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Shinizak
2013-09-30, 01:07 AM
Hey guys I was looking at my Mage the Awakening/Ascension book (specifically the Death and Time spheres) and I came up with a strange idea, what would an undead timeline look like? Not an alternate timeline where zombies rule the earth, but the timeline itself is undead.

Lets save Bob and Tim are out to save the world, Tim dies at temporal date X. Bob, who is overcome with grief, goes on a quest for the golden time machine of Phil the Time Wizard to undo the death of Tim. Bob uses the time machine at temporal date Y and travels back to temporal date Z and prevents the death. Well now the events between dates X and Y never happened and can be classified as a dead aborted time line.

Now lets say Phil the Time Wizard isn't as nice as he used to be, and decided to dabble in Necromancy. Using his vast knowledge of time and death magic he decides to do an experiment to "reanimate" the events that occurred between Temporal Dates X and Y. the resulting timeline is a mockery of what it should be (much like a zombie is to a human body). Phil then decides he wants to be a **** and stick Bob and Tim smack dab in the middle of this hell. what does Bob and Tim experience in this monstrosity that never was or could be?

LordChaos13
2013-09-30, 03:12 AM
Physical laws breaking down, becoming inconsistent
the inhabitants illogical following weird tangents as their brains, built for the original Verse's laws, fire the neurons wrong


Alternatively: Bizarro World (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_World) on a universal level

Radar
2013-09-30, 03:36 AM
I'd expect causality to be broken on some level. This timeline is forced, so some events will push themselves onto reality despite the cause not being there anymore. For example, someone was supposed to die in a car crash in the original timeline (before the use of time machine) - you know it and prevent the accident in the undead timeline, but that person dies anyway due to the same injuries, which now simply came out of nowhere. You can play this as an in-universe really bad railroading, which Bob and Tim have to break somehow. That, or cheese it up Final Destination-style.

Almost forgot: Bob and Tim have to make things right before the time Y, since the undead timeline is finite and will rot away after that moment.

JusticeZero
2013-09-30, 09:07 AM
Things will be missing or broken. Everything in the universe will act like those things are still there, even though they aren't. Buildings will crumble into rubble, and everyone will go to work and carry on as though the building was still standing. Chaos and disorder will go on, and everything will ignore it. Lots of things in the universe will be a caricature of itself.

Altair_the_Vexed
2013-09-30, 09:54 AM
Maybe the whole World of Darkness is an undead timeline already - just waiting to come to the end of the loop...

On a more helpful note, I'd suggest that dark glitches appear in time - stuff like
deja vu moments, where the repeated moment is literally darker and more decayed than the prior moment; severed causality, so that the characters experience missing time segments - when they decide to go to someplace, just jump straight to the moment they arrive, and tell them they don't remember travelling... (take this opportunity to add things to their inventory, like dead people in the trunk) anything else from Momento the undead timeline - if short enough- should loop, like Groundhog Day, but each loop becoming more and more decayed and ragged

Slipperychicken
2013-10-01, 11:44 AM
Isn't the Abyss supposed to be full of all this "nonexistent" stuff?


If you just chopped up a timeline and stuck it back together, it would be like if you took the deleted scenes of a movie and edited them back into the film. Not really hellish, things would just abruptly shift to the alternate time for a while, then shift back to the normal timeline. People wouldn't notice, because their consciousnesses would revert to where they're "supposed" to be once they went back to the normal timeline, much like the characters in a film wouldn't change their actions in response to you PhotoShopping a top hat onto the main character.

Either that, or the universe would proceed as though the alternate timeline were the "real" one, creating a future appropriate to the events therein.

Honestly it looks more like an alternate timeline rather than an undead one.

JusticeZero
2013-10-01, 12:44 PM
That was the point, that the alternate was then affected by an animation effect.

Tichrondrius
2013-10-02, 06:14 PM
Watch Donnie Darko.

LordChaos13
2013-10-02, 06:17 PM
It would end up something like this (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6829556/2/My-Immortal)

AuraTwilight
2013-10-02, 09:03 PM
The Prince of 100,000 Leaves is literally this. It's sentient and is so terrible reality would not abide it, and so it attempts to assert itself as the true history "Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"-style

Mono Vertigo
2013-10-04, 06:32 AM
Homestuck kinda sorta touches upon this, with alpha timelines, beta timelines, doomed ones, stillborn ones, etc... all coexisting. Right now in the story there are several versions of some characters who've met each other.
Of course, given the particular scope of Homestuck, it's not going to be particularly helpful as an example of what would happen in the life of 99,99999% of everything in existence.

I think you'd get things like parallel versions of people appearing and doing different things - things they'd have done in the dead timeline. For extra brainscrew, make them exist long enough to converse with the new versions of themselves, with the knowledge that they're kinda sorta undead in a metaphysical way and should have kept existing.
The consequences would get worse the longer the modified timeline has been allowed to exist before the dead timeline was reanimated. Undead things are things that are forced to go on longer than they should; that should be reflected by the kinda-sorta undead people (who might not even want that bad to keep existing, yet are forced to) and the consequences of their acts.

Adoendithas
2013-10-04, 07:25 AM
Different things are trapped in different cycles: some people are repeating one day over and over, others two days, some a whole week, some a few hours less than a week so they slowly get out of phase...

Joe the Rat
2013-10-04, 07:57 AM
That might explain why those Dark Futures that we keep trying to stop (cf Days of Futures Past, Terminator, Heroes) Keep getting grittier each time they reassert themselves. It might make an interesting excuse for switching oWoD/nWoD, with the End of Times aspect being the end of the loop - and why the mechanics of the old timeline are so crappy. Even your skills don't work right.

Regardless, Mr. Wrinkle will be pissed.

Segev
2013-10-04, 02:02 PM
Undeath - necromancy, negative energy, whatever - animates a corpse and causes it to move according to either its own will, the will of its master, or unnatural perversions of whatever drove the animal portion of its prior existence. Alternatively, with more ghostly undead, the necromantic magic causes a spiritual being or a manifest echo to persist where there is no life or future left to sustain it. Hauntings are usually tied to strong emotions that echo forward in time from a harsh event.

So, how does that correlate to a timeline?

Timelines are not sentient (or, if they are, that's a whole other set of bases for storytelling, and probably outside the scope of this particular question). However, this one is in theory animated, so perhaps it has a master who can command it. It could also be driven by echoes, like a haunting, or by "unnatural perversions of its formerly-living drives."

Let's examine each.

Some Similarities
The key thing is that an event that happened to lead to this time line's "healthy" existence now...didn't. Something changed, and the causal consequences of that change create the differences between the "dead" timeline and the "new" timeline. We'll call the "new" one the living one.

When Phil animates the "dead" timeline into what we'll now refer to as the undead timeline, he doesn't actually resurrect it, so he doesn't actually undo the change made that "killed" it and birthed the living timeline.

The prime characteristics of the undead timeline, then, are uncaused effects. The "healthiest" version of it would have the uncaused effect of the change being undone, and everything would fall out of it from there.

However, that's no fun if the only existential horror is realizing that Tim remembers the events that killed him and not how he survived, but he's still around. That doesn't carry very far. So we'll ignore that; that doesn't an "undead timeline" make so much as an "alternate" one, albeit with one oddity.

So, our undead timeline should be relatively clearly...unhealthy. Like a zombie.

The animating change is Tim being dead despite the events that "should" have killed him having been altered. So in our undead timeline, Tim is dead. Because this timeline is a mockery of the living one, events should unfold dually, I think. The paradoxes and weird acausal effects should stem from this fact.

Phil the Chronecromancer Commands It
In this version, Phil is the necromancer who controls our zombie of a timeline. He commands, and it obeys to the limits of its undead capability.

This starts with the first uncaused effect: Phil commanded that Tim be dead despite the events killing him not having happened, and so Tim is dead.

Tim would have done a great number of things. Tim's death also has a number of consequences. The timeline, being undead, can't reconcile them with a simple cause-and-effect choice of what is happening from here on out. Tim is dead, and yet things he would have done were he alive keep happening. Nobody was responsible for his death, and yet effects such as blame still need to be ascribed. In a healthy timeline, there would be no mystery behind Tim's uncaused demise to investigate. So all who now investigate are doing things that the undead timeline's lack of causal flow cannot support.

In the "Phil Commands" version of things, all of these paradoxes, these contradictions, these impossibilities give him tremendous power. Where causality breaks down because causes which "should" not happen can't have effects, or events which "should" happen with Tim still being alive now happen without cause, Phil can insert, by his chronecromantic will, new causes and new effects.

However, this timeline is still undead. While there's a definite living one from which it "branched," other valid timelines may also be sources of "uncaused effects" that enter into it. Phil is a miniature god here, and yet his power over it diminishes the reality of those involved with each imposition. The timeline must feed, ghoulishly, on healthy, living ones. Events which happen in other timelines start to happen in this one, and Phil might even command certain of them to be consumed.

Those other timelines will start to see their own causes fail to have effect, or effects happen without cause. Because they're living timelines, this initially will self-correct. It's weird, it shouldn't be, but the timelines live and can have effects stem from these strange causes that cascade from the mysterious (non)events. However, if a timeline starts to bleed too much, see too much incursion, paradoxes build up and it begins to die, itself.

Unnatural Perversions of Living Drives
This version, Phil isn't commanding it. Instead, those trapped in the undead timeline find that anything they do that wouldn't have been done if Tim had not died...doesn't happen. Things that would have happened if Tim were alive happen without apparent cause. Set and reset of memories, dual-memories of events, and cascades of things that happen both ways with accompanying paradoxes create chaos, and likely drive the denizens of the timeline insane, if they aren't constantly re-written.

When Phil cruelly drops Tim and Bob into this timeline, they find themselves as the only ones who have a clear memory of how things are out of whack. While the mad denizens might remember two or three distinct versions of every event, and the sane ones might only remember whatever version is being done at the moment with it changing completely (and retroactively) the next, Tim and Bob can see just how screwed up this is. And their own actions have causes and effects, because they're "from" the living timeline. But even this is not always helpful, as uncaused effects interfere and undo it.

Worse, the longer they remain, the more their effects are lessened, and they too may eventually be just another set of madmen or memory-wraiths.

Impacts on the living timeline will mostly occur in the form of paradoxes as denizens of the undead timeline try to go back in time to "fix" things, and wind up creating uncaused effects that distort the history of the living timeline.

Undead Timeline as a Ghost
In this version, the undead timeline isn't analogous to a corporeal undead. There's no "dropping" somebody into it. It is, instead, a powerful impression of paradoxical wrongness. It's a spirit of a never-was that manifests in the living timeline.

Like the earlier efforts to describe the undead timeline, this one imposes uncaused effects onto the living timeline, but in a ghostly sort of way. Tim's alive in the living timeline, but the ghost of his demise will cause legal trouble for the one who would have killed him, and he might just find himself late for his own funeral (with everybody, when it's pointed out, baffled as to WHY they're having a funeral in the first place).

Weirdness like this will continue to happen. Events stemming from his death will be caused by ghostly apparitions. Paradoxes where his dual state of alive and dead mean contradictory things happen will arise. If the ghostly imposition of the undead timeline is dealt with by living-timeline action to resolve the uncaused effects - that is, the consequences of the effects are mitigated - then the undead timeline's impact on the living one will eventually fade. If these uncaused effects are allowed to promulgate, however, things they cause that should NOT have happened will lead to ghosts of that alternate timeline cropping up more and more.

Mono Vertigo
2013-10-05, 05:26 AM
Reminds me, I've got a much better example of what could constitute an undead timeline: Terry Pratchett's Mort.
Death's apprentice decides not to kill someone who was scheduled to die, who happens to be a princess.
The "undead" timeline would be the one where she died. As in Segev's latest example, people act in increasingly confusing ways, acknowledging the princess' presence less and less unless she assaults them - and even then she doesn't keep their attention for long - and mourning days and funerals happening although people can't say why they're holding these.
Eventually, the "undead" reality starts taking over the rest of the world, and is closing in slowly around the princess, who's the source of the modified timeline. The world increasingly behaves as if the princess did die, and there's no question about it. Memories are rewritten accordingly, events are retroactively modified outside the bubble. When the "undead" reality finally closes in on the princess... well, everybody guess it's going to be messy. For the princess. Meanwhile, no matter in which reality he stands, Death's apprentice never has his memories or actions retroactively changed, and can observe pretty well the consequences of his actions, whereas the princess and her wizard have to work on conjecture and avoid crossing the limit of their doomed reality-bubble.

Long story short: the undead timeline is still the real timeline. It slowly but noticeably reasserts itself as the only reality. Bob, if he finds himself outside the bubble, will forget about the time travel, and Tim will die as he was supposed to. Phil, being a Time Wizard, will surely be among the few who can remember when the two reality struggled against each other.

LordChaos13
2013-10-05, 05:41 AM
Actually the Undead timeline in this case is the WRONG one
X died
Time travel shenanigans cause a split timeline
Timeline NOT true (ie before Time Travel) gets rezzed

Pushing the two protags into the Undead one would cause the same reactions as seen in Mort except switched.
Everyone KNOWS the princess died, it's a fact.
When they see her walking around they get confused, just seeing her causes it initially but the Undead timeline begins to ignore her, people stop paying attention, objects cant be affected by her, any changes made retroactively get unmade (so that guy you locked up is suddenly free, the sword you crafted is back to raw materials...)
The whole universe acts like the princess doesnt exist. She becomes a ghost, invisble and intangible

Mono Vertigo
2013-10-05, 06:12 AM
Yeah, but I'm operating here under the idea that if one timeline out of the two is less wrong and more right than the other, it's the original and now undead one, not the new and modified timeline. With that assumption, the undead timeline wins in case of struggle.
Still... I'm not quite sure to get how we're in disagreement? It seems we actually agree on this specific scenario, besides the specifics of which reality is right, and which one is wrong. :smallconfused:

LordChaos13
2013-10-05, 06:24 AM
Just correcting you one that point, that the one where Timetravel Rezzes someone is the True reality


Also define less wrong without any sort of True Timeline to set them against


The Undead reality is clearly not the real one given it needs Chronecromancy to create from the Real one where Time-Travel fixes it
Since Time-Travel exists in the real timeline of course it would be used to fix things

Necroticplague
2013-10-05, 11:15 AM
Homestuck kinda sorta touches upon this, with alpha timelines, beta timelines, doomed ones, stillborn ones, etc... all coexisting. Right now in the story there are several versions of some characters who've met each other.
Of course, given the particular scope of Homestuck, it's not going to be particularly helpful as an example of what would happen in the life of 99,99999% of everything in existence.

Actually, that was my first thought as well. An Undead timeline is probably much like a doomed one: the paradoxes (normal time-related ones, not ones you get from using magic in front of normal people) will accumulate to critical levels as the timeline decays, until it can no longer support it's self existence (due to simultaneously holding mutually exclusive events as true), and slowly fades away. The people native to such timelines are also doomed to be destroyed, because all objects derive their personal chronologies from their native timeline. Even time-traveling to a different timeline doesn't help, because they carry their own chronology with them. Not-natives shoved into such timelines, however, can avoid the decay by jumping ship into a healthier one, assuming they came from a healthy timeline to begin with. However, it's probably not healthy for such non-doomed people to be present when the whole thing finally collapses.