Webmaster's note

I’m planning to do a thorough, hopefully somewhat thoughtfully written explanation of the basic lore of my story’s setting, which will be on this page as soon as it’s done! But that might take a while, so for now, here’s a rundown of the most important info needed to understand stuff like character backstories and whatnot. Please bear with me and check back in the future when this page might be cooler!

The Timeline Collapse

• The short version is that in 2059, two major timelines, which had been very similar for centuries but had eventually drastically diverged, unexpectedly came into contact with each other. This resulted in the destruction of one timeline as its residents and some of its history and constructions were displaced into the other, creating a new, combined timeline. This event is referred to as the Timeline Collapse, due to both the societal effects as well as the idea that the new timeline came from a version of the first collapsed into the second.
• To people living in the collapsing timeline (which I lazily call the A-timeline), what this meant was that they all seemed to be suddenly and somewhat violently teleported to a bizarre alternate version of the world they had always known.
• To people living in the more stable, receiving timeline (the B-timeline), this looked like a huge number of people, animals, buildings, and objects suddenly appearing out of thin air. A vast number of unusual perceptions of the moment of the event were reported, and all differed drastically from each other. Natural disasters were also observed, including a global earthquake and eclipse. Basically the entire fabric of reality itself was tearing for a good few hours there all around the world.
• So, you can see why this would lead to near societal breakdown.

Before that

• The A-timeline was closer to our real world, while the B-timeline broke off long ago, but followed a relatively similar path until the twentieth century when history truly diverged. The timelines were still closely related to each other.
• Before the Collapse, scientists in both timelines has recently discovered time travel.
• In fact, each timeline was aware of the other’s existence due to the invention of a device called a Timescope. A theory had been proposed that timelines existed in a pseudo-physical space called timespace, and could interact with one another through it. The Timescope proved this theory and allowed users to view other timelines, although there was no possibility of communication yet at that time. This made it a little easier for them to deduce what it was that had actually happened during the Collapse.

After that

• Unsurprisingly, a metaphysical disaster involving the sudden appearance of billions of people from an alternate timeline is very difficult to adequately respond to.
• The period following the initial Collapse was marked by mass homelessness, famine, and disease as B-timeline governments struggled to relocate and provide relief for A-timeline residents. Meanwhile, they had to respond to various smaller and larger armed conflicts and uprisings involving the remnants of A-timeline armies and governments.
• Food shortages, housing shortages, medicine shortages, epidemics, roaming militias, extra-judicial vengeance killings, suicides, and mass psychological trauma were major issues.
• In response to those issues, as you might be able to predict, increasingly oppressive militaristic governments arising and depriving their citizens of basic rights became a major issue (not that it hadn’t been one before in both timelines, but this time it was in the name of disaster recovery, and it was hidden better).
• In the first ten years after the Collapse, the world seemed like it had fallen apart, and it definitely had, but actually the disaster was handled better than you might think considering the circumstances, for reasons I will have to explain later. After a few decades of near-total despair, the world began to bounce back. Things were rebuilt. In many ways, things are still being rebuilt. The period between the disaster and the ongoing recovery is referred to as the Turbulence.
• Of course, the Collapse has had a continuous effect on everything ever since it happened. Including art and media and pop culture and stuff. And so we can very directly trace the 22nd century phenomenon of “distant past nostalgia” back to the Collapse.

Why did this happen?

• Good question!
• No one knows for sure what caused the Collapse. But many theories have been proposed to explain it. I will list some prominent ones below.
• Theory 1: Timeline Drift. Timeline drift is the unpredictable slow movement of timelines through timespace as time passes and situations in the timelines change. Although timeline drift is commonly believed to happen naturally, this has yet to be conclusively proven. According to this theory, the A-timeline began to drift toward the nearby B-timeline as part of its natural movement, and unfortunately crashed into it.
• Theory 2: Destabilization. This theory states that timelines do not naturally drift in timespace, but became destabilized from their natural positions due to human activity. What human activity? Well, time travel, of course. You’re not supposed to do that! And think about the timing—a massive timeline disaster just so happens to occur so soon after people in the affected timelines discover time travel and start recklessly messing with it, spawning hundreds of new unnatural spin-off timelines through their experiments? No way that’s a coincidence! …so say supporters of this theory.
• Theory 3: Human Origin. Like Destabilization Theory, this theory suggests that time travel was in some way to blame for the Collapse, but it ties in many other factors, specifically the material conditions of the A-timeline before it was destroyed. Human Origin Theory supporters believe the A-timeline was just so fucked up that it started hurtling through timespace like a derailed train until it hit the B-timeline. Okay, maybe they don’t believe that exactly, or they don’t explain it that way, but that is essentially what the theory implies.
• Theory 4: Random Cosmic Event. Shit just happens sometimes, man. In a way this isn’t even a theory, as all it says is that the Collapse happened “randomly” (whatever that means) and that there is no hope of ever understanding such “random cosmic events” involving “greater forces”. It is a hilariously unscientific way of thinking about the Collapse, and it is also a very popular explanation among the general public, so much that the term “random cosmic event” has entered the lexicon.
• Theory 5: Supernatural. It was God/the gods/the devil/some other huge supernatural force’s way of punishing people or forcing the world to start again.
• Those are far from the only theories about the Collapse. There are many more and most of them are complicated. There are also a lot of conspiracy theories which contend without evidence that the Collapse was artificially induced on purpose by some group or other for a nefarious reason.
• When it comes down to it, most time scientists believe that current methods are unable to conclusively determine what caused the Collapse. So for now it looks like it will remain a mystery.

Government and stuff

• The Timeline Collapse is not the only important piece of Lore for this world. There is also stuff like politics. I am admittedly not very smart about this type of Lore so please forgive me for the vagueness. I am trying to improve it and make it less vague.
• Although the story takes place mostly in Chicago, the country known as the United States does not exist. What currently exists grew out of the former United States, after falling and remaking itself in different ways about 3 or 4 times. Now it is unclear whether it can be considered a singular whole “country” by the standards of our (real life current) time. But by the standards of its fictional future time it is pretty ordinary.
• The government of this “country” is not exactly stable. It used to be fairly stable, but after the Collapse happened, it had to fight off the remnants of former governments and civilian militias and uprisings on its own soil, and in response it became extremely authoritarian. This continued through the Turbulence. In the following decades, right when a status quo had come into place, the regime fell and the government was reformed yet again. After that the economy became more decentralized than it had been either before or after the disaster, and the state became relatively more democratic, but many aspects of the previous system still exist.
• Capitalism has not been the dominant global economic system for about 250 years (in the B-timeline and the combined timeline), but whether what currently exists can be called communism or whether it is something else is debatable.
• The time travel situation definitely contributes to the instability of the already-unstable situation. Time travel law is enforced by a large international self-governing group which is basically above the law of any given state that signed off on it, and this is frankly a huge problem, but that’s another story. Which will be in the story.

That's it for now. You are now as much of an expert on this world as anyone else other than me.