An IC conversation you definitely couldn’t have heard explains how I am able to retcon fully developed Micron cities into Istvanistan, and hints at the fun that could be had if it did come to war.Harvey Steffke, Minister of the Interior, was meeting with Vur'Alm Xei'Bôn, Minister of the Exterior. Since the President’s surprise resignation and disappearance three weeks ago, the two had been essentially running the government until new elections could be organised. If new elections could be organised and the nation did not collapse, as some feared it would. Anyway, that was a problem for another day. Today’s problem was Istvanistan.
“Istvanistan is not an island prone to earthquakes,” Harvey began. “Occasional volcanic eruptions throughout history, yes; but not earthquakes. It is not on or near any faultlines.”
“Understandable, given its geography. I assume it is over a hotspot and that formed the mountains, then?” Vur’Alm queried.
“Probably. I’m not here to give you a geography lesson,” Harvey replied wearily. “I just say that to observe how unusual it is that, in the last month, there have been no less than 14 minor earthquakes, ranging from 2.1 to 4.8 on the Richter Scale. The collapse of the Isvanistani government before our arrival meant the only active seismographical monitoring facilities left were focussed on the volcano. After three minor earthquakes in a week, all far from the volcano, I had several more monitoring stations installed. We’re not sure about the first three, but every tremor since has had its epicentre on one of the new micron settlements. An island with no history of earthquakes has 14 minor ones over a month after the microns arrive. Explain that to me, if you can.”
Vur’Alm paused for a moment, and said, “Do we have satellite photos of the micron settlements before and after the quakes?”
Harvey thought. “We would have,” he conceded, “but to look at them could be considered a breach of our citizen’s right to privacy.”
“Harvey, do you want to find out what happened or not?” Vur’Alm replied.
“Fine,” Harvey said. “Mind if I use your computer?”
The meeting was being held in Vur’Alm’s office. They swapped seats and Harvey brought up the files on Vur’Alm’s computer, as the micron thought. It took a couple minutes, and then Harvey called him over. “Here they are. What are we looking for?”
Vur’Alm studied the screen for a moment, grabbing the mouse and clicking through a couple. “There!” he said. “Look at the height of those buildings. Look at the extension of that housing district.”
“It’s got bigger. They’re building, that’s what you expect,” Harvey replied dismissively.
“It is more than that. Look at the times on those photos.”
Harvey looked carefully. “They did all that in a day? How have we not noticed this?”
“You were not looking, which is what they relied on. Istvanistan is an out of the way, under developed territory which, let us face it, had no more than two hundred thousand inhabitants outside of Bastion City before the microns came. The Istvanistani people have long been in decline, and few Nelagans or Gralans resettled. Micron population brought it up to a reasonable level, and since they were happy to build their own settlements, we were happy to let them. We have had bigger issues to deal with.”
“And now you’re saying they’ve built whole towns in the space of a day?” Harvey said. “How is that possible?”
Vur’Alm paused. “How familiar are you with the theory of chronomotion?” he asked quietly.
“Is that another word for timetravel?” Harvey asked, confused.
“Not at all, then,” Vur’Alm replied. “A moment, then. If you have your mobile phone on, I suggest you switch it off.” Turning off his computer, he got up and went around his desk to open one of the draws, revealing a small electronic panel. He pressed a few buttons, and room began to change. First, steel slid up the windows, and in front of the door, blocking out the light. Then the lights in the room themselves dimmed and went out. Vur’Alm had taken a candle out of the same draw and now lit it, casting a dull glow over the room. Harvey heard a short crackle. “Do not be alarmed at this next bit,” Vur’Alm said, as the two of them suddenly started to levitate out of their chairs, along with the candle, which stayed in between them. “It is quite safe.” There was a moment more, and then whatever had happened appeared done, as Vur’Alm smiled.
“What I am about to tell you is Diamond III classification; or at least it would be if anyone apart from me knew it. That is why I activated the privacy defences for my office,” Vur’Alm began.
“Does my office do this too?” Harvey asked.
“Not yet,” the micron replied. “I am trialling the beta version; if it works, it will soon be installed in the offices of all major government members. It represents the highest level of privacy possible while remaining within our offices. First, a layer of lead slides in around the walls and over the door and window; sealing the room from the outside and stopping simple scans like xray. A crystal layer also goes inside the lead; I am not too sure of the theory myself, but the Gralan mages assure me it is the magical equivalent of a faraday cage, and prevents us from being scryed. Then the power is cut; avoiding any bugs drawing power from our own cables. A small EMP is then activated, knocking out any other bugs. Outside the room, a scrambler is activated to avoid any further attempts in. Inside, we are levitated so we can be surrounded on all sides by a magical bubble of air. No air moves outside it; in particular, that stops any sounds we make from leaving the bubble in case bugs are around the room that survived the process. If you have what Gralan mages call ‘the Sight’, you may notice the bubble itself. If you can not, do not worry. The important thing is that it is now nigh on impossible for people to overhear our conversation. Of course, being sealed off from the outside I now can not deactivate it from the inside, but I just set it for how long I think the discussion will go, and if it ends early, we just activate it again.”
Harvey thought for a moment, reviewing possible incursions, then nodded. “So what are you telling me that justifies all this?”
“Chronomotion.”
“Timetravel is possible, as I am sure you know,” Vur’Alm began. “Your own ancestor led the Control of Destiny team through time on their first mission, courtesy of DERA. For the moment, let us leave aside what they say happened. The important thing is that after Jasonia fell, and DERA with it, the secret of time travel was lost to all of Micras. All of Micras but two locations. One was the Time Revisionists on Melangia; and all they know they learnt from Sakat, so that hardly counts. The other was the Time Distortionists, who you probably know better than I. By the time Ptia re-emerged in the Menelmacarian days, Fate had been defeated, and the Micron Time Distortionists were more concerned with their race than their trust to defend the universe. Understanding of time travel became ... if not common knowledge, reasonably well known among microns. But we figured out far more than mere timetravel. We figured out the science of chronomotion.
“Without boring you with all the theory, moving an object or person to a different time period is just one part of chronomotion. Not only can you change their location in time; you can change the speed with which they travel through time. The spatial analogy is helpful here – imagine a car travelling along a road at 60 km/h. You can use a teleporter to place it at different points along the road. But you can also accelerate or decelerate, and change the speed the car is moving at. You can do that temporally too. You can slow a person down so a hundred years seem like a day to them; and you can speed a person up so a day seems like a hundred years. It can be quite dangerous for a number of reasons; not least of which is that if you speed a living organising up too fast, they will, comparatively speaking, age very fast too, and speeding them up for too long can literally kill them. So it is not practical for normal use.
“But we microns have been investigating chronomotion for a long time now. It did not take too long to figure out chronatonics. A chronaton is an automaton with an inbuilt time machine – it accelerates itself and a surrounding zone, allowing it to build really quickly. Sure, it wears fast too, but its only an automaton – repairs are easy as long as they are regular, and when you have all of time available, the resources needed are not hard to come by. I am guessing Jon’Kur wanted to build quickly on Istvanstan, and so is using chronatonics to do so. For small scale work, a chronaton will just accelerate itself and its surroundings. For large scale work – such as building an entire city – its much safer to just accelerate the whole zone and let the chronatons do their work. Three micron supervisors with eight hours on, sixteen hours off can oversee a building site quite easily – that is accelerated hours, of course. Rotate them every five minutes our time to avoid excessive aging affects; and in a couple days you have a city.
“This is where the earthquakes come in. See, objects maintain their spatial momentum when you accelerate them; for a humanoid it does not make much difference, as there is plenty of room around them. For a zone the size of a city, connected to a landmass that is part of a planet whizzing around its sun, you have problems. If we just accelerated the region for, six months over the course of a day, it could risk ripping the planet apart. In six months, Micras is halfway around Atos. So to undergo chronatonics at any speed, you need to stop that background momentum. That is possible, but to get it perfect needs an impossibly high level of precision, since atoms at different parts of the zone have slightly different directions of travel. Micron engineers spends days doing the calculations. As it is, we get it close enough. But when the zone is moved back to normal temporal speed, it is very hard to also get it back to the spatial momentum it would have had had you never undergone that whole process. So compared to the rest of the world, it is, briefly, comparatively motionless, and this causes a bump as the rest of the world pushes it back into place. And that is what has been causing your earthquakes.”
There was silence, as Harvey considered this. He was a very intelligent individual, but even he had trouble taking it in. “I think I get it,” he said in the end. “What I'm much more worried about is what it means that the microns have timetravel, sorry, chronomotion. What if they do decide to rebel? How can you fight an enemy who can change time?”
Vur’Alm smiled. “Do not worry, you can not change the past. I ran all the tests you could imagine, and confirmed it. Whatever the Control of Destiny team may have claimed to do millennia ago, in this day and age, changing the past is not just logically incoherent, its impossible.”
“Tests?” Harvey said.
Vur’Alm sighed. “I had not meant to add this, but you might as well know. Before I joined Nelaga, I was a Micron Chronengineer. I am an expert in Chronomotion. I started in Nelaga in JASO, in Project Ptia – which I am hoping you have heard of – looking at timetravel. The scientists were doing all right, but it would have taken them another fifty years had I not been able to ah ... help them along.”
So that’s how you walked from a couple years in JASO to a Ministry, Harvey thought, privately. You are full of surprises, Vur’Alm.
Vur’Alm had noticed the pensive silence, and decided to fill it. “It is possible we could win. If it came to war with the microns. If it came to a time war. JASO has enough stuff developed that our loss is not definite; certainly. But it will be hard. We would be fighting a fully fledged Micron empire who have been investigating chronomotion for millennia. There is a lot of stuff I have helped, er ... accelerate development for in JASO. But there is a lot more I would have to add on the fly if it came to time war.”
“Let us pray, then, that it does not come to war, old friend,” Harvey replied, patting him on the arm. “And thankyou.”
“For what?”
“For trusting me; and Nelaga; enough to tell me this.”
Now edited with proper non-swearing micron speech!