The Treatise of a Time Traveller WIP

Our story starts off in a land of the distant future, 3021 to be more specific. The world that was known as science fiction a millennium ago is completely obliterated, and technology is completely unrecognizable to a person from our era. There are many technological advances, such as galactic territories, teleportation, gene editing, but our story focuses on time travelling. After it was invented 300 years ago, there was a rapid desolation of the chain of time and its been banned universally.

Of course, someone needs to govern those rules, especially since some of those rule-breakers aren't in the same time period as they are currently. That's where the Restraint of Universal Time Hopping (R.U.T.H.) comes into play. They're a massive corporation that monitors time-travelling activity, arrests the criminals, and fixes the time discrepancies they caused.

We start at Earth, though it's now known as Cromo due to the apparent lack of... earth. Despite our best efforts in the 21st and 22nd century, humans were unable to save the earth, and it went into hyper mass extinction. Humans at that point had colonized other planets, so they had other options. Instead of letting the Earth regrow and bounce back from its extinction like it eventually would, humans decided to make it livable for them again. They turned the entire planet artificial, with metal plates lining the Earth, preventing anything from growing, and self-sustaining food, water, and oxygen establishments.

Most occupations are taken by artificial intelligence, such as retail, sales, communication, manual labour, etc. Pretty much the only occupations that are left for humans are government positions such as leadership, law, or investigation. The way the economy works is children are trained for these specific positions for twenty years, required to work in that position for a minimum of ten years, and then they are free to live comfortably unemployed.

R.U.T.H. is one of the elite jobs on Cromo due to both the rigorous standards and the enticing nature of exploring the timeline. The business has a white and blue sleek aesthetic, everything minimal and efficient. It's divided into three major departments: History Research and Development, Time Monitoring and Tracking, and the Time Traveling Policing.

The History Research and Development team is responsible for concealment and backstories for the policing department when they go to different time periods. This department is full of people with very specific specialities such as fashion, language, dialect, common knowledge, etc. This is the department that people are most likely to quit after ten years due to feeling inferior to the other branches and it being the least interesting department.

The Time Monitoring and Tracking department is responsible for finding time discrepancies and figuring out how to fix them. They are arguably the most intuitive workers at R.U.T.H., needing to take a problem a time-hopping criminal caused and fix it without causing any other discrepancies. They are also the smallest branch since most of the tracking is done by AI. This branch tends to stay past their required time because they develop a parental instinct towards the Policing branch.

Finally, the Time Traveling Policing department, which is responsible for travelling to time discrepancies, arresting the offender and fixing the problem they caused. This is the biggest branch since AI can't go back into the past without raising suspicion. They're known as the Time Travel Task Force, and despite a lot of them being cocky and spending a lot of time when they're at R.U.T.H. goofing around, they take their job extremely carefully when they're in the field. This is the most sought after department since it's extremely enticing to young people to travel time, saving the structure of the universe.

While R.U.T.H. travels throughout all of time, this story focuses on three different locations, Ero, Cologade 119 BC, Rodit, Mars 2197, and Proser, Pluto 3008. To get to these locations, the History Research and Development team programs the specific time and location into the chips built into the task force, and they are transported through a time wormhole.

Ero, Cologade is very well known by the task force, since it tends to be a hub for time discrepancies. Ero was one of the hubs of knowledge in its time, but it kept a lot of that knowledge away from the world and became closeted. Unfortunately during 119 BC, Syche, a power-driven country that craved Ero's territory. They conquered them, but too well, a series of attacks that ended up burning the city and all of the knowledge inside. It's become a sort of joke how many times people try to save the knowledge inside of Ero.

Ero itself is very ancient compared to Cromo. The city itself is composed of basic houses, no building being higher than four stories. The houses tended to be composed of clay, a basic one-story building with only a couple of rooms and windows with no panes to help with the naturally hot weather. The richer folk would simply have more rooms, occasionally a second story if they were extremely powerful.

Ero believed in very simple ways of respecting their gods, so there was only a small tomb for each god, composed of marble that would be filled with treasures and food during the days they were meant to pay tribute to that specific god. There were plenty of other structures made from marble, including the Fortress of Ero, a four-story giant structure that could be seen above the city walls where their government meetings would take place. There was also plenty of marble statues depicting the perfect human.

Next, is Rodit, Mars, one of the first major colonies established on Mars. At that point in time, there we plenty as the Earth had become desolate and unlivable due to humans causing the sixth mass extinction. Despite humans having other places to inhabit, the prospects of returning to Earth were very enticing to the people alive who remembered it as a livable planet. The planetary government had banned any colonization on Earth though. The new president of Rodit slowly established a tyranny. That tyranny was eventually overthrown, but not before he revoked the ban on Earth colonization, eventually leading to the invention of Cromo.

Rodit used a very rudimentary way to produce oxygen compared to Cromo's current system. Plants were still one of the only ways to produce a livable amount of oxygen but it couldn't be trapped inside the atmosphere, so Rodit, like all the other Mars colonies at the time, had a dome over it to trap the simulated atmosphere. Most manual labour was replaced by artificial intelligence, but not nearly as much as there currently are in Cromo. The economy was also not in the same situation, so a lot of unemployed people were impoverished.

Rodit was still a very simple colonization. Everything was made from metal and was extremely rudimentary. There wasn't room for much creativity, just constant work to keep the colony running, so the colony was dull with greyscale colours. The dome allowed everyone to live normally, but everyone who needed to work on the outside needed to wear suits.

Finally, there's Proser, Pluto. Despite being only a couple of years before when our book takes place, Pluto is a much different place than Cromo. It was one of the later planets due to be colonized, due to the fact the planet couldn't be until the sun wasn't much of a requirement to live on a planet. The main difference between Cromo and Pluto is that Cromo is very urban and sleek, while Pluto is rural and simple.

Most of Pluto is covered in farmland watched very carefully and put on very specific environmental standards. The few buildings there are solely home and occupational-related facilities. They're very simple, made out of special heat-insulating metal due to the planet still being quite cold. So, while they're safe indoors, they need special clothing outside to not risk hypothermia.