Alright, so the Pa'rians, again.
Again?
Yeah, there's more to them than I've told you so far.
More than the 387 clan names?
I'm impressed you remembered the number.
Just don't make me do math.
I won't. Anyway, the Pa'rians love time travel, as I told you. Love it. Forget bringing future Pa'rian fleets into the present in a bid to conquer the galaxy. That was nuts, but a manageable kind of nuts. At one point in time--get it?--they had a notion to send all of their criminals and dissidents into the past. They didn't send them into the future because they worried about encountering them again. They figured if they sent such people deep into the past, they just wouldn't be a problem anymore. The expectation was that such individuals would succumb to a historical accident and be wiped from collective memory.
Wouldn't executing them be simpler?
You would think, but they had a cultural taboo against that. Directly killing each other was strictly forbidden, outside of some very peculiar circumstances that don't encompass crimes or treason. Ritual murder, that's OK. Planning to overthrow the Pa'rian clan system? Just toss you into the past.
This caused problems, didn't it?
How did you know? When they sent a convict into the past, they didn't dislocate them in terms of their physical referent. Which is to say, they would end up at exactly the same point on the planet that they departed from. And the only place they held their trials and carried out punishments was on their homeworld, so in effect that one planet became a massive nexus of temporal anomalies. It didn't seem like an issue, at first.
Actually, they ran into a different problem first.
The people they sent back rewrote history, right?
They sure did. Now, none of them wanted to mess up the whole "get exiled to the past" deal, because the alternative probably would've evolved to be capital punishment. Ironically, the more they did this, the more convicts influenced the past to make it an even more prevalent punishment. Eventually, they were shooting folks into the distant past several times a day. They started discovering cities that shouldn't have existed.
But if the past changed, it shouldn't change for the Pa'rians doing the sending, should it? That's not how you said time travel worked. It's more like navigating different timelines than moving back and forth along the same one, isn't it?
In the vast majority of cases, this is true. I'm not a theoretician so I can't give you all the underlying math, but essentially, the Pa'rians did this so much that they overwhelmed the local reality's capacity to branch. One way to look at it is, every time you branch a timeline, the divergent universes are physically close to each other, albeit across dimensional boundaries that typically can't be traversed. You can probably tell from the language I'm using that there are caveats to all this.
Yeah. So, they... broke the ability of the universe to branch timelines? At least around their homeworld?
Essentially, yes. Spawning timelines isn't "free." It costs energy, albeit of a form difficult to compare with energy as we know it in our universe. How much do you know about the Standard Model?
Uh.
Alright, I'll do my best. First, remember that nothing is real.
What?
I'm not joking. There is no underlying physical substance to the universe. That we see and feel things is just a complicated illusion. OK, I'm being flippant. Obviously, we exist. But what we think reality is, is completely wrong. Everything in existence is side effects of non-corporeal energy fields intersecting our universe. Where those fields come from, nobody knows. But it's been confirmed with the most powerful, most sensitive equipment ever developed that underneath it all, everything we consider to be "matter" is just buzzing fields of energy that, due to various interactions of forces, feel solid.
I hate this.
It's fun if you think about it long enough. No one has ever observed these fields, I should say. Instead, there's just a ton of math that describes how those fields should work, and every experiment to confirm them has... confirmed them. Which is to say, we have a good mathematical model of how the universe works at the most basic level, and that's neat.
What does this have to do with the Pa'rians and their time fuckery?
Like I said, we don't know where the fundamental fields come from. But one thing that's been observed is that, every time there is a temporal event, there is an extremely brief, extremely small dip in the strength of those fields. It wasn't the easiest thing to notice. It took some highly sensitive equipment a lot of attempts to figure up that there was the slightest detectable drop in local gravitation. Here's where it gets weird: the dip in gravity occurs at the point the time traveler arrives. By which I mean, the point where a divergent timeline is being created. You would expect that a time traveler from the future going into the past would increase local gravity, because that traveler has mass that they are adding to the local reference frame. The opposite actually happens at the point a time traveler departs from: a very tiny bump in gravity. Again, it's not enough to do anything. But it happens consistently.
And if you cause enough of these dips... bad things happen?
I said reality isn't real, due to all the stuff with the fields, but there's another way in which it's not real: things don't have fixed properties when they aren't being observed, and they can be affected by forces that are not anywhere near them physically.
For lack of a better way to describe it, because Pa'rians became so fixated on their little time-travel-exile scheme, and because they had a designated place for it, it started putting a strain on those fundamental fields across time, and across dimensional boundaries. Things started... disappearing. Like the underlying quantum fields just vanished. There's a couple ways something like that could go. Either the quantum fields would act like a liquid and rush to "fill in" the hole, or they wouldn't respond at all, leaving this weird hole in the fundamental fabric of the universe. In this case, they did the latter. Unfortunately, by the time they figured out what was happening and why, they were springing more and more holes. Best as anyone could tell, it wasn't limited to one universe, either. Mathematically, this was happening to their homeworld in every timeline where it existed. In timelines where it didn't, the same physical reference frame would just have the equivalent quantum vacuum disappear. Not a big deal unless a ship ran into it or something.
Since you told me they were still around, I guess they found a solution?
They didn't, but a solution was found, yes. The Department of Chronal Affairs got involved. It's kind of their thing, after all. They were seeing issues with these holes reaching all the way to the 500th century, which is nothing in cosmic time scales, but still aggravating to those of us with mortal constraints. The DCA sent a single agent back to identify the very first time Pa'rians tried this particular punishment, and uh, dissuade them.
Since the agent took a chronal tether along with, and because this was upstream from so many timeline branches, it basically collapsed all the variant realities into one where the Pa'rians never did this shit in the first place. They still loved time travel, but now sending their people back in time as punishment was taboo. Execution also remained taboo.
What did they do instead?
They forced their criminals into public service. Honestly, it might have been less cruel to condone execution.
Ha, ha. So, since everything was undone, how did anyone know this happened in the first place?
You know how I have done merges of different versions of myself? That was done en masse for the Pa'rians. So they retained their memories of everything that happened--some of them contained very divergent versions of their own memories. You also had weird circumstances where people were supposed to be dead, but they weren't. Everything got collapsed down into a "parent" timeline, after all. Everything at variance with that was rather confusing after the merge was done.
Are you sure this isn't what made the Pa'rians crazy to begin with?
Fun hypothesis! There is no way to tell. One thing the theorists pointed out was that this might have happened multiple times before but we just didn't remember it. Maybe the Pa'rians were the only ones who did remember, but it had happened to them so many times they lost their grip on reality and couldn't articulate what they had done or why.
The best anyone has been able to do is try to measure chronal vibration drift between Pa'rians and then taking samples from distant places, well away from their homeworld. The results are mixed. Some results suggest the Pa'rians we have are the real deal. Other results say they are from a completely different timeline, or combination of timelines.
Wouldn't you use a non-Pa'rian sample as the control?
We do! The problem is, comparing chronal variance blah blah bullshit can only be done in a relative sense. You can measure a degree of variance but you can't get absolute values for it. Comparing Pa'rian samples to control samples, they were all over the place. Some were spot-on: zero variance. Others had a big positive variance. Others had a big negative variance. You had everything in between. Just impossible to make sense of. The sum total of that evidence can only really tell you that something is extremely fucky with the Pa'rians in general.
Yeah, no shit.
One thing I'll never understand is why the DCA didn't just wipe the Pa'rians off the map completely. Don't make that face. They absolutely have annihilated entire civilizations. You can do that by preventing it from ever forming, or you can disappear their solar systems into manufactured rifts. The latter is really expensive, though. They've done both of those things when it suited their needs, all in the name of protecting the sprawling panoply of timelines.
The Pa'rians must have some bigger purpose.
Yeah, you let me know if you ever figure out what it is. I'm convinced it's some kind of spite so that they'll be a perpetual thorn in my side.
The universe doesn't revolve around you, dude.
In point of fact, where the DCA is concerned, it very much does!