The Great Sickness The story is set in the year 2089, a decade after a catastrophic disease swept through the global population. This plague specifically targeted females, wiping out the majority of women and leaving a devastating gender imbalance of one woman for every ten men.
Societal Collapse & Restructuring To prevent chaos and violence among men fighting for the few remaining women, global governments enforced strict, dystopian regulations:
Redistribution of Companionship: Lifelong marriage became rare. Divorce was encouraged to “circulate” partners, ensuring more men had a chance at companionship.
Orientation Laws: Lesbianism was outlawed to ensure every surviving woman was available to the male population. Conversely, gay men were celebrated and socially adored for removing themselves from the competition.
The “Wife Lottery”: In the corrupt timeline established by “The Club,” wealthy elites (billionaires and CEOs) manipulated the system to purchase young, retrieved women as wives, leaving the general male population with nothing.
The Mission Time travel technology was developed as a desperate solution to the population crisis. The Time Retrieval Office authorizes agents to travel back in time to “retrieve” women from the past.
The Rule of Death: Agents are only permitted to retrieve women whose deaths are already recorded in history. This allows them to save the woman without theoretically altering the timeline, as history already records them as “gone”.
Integration: Once retrieved, these women are brought to 2089 and integrated into modern society to help repopulate and stabilize the world.
“Clocked Out”: A euphemism for when an agent is killed or erased from existence. If an agent is discovered or fails, the agency labels it an “unexplained anomaly” or “act of God” to prevent timeline ripples.
The Single Attempt: Agents typically get only one chance to retrieve a target. Failure usually results in the target dying as history intended, and repeated attempts are forbidden to prevent paradoxes.
Retrieval Pods: The vessel used for transport. They are hidden in the past and require precise landing coordinates. They are equipped with a proximity chip fail safe: if anyone other than an agent touches the pod, a one minute timer triggers, causing the pod to vanish to protect the technology.
The Drive: Every agent wears a small square drive on a chain. It records data from the past. Upon return, this data is compared to the company’s files. If the data matches, the timeline is stable. If it doesn’t, the agent must return to fix the error.
Time Shards: A combat tool consisting of a long glass cylinder. When smashed against a hard surface, it bursts into white light, creating a localized time distortion. This slows enemies to a near frozen state while allowing the agent to move at normal speed.
Echoes: Described as “overlayed time.” These are not random anomalies but signs of deliberate, repetitive manipulation of the timeline aimed at forcing a specific result.
Ripple Effects: Significant changes in the past can instantly rewrite the present. In the book, a “map update” by the antagonist Ramses resets the current history, erasing agents and altering the geopolitical landscape of 2089.
Timeline Correction: The universe attempts to “course correct.” If a timeline is broken, the only way to patch it is often by locating the specific drive an agent left behind or by physically returning to the moment of divergence.
