Continuing the Tosev (World War) Timeline - Crosstime Traffic

[Tom Kalbfus]

One of the thoughts that have been kicking around in my head as I finish Homeward Bound by Harry Turtledove is the possibility of using this timeline in Turtledove's other series Crosstime Traffic. Crosstime Traffic is set in the 2090s, while the novel Homeward Bound is set in the 2030s. So what happens if we advance the timeline 60 years so that it can intersect with the Crosstime Traffic series?

I think the company Crosstime would want to be very cautious when dealing with this timeline, mostly because this setting is likely to be even more technologically advanced than Homeline, and would be very capable of duplicating Crosstime's secret of Transposition technology, and their are certain nations they would not like to have the ability to compete with Crosstime such as the Third Reich, the USSR, the Empire of Japan, and of course there is the Race and its Empire, but the Race is a cautious species, and is still trying to catch up with the Americans an their FTL secret. Probably by the 2090s in this timeline, the secret of FTL travel has got out. The Race has probably got a working FTL drive by now as does the Third Reich, the USSR, and the Empire of Japan. So what kind of setting do you think this would be like? Some kind of Space Opera with the Third Reich replacing the "Klingons", and the Empire of Japan the "Romulans"? The Race most closely resembles the "Gorn" in the Star Trek series. Any thoughts on this? What do you think Crosstime would be most interested in accomplishing in this timeline? Perhaps they wish to acquire the secret of the FTL drive without any of the powers that be here learning about them? Or maybe some Timeline agents arrive here by accident - a transposition chamber accident to a timeline not previously explored. What do you think?

 

[Sachyriel]

NORAD becomes the UFP?

Otay, edit time...

I think the Race will have to 'buy' the FTL in the form of War Reparations.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I don't think the United States is prepared to give war preparations as they did not ask the Race to Invade in the first place, they figure the destruction of the Race's colony ship was in part payback for what happened to Washington DC.

As fro crosstime, I think a bully or thug could shove a teenager out the door of a transposition chamber as its moving across time, that way homeline would have no way of tracking or rescuing him. The kids only hope would then be to use the technology of the Tosev timeline to build another transposition chamber so he can find his way home. Than means finding a sympathetic scientist or engineer that believes him of course.

 

[Sachyriel]

I don't think the United States is prepared to give war preparations as they did not ask the Race to Invade in the first place, they figure the destruction of the Race's colony ship was in part payback for what happened to Washington DC.

I meant the Race paying the US, not the other way around.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Well this is 60 years later. The Race will have other options besides buying an FTL drive from the United States. The USSR will probably have copied an FTL design from the United States by this time, the Third Reich will have one also, and the Empire of Japan may have one too, they are quite technically adept, and if they see the USA cruising around with FTL drives planting American interstellar colonies, they set their engineers in motion to build an FTL device for themselves. The race will have three possibly entities to buy FTL drives from, I think the most likely seller would be the USSR, their economy is not very dynamic, it is centally planned, not very innovative unlike the other market-based economies. The USSR and the Race's Empire are in a similar bind, they are afraid of being left behind by the other three powers. I could forsee a USSR/Race alliance, the USSR gains some of the resources of the Race's three planets, in exchange the USSR uses its espionage assets to steal the secret of the FTL drive from the United States - just like it stole the Atomic Bomb in our history. The Race/USSR alliance is a bit unstable, I imagine the USSR would believe the Empire of the Race is ripe for Revolution, and would probably try to establish some Communist cells among the Race, and get them to overthrow their Emperor.

In the midst of all this, some people from our timeline get stranded in this one, when a bully or thug commits a crime and uses a transposition chamber to escape, when he finds a witness in the form of a teenager, he attempts to shove him through the door while the chamber is in motion, he hits him on the head to knock him out, and pries open the door with a crowbar while it is in motion, sideways through time, but a failsafe halts the chamber when he does this and incidentally burns out the control circuit leaving both the bully and his teenaged victim stranded in the Tosev Timeline in the 2090s. No doubt they'll have to find someone here who can fix the chamber and incidentally reveil the secret to a native in the process, but perhaps Timeline can kidnapp him before he can spread the secret around or perhaps not.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Actually, now that I've had time to think about it, the Soviets could be playing a double game. Specifically the Soviet leader sees all the Race's planets: Home Hallasi, and Rabotev as potential future Republics of the Greater Soviet Union. The Race probably has alot more people than humanity, maybe around 20 billion all told. A Soviet agent might work with members of the Race sympathetic to Communism, with some skill in technical fields, and pass on stolen plans for the American FTL drive to them. The Race members will then claim to have stolen it from the Americans or to have invented it themselves, and they'll use there new exalted position in the Empire to get closer to the Emperor himself, perhaps gain his trust, while at the same time overthrow his government. I'm sure the public at Home is becoming dissatisfied with the current state of affairs with them falling behind the human race, by tapping into this dissatisfaction, the Communist Lizards may be plotting a Revolution against the Empire to put themselves in power in its place. The Soviets in turn will attempt to stay on top of this and make the Race's Empire their own, and perhaps some kid and his allies from another timeline may attempt to stop this. That would be a potential plot for a future novel, what do you think?

 

[Ivan Druzhkov]

From what little I remember of the Crosstime series mechanic of AH travel, it might take a while for any scouting parties to come across the Worldwar TL. After all, while human history only starts to get weird in 1942, the actual POD is probably sometime around 5.5 billion YA, when the Tosev, Rabotev, and Halessi systems formed (they don't exist in OTL, right?). Most of the TLs that have been explored by the Crosstime company have PODs that seem to go back only as far as maybe one or two million years (i.e. the "no humans" ones), so it might take a lot more power to find the even more distant Worldwar line.

As for what they'd do, I assume scout, analyze, and report, with particular focus on whether anyone in Worldwar can build Crosstime technology. After all, it's entirely possible that getting a mass of technology from the Race has distracted humanity from looking down other avenues that could eventually lead to crosstime devices.

Personally, I've been interested in the idea of a starfaring Soviet Union, but the only way I'd be able to figure out what they would to would be to take a look at how a Molotov-run USSR (conservative, Stalinist, but not as dangerous as before) would react to learning about aliens, and that's a research project in of itself.

 

[B_Munro]

From what little I remember of the Crosstime series mechanic of AH travel, it might take a while for any scouting parties to come across the Worldwar TL. After all, while human history only starts to get weird in 1942, the actual POD is probably sometime around 5.5 billion YA, when the Tosev, Rabotev, and Halessi systems formed (they don't exist in OTL, right?).

Interdimensional travel doesn't exist OTL, either. There's no logical reason for the Crosstime TL _not_ to be one in which the Race exists, except for the fact they haven't arrived by 2090-odd in any of the TLs they have been to. But then, if you believe divergences happen all over the universe, it gets confusing: because how are TLs which diverged a few million years ago on _earth_ and giant cannibal apes rule _harder_ to reach than TLs which diverged millions of years ago when the X'Floon'Bleah blew up their entire galaxy, the light of which won't reach us for another hundred million years - and the _earth_, not effected by the phenomenon due to the light-speed barrier, is exactly the same as OTL?

Bruce

 

[Tyr]

nyeah. I'd hope any continuation doesn't go this way, cross time stuff is fun as a side story but as a definate continuation it ruins things.
It just doesn't make sense. Its too illogical and too infinite.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Interdimensional travel doesn't exist OTL, either. There's no logical reason for the Crosstime TL _not_ to be one in which the Race exists, except for the fact they haven't arrived by 2090-odd in any of the TLs they have been to. But then, if you believe divergences happen all over the universe, it gets confusing: because how are TLs which diverged a few million years ago on _earth_ and giant cannibal apes rule _harder_ to reach than TLs which diverged millions of years ago when the X'Floon'Bleah blew up their entire galaxy, the light of which won't reach us for another hundred million years - and the _earth_, not effected by the phenomenon due to the light-speed barrier, is exactly the same as OTL?

Bruce

It could be that one of the other races the Race conquered in the World War Timeline, turned out to be more technologically advanced in the Crosstime Timeline and both world destroyed each other leaving an extinct civilization and nothing to invade Earth. It could also be that the World War Timeline branched off from a Post-Appocalyptic timeline where the Race and Humanity got in a nuclear war. Crosstime scouts before might have only seen a post nuclear war devastation, and not make the connection to an alien race invading, then another timeline split off from that where their was no major global nuclear war.

It could be the transposition chambers skip over many timelines that are not seen on their way to known destinations - maybe a particular timeline might be out of synch with the home timeline until a certain amount of history passes from the divergence point to make it accessible from homeline. Also their are no divergence points from any times after crosstime travel was discovered, so there are no multiple homelines - or at least not yet. I think Crosstime might give the Worldwar timeline a wide berth, they might know about it, but they would keep it a secret, viewing it as possibly too dangerous to send agents their, they especially don't want the Nazis to get a hold of crosstime travel! A transposition chamber might arrive there by accident though, that is if something interupts its travel to some other destination.

I think crosstime will try to keep a low profile there in anycase, and if the locals are none the wiser, the Tosev timeline can continue much as it has before. With the ability to travel to other planets around other stars, it might not occur to them that their are other parallel universes, and such a think might not be looked for.

 

[Ivan Druzhkov]

Interdimensional travel doesn't exist OTL, either. There's no logical reason for the Crosstime TL _not_ to be one in which the Race exists, except for the fact they haven't arrived by 2090-odd in any of the TLs they have been to. But then, if you believe divergences happen all over the universe, it gets confusing: because how are TLs which diverged a few million years ago on _earth_ and giant cannibal apes rule _harder_ to reach than TLs which diverged millions of years ago when the X'Floon'Bleah blew up their entire galaxy, the light of which won't reach us for another hundred million years - and the _earth_, not effected by the phenomenon due to the light-speed barrier, is exactly the same as OTL?

Bruce

To be honest, I was operating under a bastardized version of the system GURPS uses to separate alternate timelines, with timelines with PODs farther in the past and with greater differences in physical laws being harder to enter. It really has no basis in any hard science, but then most forms of crosstime travel in fiction operate on completely arbitrary rules (or, on occasion, on more advanced laws of physics that allow for the author’s preferred form of multiverse to exist). It’s a necessary evil for the purposes of storytelling, but it does make arguing about it kinda pointless, a fact I should have realized earlier.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

To be honest, I was operating under a bastardized version of the system GURPS uses to separate alternate timelines, with timelines with PODs farther in the past and with greater differences in physical laws being harder to enter. It really has no basis in any hard science, but then most forms of crosstime travel in fiction operate on completely arbitrary rules (or, on occasion, on more advanced laws of physics that allow for the author’s preferred form of multiverse to exist). It’s a necessary evil for the purposes of storytelling, but it does make arguing about it kinda pointless, a fact I should have realized earlier.

A wormhole in space could connect two alternates, by the simple device of Einsteinian Relativity, you could dialate one end of the wormhole further into the future than the other by means of either accelerating it to near the speed of light for a while and then slowing it down, or by keeping it down the gravity well of a large mass such as a black hole or massive star for a time. The dialated end of the wormhole is the "future" end while the non-dialated end is the "past" end. A time traveler would start at the "future" end and travel through the wormhole to the "past" end, so in order to resolve any paradoxes that might be caused by the traveler from the "future" the "past" he is in is actually a parallel timeline, so it doesn't matter whether he kills his grandfather or not, it won't effect his own personal past one bit. In fact the histories of the "future" and "past" timelines will diverge as time goes by, even if one were to dialate the "past" end so that it reaches the same point in time as the "future" end as the wormhole will now connect two seperate altenates. If you accept "multiple universes" as a way of resolving time paradoxes from time travel, this is one way to handle crosstime traffic.

One favorite plot device would be to imagine an alien civilization in the remote past, now long gone which created a number of wormholes and time dialated one end of each wormhole there created to reach various points in the future relative to them. I'm digressing a bit. maybe its time for me to start a new thread.

Look for Crosstime Travel by means of Wormholes

 

[mikal]

I would think that Crosstime might actually try and deal, or get specs on the FTL. Maybe also the hydrogen fuel cells and the like

IIRC one of the big issues of their world was lack of resources and overpopulation. Getting the energy and transport sources of the Lizard Timeline would help them expand exponentially, as well as use Crosstime to explore other alternative Homes, Rabotevs, etc...