Time Compression/Bending
What a beautiful technology it is, for it allows you to speed up or slow down time in a specific area (called a timezone) to specific degrees. Oh, just imagine: a planet is going to be attacked and, just in the nick of time, they create a 1000% timezone and turn a day of prep time into 10, making the difference between being conquered or having a successful defense.
Well, at the moment, the CHG can't speed up time by more than 20% and can't slow it down by more than 50%. The The LIR or League of Intelligent Races , meanwhile, can go up to 170% and the The New Old One Empire is completely insane with 2340% maximum and 0.5% minimum.
Utility
If one walks head first into a timezone from outside of one, their body will either be compressed or spread out. This usually results in death. You can't actually see a timezone in front of you beyond "well that rock sure should've hit the ground by now". Yeah these can be used for utterly deadly traps. Also if you make a timezone take up the West half of a hall then the West side will slowly have more air particles in it than the East side, which can kill anyone stuck in either side of the hall. Old Ones can take their timebending up very far and use it for fission, fusion or, going a step further down, breaking apart sub-atomic particles into pure energy, which can then make for bombs with a truly terrifying boom:size ratio.
Moving on from methods of ending lives with this technology, of which there are many more, come the civilian/business uses. Attach timebending machines to your space ship, make them make a timezone around your ship in which time goes faster, move your ship along, it pulls the timebending machines with it. Now what for you is a 6 year journey is a shorter one for the outside universe. Now go into cryosleep for the journey. Less time for you, less time for the universe, the package arrives sooner and it doesn't get delivered by someone whose hairs turned grey over the course of the journey.
Of course: a massive factory containing only machines that are making stuff could be timezoned to up production, prisoners can serve sentences faster while still experiencing and aging a suitable amount for the sentence (this means they're technically out quicker, so more space is freed up and the government need not make more prisons), the back of an ambulance can have time within it slowed down to increase the time limit before the patient inside dies of bleeding or something so that there's a higher chance of getting to a hospital in time (the same can be done at the hospital if doctors are wildly outnumbered by patients), etc.
Unfortunately, this can't be used for going back in time, just making it go by faster or slower from your perspective.
Manufacturing
Each timebending machine takes 10 years to make in a gargantuan (several miles wide and tall) automated factory that has to be repaired after making each machine (and can only make 1 at a time). Meanwhile these things kinda use black hole magic for their time muckery so that's a lot of matter having to be flung in. But, in all fairness, getting to screw with the flow of time is a pretty massive payoff for all that effort.
Access & Availability
The CHG allows the technology to be available in the free market and so does the LIR. The Old Ones are using this like it ain't no thing but then again they're already biologically immortal and very good at hibernating so getting stuck inside a 2000% timezone is more of an annoyance than a death sentence or chunk of one's life lost.
Complexity
Well, it takes years of training for a human to know how to build and operate the machines that make it possible - and that's in a world where AIs and other machines are doing most of the work. But in the basics of how to use it rather than the internal physics-beating muckery you get multiple time bending machines in the locations of corners of a 3D, straight-lines-only shape in which time can be sped up or slowed down by certain amounts, depending on the machines you're using. There are limits to the sizes of areas you can make due to the timebending machines not working if they're too far apart but that's where bringing in more timebending machines comes in.
Discovery
The New Old One Empire inherited the knowledge from the Old Old One Empire because Old Ones have basically infinite photographic memories. The LIR scavenged some Old Old One Empire stuff and, after decades of researching said stuff, figured out how to do it to a lesser degree. The CHG figured it out through general espionage in the LIR.
Related Items
Remove these ads. Join the Worldbuilders Guild
Comments