something is "wrong" and the repairs will be up to them to decide on or discover.

There are also those for whom a major temporal shift caused a major change. Similar to the second case above, these people may not understand exactly what happened, but they will have a feeling that something is out of place. In cases where paradox erases the time traveler this may even include the new timeline's version of the person who made the change in the first place. PCs might go from positions of power and authority to being lowly grunts or the poor and downtrodden. Of course without any idea that time travel exists finding a way to right things may be a very long road indeed.

Lastly (?) there are those who are in some way shielded from the changes to the timeline. This could be by mechanisms supporting time travel, such as "temporal energies" that leak from the machinery, Alternately a more physical factor like the very complex in which the machinery of time travel resides is heavily shielded in some way. This might mean that the time travel mechanism becomes a sort of "null time zone" where anybody within will be able to ride out any changes brought about in the past. This likewise opens up story possibilities including ways to get your characters pulled into your adventures.

“So, it wasn’t until his twenty-first birthday that Biff had will have placed his first bet …”

You may have noticed some rather torturous language above, and the truth is that time travel can generate some really bizarre sequences of events that lead to even more bizarre sequences of verb tenses when you try to convey said events. The fact is that telling somebody in the present about something that they did in the past that is still in their personal subject future is ... messy. "Hey Bob you need to watch out, if you keep down this course of actions you will have had caused a paradox if I had have stopped you." That hurt to write, and I'm not even sure if it's technically correct. Suffice to say that when dealing with time travel and verb tenses it's best to keep it simple. Granted that's difficult but that's what you get for messing with causality. 

I don't have any more to say on this subject so here is a confused chicken...

This week is a little shorter than last, but I think the prior topic was one that lends itself to verbosity. We'll be taking next week off from time travel while I do the monthly GMs Roundtable of Doom, but I'll probably be back the following with some talk about the methods of time travel.

As is always the case I am more than willing to hear your thoughts on the matter. Did I miss something? Have I made a mistake? Please let me know. Meantime, for the next article in this series I will be planning to discuss changes to the timeline, and the damage that such actions can potentially cause. 

Story Seed - Infiltration

Image Source: http://balaskas.deviantart.com/art/Tagonis-Refinery-Depths-470622923
(click through to see the impressive full size, it's worth it)

The small shuttle wove between the great towering structures like a needle wending its way through the separate threads of a piece of cloth. The atmosphere behind it swirled, a threadline trail forming in the ship's wake as the engine's ionized trace particles in the air. The facility was truly massive, covering nearly a hundred square kilometers, and from a distance it could be easily confused for a great metropolis.

The towering structures were not businesses or housing however, instead they scrubbed the air, some removed undesirable compounds, others isolating particulate, while still others processed and converted materials drawn from both air and land. Massive tanks, like great squat hills hid among the towers, acting as collection vessels for materials that required sequestration or storage.

Into that great tangle of steel the ship penetrated ever deeper, zigging and zagging as it cut through the tangle toward the heart of the installation.  Infiltration transport Corb finally located its goal, one of the command and control towers. The vessel dropped quickly to the landing deck, thrusters shaking the craft heavily as they compensated for the pilot's actions. With a final shuddering lurch the Corb landed.

Onboard, comms officer Tashida adjusted the tight beam laser transmitter's orientation and blasted off a quick message to the Balor awaiting in high orbit. A lance of ultraviolet returned with a mission go ahead. The shuttle's loading ramp deployed and a team of five clad in form fitting shadow-weave, and carrying compact weaponry quickly disembarked. A short time later a low power transmission returned to the craft, "Fomor 1 reporting. Infiltration of Q38MM Installation 7 successfull. Fomor 4 is slicing into the main datacore. Primary memory access in ... T minus eight point five minutes."

Ten minutes later the Balor received a new tight-beam transmission from the Corb. "Fomor 6 requesting backup. We need a tech tech and a Type Six Datacore. Whatever C.E.M. is hiding down here it's way bigger than we expected."

Last Week Today - Week of June 22-28, 2015

Monday
Story Seed - Unknown Outcome

Wednesday
Nuts & Bolts - Time and Again Part 2 - A Pair of Docs (Part 1 here)

Friday
Story Seed - Intelligence