Alright, I have a pretty talky description for my cover of Homeline, so I'll post the map separately. What I'm going for here is that parachronics have removed resource scarcity as a concern, so the world is pretty sedate and isn't as crazy and unbelievable as ours. Trump is still on The Apprentice, Crimea is still Ukranian, and the Islamic State is the official name for the Afghan northern alliance. 9/11 never happened due to improved security technology, so there wasn't a war on terror. However, things are hardly boring in Homeline...
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Homeline. Secundus to the Centrans, the second discovered timeline with the ability to unlock infinite worlds. Zweiter Sieg der Juden - second triumph of the Jews - to the Thousand-Year Reich, who see Israel’s existence as proof that the International Jewish Conspiracy has triumphed here. To the Pact of Silence, who first stumbled across Uhuru, Homeline is Negro’s World. Worrying to the totalitarian, terrifying to the tyrannical, Homeline has made its presence felt across the multiverse in the 33 years since it discovered Parachronics, or the ability to move between dimensions.
Since 1995, Homeline parachronic technology has been the domain of the United Nations Interworld Council, and more specifically, its chartered corporation Infinity Unlimited. Infinity operates the Infinity Patrol, Homeline’s multiversal military and so visible that other timelines associate Homeline more with the Patrol than the timeline itself.
Infinity Unlimited, under the nominal oversight of the United Nations Interworld Council (UNIC) maintains a wide variety of divisions, from the humanitarian Miracle Workers to the unofficial death squads of the ISWAT, reserved mainly for “partisans from nowhere” exercises on crosstime Nazis. Mainly.
The largest and most pressing concern for Infiniters is the Temporal Cold War they are fighting against Centrum. The first other parachronic power discovered by Infinity, the Centrans are collectivist authoritarians strongly opposed to Homeline’s democratic, liberal status quo. The two timelines fight for influence across the quanta that separate them, Centrum supporting technocratic (feudal when it can’t be picky), pan-Anglosphere and globalist movements, while Homeline backs nationalist, egalitarian and progressive groups (in reactionary worlds, they’ll just back the nicest kings). Unfortunately for both, the temporal Hitlerists of Reich-5 now attempt to spread National Socialism through the multiverse, which has lead to local cooperation against the Nazis. It seems that Homeline’s efforts to keep multiversal technology isolated to a few worldlines are futile, however, as more and more worlds such as the magical Merlin-1 gain parachronics from captured Infinity technology or personnel.
Homeline is hostile to most other parachronic powers, from the Confederates to the Cabal, magical conspiracists who work to undermine their rivals. They do, however, count many local allies amongst their friends, with their efforts to subvert and control governments in other timelines being among the most sophisticated of any parachronic power. Infinity practically has it down to a science: the Homeliner megacorporations such as White Star Trading or Consolidated Mining either “invent” capitalism and democracy or end up controlling them when they already exist, “discover” technologies such as telegraphs and indoor plumbing, and Infinity begins replacing government leaders. Entire planets are controlled in this way. A good example of this is Rome-2, where Johnson Crosstime, Inc. has in their pocket the rulers of every major power on that Earth, and telegraph lines and sewage pipes run from Rome to Byzantium.
This practice is the central thesis of the dominant Homeliner school of thought: Post-Scarcity Economics (PSE).
With the basic concept that access to infinite worlds means infinite resources, all variants of PSE share some common ideas: that humanity must not be constrained by imagined limitations to resources, that looting sterilized or uninhabited worlds can bring prosperity, polluting industries can be relocated to uninhabited Earths, and that better technology can simply be taken from other timelines. The main variants of PSE are Post-Scarcity Neoliberalism and Neoconservativism. These advocate the introduction of capitalism and democracy to other timelines to benefit both Homeline and their unknowing puppets, and the licensing of corporations to accomplish this. Their critics claim infinite resources have made capitalism obsolete, though China’s Post-Dengism agrees that markets are still the best way to allocate resources. Fully Automated Communism, practiced on the French world on Communité, attempts to use looted high technology to eliminate the concept of ‘work to eat’ altogether.
PSE has shaped the geopolitical status quo of Homeline’s nations. The nature of political debate has changed greatly. Arguing about which ideologies work economically is a rarity - mostly, every ideology works economically, if only by pumping in goods from other timelines in the worst cases. The political discourse now mostly concerns what conduct is just and how effective governance is. Fully Automated Communism is criticized for its incompetence and political repression, for example, while Post-Scarcity capitalists are under fire for failing to have eliminated starvation as they’ve been promising for years.
All adherents to PSE rebuke ‘old systems’ such as Social Democracy, whose adherents have lost most influence outside of Scandinavia and the Benelux countries. New Labor in Britain has completed its realignment, and Blair’s ‘social-ism’ dominates the British left.
The western bloc orbits Washington, D.C, but it is not just a club of America and little buddies. Chicago and the Canadian wilderness host Infinity operations, and some conservative critics see their influence as catching up to that of Washington’s. Uhuru, an African-American project, invest in Africa with their endless resources, attempting to bring the ‘new Africa’ into an equal partnership with the West. The EU’s Common Chross-Chronal Project and America’s extra-temporal operations collaborate, but the UK’s separate system is seen as more trustworthy due to no French involvement.
France is a curious case. It has aligned itself with China despite remaining in the EU, and sponsors a Communist colony despite being a liberal country allied with a state capitalist one. This is because the Shanghai Six - China, France, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Mongolia - primarily define themselves as the opposition to the American world order, sharing in the non-ideological fruits of cooperation.
Yeltsin aggressively pursued a parachronic program in the late 90s, which paid off as Russia is now one of the world’s most developed countries. While considered a de facto ally to the west, Yeltisn’s successors declined membership in NATO or the EU, despite being prime candidates for membership.
Homeline has felt the cultural effects of opening itself up to infinite dimensions. Works that never were, or have yet to be, are here today, leaving contemporary artists frustrated that people are getting works they haven’t written for free (the rule is that if a future work the Homeline artist hasn’t even started is found, it’s copyright-free). Similarly, scientists have followed the money into the only field that can’t have achievements looted from other timelines - parachronics.
Homeline’s colonized virgin earths are a diverse bunch. American colony New Colorado is pretty standard, but Tecumseh, the “Big Rez” is open to permanent settlement only to Amerindians and Canadian First Nations. Bhuvarlok is a new Indian province located on the same Earth.
Uhuru was an American black nationalist project that gained independence with American permission and remains allied to the motherland. It is investing in Africa and open to immigration to anyone with black African ancestry which can afford the Conveyor trip.
Communité was created to be a showcase for Fully Automated Communism, but ideological splits have meant the emergence of two mutually hostile camps separated by the UN Loiré buffer zone.
China’s Dai Zhongguo is a standard colony, but Tebugo is a resettling dump where China plans to put most of its minorities and dissidents, starting with Tibet. Other dictatorships have begun to follow.
The KMP Petroleum bloc is composed of the countries that own KMP Petroleum, essentially a monopoly created from the combined oil assets of OPEC and the Gulf monarchies. KMP is worried oil will become completely useless as things like fusion-powered cars taken from other timelines are introduced, and have taken over environmentalist groups like Greenpeace to manufacture obstacles to parachronic intervention, and, hopefully, the total obsolescence of oil.
Concerningly, the multiversal Nazi groups appear to hold sway over some of the street trash of Homeline, and pro-Reich-5 violence and graffiti is uncomfortably common. This has lead to Infinity’s most controversial clandestine assignment: it now uses the subconscious propaganda techniques once reserved for other timelines to try to inoculate Homeliners against fascism, and ISWAT death squads target suspected Reich-5 spies. Though Nazis are locked out of the American political system since President McConnell purged far-right Republicans from the party in 2020, their street gangs are most present in the States, which Infinity believes is because they are also based there.
Homeline is essentially a liberal capitalist world that doesn’t realize its technology means it doesn’t have to be. The theory of ‘comfort economics’ holds that the inertia of the market is simply because the vast majority of Homeliners simply prefer a market, their transactions have spontaneously created a capitalist economy that, logically, literally doesn’t need to exist. This isn’t nessesarily bad, as anyone can ‘opt out’ of this system and pack up for the colonies. However, the true potential of Homeline has yet to be unlocked, and when it is… the multiverse won’t know what hit it.
