Time Travel Agencies

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Acatalepsy
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Time Travel Agencies

Post by Acatalepsy »

Time Travel Agencies


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: 1.1 to 1.5

A time travel agency is a subgroup within a flat civilization that uses and (usually) abuses time travel, in order to accomplish the goals of the leaders of that civilization. Agencies are characterized by a large ratio of non-time traveling personnel to time traveling personnel.

Structure and Classification:


Time travel agencies are typically based on the military or police of their home time line. More rarely, a time travel agency exists as an academic, cultural, criminal, business, philosophical, or religious group. This is generally because emerging time travel technology, and with it practical teleportation technology, are generally regarded as a military technology, and thus subject to both weaponization and regulation. Other entities are rarely capable of funding and powering the early functional stages of time travel technology, but they have been known to occur.

There are two main characteristics that matter to a time travel agency: whether it is protectionist or revisionist, and whether it is near-oriented or far-oriented.

Near-orientation and far-orientation are whether the agency focuses on the recent or distant past, or on the near or far future. What the significance of their focus depends on the organization's role within it's society, and it's role as a protectionist or revisionist. Generally speaking, though, near-oriented agencies which focus on the recent past tend to have a greater success in general, in terms of influencing their own development into higher meta-level and in slowing down the natural entropy of a time line. Far-oriented agencies are more rare and tend to have less success, but a far-oriented strategy can often easily defeat a near-oriented opponent; it is simply that such agencies often self-erase on accident, and sometime self-erase deliberately.

A protectionist time travel agency seeks to preserve it's own time line by whatever means necessary. Typically this means sending information, agents, and technology backwards in time containing information on how the future is “supposed” to go, and with instructions to ensure that this future actually comes to pass. Most also attempt to create redundant systems to prevent unauthorized time travel in the future, or go so far as to send agents forward in time, making them more difficult to circumvent. While protectionist agency aren't always responsible for dealing with time travelers from the future in their own present, this can be the case.

A revisionist agency is one that seeks to actively change parts of its own past. These agencies are more rare due to both the paradoxes they generate and the natural tendency of most sentient beings to value specific details of their own existence. Revisionist organizations are also by nature more radically diverse. Most protectionists, regardless of their actual origins, are forced into a law-enforcement style role, where revisionists can be anything from elite military strike forces to missionaries to ridiculously over-funded anthropologists.

It should be noted that there are a few agencies that use time travel but explicitly avoid anything resembling making changes. These agencies are generally considered to be in the .9 to 1.1 range on the MF scale, as their refusal or inability to change things makes them almost as easily manipulated as most flats.

Technology and Assets:

Time travel agencies are almost inevitably using early projector technology, with few entities that are still classifiable as time travel agencies ever coming to operate any sort of shifter. Or rather, most agencies that advance beyond projector technology have also advanced in enough other areas that they are considered approaching time colonist status.

Because they use projectors, time agents have no safe way of returning to their own time once their mission is complete. With near agencies this is less of a problem, especially when suspended animation technology is available. With far agencies, things are more problematic. Some particularly draconian agencies going so far as to create kill switches on their agents that trigger when the agent's mission has been completed.

Near agencies, and agencies dealing with time travelers in the present, often use a verity of trade-craft tricks to confirm identities and manage travelers from different times. One common such code is a “believe me” time traveler code, that confirms that a the user of the code is in fact a time traveler. Such codes are randomly generated but never given out until past the date that they expire – ensuring that anyone who does use the code must be from the future. Similarly, agencies often keep a random number generator going constantly, adding digits to code that marks the date of divergence between two separate time lines. By comparing the code from a time traveler with the code in the present, it can be determined when the time traveler's time line diverged from the present.

Far agencies often plan for long term missions, given the nature of the agency. Societies with practical fabrication technology often use it to create self sustaining expeditions. A few can even recreate the time travel technology well enough to send themselves back, though such an organization is well on its way to time colonist status.

Role in Meta-History:


As a general rule, these are are first stages of an organization or individual that will become a meta. At this point their effect on their own futures is so dilute that any one possibility does not have a definite effect on the distant future. What is true is that the general nature of the organization and all of its myriad probable incarnations does have a massive influence, though not always in the ways that might be expected.

In the near term, temporal colonists often recruit from time traveling agents, who form a useful pool of non-flat manpower, technology, and future knowledge. As the colonist organization grows, this dependence gradual disappears, but what time travel agents it does recruit have a noticeable impact on the character of that organization, and in some cases an individual time agency fighting on its own turf can swing the balance in a fight between multiple higher order powers.
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

So these are the Seven Days and Terminator guys, the near-organizations?

I like how these standard sci-fi time traveling stuff is seen as the "basic" organization, and how despite the details, these Time Travel Agencies seem to be relatively simple compared to everything else that's implied to be "out there", that these guys seem to be small fish in an even bigger and far more dangerous and outrageous game. I guess you're starting with fairly simple, familiar and easier to understand concepts before you bring in the weirdo headache inducing madnesses!
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Acatalepsy »

Something like that. Actually, Terminator is at the low end of the "far" scale; anything that sends stuff back before their own organization existed is on the far side of things because it means they can't control the consequences and ensure that the time travel goes on to take place. Seven Days is a perfect example of a near-revisionist organization.

I'm still working on some terminology and basic concepts that need to be posted, so that will have to happen soon. ChronCom, by the way, from the snapshot story Possibilities is a near-protectionist organization with a military bent, probably the most common type of time travel agency overall.

One of the important things with this 'verse is that the articles are very, very general, and snapshots and stories are extremely specific, with very little middle ground. I'm never going to write up an article about ChronCom, complete with ranks, personnel, mission, funding, equipment, etc, etc. I'm not going to do that because that particular version is almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things; at this level only the general probabilities tend to matter.

There are exceptions, of course. Any one possible agency such as ChronCom, or at least one of it's agents, might eventually become a powerful meta or a member of a meta organization. But that's more luck than anything else, and the specifics of ChronCom still don't matter.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I wonder. In these realities where organizations like the ChronCom exist, unless they are secret, I doubt the general populace will be completely ignorant and completely helpless against these near or far protectionist or revisionist agencies. Won't see see everything from civilian to military organizations in all sorts of nations within these realities begin to act against, or develop measures of protection from, time travelers?

Like, after that incident in Possibilities where the police guys witnessed weirdo unexplained assassins and Spanish Knight-Inquisitors, and someone pieces the bits together, won't we end up seeing people becoming more and more careful and paranoid regarding these shmucks? If a bunch of bearded ladies with boxcutters in an airplane bound for New York can get people in such a fuzz, imagine what this kind of shtick - if it ever comes out - might cause!

Man, even when it's NOT about temporal mechanics, time travel is still a complete bitch to implicate!
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Acatalepsy »

Time travel isn't secret, exactly. It can't be, any more than atomic power could be secret - aside from the high profile stuff, you have all sorts of physicists who can do the math showing that time travel could work. By the time anyone gets around to making huge projector set ups to send agents back in time, universities should be able to set up time travel experiments on a small scale at least. Only in the most repressive regimes where information is tightly controlled could time travel remain a secret for any length of time - and even then that's unstable.

The fact is, though, that time travelers are at an enormous advantage. They know more or less exactly what is going to happen when, and can practically walk around most security simply by knowing where all the weak points will be. This is compounded by the technology advantage a time traveler has.

That's not to say that flats are helpless against time travelers; they aren't, not all the way. But they do have problems. And compounding this is the fact that all time travelers are not enemies, and in some cases it is impossible to figure out if a time traveler is really a friend or an enemy. One might set up safe houses for your own guys...but what happens when your own guys from separate futures start fighting each other? Who's side are you, in the present, on?

That's not even counting fighting against opponents in the present who have or might in the future have time travel. That gets...interesting. As I noted, those agencies that use time travel are often called on to fight time travelers, though not always.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

That's one glorious mess. :P
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Kingmaker »

Maybe I missed something, reading through these threads. What is a meta?
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They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Acatalepsy »

Dammit I need to get that terms post up. I just need to get the actual time travels rules summary up first, and thats...getting more complicated.

Anyway, a meta is someone that has time travel technology far in advance of your standard time agency and can continue to exist in some form or another even in situations where there is literally no possible way for them to come to exist. Normal, or "flat" people, can do this...but it is rare. Very rare, the result of chance more than planning. A meta can control things well enough to ensure that any possible universe which does end up existing contains them.

That's not to say they are totally safe. But flats don't fuck around with a meta if they can help it.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Kingmaker »

Do they have some sort of temporal anchor device-thing? Or something more sophisticated.

On a different note, how do these people reliably influence their timelines. I'd expect timelines to be a chaotic system, so projecting the effects of even minor changes would be phenomenally difficult.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
-Rudyard Kipling
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Acatalepsy »

It is extremely difficult. Metas have the "sufficiently advanced" technology that's (almost) indistinguishable from magic. For every meta, there are several thousand to million time travel agencies. This is somewhat offset by the fact that those agencies don't all exist at the same time, where the meta usually do more or less, but the metas are still outnumbered by a lot.

They don't have a single specific anchor device, there are multiple techniques to cheat time, which I will go in to in the article on metas.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Perhaps you can add tiny little miniature story snapshot "flavor" pieces, ala what Siege does so well with his articles like Jurgen Baccara's. I mean, you could've used excerpts from Possibilities as examples in your Time Travel Agencies articles. Or, in later articles. It doesn't have to be part of a bigger story, just something spiffy you might want to add to your article to spice it up.

I say this because as you yourself said, due to the fluxy nature of Continuity Wars, a lot of your descriptions will be pretty general and "generic" since any specific example probably won't exist for too long due to the whole TIME PARADOX nature of the 'verse. But these spicey excerpt examples could provide some, well, examples and some flavor-pieces.

I mean, due to the fluxy nature of your 'verse, there probably won't be any hard constants at all. But these "flavor pieces" could help us delve into the more colorful and personable bits of the 'verse. Would provide some fun reading too. :D
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Underwhelming »

I might be more helpful when it comes to that side of things. I'm a little better when it comes to the thematic than the theoretical. :D
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Who are you anyway?
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Re: Time Travel Agencies

Post by Underwhelming »

I am a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an Enigma...

And in Soviet Russia, Enigma ponders YOU.
I went away on a Government vacation
It was the best time that I ever had
Shipped me back home from the secret location
My legs came back later in a plastic bag
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