Crimes Against History (short story)

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Crimes Against History: The "Definitive" Faction Timeline was a 2001 digital short story written by Lawrence Miles and released as part of The Spiral Politic Database.

The story is told from the perspective of the 51st year of the war, the setting of The Faction Paradox Protocols. Notably, the story features more explicit ties to Doctor Who than other Faction Paradox releases, with Miles using his licenses to Marc Platt's Great Houses, Robert Holmes's Sontarans, and Neil Penswick's Yssgaroth.

Publisher's summary

First edition

What follows is a chronology of Faction Paradox, at least as far as chronology can be applied. Much of the background material comes from the Faction-related books already published, and the events of The Faction Paradox Protocols - the "present" - aren't dealt with here. For anyone listening to the Protocols, none of this information is vitally important: however, some of it may turn out to be significant, which is a different thing altogether.

The dates given are relative to the present as it's perceived by Faction Paradox, and certainly don't relate to the early twenty-first century.

Second edition

What follows is a chronology of Faction Paradox, at least as far as chronology can be applied. Further details (on most of the subjects covered here) can be found in The Book of the War, while the events of The Faction Paradox Protocols - the "present" - aren't dealt with in this timeline.

The dates given are relative to the present as it's perceived by Faction Paradox, and certainly don't relate to the early twenty-first century.

Plot

Ancient History

Around 10 million years before the start of the War in Heaven, the first conscious life evolved. Due to its status as the "first self-aware tenants of the continuum", it was more a force of nature or of history than it was "alien" or a species.

They invented stellar technology and complex timeships which gave them control of the temporal sciences. This gave their homeworld an unusual relationship with the rest of history, and they began to regard themselves as neutral arbiters of causality, observing the "lesser species" evolving in their wake.

However, in exchange, they become sterile: both natural childbirth and natural death become passé in their culture. Their society was instead organised into aristocratic bloodlines called Houses, which could occasionally create new members through biological engineering.

The Homeworld was led by a High Council of representatives from the five ruling Houses, overseen by the Presidency, with the purpose of maintaining the status quo. After early experiments punched large holes in the continuum and allowed in monstrous "anti-structures" called Yssgaroth, which were then destroyed in a monumental struggle, a sixth House attached itself to the primary five as a "security advisor". This was the last change to House political structure for millions of years, and the Yssgaroth incident was remembered as proof that progress was bad.

Living Memory

1151 years before the War, Houses Lungbarrow and Dvora produced new offspring on-schedule, but impurities in the birthing system meant the newborns were born with psychological imperfections. Lungbarrow's generation included at least one with signs of insanity, as well as the greatest dissident the House ever produced. Due to the Houses' overconfidence in their own security and superiority, the imperfections in the birthing process were never corrected.

869 years before the War, one of these children of House Dvora, later called the Imperator, became Lord President of the High Council. He was initially quiet with his ambitions, only secretly creating the Order of the Weal as a counter-intelligence service; however, when that same Order revealed him as the primary threat to the Homeworld's security, he began an open revolt against the protocols of the Great Houses, waging a crusade against the universe to build himself a continuum-spanning empire. His army of lesser species laid waste to over a dozen other worlds over the next four years as the ruling Houses were paralysed by shock and inertia. When they finally acted, they returned him to the Homeworld and executed him in an instant.

While the Imperator was defeated, he brought the Houses to the attention of the lesser species for the first time, and his execution reminded the Homeworlders of their biological reality. Not long after, the High Council reopened their ancient prison planet and began secret imprisoning select individuals from the outside universe. Over the following 170 years, the cracks grew as more and more renegades ran away with timeships and relics of the Houses's biological pre-time-travel era reemerged.

700 years before the War, an interventionist protest movement began among the populace for the first time, and they were apparently vindicated when the ruling Houses intervened to prevent the Sontarans – a stunted and aggressive homunculus species of hobgoblins – from acquiring time travel technology. The Order of the Weal assesses the interventionists to be the greatest threat to the Homeworld, but the movement grows in size to the point that it can't be contained.

300 years later, covert interventionists had gained so much power that the Council was forced to approve of more and more interference in the outside universe, even the genocide of lesser species, just to avoid a political schism.

At this time, one of the "broken" offspring of House Lungbarrow publicly questioned the protocols and began advocating a more dynamic model of history that would embrace some principles of lesser species, such as change as a good thing. This far exceeded the suggestions of the interventionists, and the Houses rejected the rebel, who formed the first new bloodline in millions of years: House Paradox, named to needle the Houses who abhored paradox. The rebel took the name Grandfather Paradox after the traditional title for a House founder.

While the High Council could not punish the creation of a new House, when he was caught experimenting with non-linear time systems, he was called before the President. He appeared dressed in ceremonial armour, a half-hominid half-bestial skeleton from a paradoxical timeline where the Houses lost the Yssgaroth War. Shocked, the Council proved itself impotent and the Grandfather walked free.

The next year, the President of the High Council was assassinated in his 400th year in office. The assassin, a deranged renegade, was quickly identified and believed dead, but the Council delayed the process of electing a new President in the midst of cultural crisis.

The 406th President was eventually chosen after five years, but he quickly proved unstable. Based on his temporal research, he claimed that the Homeworld was threatened by formless horrors from the early universe and that the coming war would dwarf the Yssgaroth conflict in scale. He created ambitious plans for a series of colony-worlds, which the ruling Houses disregarded, and he covertly allowed House Paradox to purchase eleven days of localised history in the first year of his term. Despite the Council's best attempts to spread propaganda emphasising the President's sanity, he committed suicide three years into his term, and his researches were outlawed.

Although the High Council intended to drag out the replacement process, a candidate put himself forward and took office through a loophole in the electoral system. Unfortunately for the Houses' dignity, the 407th Presidency lasted only a few days: his inauguration coincided with an invasion attempt by the Sontarans, who had been considered a minor threat but managed to successfully penetrate the Homeworld's separate time-frame and set foot on the planet. The Sontaran fleet was easily dispatched, but it exposed the Homeworld's vulnerability; worse still, some prominent members of the Houses fled to the rarely-acknowledged wilderness outside the Capital, with large psychological effects.

The result of these events was the much-feared schism: a rival Council of the Great Houses broke away from the Homeworld and established itself in normal-time on the medium-technology world Dronid. The attempt at creating a New Homeworld quickly faltered, but fragments of the Houses' time technology were scattered around the planet. In the subsequent crack-down by the ruling Houses, Grandfather Paradox was tried and imprisoned for life in the prison-world.

The Order of the Weal investigated the 406th President's warnings of a future War in Heaven and concluded that he was correct. However, preparing for the future left them neglectful of the Homeworld's current affairs, and the Order disintegrated.

Modern Time

to be added

Current Affairs

to be added

Tomorrow's News

As the war continued, 103-forms became common and research began into a new generation of timeship. Altering regeneration cycles of members of the Great Houses to increase their bodies' military potential, a practice which began in the Second Wave, became commonplace. The first stage of biological armour resembled that worn by the Faction, but the final stages transformed the soldiers into inorganic war machines.

Both the War King and War Queen established disguised military garrisons on worlds throughout the Spiral Politic, and the Houses' soldiers replaced individuals on those worlds, living out their lives until combat troops are needed. At some stage, the War Queen's time as President came to an end, but her fate is unclear.

Ultimately, the enemy gained enough ground to destroy the Homeworld itself. By that point, eight "substitute" Homeworlds were fully populated by the High Council's agents, with more cloneworlds in the process of being cryptoformed; communication opened between these worlds, with Houses and caretaker-Houses forming a united front on the brink of extinction.

In the future, power-hungry Mother Mathara and a surviving "Eleven-Day Parliament" leads a coterie of the Faction which has evolved far from its original intent, mirroring the changes to the Homeworld's High Council. Rather than using death- and paradox-imagery as a black joke against the Homeworld, her followers are sincerely bloodthirsty and embody cadaverous forms.

Realising that the biodata virus overcame its victim around the start of the War, Mathara and her fleet exploit the "crack" in causality to travel back in time and attack the War Queen's Homeworld before the War began. They summoned the 406th President's ancient horrors, which the High Council mistook for the Enemy, and in the chaos Mathara's legions overran the Capitol and crowned a "new (ersatz) [[Grandfather Paradox|Grandfather". However, the infected agent had not been entirely corrupted by the biodata virus, and he destroyed the planet.

However, this rewriting of history may itself have been unwritten, and the true final outcome of the War remained uncertain, if such a thing even existed in a four-dimensional war.

Characters

References

to be added

Notes

Continuity

External links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Only present in the second edition.
  2. ↑ [1]

Category:2001 short stories Category:2002 short stories Category:WEB short stories

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