New Reality Seeds

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by fchase8

I always though of conveyors like nuclear weapons, in terms of difficult to make - while difficult to build, the big issue is getting the scientific know-how. And Infinity control parachronic know-how a lot better than the International Atomic Energy Agency.

I think the creators of Infinite Worlds intentionally wanted to parallel parachronics and nukes. The fear isn't states using parachronics in war, but terrorists - like how IRL we're more worried about terrorists getting nukes than even North Korea. North Korea has nukes and, it seems like, missiles that could reach the U.S., but is constrained by the response to using them.

There's an alternate for you.

Officially, Kruschev-1 is one of the nuclear holocaust worlds - a Q5 parallel. Sometime in the Cold War, probably local year 1967, things went hot and there were no survivors. The worldline is heavily restricted, and mostly ignored; there's nothing worth exploiting there what with all the fallout. The current local year is 2012.

The truth is considerably worse, at least in Infinity's eyes. The first scouts on Kruschev-1 found the irradiated remains of a projector in Mumbai. Further investigation revealed that Kruschev-1 developed parachronic travel in the early '60s. It spread, quickly, to all the major powers, and the Cold War became a parachronic Cold War. As far as Infinity can tell, Kruschev-1 was only able to discover a dozen or fewer worldlines, and exploited only a couple before one side initiated a cross-time nuclear strike. The resulting war destroyed Kruschev-1 and appears to have wiped out all of its colonies.

Infinity would like to believe that's the end of things, but there a number of nagging questions:

• Were there any survivors? Worse, were there surviving colonies with cross-time capabilities?
• Was the war that destroyed Kruschev-1 actually started by normal tensions, or did another cross-time power engineer it?
• Did Kruschev-1 actually develop parachronics on its own, or did someone leak the Secret? The timing is difficult to work out. The details of Kruschev-1 parachronics tech are still to be worked out from the remaining evidence, but in broad strokes it looks very similar to Homeline's.

Among those who know the secret of Kruschev-1, there are further theories that tend to come to mind.

• First, was Kruschev-1 one of the first worlds Van Zandt discovered? If so, its history and its fate after discovering parachronics are the secret that persuaded the UN to create Infinity Unlimited, in hopes of avoiding the same.
• Second, was Homeline's parachronic technology is not in fact an invention of Van Zandt, but the result of explorers or refugees from Kruschev-1? One of them might have been Van Zandt himself...
• Third, that if the second theory is true, was the nuclear war triggered not by a national power, but by a rogue parachronics engineer who wanted to cover his tracks, prevent pursuit, and set up his own cross-time empire? This particular theory is probably the result of paranoia. Probably.