Snippet: The Smythe-Worthington Foundation.

Stuck in my head for a while: I may be expanding this a bit for Patreon. Haven’t decided yet. Also, a bit maybe more gray than I was originally imagining.

The Smythe-Worthington Foundation

Base assumption: time travel is possible, but you cannot change history. Alternatively, you can change history, but the act of doing so merely creates a new timeline and leaves yours untouched. Also: time travel is known, and common/cheap enough to allow non-governmental or non-military use.

The academic community did not react well to the discovery of practical time travel. On the one hand, people were finally and suddenly able to go Downtime and prove or disprove various pet theories, once and for all; on the other hand, …people were finally and suddenly able to go Downtime and prove or disprove various pet theories, once and for all. There were regrettable incidents. Worse, there was no effective counter-measures put in place to prevent particular regrettable incidents from occurring again and again.

To give just one example: during one six month period seven academic institutions were involved in nine attempts to firebomb Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, three of which were successful. All of this would have been tacitly ignored by Earth’s governments – after all, all the things being done in the past apparently weren’t affecting the the main timeline – but organizations and institutions were starting to attack each other Uptime as well as Downtime. At that point, the UN Security Council nations stepped in and created an international Time Security organization. Uniquely, the TSO doesn’t act to protect the timeline or the past; it merely acts to keep any nonsense spawned by Downtime strictly out of Uptime.

Still, there’s money in confirming historical data, particularly if you’re an academic institution with fat endowments and a hankering to get your hands on an original live performance of Doctor Faustus. Or your very own Christopher Marlowe, suitably dewormed and vaccinated and so forth. For that sort of thing, the TSO authorizes private contractors to go in, do the job, and come back.

The Smythe-Worthington Foundation is merely one of the more prestigious groups in that regard. With offices in London, New York, Athens, Beijing, and Buenos Aires, it specializes in filling in the holes of academic theorists. Want to see what crop yields were like in the Incan Empire? They can get you yearly photographs on select croplands. Need evidence that the Vikings visited New England? They’ll track down where the longboats beached themselves. Trying to prove linguistic shifts in Cantonese? They’ll bring back all the surreptitious audio coverage that you could want. Just be prepared to pay for the information. And not ask any more questions than the ones that you’ve already purchased the answers for.