Why do people act like there’s a specific time that is ‘now’ in other timelines? And why is it different?
All the temporal enforcement agencies were created at different points in time. The Restricted Operations Division (Or, rather, the corporate research project operated by time travelers that turned into it.) was created in 1908. The Office of Legacy Management (Originally ‘Legacy Bureau’, then ‘Office of Legacy Control’) was given authority to monitor time in 1967, or 1963, depending on how you count. The Temporal Asset Security and Protection (Which has managed to keep the same name and thus not confuse everyone.) was created in 2024.
That, by itself, doesn’t really matter. You can go to any point in any of the timelines.
But the multiple timelines started interacting with each other. All these entities became aware of each other between 5-10 years into their existence. No is quite sure how everyone found each other. All MTPs, by that point, knew how to jump to specific threads, so could understand the concept of jumping between timelines, which is the same but just much farther.
But no one knows how the MTPs found the coordinates to each other, considering the emptiness in between. Someone, lost literally to history, clearly found another timeline. Twice. And probably people in those timelines found them, and traced them back. That is one of those mysteries that is lost in bad recordkeeping and overwritten threads
And, as happens when you run across people with different ideologies, clandestine meddling happened. Grudges started, a cold war started sliding into place. There was maybe 5 years of that, depending on your frame of reference. Luckily, sanity prevailed. Agreements were formed to not to try to change things. That everyone had jurisdiction over their own timeline, and should not be operating in other places.
But if you’re trying to negotiate with someone, you have to have a before and after. You need a way to sequence conversations.
Luckily, the timelines also had discovered Timeline Zero. Again, no one is quick sure how, it appears to been located independently by all timelines. They already had all established at least some level of research operations on Timeline Zero, all of which were taking advantage of a timeline with a single thread to try to figure things out. And then discovered the others were already there. It’s even possible that this is how everyone located each other.
So the MTPs founded Project Zero, with sole authority over that timeline, and they shut all existing projects in that timeline down. They withdrew their operations, which had mostly been in their ‘present’ (So sixty years apart), demolished everything, and left the timeline alone for a thousand years, to make sure it completely settled into a single thread.
And then, in the year 3000, Project Zero built started to build a building, called Central Point, on the island called Key West, as part of the Haven concept. And the official groundbreaking of that marks Haven Year 0 (Technically 3000), which was deliberately also 1920, 1980, and 2040, making everything sync up nicely.
The idea of using Timeline Zero for temporal refugees was there from the start, hence the name Haven, and a lot of them immediately relocated there unofficially, even before they were ‘supposed to’. Before that, they generally just had to keep skipping around trying to do as little changes as possible. The formal refugee system of registration and food shipments was set up piecemeal over the next few years, and has been fully in place since 4 HY.
At the time of writing this, it’s 31 years later. So it’s 31 Haven Year (3031 Common Era) in Haven dating, 1951 CE in Commonwealth, 2011 CE in Legacy, and 2071 CE in InterAct.
I’m still not sure why you’re calling some time ‘the present’? That’s not my present?
It’s best if you don’t think that way. You can’t go back to wherever you cam from, so there’s not really any reason to consider it your time anymore. For your own mental health, think of it as a…destroyed county. One you can visit, but it isn’t yours.
But there are plenty of people you interact with that do have a ‘now’.
Employees of the TEAs live in their own timeline. They get up every day and go to work. They have a now. When they interact with other people at their agency, it’s always with the people from the same time. When they use a time machine to visit Haven, or do their job in the past or future, it’s only one thread of them that goes, and the other stay, but that thread then returns to the exact time they left and they have ways to make sure all of them remember it. That’s their life.
When MTPs started interacting with other MTPs, it was completely chaos.
Thus, one of the reasons for Haven, and synchronizing things. But the ‘now’ that was picked as just picked randomly in each timeline, including Haven Acknowledging this ‘now’ means you can continue to interact with people in a linear manner. Both here, and in other timelines.
So everything is exactly in sync?
Yes and no.
You may notice that the days of the week are not the same. The day Haven was founded, January 1 HY, was a Thursday in 1920 in Commonwealth, a Tuesday in 1980 in Legacy, and a Sunday in 2040 InterAct.
On Haven, it was decided that Jan 1, 0 HY, was a Friday, as it wouldn’t be fair to have the day of the week match any specific timeline, and Friday was what it would have been had the 3000 calendar been in use.
There is also the slightly awkward situation of the fact that, while all Leap Day have been identical to this point due to the twenty-year gap spacing, 2100 is not a leap year, which mean the calendar date would be permanently offset by a day from then on. The first timeline to reach this will be InterAct, and the solution is likely to be that InterAct just ‘jumps ahead’ a day on Haven, it just pretends that February 29th, 60 HY doesn’t exist and everyone commuting from there to Haven just skips forward 24 hours. Eventually, all of the timelines will have skipped forward, and then Haven itself can skip forward.
A somewhat interesting fact is that because the year is actually 365.24 days long, if the intervals had not been multiples of 20 years, but had been exact years, the time could have been 6, 12, or 18 hours different between Haven and timeline. However, they were, so sunrise and sunset matches exactly.
Or at least, close enough. There’s been some debate on what to do about leap seconds and how to deal with that slight variation, but as travel between timelines, including to and from Haven, has a 42 minute arrival window, trying to synchronize things to the exact second seems somewhat pointles