Post by Catsmate on Apr 9, 2024 12:06:48 GMT
Another odd little character concept that's been floating around my mind. It's also a little rougher.
The Nomad.
How many people truly ‘die’ when an entire timeline ceases to be, wiped out by an alteration to it’s history, be it by accident or design?
That is a question in the murky area where chronophysics and philosophy intersect that Mariele Richter tries never to think about, despite, or perhaps because of, being the only survivor of such an occurrence.
She was an officer of the European Federation, involved in one of those unceasing ‘little wars’ between the European Federation and the despotic Anglo-Russian alliance, not a ‘real’ war, there were too many Holocaustic Weapons around for that.
Or so she, like most people, thought.
Mariele listened to the radio, watched the telecasts, Russia was falling apart and the Brits were scared. There’d been skirmishes over the refugee boats in the Irish Sea and the European Channel, a frigate sunk by their own planes in the German Sea, the “rioting” was more like an insurrection now that Pattison was dead and the government couldn’t find a successor to the old general.
But the Russians were worse, so far anyway, flamethrowers and nerve gas for ‘crowd control’, mass executions by bomb and impaling stake, the leadership were terrified of the populace, each other, ambitious underlings and outside meddling. Hence she and her motley collection of techs and troops were wasting time guarding against Russian supported guerrillas in the rocky underbelly of the Dalmatian Federation. Hers by rank alone, she was a tech not a Jäger. She’d have preferred a nice, quiet, posting in Jerusalem.
Then that last night was shattered by the ‘crump’ of the mortar shells blasting chunks of the soil into the air, filling the world with dirt and shrapnel. Then rockets shrieked overhead, leaving trails of fire above her as they headed further inland. Scheiße, how had a group this large, this well-armed, been missed by the over-watch drones? She donned her armour, checked the plates, and grabbed her gear, rifle, grenades, sidearm, stuffing extra ammunition in her pockets while yelling on the radio for support.
Then the radio voice disappeared into the static of a jammer and Mariele was scared.
Outside she watched as a Panzerfaust 90 arched away on a trail of concentrated fire and detonated a couple of hundred metres away in a computer controlled airburst. Her troops were returning fire, the gamut of weapons fire ranging from the light machine guns and rifles, with the occasional grenade launchers, through the old ’77 mediums to the harder bark of the 15mm caseless rounds of the heavies. An incoming rocket hit a Spähpanzer and sent the carrier rocking on its wheels as the warhead smashed the interior. No Wolfs here to return fire with their auto-mortars.
There was a certain stark beauty in the pattern of flashes and tracer.
Then Mariele died.
She actually saw the bullets that the guerrilla fired at her, on that bleak corner of the Dalmatian coast. Until time seemed to freeze, the bullets hung in the air, and a door opened in the air, and a small, dark woman sat down on the step and made her an offer.
An offer to live, to survive. Or to remain and die on that windswept coast..
Mariele took the offer and entered the time machine, and a new life.
Her new comrades were Time Agents, attempting to reverse an ‘edit’, an alteration to history. That’s when she learned that she shouldn’t have existed. And wouldn’t have existed for much longer.
A few minutes later, sitting in a comfortable seat in the cramped interior of the time-ship, out of phase with exterior time, she witnessed the destruction of her base, and its motley bunch of defenders, in the fireball of a ‘tactical problem solver’ the guerrillas had been provided with.
In fact, she learned, her entire world shouldn’t have happened. The British Empire should have decayed in a mostly peaceful whimper, not an insensate spasm of nuclear mushroom clouds. The Russian Empire should have collapsed under the weight of it’s own incompetence and then twice more. Not formed an unholy alliance of tyranny.
Mariele joined the quartet willingly, there wasn’t much of her world to go back to; she’d watched as the mushrooms bloomed around her world, her mind a whirl of an information overload.
The next few months of her life were confusing, jumping through time, spending weeks infiltrating, investigating, evading. Skirmishing with their counterparts from different Time Bureau, killing a couple of them. She couldn’t entirely grasp the complexities of the time stream, and its peculiarities, but she could fight and think.
In a skirmish in pre-human Australia, eighty-five thousand years before she’d been born, several of her new team died, but they accounted for the trigger-happy crew of another, enemy, time-ship, mainly thanks to the efforts of the team’s brilliant, odd, hacker.
They didn’t have time to more than look over the ship. The interior was elegant, more advanced than their own, especially in the spatial expansion, but there wasn’t much they could do so they rotated it out of phase and left it to be collected later.
Except that ‘later’ was a long time coming; more than a year to her, not including the month spend in a tank while the neural education implant constructed new neuron connections in her brain. Then there were skirmishes, probes, skulking around and a spot of cross-dressing to impersonate a British Army captain in the Summer War. Finally they’d tracked down and dealt with, well killed if she dropped the euphemism, the ‘editors’ who’d sought a Better World, where Britain would rule forever.
She almost felt sorry for them. But her world ended there too, as ‘proper’ history was restored. Her family, friends, comrades, every single person she’d known, would never have been.
But there was one final task, to track down the last surviving time-ship from that other universe, and eliminate it and it’s crew, before they could undo their work. The crew must have had some way to track the ship left in pre-human Australia because that’s where they headed.
The brutal fire-fight, with both sides deploying more firepower than an armoured brigade from what was still ‘home’, ended with almost everyone dead, only Mariele and the team’s hacker alive, or so they thought. And their ship disabled, a hole in the outer hull from a fusion-hot plasma bolt, far beyond the crippled self-repair system’s ability to fix. But there was a possible escape.
As he cracked the security on the other time-ship he babbled a bit, still in shock from so many deaths he explained; they could escape, back to his future, and she could find a new home in the far future, a role with the Bureau.
She wasn’t so sure, perhaps it was the shock catching up with her, now that things were calmer, all the people she’d worked and fought with for the last year. And the entire world she’d known was gone, “the edit fixed”.
But it was her world, her history, her family, her friends, her life.
All gone in the ‘fix’.
The wasn’t much she could do, so she went for a walk. It was cooler than she’d expected, but all she knew of Australia was what she’d seen on the ‘cast or read in books. She was lost in thought when the dead man stirred and started to move.
Bernardo didn’t bother to use their comms, exuberant with success he stood in the door of the others time-ship and shouted to her. Mariele turned at his call and strode back to the saucer. Inside he explained, he’d negated the security protocols with surprising ease, changed the allegiance of the ship’s AI and unlocked the systems. He’d even spliced one of their spare links into the ship, to ease use and comarison of technologies.
They could take off and head home whenever they wanted to. Home. His home.
They headed outside, to gather what they needed from the remains of their time-ship, and carry the remains of the three dead into the ship for the trip to the future.
No-one left behind.
And that’s when Bernardo died. Maybe if, like her, he’d been wearing one of morphic explosuits it would have saved him, certainly hers stopped the plasma that splattered on to her.
She drew her sidearm and returned fire almost without thought, dropping to one knee to reduce her target profile, years of instinct complemented by the implanted neural routines. The rapid pulses of coherent gravity from the salvaged weapon pulped the last survivor of that other timeline.
Her timeline.
Mariele crawled cautiously to the woman she’d killed and looked down at the results of her gravy gun. An apt nickname she thought, looking over the remains. Her hardsuit was almost intact but its systems were still locked from Bernardo’s hack. This agent hadn’t died though, and had managed to escape the bulky suit through the access hatch. She shuddered in sympathy, the idea of being inside such a suit, unable to move, knowing the life support was limited and you were helpless, was terrifying.
Suddenly wary, Mariele checked the other bodies. Everyone was dead.
Releasing the pistol, letting it to return to its holster, she sat down on a rock and thought.
What was there for her? Maybe she should stay here, make a life for herself? No, humans would be along soon, anything she did might effect human development. She needed to leave. But where to go?
The future of the Time Agents seemed less inviting now that her comrades, her friends rather, were dead. She could return to 2008, make a new life for herself there? But it wouldn’t be her world.
But she needed to get away from this place of death.
Rising, Mariele unsealed the hood of her suit and took a deep breath.
Mariele returned and scouted ‘their’ time-ship, picked up her few possessions, mostly gathered over the last year, her ship-suit coveralls, tools, weapons and gear, Bernardo’s backup of the ship’s data-store, that’d been so useful in detecting the alterations in the timeline, other stuff that might be useful.
In loads, Mariele carried the stuff over to her new home.
The Nomad.
How many people truly ‘die’ when an entire timeline ceases to be, wiped out by an alteration to it’s history, be it by accident or design?
That is a question in the murky area where chronophysics and philosophy intersect that Mariele Richter tries never to think about, despite, or perhaps because of, being the only survivor of such an occurrence.
She was an officer of the European Federation, involved in one of those unceasing ‘little wars’ between the European Federation and the despotic Anglo-Russian alliance, not a ‘real’ war, there were too many Holocaustic Weapons around for that.
Or so she, like most people, thought.
Mariele listened to the radio, watched the telecasts, Russia was falling apart and the Brits were scared. There’d been skirmishes over the refugee boats in the Irish Sea and the European Channel, a frigate sunk by their own planes in the German Sea, the “rioting” was more like an insurrection now that Pattison was dead and the government couldn’t find a successor to the old general.
But the Russians were worse, so far anyway, flamethrowers and nerve gas for ‘crowd control’, mass executions by bomb and impaling stake, the leadership were terrified of the populace, each other, ambitious underlings and outside meddling. Hence she and her motley collection of techs and troops were wasting time guarding against Russian supported guerrillas in the rocky underbelly of the Dalmatian Federation. Hers by rank alone, she was a tech not a Jäger. She’d have preferred a nice, quiet, posting in Jerusalem.
Then that last night was shattered by the ‘crump’ of the mortar shells blasting chunks of the soil into the air, filling the world with dirt and shrapnel. Then rockets shrieked overhead, leaving trails of fire above her as they headed further inland. Scheiße, how had a group this large, this well-armed, been missed by the over-watch drones? She donned her armour, checked the plates, and grabbed her gear, rifle, grenades, sidearm, stuffing extra ammunition in her pockets while yelling on the radio for support.
Then the radio voice disappeared into the static of a jammer and Mariele was scared.
Outside she watched as a Panzerfaust 90 arched away on a trail of concentrated fire and detonated a couple of hundred metres away in a computer controlled airburst. Her troops were returning fire, the gamut of weapons fire ranging from the light machine guns and rifles, with the occasional grenade launchers, through the old ’77 mediums to the harder bark of the 15mm caseless rounds of the heavies. An incoming rocket hit a Spähpanzer and sent the carrier rocking on its wheels as the warhead smashed the interior. No Wolfs here to return fire with their auto-mortars.
There was a certain stark beauty in the pattern of flashes and tracer.
Then Mariele died.
She actually saw the bullets that the guerrilla fired at her, on that bleak corner of the Dalmatian coast. Until time seemed to freeze, the bullets hung in the air, and a door opened in the air, and a small, dark woman sat down on the step and made her an offer.
An offer to live, to survive. Or to remain and die on that windswept coast..
Mariele took the offer and entered the time machine, and a new life.
Her new comrades were Time Agents, attempting to reverse an ‘edit’, an alteration to history. That’s when she learned that she shouldn’t have existed. And wouldn’t have existed for much longer.
A few minutes later, sitting in a comfortable seat in the cramped interior of the time-ship, out of phase with exterior time, she witnessed the destruction of her base, and its motley bunch of defenders, in the fireball of a ‘tactical problem solver’ the guerrillas had been provided with.
In fact, she learned, her entire world shouldn’t have happened. The British Empire should have decayed in a mostly peaceful whimper, not an insensate spasm of nuclear mushroom clouds. The Russian Empire should have collapsed under the weight of it’s own incompetence and then twice more. Not formed an unholy alliance of tyranny.
Mariele joined the quartet willingly, there wasn’t much of her world to go back to; she’d watched as the mushrooms bloomed around her world, her mind a whirl of an information overload.
The next few months of her life were confusing, jumping through time, spending weeks infiltrating, investigating, evading. Skirmishing with their counterparts from different Time Bureau, killing a couple of them. She couldn’t entirely grasp the complexities of the time stream, and its peculiarities, but she could fight and think.
In a skirmish in pre-human Australia, eighty-five thousand years before she’d been born, several of her new team died, but they accounted for the trigger-happy crew of another, enemy, time-ship, mainly thanks to the efforts of the team’s brilliant, odd, hacker.
They didn’t have time to more than look over the ship. The interior was elegant, more advanced than their own, especially in the spatial expansion, but there wasn’t much they could do so they rotated it out of phase and left it to be collected later.
Except that ‘later’ was a long time coming; more than a year to her, not including the month spend in a tank while the neural education implant constructed new neuron connections in her brain. Then there were skirmishes, probes, skulking around and a spot of cross-dressing to impersonate a British Army captain in the Summer War. Finally they’d tracked down and dealt with, well killed if she dropped the euphemism, the ‘editors’ who’d sought a Better World, where Britain would rule forever.
She almost felt sorry for them. But her world ended there too, as ‘proper’ history was restored. Her family, friends, comrades, every single person she’d known, would never have been.
But there was one final task, to track down the last surviving time-ship from that other universe, and eliminate it and it’s crew, before they could undo their work. The crew must have had some way to track the ship left in pre-human Australia because that’s where they headed.
The brutal fire-fight, with both sides deploying more firepower than an armoured brigade from what was still ‘home’, ended with almost everyone dead, only Mariele and the team’s hacker alive, or so they thought. And their ship disabled, a hole in the outer hull from a fusion-hot plasma bolt, far beyond the crippled self-repair system’s ability to fix. But there was a possible escape.
As he cracked the security on the other time-ship he babbled a bit, still in shock from so many deaths he explained; they could escape, back to his future, and she could find a new home in the far future, a role with the Bureau.
She wasn’t so sure, perhaps it was the shock catching up with her, now that things were calmer, all the people she’d worked and fought with for the last year. And the entire world she’d known was gone, “the edit fixed”.
But it was her world, her history, her family, her friends, her life.
All gone in the ‘fix’.
The wasn’t much she could do, so she went for a walk. It was cooler than she’d expected, but all she knew of Australia was what she’d seen on the ‘cast or read in books. She was lost in thought when the dead man stirred and started to move.
Bernardo didn’t bother to use their comms, exuberant with success he stood in the door of the others time-ship and shouted to her. Mariele turned at his call and strode back to the saucer. Inside he explained, he’d negated the security protocols with surprising ease, changed the allegiance of the ship’s AI and unlocked the systems. He’d even spliced one of their spare links into the ship, to ease use and comarison of technologies.
They could take off and head home whenever they wanted to. Home. His home.
They headed outside, to gather what they needed from the remains of their time-ship, and carry the remains of the three dead into the ship for the trip to the future.
No-one left behind.
And that’s when Bernardo died. Maybe if, like her, he’d been wearing one of morphic explosuits it would have saved him, certainly hers stopped the plasma that splattered on to her.
She drew her sidearm and returned fire almost without thought, dropping to one knee to reduce her target profile, years of instinct complemented by the implanted neural routines. The rapid pulses of coherent gravity from the salvaged weapon pulped the last survivor of that other timeline.
Her timeline.
Mariele crawled cautiously to the woman she’d killed and looked down at the results of her gravy gun. An apt nickname she thought, looking over the remains. Her hardsuit was almost intact but its systems were still locked from Bernardo’s hack. This agent hadn’t died though, and had managed to escape the bulky suit through the access hatch. She shuddered in sympathy, the idea of being inside such a suit, unable to move, knowing the life support was limited and you were helpless, was terrifying.
Suddenly wary, Mariele checked the other bodies. Everyone was dead.
Releasing the pistol, letting it to return to its holster, she sat down on a rock and thought.
What was there for her? Maybe she should stay here, make a life for herself? No, humans would be along soon, anything she did might effect human development. She needed to leave. But where to go?
The future of the Time Agents seemed less inviting now that her comrades, her friends rather, were dead. She could return to 2008, make a new life for herself there? But it wouldn’t be her world.
But she needed to get away from this place of death.
Rising, Mariele unsealed the hood of her suit and took a deep breath.
Mariele returned and scouted ‘their’ time-ship, picked up her few possessions, mostly gathered over the last year, her ship-suit coveralls, tools, weapons and gear, Bernardo’s backup of the ship’s data-store, that’d been so useful in detecting the alterations in the timeline, other stuff that might be useful.
In loads, Mariele carried the stuff over to her new home.