The Problematic Jerry Moore. [GURPS 4E]

I may have written this guy up in the past – I know that I referenced him in at least one Infinity thumbnail – but I wanted to get this out of my head and onto the screen anyway.

The Problematic Jerry Moore

A version of Jerry Moore exists in most timelines that have both a United States of America and a Bayonne. Born in 1940, Jerry typically has as stable an upbringing as the local timeline allows; he usually studies engineering, and uses the military to pay for it. That invariably leads to Jerry serving in whatever war is taking place in his twenties; he serves his term as an engineering officer, then comes home and (if possible) starts up his own company. Jerry never marries during this time, thanks to the disruption to his life caused by the war; but he fully intends to rectify that, once he establishes himself. Jerry typically finds success as an independent engineer, but he usually concludes that he will need to move to DC (or California, in timelines where there is a California and it belongs to the USA) to make the big bucks; so he will, some time after his 31st birthday, throw all of his stuff into a pickup truck and drive to his new home. With one exception (Homeline) he never makes it there; instead, Jerry is invariably caught in a banestorm and forcibly transported to a new timeline.

And that’s when things get bizarre. A lively debate continues inside Infinity over whether or not the various versions of Jerry Moore formally qualify for ‘demigod’ status. It’s not just that Jerry typically operates at a physical and mental level beyond that of most human beings; what readings Infinity have gotten over the years suggest that all the Jerry Moores possess a remarkable amount of psionic-based probability-alteration powers. Whenever any particular Jerry Moore gets transported to a new timeline he invariably immediately encounters someone who badly needs his help, and just as invariably the now-stranded dimensional traveler decides to do the noble thing and offer that help; several highly improbable adventures later, Jerry ends up running a rebellion or a conspiracy or a small country, typically at the ultimate expense of an unremittingly awful would-be world conquerer or empire. And the fallout from that continues until Jerry’s eventual death, generally of old age.

Infinity, of course, finds this sort of thing incredibly dangerous and frustrating: one thing that all Jerry Moores have in common is that none of them know that there’s such a thing as the Secret, nor would they have any innate inclination to keep that Secret anyway. As a result, at least six timelines currently exist where the inhabitants know of alternate timelines; on three of them, programs are in place to duplicate the process that originally brought Jerry Moore to them. Fortunately, none of those programs look likely to succeed – but that just applies to the timelines that Infinity knows about…

One last note: Homeline’s Jerry Moore lived out his life relatively calmly. His company was one of many that thrived after the discovery of parachronic travel; after Moore’s death in 2020 his heirs sold it to Infinity Unlimited without much in the way of fanfare. It thus came as a bit of a shock when the I-Cops started encountering Jerry Moores in other timelines, usually just a bit too late to do anything about it: the one Jerry Moore that Infinity was able to find in time (Lenin-5’s) was duly recruited, and is now… fighting a long-distance proxy war with the Jerry Moore (Dixie-2) that Centrum’s Interworld recruited at about the same time. As either version could easily wipe the floor with either a Centran Unattached Agent or an Infinity I-SWAT Operative, many people inside both organizations quietly feel that this may end up being for the best, anyway.