2010-2012: Fortean Events skyrocket in frequency.
- A flock of passenger pigeons, ten thousand strong, darkened the skies above New Jersey for the first time in over a century.
- A man began ranting and raving at a store in San Francisco when they refused to accept his payment in "Colonial Pounds". His driver's license was issued by "The Crown Colony of California".
- Dozens of witnesses, most with cell phones to corroborate their story, reported a Tyrannosaurus roaming the outskirts of a small Georgia town.
2013: A rippling field appears in Potterston, PA. Most pass through it without effect. One man enters and vanishes. He returned a minute later, saying there was another town on the other side, with all the store signs in German and the fashions, cars, and so on all looking different. After much cajoling, he agreed to pass through again, and this time he stole a newspaper. Extensive analysis of the articles, written in a German dialect, revealed it came from a world where the dominant culture and language of North America was Germanic, though it was not obvious how history had changed, as the daily paper failed to helpfully include a timeline of events. The "field" stayed visible for 14 hours, then vanished.
2013: Other such fields began appearing rapidly. Sharing of information about the fields, between nations, was hampered by mutual suspicion and recrimination. In 2007, the United Nations formed the Task Force for Para-reality Assessment & Investigation, or PAIN. All five nations of the UN Security Council shared equally in oversight and management of PAIN, but all had also been forming their own "above top secret" organizations for several years. NATO had formed BREACH, the Bureau of Reality Exploration, Access, and Containment of Hostiles. In 2014, this acronym was changed to "Control and Homesteading", reflecting the desire to make use of those realities that were seemingly empty of sapient life.
2014: CERN successfully created, and stabilized, a reality breach. Self-guiding drones were flown through. They returned with images of a region later identified to be where Paris stands in our reality, but instead, there was a city with 19th century technology and Moorish styles, with Arabic writing clearly visible. One drone was shot down by a rifleman; the other returned through the breach, which was positioned in the middle of a busy market. Seconds later, a woman stumbled through, nearly fainting in shock and fear. The breach was immediately shut down before anyone else could get through. The drone had recorded dozens of people standing around or walking through the heat-shimmer effect of the breach, but the woman was the only person to pass through it.
2017: Late in 2016, gigabytes of technical details about breach detection, creation, and stabilization were posted to WikiLeaks, ironically via a hacked administrative account so that the data could not be vetted first. By the time the hack was detected and corrected, tens of thousands of copies of the information had been downloaded and then uploaded to uncounted file sharing and mirroring sites. By March 2017, hundreds of people, businesses, and groups were experimenting with them. The world began to be flooded with items from alternate worlds, and more rarely with people from them. Extinct species, and wholly new species, began to appear... as did new plagues. Sydney, Australia, suffered "the three day dieoff" in which fully 30% of the population were killed by a sort of super-measels.
Containment of the technology was not possible. It became necessary to shift from trying to stop all "unauthorized" use to focusing on the most dangerous uses, and the creation of safety guidelines and protocols.
2020: The breaches have changed Earth, or Baseline Earth, or simply B. Industrial exploitation of "lifeless" worlds, rich in resources, is the new frontier. Hundreds of alternate histories have been discovered, and beyond that, alternate physics. There are worlds where people practice what can only be called magic. There are worlds where telepathy and telekinesis are proven and used. There are worlds where the technology is decades ahead of Earth's, and worlds where it followed alternate paths that defy what ought to be possible. There are worlds that are not even remotely like Earth, and worlds that are nothing like anything.
All major population centers have stabilization generators that prevent the random breaches that began in 2004. There are not enough to cover the globe, though, so new gateways occasionally pop into existence, with agents of PAIN ever alert for a call to action.
