Sabertooth

Sabretooth

You try smuggling diamonds, drugs, or pocket AIs from an alt, they'll catch you quick and you'll end up pulling six months on carrot world, or worse. But a Chicago Sabertooths' pennant, or an Arizona Peccaries t-shirt? They don't care. But they sell for big bucks on the collectors' markets.

— Joe Marksfield, BREACH agent

Sabretooth is a parallel very similar to Baseline in most respects. The key difference is that, for reasons still being researched, Jefferson's belief that megafauna survived in the Americas away from the settled East Coast was correct. The Lewis and Clark expedition brough back smilodon pelts, mastodon tusks, and glyptodont claws. The "big beasts" became iconic to the new nation of the United States. As westward expansion grew, the images, names, and imagined virtues of the creatures were incorporated into multiple cultural signifiers. A slight beneft of this was an earlier awareness of environmental concerns led to regulations protecting the habitats of the most impressive species. (That this tended to criminalize indigenous practices that relied on careful husbandry of these species was, of course, *totally* not the true goal.) Sabertooth is of relatively minor interest to BREACH, and it's considered a "safe" world for visitors. It's popular as a source of slightly-altered media -- Lassie saves Timmy from a smildon, not a wolf; "Gentle Ben" was about an immense flat-faced bear; and Siegfried and Roy's act involved endangered cave lions. The political symbols of the dominant parties in America, still drawn from Nast's work, are a mastodon for the Republicans and the "zonkie" -- a zebra-like donkey ancestor known on Baseline as Hagerman's horse -- for the Democrats. (The eagle remains the national bird, however.)

Pleistocine Park

Some dendriclimatologists and biologists are very interested in the differences in the history of this world and Pleistocene Park, where humans simply didn't evolve at all. The biological samples from the two worlds show the evolutionary differences, which are fascinating to academics but not to anyone else. Sabertooth is also of little interest to big-game hunters, at least those seeking a genuine risk. More benign tourism is popular; regular trips to the Chicago Zoo, with the largest collection of megafauna kept in carefully maintained environmental enclosures, bring in sufficient funds to support a few doctoral candidates.

World Type

Alternate Historical

Divergence

~15000 BC

Current Year

2022

There are probably multiple divergence points over a period from 15,000 BC to the present; at each tipping point where one cause or another would have led to the extinction of the preserved species, minor changes in climate, competitors, human migration or subsistence patterns, or economic factors led to the species surviving. There have also likely been progressive adaptations in the surviving species; small anatomical differences, changes in metabolism, and so on, helped them survive a warming environment while remaining visually identical to their ancestral species, at least to anyone not trained in the differences.