The Secret

[David Johnston2]

I think it's time to discuss just why the Secret exists. As far as world-building goes, it's simple. It preserves the individuality of the worlds. If it didn't exist, then say good-bye to your quaint steam punk setting. Look for Macdonald's arches in your Roma Aeturna as they start wearing suits and jeans. That setting where John F. Kennedy was cast as the captain of the Starship Enterprise will be just as familiar with Star Wars and the MCU as we are.

But digging deeper we should look at the roots of Infinity. Where did it come from?

It comes from two places. The first is H. Beam Piper's Paratime series in which:

To supervise Paratime, the Paratime Commission exists; to enforce the Paratime Code, the Paratime Police exists.

There is only one law that is totally inviolate: no one from outside the Home Timeline civilization must ever know about paratime travel. The Paratime Transposition Code sets out legal penalties for this, as well as other crimes involving paratime, such as kidnapping and enslavement. Paratime Police officers are authorized to use extrajudiciary means, such as assassination, of both Home Time residents or outtimes, to protect the secret if necessary. This action is at the agent's discretion.

Another method to protect the Paratime Secret involves spreading uncertainty and doubt about accounts of encountering paratimers. In the case of pre-scientific cultures, this is easier; actions can be explained as acts of the gods. In our timeline, in which the concept of alternate realities is common, the Paratime Police have spread stories which are implausible when investigated; however, the number of stories to investigate lessens the chance of detecting the truth.

Note that in the Paratime setting there are actually many thousands of timelines that know the Secret. They are however all part of the same incredibly vast civilization. They have been totally absorbed. So much so that entire worlds in the setting are devoted to nothing but, say, manufacturing or the service sector. Piper doesn't go into how that happened since it happened many thousands of years ago but given the outcome, it seems to me that can only have happened by means of a war on a scope that would been like 10,000 World War IIs going on at the same time for centuries.

The Secret exists for a reason. There are probably thousands of known worlds that are potentially capable of learning parachronic technology with a bit of help. And among those worlds there are hundreds who would cheerfully go on a campaign of conquest and enslavement extermination of the populations any world they find over which they have a technological edge as well as any underdefended colonies on previously uninhabited worlds. And dozens who are paranoid enough to eliminate potential threats with a pre-emptive parachronic WMD campaigns of extermination before they others can do it to them first.

Paratime doesn't want to fight a war. Sure, they'd doubtless win with their head start, but they'd still be put into the position of obliterating entire worlds and maybe losing a few of their own in the process. So yeah, they grab people who know too much and erase their relevant memories or kill them if they refuse. Infinity is already fighting a couple of low intensity conflicts. But it could get a lot worse.

But there's Infinity's other parent and that's Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium which raises another issue:

The Maxoni-Cocini drive, invented in the Imperium universe by Italian scientists/experimenters Giulio Maxoni and Carlo Cocini at the end of the 19th Century, is the technology for traveling between worlds and is extremely dangerous. Only if several sensitive parameters are tuned exactly can disaster be avoided and the trans-world transportation effect be achieved. Almost all worlds where its development is attempted or even inadvertently stumbled upon are destroyed, often in bizarre and horrible ways.

The collection of time lines where such disasters have occurred is known as the Blight, and the rare ones where the Earth survives are known as Blight Insulars, or BI's. BI-1 is the Imperium, where, by rare chance, the Maxoni-Cocini drive was successfully developed. The Imperium has become rich and powerful by trading with time lines beyond the Blight.

One of the curious aspects of Infinity is that their parachronic drive technology is so damn mature and came out of nowhere. Van Zandt just popped up with a technology that was virtually bug-free, and portable. I have imagined different parachronic technologies but almost all of them were distinctly inferior to Van Zandts projector/conveyor tech just as Reich-5's approach is distinctly more limited. I have wondered "Where is the CERN-sized initial prototype that opened the first door?" It never existed. Not on Homeline. And real technologies have people working in dozens of countries on some version of the concept, but Infinity allows the technology to have been largely monopolized, with the exceptions having been just been copied rather than independently developed in many places so it couldn't be controlled.

The answer is simple. Van Zandt, or or whoever gave Van Zandt the finished technology isn't from Homeline. And the Other Secret...the one that Van Zandt revealed in that secret council meeting that caused the major nations of the world to agree to the joint monopoly, might very well have something to do with what happens to a world where someone develops parachronics...the wrong way. When they abduct those "innocent" witnesses and physicists they may think that they are saving those worlds from stumbling into something that will likely lead to death or worse than death.

[ravenfish]

I always sort of assumed the "secret" that Van Zandt revealed was his possession of compromising photos [EDIT: Or their counterpart on a larger scale]. I don't see any matter of the general good or the survival of the human race or anything as trivial as that being able to command universal assent from the representatives of the world powers, unless Homeline differs from our world in ways far more fundamental than Parachronics.