Meta Rating : 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.