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 in Heaven, 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

Around 150 years before the War, an influx of influence from the outside universe led to the short-lived popularity of robots on the Homeworld, inspiring thoughts that timeships could be given hominid exterior form. Whereas previously generations of timeship were identified by number, with the most recent being Type 88s, a technological "revolution" began with experimental grafts of new systems onto timeships' internal architectures, leading to many nonstandard types like Type 104, Type 128b, Type 161.55, Type n+x, and Type pi-R-760. Upon the debut of the Type 1056771z, the High Council stepped in and reclassified them all as 89-form, regardless of their cross-bred elements.

The 411th President was elected in a surprise close victory which many believed to be rigged by the interventionists. Unusually, she had extensive experience in the outside universe, better equipping the Homeworld for new threats.

Mere months into her term, however, a temporal crisis on 18th century Earth released ancient forces. This would ordinarily have posed no problem for the , but this incident sent shockwaves to the Homeworld itself, triggering a nervous spasm in the Lady President. In her brief insanity, she saw visions like the 406th President's and released several hundred inmates of the prison planet.

Grandfather Paradox, freed, promptly sliced off his arm with a rusty knife, removing his criminal tattoo and last link to the Homeworld. He refounded his cult as Faction Paradox, borrowing aesthetically from the voodoo cults developing in the West Indies during the late 1700s (unless the voodoo cults instead borrowed from the Faction). He then removed all personal traces of himself from the continuum, leaving no remnants other than his followers and their relics.

The next year, the Grandfather's birth house, Lungbarrow, collapsed following the long-term insanity of its members. Its survivors planned to build themselves a new House, but they were generally believed to have died out or joined Faction Paradox.

As the House had fallen into obscurity, this change was overshadowed by its last legacy: the first natural childbirth on the Homeworld in 10 million years, born to an alien who mated with a member of the Homeworld's servitor-classes. This was an unpleasant surprise for the ruling Houses, but some wondered whether alien biomass was not a smart addition to the birthing-process.

Four years later, 145 years before the War, another of the lesser species attempted to invade the Homeworld: a machine-species which had been the subject of an earlier interventionist genocide attempt. The Lady President ended the invasion, but it was much harder to repel than the Sontarans had been.

137 years before the War, the coming conflict war became apparent: agents in the field began encountering beleaguered House agents from the future, a sign that the protocols of causality were breaking down. The Lady President began research into new weaponized timeships using "cross-fertilization", and 125 years before the War, the first generation of natural births on the Homeworld arrives.

Many paranoid House members were driven to Faction Paradox, which also began building its influence, recruiting members from both Great Houses and lesser species without distinction. They began building themselves a homeworld.

Another of the Lady President's preparations was crypto-forming eight "cloneworlds" of the Homeworld as decoys and bolt-holes against the enemy. Her final orders forbade any contact between the cloneworlds and the Homeworld so the duplicates could be kept "sterile" in case back-up copies became necessary, suggesting that the other Homeworlds' inhabitants didn't know their worlds were forgeries.

Following the creation of these cloneworlds, 95 years before the War, accounts differed regarding the Lady President's fate. On one Homeworld, she remained in office through the beginning of the War. However, on another Homeworld, she appeared to vanish. Her replacement came from the camp that regarded War as an impossibility, trusting the interventionists to neutralise any enemy before it could become a threat.

Twenty years later on this Homeworld, 75 years before the War, one of the original renegades from the broken generation returned to the Homeworld despite being wanted for many crimes. He presented solid evidence of the enemy to a Closed Session of the ruling Houses. While this convinced many House elites, the Presidency itself became more obstructionist than ever, culminating in ts iattempt, forty years later, to visit the enemy's "home" and prove its nonexistence once and for all. The project failed: the only trace of the expedition was its leader's remains, returned with the First Message from the Enemy. Panicked, the elite turned to the renegade for guidance.

Approximately 20 years before the War, the interventionists elected to escape the coming conflict and possible eradication by removing themselves from history on their own terms, thus becoming the Celestis. Over the final fifty years before the start of the War, Faction Paradox exerted more and more influence on Dronid, which, scattered with relics of the Great Houses, was a natural fit for Faction infiltration. Its powerbase on the planet took the form of a crime organisation rather than a cult, but over time this devolved into a purely political organisation seeking power for its own sake. 11 years before the start of the War, a rival syndicate arrived on Dronid: the InCorporate, run by unseen leaders but managed on the ground by Gabrielideans. This sparked a decade-long gang war.

Meanwhile, on their homeworld, Faction leadership began to think of themselves as untouchable. Godfather Morlock created a biodata virus that could turn a victim into a Faction agent from birth, and the Faction's agents throughout the intertemporal underworld freely peddled time technology to the lesser species. However, two years after InCorporate's arrival, the increasingly-paranoid Great Houses cracked down and wiped out the Faction's homeworld. The few survivors settled in the Eleven-Day Empire, slowly rebuilding their influence, but now through ceremony and cultural infiltration rather than weaponry. Cults dedicated to the Grandfather even spring up among the bored newbloods of the Homeworlds.

On one Homeworld, the Lady President took up the title "War Queen".

Current Affairs

In the last months before the War, the first organic-timeship hybrid was created: the 102-form "Compassion". Some elements among the Houses, including the Lady President on her Homeworld, attempted to capture Compassion for study and force-breeding with other timeships, but Compassion and her pilot refused to allow this. The War King, on the other hand, pursued negotiation and brokered a deal with the 102-form. However, before any breeding programme could begin,

The proxy war on Dronid, with the enemy using Gabrielideans and the Houses using Faction Paradox, began its next stage when the enemy abruptly seized the planet.

By the 40th year of the War, the Faction and Remote were no longer in communication, and the Faction had turned towards bio-research rather than sweeping gestures. Cut off from the Eleven-Day Empire, Father Kreiner's timestream desynchronised, and he experienced 1000 years among the Remote without any contact with the Faction.

45 years into the War, the Faction sent its six large-scale warships to destroy the planets where Faction agents had carelessly left behind clues that the ruling Houses might notice.

Justine McManus was recruited into the Faction as a side-effect of a Remote experiment on 19th century Earth, and she was sent to Dronid to apprentice under Cousin Sanjira as a Little Sister. By then Dronid had been forgotten by both sides of the War, and the Faction Mission's only opposition was the criminal Corporation, no longer controlled by the enemy.

In Justine's second year at the Mission, Sanjira obtains a relic: the corpse of a hero of the Great Houses, likely planted in the ruins some time after the first battle of the War. Not realising he had the body of the last member of House Lungbarrow and a bloodline-relative of the Grandfather, whose biodata held invaluable secrets, Sanjira performed the usual ritual of dispatching the body into the nexus of causality. Upon realising his error, he committed suicide.

Justine was brought to the Eleven-Day Empire in recognition of her promise, and, the next year, she was sent to the late 21st century to retrieve the Relic. While she failed, she met an agent of the Great Houses from tje future, several hundred years into the War, when the Houses were all but defeated. This agent recognised the Faction, indicating their survival into that time period. The elders, pleased, initiated 18-year-old Justine as a Cousin alongside her close confidant, Eliza.

The Book of the War was published in the 50th year of the War. Cousin Justine is 22 years old and serving in the Eleven-Day Empire under Godfather Morlock, who has sent Mother Mathara in a Faction warship to the planet Dust, where she was to release his biodata virus into the formative new ecosystem there. However, Mathara found Father Kreiner and a Homeworld agent from the distant past, who was infected by the virus instead. Mathara concluded that the agent could be used by the Faction as a Trojan Horse into the history of the Homeworld.

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.

Mathara's 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. ↑ On the Fringes of War: Crimes Against History

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

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