[IW] Blip

[PTTG]

So, Blip is an alternate universe with minor changes from Homeline history, but with extremely accellerated time.

Needless to say, this is quite threatening. In only a few weeks, they'll start industrializing. In a "couple of months," it'll have been long enough for them to have invented Parachronics, and plenty of weapons too.

It's a nice place to take a vacation, of course, since a weeklong trip to anywhere lasts only a few seconds on Homeline, but Something Needs To Be Done, and nobody knows what.

I frankly love the presence of some great puzzle worlds like these, but it bugs me that there isn't a solution. The part of my mind I should be using to remember to pay off parking tickets is instead busy trying to "solve" Blip.

So, here's some potential solutions. The key thing in most of these is the fact that Blip has probably been around as long as all the other worldlines, in which case it should be much more advanced than it currently is. As such, we can assume that time rates change over... well... time:

* Blip doesn't have fast time, it has cyclicaltime. In the near future, its time will gradually slow down to a crawl. This could be hazardous, since anyone trapped there wouldn't even know what went wrong until they jump home to discover their 30-second scouting trip took five years. Its average time rate is only slightly below homeline, meaning that it might spring forward again in the future!

* Blip has looping time. In a few internal centuries, some internal event will cause a rewind; the high time-speed is simply a natural "spring-back" function of the universe refilling history (with changes caused by minor fluctuations in the parachronic field in each loop). This could be natural- a weird combination banestom-black-hole-fragment which inevitably strikes Earth, providing the PCs some people to save from chrono-annihilation. It might instead by partially natural, if a mad scientist can do something to attract and possibly control this BBHF.

* Blip is being manipulated by outsiders. It's is an artifact of forces that make the Cabal look like an eight-year-old's birthday party. Presumably, somewhere on that planet is a ruin that contains a time accelerator, although why it was built is possibly unknowable. (My money's on Testing Human Evolution, or Chronoforming the entire cosmos until it matches the parameters these creatures like.) Luckily for the heroes, we've managed to locate the site down to a very specific spot- In homeline, it's called "Europe." ... Hey, you try finding ancient alien technology in a haystack the size of an entire universe. Look, we've got two or three days until Blip starts getting close to Parachronics. Every second you spend out here is another day you could be in there looking through burial mounds next to Madrid. I'll send you some more supplies in like thirty minutes- I mean, a month.

* Blip is naturally like this, due to an unusual reality fracture a while ago. It's going to overtake us soon, and we can't let that happen. That's why you need to teach them to build Nukes and then get Blip made into the fastest Lucifer ever. I guess this means we're bad guys now? Alternatively, let's just get these people off that planet, then we'll use it as the best server farm ever. There's a lot of stuff we could do with that sort of universe...

Of course, any and all of these things can be combined. Maybe there's an alien reset machine on Blip. Maybe there's a way to use Blip's inevitable resets for greedy reasons. Maybe shutting down the time accelerator will cause nigh-fatal Time whiplash on everybody. Maybe I should go pay my parking stubs.

[Gedrin]

* Blip is a weapons test. The temporal phenomenon, looping or currently fast and slowing, is an attack on the reality by <Unspeakably Powerful Folks/>. Their goal is to use slow or looped time to trap other realities and prevent them from achieving competitive technology. While they are a people of power so great as to be playing on a different field than Homeline, they have a set of somewhat comprehendable morals, and view this as a compassionate security measure. This is only a concern to Homeline in terms of its timerate relative to its competitors. If everyone's slow (maybe they are? Maybe Blip's timerate is steady and "normal".), it's not really a problem that the space-gods think we're not worth troubling over.

* Blip is a defensive(dual purpose) measure. Upon discovering alternate realities, and the significant tech advantage those realities had, the powers on Blip hatched a plan to gain an advantage. Harnessing quantum-temporal-plotdevicium they have accelerated their reality in an attempt to gain ground on other worlds. Once they have that ground, their plans are unknown.

[Culture20]

* The one change between Blip and Homeline is that when paracronics were invented, they made a mistake, and succeeded instead in actually time-traveling (shifting then accelerating) their entire timeline. But all the energy used must come from somewhere, and even worse, the shift and acceleration have had no perceivable effect within Blip, so Homeline must not only know where the problem equipment is, but when it is as well assuming they want to fix it.

* Blip is an echo that slows down its time progression logarithmically as time(Blip) approaches time(Homeline). Once the two match, Blip and Homeline merge (a strange example of a root growing from a branch). Does the point of merging indicate a paracronic disaster? Can Homeline send agents to Blip at the last second before the disaster to gain one last 1/60th of a minute to avert the disaster assuming there is one? Would the agents know if they were on blip or Homeline (the two are virtually identical at this point)? What happens to the agents that get sent from Blip? Is there a blip version of blip ad infinitum?

[ericthered]

* blip isn't a threat because parachronics takes too long. What reformed life on homeland is worthless for anything but historical study. Worse still, people from blip either are in a huge rush to get back home, or find infinity to be their new home.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by ericthered

* blip isn't a threat because parachronics takes too long. What reformed life on homeland is worthless for anything but historical study. Worse still, people from blip either are in a huge rush to get back home, or find infinity to be their new home.

You're right. The time disparity means that even if they can make parachronics work, any explorer they send out will be instantly lost and forgotten. If their accelerated time continues then they'll quickly overtake us and barrel right into extinction in some form.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Culture20

* Blip is an echo that slows down its time progression logarithmically as time(Blip) approaches time(Homeline). Once the two match, Blip and Homeline merge (a strange example of a root growing from a branch). Does the point of merging indicate a paracronic disaster? Can Homeline send agents to Blip at the last second before the disaster to gain one last 1/60th of a minute to avert the disaster assuming there is one? Would the agents know if they were on blip or Homeline (the two are virtually identical at this point)? What happens to the agents that get sent from Blip? Is there a blip version of blip ad infinitum?

When the merging comes, projectors will no longer work on Homeline.

[Gedrin]

* Blip is not a separate reality. It is Homeline. It's not blip's universe that's different, but the transit to it. There's a temporal translation effect caused by self referencing para-chronic travel. The self-reference is created by a massive higher dimensional anomaly, similar in the way a massive object can cause twin images of a star. Or not, the guys working on this stuff are really sketchy and have a tenuous grip on reality (or everyone else does...). Theory has it that transit from Homeline to "Blip", pastward, causes branching reality from the "Blip-past". Traveling back to Homeline moves you to the future of that branch, with your origin Homeline forever lost (not that you can really tell). Once Blip passes Homeline in time, past travel will be toward Homeline, and branching occurs from there. It's real live time travel, and it has zero impact on Homeline, as travelers returning from the Blip-past, must be returning from that Homeline's own past. Sure, an individual could hop into blip and go to a different Homeline future, but Homeline prime isn't all that concerned about it since they wouldn't even notice it. A bigger concern will be the travelers from the Blip-future, but looking at the history of infinity...this might not be a unique anomaly. Plans are to forbid travel to Blip at the merge point, as creating an instant-infinite folding of matter into the local reality might do some "Bad Things".

[Salabasama]

Maybe Blip is a vanish setting, but Infinity doesn't know it because they've never found one of these worlds before they burned themselves out before.

Could also throw Infinity for a loop. Days after Blip passes Homeline's present, a disaster of some sort, like a meteor, hits. Homeliners will be watching their skies.

[Drifter]

Originally Posted by Salabasama

Maybe Blip is a vanish setting, but Infinity doesn't know it because they've never found one of these worlds before they burned themselves out before.

Could also throw Infinity for a loop. Days after Blip passes Homeline's present, a disaster of some sort, like a meteor, hits. Homeliners will be watching their skies.

Too easy. Its a one shot adventure at best. If you're going to use Blip you may as well squeeze out some story.

A few days go by and you get the occasional Parachronic probe from Blip, one every few hours maybe, but from their point of view alternate timelines just make their people and probes vanish so there is not much interest. Good excuse to get a high powered AI from centuries in the future into your IW campaign - a robotic scout from Blip.

After a few weeks you stop getting even that - blip figured out the issue. If you want Ultra-ultra tech, or near magical technology, here is your excuse; another probe, probably AI, but just as likely an AI/bio-mod whatever that volunteered for a one-way mission to study alternate timelines. It will want to go back in fairly short order so not that good for a PC or longer term NPC, but good for one shot.

Or if you do want Blip destroyed; you get otherwise empty timelines that suddenly have Blip refugee colonies. That colony is bound to be high tech, and will know all about Homeline's possible future. One that doesn't include visiting alternate timelines so its usefulness is problematic. These colonies probably won't have much Parachronics technology, just enough to get it there in the first place to escape whatever happened to Blip. They will have a lot of campaign unbalancing goodies so be careful.

Otherwise you can do whatever far-future you want with Blip. Maybe a Traveller stop off if only thousands of years have gone by, but I'd go with something even further. Book of the New Sun, which by chance has its own GURPS book, or the Dying Earth setting by Vance, or Wells Time-Machine with morlocks and eloi, and finally giant crabs.

If you have a kind heart you can go the Futurama route. Blip eventually suffers proton-decay and ages into nothing - only to be reborn, as in the above looping time scenario, staring the whole process over again.

[Flyndaran]

Maybe it's somehow intimately connected to a universe that progresses much slower than homeline.