Name of timeline: Romanitas
Creator: Sophia McDougall
Current year: 2004
Notes: Emperor Pertinax learns of the plot to kill him and acts quickly to avert it. IOTL he was assassinated, but here he survives and goes to enact a series of reforms that allow his successors to eventually conquer most of the known world. Deliciously cliché, the Roman Empire nonetheless has multiple setbacks (Independent Africa, here represented by South Africa to show their control of Madagascar, was originally Roman), none moreso than the Nionian (Japanese) Empire - who discover gunpowder and naturally build a colonial empire in the Pacific. Sina (China), originally a Roman rival, is now little more than a buffer state between the two. For two centuries (starting in the 17th) they fight over Terra Nova (the Americas) before settling on the border shown. Technological process is
schizophrenic; longdictors (telephones) are in their infancy, longvision (television) is more akin to our cinema (and only present in forums (market squares)), magnetways (maglev railways) have been around since the 17th Century (first electrostatic machines (electric generators) appear in the 15th) - but there are no cars, there are no airplanes but there are spiral-wings (helicopters) and the slavery system is still present but growingly uneconomical and ethically repugnant (it's a major part of the plot, actually). Christianity is virtually unknown but not persecuted. And it's implied that both Rome and Nionia possess nuclear weapons (nothing on their delivery system), with both sides in a Cold War that's set to go hot.