Convergence: Black and Silver Seas

Tags

Books, Convergence, Philosophy, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Convergence the RPG now ran two weekends ago, and with many thanks to my wonderful players, who put up with my generalised panic at suddenly running a game entirely solo for more than twice the number of players I’ve ever handled alone before, it went great! Set a year or two after the book’s base timeframe, we followed the newly graduated chrononauts of 2368 as they were sent “back through time” to the Silversea Moonbase in 2149 to find out why disaster so nearly befell it on that 50th anniversary of its permanent habitation.

And there, they found what at least appeared to them to be evidence of a renegade time traveller… but this time, one who had no record whatsoever in Chronos’ vast temporal extent.

Now, Chronos is the incredibly complex supercomputer that permits the “time travel” of the chrononauts of the Temporal Institute. It has its own dedicated power plant, which is routinely taxed almost to its limits simply to send these intrepid adventurers “through” time. Chronos’ complex memory systems are also the only known way of preserving information from one timestate to another — and this is where all those quote marks come in, because they aren’t just air quotes or scare quotes, but reflect something much more fundamental.

(There follows a digression into the temporal mechanics of Convergence.)

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Will You Two Stop Fighting?!

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Books, Convergence, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

You can probably tell from the title that this post is basically going to start with the words “oh dear…”

So my lovely, idiot chrononauts are arguing. Again. Aria spotted Dallas feeling guilty and called him on it, and he admitted he deliberately changed the future again. So she yelled at him (wouldn’t you?), and, well…

“So the future’s already changed! And even if it wasn’t, maybe it ought to!”
“It’s not our place to decide that, Dallas!”
“Then whose is it?”
Aria was silent for a moment, only a moment. “Theirs! The people who actually live in this time! It’s their decisions that should shape the future, not some lost chrononaut with a god complex!”

In the end, she said if he kept this up then she was going to stop him no matter what, and he called her the mirage again, meaning she was here to kill him, and ran away. Derp. He’s currently still running and feeling guilty and conflicted about it, and she’s still running after him and feeling massively overburdened and conflicted by it. Saving the future from the nutcase she’s spent all this time trying to save did just land squarely on her shoulders, after all.

I think it’s Arc 4 we’re nearly into now, but I’ve kind of lost count of the numbers. The future is shifting further and further, and as Chronos gets further from its original starting point, the alterations it can handle get larger and larger. Soon Aria and Dallas won’t just have each other to contend with…

Small-Scale Deconvergence Sucks

Tags

Books, Convergence, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

It happened! After a bunch of word sprints and a race in which my friend Duck beat me by 40 of my words. (We run at a multiplier because I type faster.) I clearly haven’t done enough word racing this year!

Anyway, *ominous voice* as previously foretold… yep, Aria and Dallas have been shot at by the crooks, chased, and either killed or severely injured. Or… y’know, not. Because what happened was that they experienced it, or thought that they did, then snapped back to right before it happened. Whatever “it” was. (Mostly getting shot, so far.) Like sensible extremely confused people, they then proceeded to do something else, and therefore survived.

They’ve now escaped once again, and Aria’s talking to Chronos (Dallas still can’t) about what just happened, which Chronos is explaining as ‘permitting localised deconvergence in order to establish a more favourable large-scale convergence’, and which she’s currently trying to interpret to Dallas.

Also I got closer to the line than I’ve been before this month, which was nice. Maybe I can make it after all… (Though it does have to be by the 28th, due to the last two days of the month being pretty much entirely taken up by other awesome things that will not permit much writing time. Sooo… erk? However, I have never lost a NaNo and I will not lose now! Determination!)

Drug Bust?

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Books, Convergence, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

I mean, no, not a drug bust, a drug observation. Definitely. Totally. Yeah.

So they did just about manage to escape their confines without dying of heatstroke, and even managed to survive until they were unceremoniously dropped into another, rather more peaceful time, which they used as a good chance to rest up and actually talk to one another some. All well and good… until they ended up somewhere else again.

Today, they’re in a hotel! And they suspect they’re here — or at least, originally were here — to observe a drug deal between some criminal element or other and the chappie in charge of the country’s finances that year. HAHAHA WHOOPS. They’re currently taking inventory, but when they’re done, this is where I expect the next interesting Plot development to occur.

Aria’s found out that the reason she has the memories she does is because they’re essentially getting filled in every convergence from her connection to Chronos’ temporal memory banks. This, of course, begs the question of how the hell Dallas is keeping his memories, something to which Chronos still has no answer! She does have one of his old personnel records now — there are no longer any restrictions on her access to the database, as she doesn’t exist as a person and can be viewed as essential to the current state of Chronos. There aren’t really any clues there, although she notices that he’s listed as a survivor from his hometown rather than simply a refugee, after the place was swallowed by the EDB. So, that’s interesting, but probably irrelevant, and certainly personal, she decides.

Anyway, the next major plot development is localised reconvergence. Or, translated, Chronos will not let you die. It’s going to be all kinds of crazy for the two chrononauts trying to figure that one out!

Uniformly Terrible Ideas

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Books, Convergence, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Where did we leave Aria? Oh, that’s right, standing on a roof! The helicopters are circling overhead, and she tries asking Chronos to find Dallas. At first, there’s no response, but then Chronos warns her that the probability of Chronos becoming deconvergent is increasing. And if that happens, it’s game over, man, game over!

Unsure of whether it will work, Aria asks Chronos to show the path that maximises convergence on her retinal display — she’d put money on the impending deconvergence being due to something Dallas is up to! Which, since he’s in the middle of getting arrested and dragged off by corporate security, is pretty much true.

Naturally, the best possible way to deal with this is to leap off a drainpipe onto the security types and beat them up with their own shock batons. Obviously. Then when one of the helicopters gets in on the action and threatens lethal force, obviously the best thing to do is jump into the armoured security van that’s idling just there and go on a high speed car chase. OBVIOUSLY.

And when that doesn’t shake the pursuit, clearly the best thing to do is to run into some kind of giant factory, set off all the alarms, and hide in a very hot place to fool thermal imaging. Yep.

I’ll let you know how all of that works out for her…

Adrift in Time

Tags

Books, Convergence, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

More than 3,000 words for today, which I badly needed as I’m actually still not caught up to the line… 😦 Dallas has succeeded in altering another historical event, but what the repercussions are, only time (or at least Chronos) will tell. But now he and Aria are separated, and the city they’re in is a hornet’s nest of rioters and corporate security.

Also I tried to write a speech. Supposedly people get shot over it (if Dallas didn’t do that thing where he jumps in to prevent that and changes history), but hahahahaha public speaking has never been my forte, so it’s probably terrible. (I wonder if WordPress does the little accents.) But that’s what revision is for! Much later. Yep.

So, Aria’s on a rooftop right now (again), and she has a couple of helicopters she has to worry about spotting her, and of course she has to find that pesky other chrononaut before he goes and gets himself into even more trouble. Good times!

Also, I wrote an entire segment from his point of view (involving the Equatorial Desert Belt, which is a named thing that exists in the future) which may never actually get used anywhere because he doesn’t remember that in that much detail yet. I blame NaNo.

Altered Future

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Books, Convergence, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Aria’s got a problem. She’s got a lot of problems, actually. But right now, her particular problem is the man called Dallas, the chrononaut she’s trying to rescue. Not only has he unknowingly changed her future and rewritten them both out of existence, he’s trying to do it again. In his aimless and accidental journey through history, he’s come to feel that it’s his responsibility to do something about the terrible things he’s witnessed, changing each historically important event to something better. But the effects on the future, on the time when they should have been born, can’t be predicted — certainly not by humans. And if Chronos knows what will change, it isn’t telling.

Aria’s mission to get back to her own home time just got a whole lot harder…

Time Travel Fun

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Books, Convergence, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

The second arc of the story has begun! That’s the really fun one! Completely deconverged from her original life and time, Aria is now free-roaming through history, Chronos the only fixed point in the timeline. Dallas’ actions have done this to her, after all she’s done to try and rescue him, yet he didn’t know what it was he was doing and she doesn’t know whether to hate him or forgive him, because what he did was done for good reasons. Whether she likes it or not, though, they’re now in this together as she tries to find a way back to her original time, this time with a stranger in tow.

Temporal Flux

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Books, Convergence, Fused, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Well, I thought hoped that I could do NaNo and The Fused at the same time, but alas, with a thesis to write as well, ’twas not to be. The Fused is therefore on hiatus until the end of November (luckily for Lindsi, that doesn’t actually mean she has to find an excuse to camp out in Engineering for a month, not least because she doesn’t have a month!), but in exchange, here come some updates on my poor, long-suffering time travellers!

It’s occurred to me since starting NaNo that maybe I shouldn’t have picked a topic that might actually require genuine historical research! Sooooo I’ve skipped over half Aria’s trips instead, or else just outlined them for later heavy editing. The important thing is to make words, right?

A Post in Advance (for once!)

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Books, Convergence, Fused, NaNoWriMo, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

There will be no Fused update next Tuesday – I’m away! Tune in the week after for, hopefully, more irregularly scheduled adventures!

In other news, I’ve chosen this year’s NaNo, and it’s time travel again! But rather than the last adventure in preventing war, this time it’s both more personal… and further-reaching.

Advances in technology have led to the development of a temporal computer, Chronos, capable of finding convergent solutions to the temporal state that accommodate certain requirements. From the central complex that houses Chronos and its associated machinery, carefully selected and trained chrononauts set out into the distant past to learn what really happened at the key moments of history. Safety precautions programmed into the computer ensure that while minor events may be different — a chrononaut’s favourite colour might be turquoise instead of blue, or one of the technicians may support a different football team — major events, such as the existence of staff members, are conserved.

Aira Mirane is one such traveller, and an experienced one at that. She returns from a trip and reports as usual, only to be informed by Chronos that the impossible has happened. Although she returned from this trip alone, she was not sent on it alone. Somehow, impossibly, Chronos has lost a chrononaut. Now, without even a memory of who it was she has lost, Aria must travel through time in search of the elusive possibilities that will allow a missing person to be reconverged… without even a memory of the missing agent to guide her.