The Hormonal Plague shifts civilization into a desperate scramble for survival. With 90% of women gone, the future becomes a numbers game, and time travel becomes the only path forward.
This catastrophe does not merely set the stage, it becomes the reason the government, elite, and Initiative justify their most extreme decisions.
The Initiative is built around a single rule:
You can retrieve only those who are about to die.
This creates the illusion of moral righteousness, but masks a profound violation of autonomy.
Retrieval is performed using:
shards (timeline fragments)
pods (anchored retrieval chambers)
displacement calibration
death pulse detection
The more a timeline is altered, the more unstable it becomes.
Every retrieval generates a displacement score, a measurement of how much the timeline is bent or broken by intervention.
High displacement leads to:
timeline fractures
rogue echoes
paradox bleed
loss of prime continuity
It’s both scientific and symbolic: the cost of rewriting fate.
Echoes are alternate versions of events created by interference.
Some are harmless.
Some gain autonomy.
Rogue timelines are introduced when:
someone returns differently
someone intervenes in their own past
emotional trauma creates divergent echoes
The docks serve as the arrival point for retrieved subjects—cold, metallic, pressurized structures beneath the ocean. They represent the emotional tone of the world:
Everything beautiful is buried.
Everything hopeful arrives underwater.
