Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[PTTG]

Would that make it Pre-TSD?

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by PTTG

In Metaecho, the current physical date is 1995. However, there is a complication. Two days ago, all human beings abruptly "remembered" 20 years of future history. Arguably, the worldine just physically reverted backwards. Anyone younger than 20 ceased to exist, and people who died at some point in that window exist and remember their experiences up to that point.

One person with future foresight is subtle. Everyone on the planet suddenly getting the opportunity to revise future history is rather more difficult. There are political complications immediately, of course; everyone remembers that, in their subjective yesterday, Obama was President; however, he is at that moment a year below the minimum age, and Bill Clinton is sitting in office. Some individuals, particularly those that enjoyed their youths more than their older age, insist that people should accept the physical moment as the "real present," whereas people who were especially happy in 2015 rather than their younger years tend to argue that the collective remembered experiences should not be ignored.

Parents of children who were unborn grieve, while those who loved ones lost in the intervening years rejoice. Some hope that we are still flowing down the same river of time that will encounter those people yet to be born. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that is the case.

The stock market, in the immediate moments after the stunned silence that accompanied the global recollection, went so chaotically haywire that it immediately shut down. People are already discussing ways of rapidly jumping up to the late TL-8 technologies they remember -- even as others are breaking off the rust of years since they last had to deal with VHS and telephone modems. The timeline has already proved to be diverging, though it's a matter of, uh, time to see by how much.

An interesting variant might be a world where A (I'll be A) went back in time and changed something in history (as I'm being A, R.F.K. isn't shot in 1968. We'll assume I waylaid Sirhan Sirhan and he never got anywhere near RFK).

Now, assume that I've got a deal to protect my family, they'll all exist, and I got my preferred decidedly Liberal America. But as soon as I get back, everybody remembers both worlds. Note: people who don't exist is this world (Billy never went to Vietnam so Sue married him instead of Eddy, so none of Sue and Eddy's kids got born) don't send their memories to anyone, people who exist in this world but not the first (Sue and Billy's kids) don't get extra memories. But everyone that was in both worlds gets both sets of memories.

People would naturally compare both of their lives. Although most folks would be better off (IMHO) others wouldn't be. Some wouldn't be worse off financially or be sicker, but they didn't marry their true love (poor Eddy) or they never got in be in office, or regulations to protect against fraud limited their business model so they never got rich. Other folks would be much better off. The fuss and feathers would be massive.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Would that make it Pre-TSD?

They likely would coin a unique term for the disorder.

[PTTG]

Nice one, Astromancer. Both of these worldlines have a strong potential to be Jinn worldlines... but then even the weirdest hell worlds have that, I suppose.

We still haven't touched on the people who grew up in the intervening years. A person who goes from 31 to 11, or from 21 to 1, has rough couple decades to go through.

[ericthered]

There would be massive efforts to contact others separated by enormous distances. People would have good friends or life partners they want to reunite with who they hadn't met 20 years ago. The adult/minor life partner situation is hard, but far more common are myriad pairs of precocious 7 and 8 year olds who remember being married to other youngsters who live in different cities and states.

So much documentation will have been lost. Technology has been mentioned, but that's just the tip of the iceburg. 20 years of college diplomas are gone. Concern has been expressed about holding people accountable for crimes they committed "in the future", but the only documentation will exist in memories.

In the rush to "Catch up", will they employ the adolescents who remember how all the tech works in a mad dash to rebuild? Will they send them back to school?

Many cultural touchstones will exist only in people's memories. The first Harry Potter was published in 1997. Does anyone remember it perfectly? Everyone wants it again, but Rowling isn't going to write the exact same books, and fans are going to try and reproduce the original. Harry Potter is only one example of this: this pattern will be repeated across literature and film.

What happens it areas already war torn today? Do they explode into violence as 20 years of confused loyalties and violence are dumped into a day? Or does knowledge of the future help chart a more peaceful path?

The timeline as explained won't actually see the next effect, but its worth mentioning: you'll have a 22 year gap in intellectual age between those born in 1994 and 1996. That's likely to be tough.

[David Johnston2]

Pandora-1:

Pandora is a weird parallel because it is a jumble of alternate history tropes. Which is to say:

Rome never really fell. It lost Britain to Boudicca's rebellion, and then was briefly conquered by King Artos of Britain, but he couldn't hold it, being drawn back home by a rebellion that he died trying to suppress. Later it lost North Africa and West Asia to the Muslims. But later it once again became the world's largest empire as it conquered the civilizations of South and Central Columbia (what America is known as in this parallel) and large parts of Africa, rivaled only by Britain. But Rome and Britain lost most of their Columbian possessions, with the British breakaway colonies forming the United States of Columbia.

Later on the United States of Columbia split with the southern part of it becoming known as the Confederacy. An enfeebled Rome under Emperor Napoleon III was dealt a devastating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, who united the various German states under their banner. This led to the Great War, in which the allied Romans, British, Americans, and Russians, defeated the Germans, Hungarians, Turks, Bulgars, and Confederacy in a fierce war in which airships battled in the sky while the earliest crude mecha fought on the ground.

But after World War I, the Roman Empire was destabilized in a terrible civil war when the crown was usurped by the self-appointed Emperor Mussolini, and a new leader of the Germans and Austrians took advantage of the discord, assisting Mussolini to victory in return for ownership of northern Gaul. From there the German Reich went to war with the British Empire, conquering and occupying Great Britain.

Now the year is 1980. Richard Nixon is of course President of the United States of Columbia, having just won his third election. He's quite popular after bringing the Canadian prairie provinces and Northwest territories and Yukon into the United States. Alaska is no longer isolated from the rest of the United States. The former Roman colony of Quebec now an independent nation along with Ontario. British Columbia and the Maritime Federation.

However, relations are tense between between the USC and the German Reich. Each is stockpiling their ultimate weapon, a bomb that apparently replaces the affected area with some place from the past at least based on what happened when it was used on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the last holdouts of the Soviet Union. If the airships launch and drop their chronal bombs, every major population center in the northern hemisphere is at risk of being blasted into a random parallel...

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Pandora-1:

Pandora is a weird parallel because it is a jumble of alternate history tropes. Which is to say:

Rome never really fell. It lost Britain to Boudicca's rebellion, and then was briefly conquered by King Artos of Britain, but he couldn't hold it, being drawn back home by a rebellion that he died trying to suppress. Later it lost North Africa and West Asia to the Muslims. But later it once again became the world's largest empire as it conquered the civilizations of South and Central Columbia (what America is known as in this parallel) and large parts of Africa, rivaled only by Britain. But Rome and Britain lost most of their Columbian possessions, with the British breakaway colonies forming the United States of Columbia.

Later on the United States of Columbia split with the southern part of it becoming known as the Confederacy. An enfeebled Rome under Emperor Napoleon III was dealt a devastating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, who united the various German states under their banner. This led to World War I, in which the allied Romans, British, Americans, and Russians, defeated the Germans, Hungarians, Turks, Bulgars, and Confederacy in a fierce war in which airships battled in the sky while the earliest crude mecha fought on the ground.

But after World War I, the Roman Empire was destabilized in a terrible civil war when the crown was usurped but the self-appointed Emperor Mussolini, and a new leader of the Germans and Austrians took advantage of the opponent, assisting Mussolini to victory in return for ownership of northern France. From there the German Reich went to war with the British Empire, conquering and occupying Great Britain.

Now the year is 1980. Richard Nixon is of course President of the United States of Columbia, having just won his third election. He's quite popular after bringing the Canadian prairie provinces and Northwest territories and Yukon into the United States. Alaska is no longer isolated from the rest of the United States. The former Roman colony of Quebec now an independent nation along with Ontario. British Columbia and the Maritime Federation.

However, relations are tense between between the USC and the German Reich. Each is stockpiling their ultimate weapon, a bomb that apparently replaces the affected area with some place from the past at least based on what happened when it was used on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the last holdouts of the Soviet Union. If the airships launch and drop their chronal bombs, every major population center in the northern hemisphere is at risk of being blasted into a random parallel...

You are twisted. I admire that.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

The Ghoul Worlds are several near-parallels at various points in their development, from 1955 to 2005. A native who went from one to another would be justified in thinking he had traveled in time.

These worlds all diverged from Homeline history in 1950 with the publishing of The Happiness of Early Man, a pseudo-scientific piece of claptrap disguised as a treatise on sociology. In the Ghoul Worlds, this book became a major influence on society, considered Holy Writ by an unknown-but-large number of people.

The basic tenent of the work is that humans have a genetically-programmed culture which our earliest ancestors lived in for far longer than recorded history, and that the further we diverge from that original culture, the more unhappy and out-of-touch we become.

But the author's model of "the original culture" was based more on comic books, schlock movies, and bad novels about cavemen than any solid research into Early Man. The Happiness of Early Man describes Early Man as being a clan-based semi-communistic society who were largely nocturnal and ate unprocessed foods, who had little in the way of inhibitions and whose main social bonding revolved around the ritual consumption of the dead. The book argued that this had been an unchanging society for hundreds of thosands of years until vague "outside influences" - including the development of agriculture, religion, and architecture - made Early Man devlop highly unstable short-lived civilizations that left people unfulfilled.

The entire work was badly written and based ion a ridiculous premise to begin with, and was panned by critics and the scientific community alike.

Almost immediately some idiots attempted to "recapture the Original Society". They formed isolated communes and sealed up the windows, trying to live as primitive nocturnal hunter-gatherers. Most collapsed in short time, others were forcibly shut down when the "ritual consumption of their own dead" detail reached the local authorities.

But a few, mostly the urban ones that adopted a more practical definition of "hunter gatherer" and "unprocessed food", actually survived. And they proliferated. By 1960, most major cities in Western Europe, the Commonwealth, and North America had secret enclaves of "The Original Society", some now entering their second generation.

By the mid-'60's a few had come out to the public, trying to be recognized as a minority sub-culture. But their acceptance of inbreeding and ritual consumption of the dead made this all but impossible. The walled-up houses and basements full of pale people who only came out at night didn't help theiir public image either. This is when the term "Ghoul" stuck.

And then there were the radicals who took the "ritual consumption of the dead" to extremes and became active cannibals. As a group of 50-60 persons who lived primarily by eating human flesh would have to kill one human a week to keep them going, they eventually made the news in a negative way. This caused the first "Ghoul Hunts" in 1968. "Ghoul Nests" were burnt down or ripped open, many adults were killed and the children institutionalized. But many escaped.

The late 1970's saw the surviving populations spreading in secrecy and a percentage of the institutionalized children growing up and seeking to rejoin. The third generation products of Ghoul inbreeding were beginning to manifest significant traits, such as more incisor teeth, albininsm, porphyria, goat-like digestion, and superior night vision. This physical evolution and social paranoia caused a radicalization. Large numbers of Ghouls began actively speading, building nests, forcibly "recruiting" (kidnapping children), and hunting humans for flesh.

The 1980's was a period of active reaction in society. Pale skin became considered unattractive and dark skin became the epitome of beauty. Anyone who talked about "how good things used to be" got associated with Ghoul claims of being "the Orginal Society" and got shunned. Abandoned buildings were used or destroyed, the homeless were rounded up and given homes to deny Ghouls food and recruiting. Vegetarianism became more popular.

But the last decades of the 20th century were also the prime recruitng period of the Ghouls, as they went to the internet. They managed to tap into resources and support prevoiusly undreamt of and began a radical expansion. Small towns were taken over, skyscrapers had secret passages housing Ghoul Nests, and in 1999 Indonesia and Lebanon were completely and openly taken over by Ghouls.

The skerry has a number of worlds showing the evolution of this movement, from a laughable book in the 1950's to open existential warfare in the early 2000's. How such a radical movement could succeed in worlds with no magic or abnormal powers stymies cliodynamicists, but the nature of the skerry allows in-depth research into the entire process. The whole skerry is still restricted, in case the phenomenon has some memtic component that would allow it to spread.

[YankeeGamer]

The ghouls is creepy! It's also a prime candidate for the great powers to consider the nuclear option, either as a warning, or to solve the problem of the ghoul nations permanently.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

The ghouls is creepy!

Thank you. "Creepy" was what I aimed for.

It's also a prime candidate for the great powers to consider the nuclear option, either as a warning, or to solve the problem of the ghoul nations permanently.

Which would only work on the open nations (maybe). But what of the secret and hidden nests and enclaves in their own nations? And what of unknown fellow travelers?

And after three or four generations, these are going to be fanatics. They might just consider being so fearsome that they get nuked to be encouraging!