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2037:
The Observers had simply disappeared. Walter and Michael walked away through the wormhole, the wormhole shut behind them, and a beat later, every Observer in the world simply... vanished, leaving a roaring silence. Everything was the same as it had been before, except... they were simply gone.
Humanity waited. Was it some bizarre plan of theirs? Did they vanish simply to return in greater numbers, greater strength? But days became weeks and then months and it seemed as though they would never return. After all, a time-travelling species can appear whenever they wish. And the moment for their return simply... passed. Time marched on without them.
So the remainder of the human race now moves on to recovery. The atmospheric degradation engines are dismantled, the Loyalists flushed out and rounded up, the labs opened, the news spread.
The plan hadn't worked exactly as expected, but at least everyone is free, now.
The signs and posters are taken down. Buildings are re-repurposed and people move back into them. Plants are starting to grow again. The economy staggers its way out of its cave, blinking in the metaphorical sunlight, and in the space of maybe a year the prevailing culture swings as far away from invasion-imposed austerity as it can to something very like the 1920s: colour and noise and possessions and a kind of desperate debauchery.
Never had hair been so important to a culture.
And yet... there have been sightings. Very recently, someone who looks like one of Them has been seen. Always breifly, always vanishing before he can be confronted or captured. Always seeming as though he's looking for something or someone.
There's an edge to the gaiety, now. A watchfulness. People are armed with every anti-Observer trick in the book, these days.
2168
Oslo in 2168 is home to an enormous laboratory complex on the island of Malmøya, 3 km out from the city's mainland. The lab is called Fremtiden International, and belongs to Uttstrakt Innbyrdes (three guesses who that is and the first two don't count.) Walter and Michael are successful in their aims... to a point. While the scientists there do agree to alter the Cerebral Augmentation Project to allow for emotional capacity as well as intellectual, the project itself still goes forth.
Fremtiden International is home to rather a lot of experiments that will later become Observer-tech thanks to the Massive Dynamic archives. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on. They're in danger of creating a closed causality loop if they aren't careful, but only a strange boy and a crazy old man know this....
---
A Breakdown Of Temporal Mechanics Terminology
Closed Causality Loop: An originless object or series of events. A loop of causality seen from the inside. In this case, the scientists are reverse-engineering the tech from the tech that someone had brought back from the future, thus creating the tech that was brought back. Where does it actually originate?
Grandfather Paradox: A loop of causality seen from the outside. You build a time machine, go back in time, accidentally kill your grandfather, erase yourself from existence. You don't exist, which means you can't have built the time machine, which means your grandfather does survive, so eventually you might exist, and you might build the time machine, et cetera et cetera, with no resolution.
Blinovitch Limitation Effect (aka Conservation Principle): The term is taken from Dr Who, but the principle is the same, a correllary on the rule that two objects cannot exist in the same place simultaneously, which goes on to say that the same object cannot exist seperately in the same place simultaneously. Subverted by Everett Existence, in which the two instances of the same object are not, in fact, the same, and can occupy the same space safely.
Crystallised Timeline Theory: The belief that one cannot change the past at all. Time is seen as a single line and, like a drop of water whose trail freezes behind it, becomes immutable with each passing second. Meddling in this timeline will either destroy the universe or, much more amenable to storytelling, cause a sequence of events that will restore what was changed.
Schroedinger Existence: Taken from the secondary result of the famous cat experiment in which it is believed that time is in flux until an event is observed: the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened, wherein one waveform of existence collapses and the other continues. These waveforms split at what is called, in this context, Schroedinger Temporal Nexus Points.
Everett Existence: Taken from Hugh Everett's Many Worlds Hypothesis. The belief that time branches at every event, creating a multiplicity of alternate universes. It is usually limited to a variation on the Temporal Nexus Point, but the full scope of the theory means that time is branching every second, creating infinite universes.
Everett Barrier: The barriers between the universes. The breakdown of the Everett Barrier is the main point of the first two seasons of Fringe.
NPCs in order of appearance:
Astrid Farnsworth
Agathe Trygstad, Doctor of Physics
October
Cheryl Armitage
July
The Observers had simply disappeared. Walter and Michael walked away through the wormhole, the wormhole shut behind them, and a beat later, every Observer in the world simply... vanished, leaving a roaring silence. Everything was the same as it had been before, except... they were simply gone.
Humanity waited. Was it some bizarre plan of theirs? Did they vanish simply to return in greater numbers, greater strength? But days became weeks and then months and it seemed as though they would never return. After all, a time-travelling species can appear whenever they wish. And the moment for their return simply... passed. Time marched on without them.
So the remainder of the human race now moves on to recovery. The atmospheric degradation engines are dismantled, the Loyalists flushed out and rounded up, the labs opened, the news spread.
The plan hadn't worked exactly as expected, but at least everyone is free, now.
The signs and posters are taken down. Buildings are re-repurposed and people move back into them. Plants are starting to grow again. The economy staggers its way out of its cave, blinking in the metaphorical sunlight, and in the space of maybe a year the prevailing culture swings as far away from invasion-imposed austerity as it can to something very like the 1920s: colour and noise and possessions and a kind of desperate debauchery.
Never had hair been so important to a culture.
And yet... there have been sightings. Very recently, someone who looks like one of Them has been seen. Always breifly, always vanishing before he can be confronted or captured. Always seeming as though he's looking for something or someone.
There's an edge to the gaiety, now. A watchfulness. People are armed with every anti-Observer trick in the book, these days.
2168
Oslo in 2168 is home to an enormous laboratory complex on the island of Malmøya, 3 km out from the city's mainland. The lab is called Fremtiden International, and belongs to Uttstrakt Innbyrdes (three guesses who that is and the first two don't count.) Walter and Michael are successful in their aims... to a point. While the scientists there do agree to alter the Cerebral Augmentation Project to allow for emotional capacity as well as intellectual, the project itself still goes forth.
Fremtiden International is home to rather a lot of experiments that will later become Observer-tech thanks to the Massive Dynamic archives. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on. They're in danger of creating a closed causality loop if they aren't careful, but only a strange boy and a crazy old man know this....
---
A Breakdown Of Temporal Mechanics Terminology
Closed Causality Loop: An originless object or series of events. A loop of causality seen from the inside. In this case, the scientists are reverse-engineering the tech from the tech that someone had brought back from the future, thus creating the tech that was brought back. Where does it actually originate?
Grandfather Paradox: A loop of causality seen from the outside. You build a time machine, go back in time, accidentally kill your grandfather, erase yourself from existence. You don't exist, which means you can't have built the time machine, which means your grandfather does survive, so eventually you might exist, and you might build the time machine, et cetera et cetera, with no resolution.
Blinovitch Limitation Effect (aka Conservation Principle): The term is taken from Dr Who, but the principle is the same, a correllary on the rule that two objects cannot exist in the same place simultaneously, which goes on to say that the same object cannot exist seperately in the same place simultaneously. Subverted by Everett Existence, in which the two instances of the same object are not, in fact, the same, and can occupy the same space safely.
Crystallised Timeline Theory: The belief that one cannot change the past at all. Time is seen as a single line and, like a drop of water whose trail freezes behind it, becomes immutable with each passing second. Meddling in this timeline will either destroy the universe or, much more amenable to storytelling, cause a sequence of events that will restore what was changed.
Schroedinger Existence: Taken from the secondary result of the famous cat experiment in which it is believed that time is in flux until an event is observed: the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened, wherein one waveform of existence collapses and the other continues. These waveforms split at what is called, in this context, Schroedinger Temporal Nexus Points.
Everett Existence: Taken from Hugh Everett's Many Worlds Hypothesis. The belief that time branches at every event, creating a multiplicity of alternate universes. It is usually limited to a variation on the Temporal Nexus Point, but the full scope of the theory means that time is branching every second, creating infinite universes.
Everett Barrier: The barriers between the universes. The breakdown of the Everett Barrier is the main point of the first two seasons of Fringe.
NPCs in order of appearance:
Astrid Farnsworth
Agathe Trygstad, Doctor of Physics
October
Cheryl Armitage
July
