Time War RPG: Temporal Physics

A Beginner's Guide to Temporal Physics

Plasma

So, you’re a badass Time Corps agent. You eat Time Waves for breakfast, spit Chronoplasm and actually understand the Echo Effect. Destiny loves you. You’re the Timestream’s little golden child. But it's got a few more curves to throw you.

We’ve dealt with all the problems that can be caused when travellers interfere with time. Here’s what can happen when time interferes with you.

Paramemory

The first lasting effect of time travel most agents experience is actually the most beneficial. Paramemory is the ability to remember a previous version of history once that history has been altered. Agents using this remarkable ability can actually ‘remember’ two or more different histories, and can - with sufficient experience - distinguish between them. Paramemory is a learned ability, unlike normal memory, and must be used consciously, though it has been known to activate spontaneously. Theoretically this could mean that a change in history might go unnoticed by anyone until they happened to use their paramemory, but this is rarely the case. Most often when a disruption has taken place, an agent will be struck by an indefinable sense of wrongness, or may suffer disturbing dreams or visions, until he consciously searches his paramemory. Events recalled through paramemory are seldom perfectly clear, but often they are the only warning the Corps has that something has been changed. With sufficient training using meditation and mnemonic feedback, agents can learn to use paramemory at will, with almost the same degree of recall as normal memory.

Paramemory is also the ability that allows travellers to recall events yet to occur, that have already been experienced by a future version of themselves who has been annihilated by the Singularity Effect.

The mechanism of paramemory is still not understood. The Corps’ Sci-Techs have concluded that this faculty develops in most sentients almost immediately after their first journey through time, though it has been noted that many individuals diagnosed as schizophrenic throughout the past were undoubtedly experiencing memories of previous histories that they could not distinguish from their current reality. The roots of this faculty are not psionic, lending credence to those within the Paranormal Research Division who support the theory of the indivisible nature and continuity of the soul.

The Rule of Death

Often, when a time traveller dies, it is possible to revise the circumstances of that death, theoretically preventing it. However, in reality this is rarely attempted, not simply because of the dangers inherent in making any change to the timestream, but because it is destined to fail approximately 95% of the time. Agents whose deaths have been deleted usually die at the same moment as they died in the revised timeline. This effect is referred to as ‘the Rule of Death’.

The cause of this phenomena is paramemory. Ironically, agents able to remember revised timelines usually remember the trauma of their own death in such detail that their bodies literally shutdown, killing them in short order. To date, no agent who has fallen prey to this effect has survived.

It is because of this effect that agents who are killed during the course of a mission which is then deleted (as is the practise of the Corps), are given access to the Corps’ extensive hospice facilities. There they may be given counselling and allowed to prepare for the end in whatever way they see fit.

Time Sickness

Actually one of the mildest of the effects of time travel, the affliction known as Time Sickness (also known as "Hawking’s Revenge" or "Clock Chucking") can vary dramatically in effect. In its mildest form it is no more severe than a weak headache. In its stronger forms however, it can be potentially crippling, even life threatening.

Time sickness is caused by a reaction to the psionic stimulus of time travel, and is more likely to occur in those with developed or latent chronopsionic abilities.

An Ops Agent Speaks:

I’m one of those happy souls who’s never suffered from time sickness, so I can’t give you a first hand report. However, I’ve been told that it resembles wanting to expel everything you’re ever going to eat from every available orifice, whilst going blind and having someone trepan you with a dental drill. Bon appetité.

Time Lag

A range of physiological disturbances such as malaise, light-headedness, and insomnia, associated with time travel. Similar to the jetlag experienced by airline passengers travelling across global time-zones on Earth, this condition is often experienced by travellers who jump from one time of day to another (e.g. from 13:00 PM July 13^th 1947 to 08:00 AM October 23^rd 1965). Time lag occurs most often when a traveller's internal biological clock (circadian rhythms) is out of synchronisation with the time zone of his or her destination, thereby disrupting the normal daily rhythms of sleeping, eating, and other activities. Some or all of the symptoms may last up to several days until the body has adjusted to local time. Time lag should not be confused with tiredness caused by the stress or exertion of time travel.

Usually manifesting as a persistent drowsiness, it is often accompanied by flu-like symptoms, and is frequently quite debilitating. However the condition is only temporary, and is most effectively treated by a period of prolonged sleep.

An Ops Agent Speaks:

This makes time lag seem quite cosy, compared to some of the side effects and illnesses we’ve discussed. It isn’t. When an agent clocks into a situation, he or she needs to be on the ball immediately. The enemy aren’t going to wait for you to have a nap before they come looking for you, so ignore the manual on this one. My advice is to get your Med-tech to give you as many stims as you can handle and sleep after you’ve got the job done.

Chronon Dependency Syndrome

C.D.S. or Temporal Narcosis is a condition in which the sufferer becomes physically addicted to the flow of chronon quasi-particles encountered during time travel. Though the craving for the chronon induced euphoria is powerful, most sufferers are able to function at normal efficiency until the later stages of the condition. After an as yet undefined period of time, the sufferer’s subatomic structure begins to erode without exposure to the increased chronon field, forcing them to travel in time, or face slow and horrible disintegration.

With current Corps medical technology, C.D.S. is treatable only in the earliest stages.

Gray’s Disease

Named after the 21st Century temporal theorist who helped codify much of modern parachronal physics and who first identified the illness, Gray’s Disease is a nightmarish affliction which, left untreated, can have worse than terminal results.

Gray’s Disease is caused by the victim’s body becoming host to small groups of complex chronon/psion hyperstructures. These structures, while not alive in any conventional sense, act like a virus, absorbing temporal energy from the host and using it to replicate themselves. Because these structures exist independently of the normal flow of the timestream, hosts become infected along the entire span of their history. As the temporal energy is drained from their lifespan, the victims of this disease see history slowly change around them, accommodating their eventual uncreation. Friends and family find it harder and harder to remember the victims, until they inevitably forget. Deeds done by the victim become the achievements of someone else. At every turn, the Fate Factor and Temporal Inertia conspire to ensure that history will not miss the victim, until they no longer exist, mourned only by those with paramemory.

Currently, Gray’s Disease is untreatable, and the most we can do is honour the paramemory of its many victims.

Absorption Sickness

Thought by many to be related to Gray’s Disease, Absorption Sickness offers an equally horrible fate if left untreated. Absorption sickness occurs when the quantum signature of a time traveller begins to take on some of the characteristics of the time period they are currently in. While the mechanism for this is unknown, it has been observed that the majority of cases develop among those who have looped repeatedly while on Event Guard duty.

Victims of absorption sickness gradually begin to change, both physically and mentally, eventually becoming someone from the period in which they are in. During this transformation they lose all memory of their previous life, and may even change sex or species. One of the most puzzling aspects of this progressive affliction is that the person the victim becomes will, at the transformation’s end, always have existed, though they had no existence prior to the onset of the disease.

Absorption sickness is curable in it’s early stages by the simple expedient of evacuating the sufferer back to their point of origin. This evacuation must occur within 12 hours of the onset of the illness, or else it becomes irreversible.

An Ops Agent Speaks:

I lost a good friend to Absorption Sickness. We’d been trying to close down an adjuster cell in 14th Century Poland when our guide began to get sick. At firs t we thought it was flu, but when our medic reminded us about our panimmunity we began to worry. Calvert collapsed pretty soon after, running a fever and speaking in tongues. We put her to bed and waited, all the time trying to make contact with the local period base to get an emergency evac. The evac squad came a day too late. Earlier that morning a Dutch trader named Lars Hendisburg had woken up in Calvert’s bed and wanted to know what had happened to him. Helpless, we told him we’d found him in the street and brought him home. He thanked us for our charity, told us to look him up if we were ever in Holland, and left. Calvert was gone, as if she had never been, but Lars Hendisburg fitted into history as if he’d never been anything other than a local.

Warp Fatigue

Though the phenomenon of Warp Fatigue only affects inanimate matter, it is still one of the major effects of time travel and should be addressed here. Warp fatigue occurs as the result of the protective field generated by a time machine slipping out of phase, allowing small clusters of positively and negatively charged chronons into the machine’s pocket reality. Over time the chronon density within the time machine’s structure reaches a critical mass and the machine suddenly gains several million years in age. The net effect of this is that the machine is reduced to a subatomic mist within subjective seconds. As yet , there is no test which can indicate whether or not a time machine’s chronon level is becoming dangerously high, making warp fatigue the second highest cause of agent attrition next to enemy action.

Warp fatigue is just about every agent’s worst nightmare, and it makes every jump the equivalent of a game of Russian Roulette.