Armageddon Minus Five
Physics-defying guys in tights? Too many sapient dinosaurs ? No. It's stuff like this that drives a lot of us to try to descend into a haze of oblivion for a while.
What If You Knew The World Would End Tomorrow?
Or in a few years? And it was inevitable and inexorable and everyone else knew it, too? The world BREACH has informally designated as "Armageddon Minus Five" (even more informally, with gallows humor "Bay-1") learned that something had disrupted the sun. It might have been a neutron star passing through, or a spontaneous strangelet, or something no one had imagined, much less named, but the result was measurable: The sun would go nova in a spectacularly short time. While the exact day and hour could not be calculated, the probability curve looked like a cliff after about seven years: Less than a 1% chance for five years, slowly going to 2% by the end of six years, and 99 followed by a dot and too many other nines after seven years.That was two years before BREACH discovered this world, which was relatively close to Baseline in technology but had numerous historical deviations. Since then, the reactions have been sadly predictable: Panic, riots, religious mass movements (leading to often violent conflicts), conspiracy theories, con-men selling 'survival bunkers' or 'escape rockets' to the rich and stupid (not that the money they swindled is going to do them much good), and so on. Some embraced extreme penitence and asceticism, either hoping some deity will relent if they're sorry enough, or simply to die with a cleansed soul. Others turned to hedonism, sometimes purely self-indulgent, other times violently sociopathic. A few kept trying to keep on with as 'normal' a life as possible, a difficult task when so many of the rest were refusing to play along. The result is that plague, war, and famine are likely to kill a large percentage well before the sun does.
BREACH
BREACH has shared this information with other legitimate dimensional groups, hoping to come up with something, but very little suggests itself. Simple humanitarian aid, providing food, water, and medicine to help people survive the few years they've got left, is not hard, but even without all the other, non-doomed worlds attracting attention, it would never be more than a token effort. Seeking out any autotunes on the world, and bringing them to Baseline, has been mentioned, but finding them isn't easy, and asking people to line up, walk through the invisible wall, and see if you come out somewhere different is clearly not a solution. Some feel that in five years, Breach Stabilizer technology could advance to the point attunement isn't necessary, which could mean saving slightly more people, on the order of perhaps thousands, depending on conditions -- but it has been noted such advances are speculative, not certain, and it's likely smaller-scale measures would be sidelined while people hold out faith in future miracles. (A related, slightly better, idea is to set up a stabilizer there and see if maybe, just maybe, it's a road or double-hop, and, if so, if there's somehow a better world that can be reached.)It is highly probable the debate over 'what to do' will become an end in itself, avoiding the issue of actually doing something until it's too late.
Historical Deviations
Among other things, Russia is a Constitutional Monarchy with a well-loved Tsar, North America is loose alliance of medium-sized nations including regions originally colonized by Dutch, Danish, and Polish colonists, with the southwest still held by indigenous peoples; labor uprisings in 19th century England led to a Western Europe structured much like the USSR, and so on.A small subset of Baseliners, recognizing that saving even a few people is very unlikely, have decided to try to preserve as much as they can of this world's culture, art, and history. This has led to a few quick raids on whatever libraries or museums or private collections may survive, sometimes with the 'aid' of criminals who just want 'the good stuff', and are willing to let their partners take 'worthless crap' like microfiche archives and boxes of cheap paperback romances.
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