WARP TRANSMISSION #009

History usually has one useful property: it already happened.

In NOCTILION, that isn't necessarily true. Entire civilizations can disappear without ruins. Wars can become victories that were never fought. People can die in one history and live perfectly ordinary lives in another.

And almost everyone simply accepts the new version as if it had always been there. This is what we call a: CORRECTION.

Riva Calder remembers the end of her world. She remembers the attack.

She remembers the gods. She remembers fighting back.

And she remembers Elyon being destroyed.

Then, one month later... Elyon was there. Its cities stood where they always had. Its people were alive.

History contained no planetary destruction.

No final battle.

No apocalypse.

According to reality itself, the world Riva remembered had never existed.

There was only one problem. Riva remembered it anyway.

A Correction isn't rebuilding.

It isn't time travel.

And it isn't simply changing someone's memories.

A Correction changes the continuity itself. One version of history is replaced by another. The new reality doesn't begin at the moment of the change.

It comes with its own past.

Its own records.

Its own relationships.

Its own consequences.

People remember childhoods that belonged to this version of history. Governments possess archives describing events that never occurred in the previous reality.

Entire lives can exist because of a Correction.

Which makes the obvious question surprisingly difficult: Which history is the real one?

A perfect Correction should leave no contradiction.

No witnesses. No evidence. No reason to suspect reality was ever different.

But Corrections don't appear to be perfect. Something sometimes survives.

A memory.

An object.

A coordinate.

A machine.

A feeling that something happened differently.

Most of those fragments can probably be dismissed as errors. Some cannot. Riva is one of those errors. And so is the ship she now commands.

Some objects don't belong to the universe they're found in.

A map may show a star system that doesn't exist.

An archive can reference a government nobody remembers.

A photograph may contain people who were never born.

A military insignia can belong to an army that history says never existed.

These objects are known as:

GHOST RELICS.

To most people, they're curiosities.

Contraband.

Frauds.

Artifacts with corrupted records.

But certain underground networks collect them for a very different reason.

Because enough impossible objects eventually stop looking like mistakes.

They start looking like evidence.

Then there is NOCTILION.

A ship built by a civilization that understood reality very differently from the people now flying it. Noctilion can recognize routes that shouldn't exist.

It retains information connected to erased histories.

It responds to places and systems that modern navigation considers impossible.

Riva remembers one deleted world. Noctilion may remember considerably more.

Which raises another uncomfortable possibility: Perhaps the universe hasn't been rewritten once.

Perhaps it has happened many times.

The beings humanity calls gods clearly possess capabilities that extend far beyond conventional weapons.

They conquer worlds.

They impose order.

And somewhere inside that system exists the ability to interfere with continuity itself. How Corrections work remains unclear. Who can authorize them remains unclear.

How often they've been used remains unclear.

And the largest question is still unanswered:

Why erase a civilization when you could simply defeat it?

CLASSIFIED // DATA UNAVAILABLE

Corrections can replace entire histories.

Most inhabitants accept the new continuity as the only reality they've ever known.

Some memories and artifacts appear capable of surviving the change.

Riva remembers Elyon before the Correction.

Ghost Relics contain evidence from histories that officially never existed.

Noctilion appears able to recognize erased routes and causal information.

How many Corrections have already happened?

How much of recorded history is original?

Why do some people remember?

Why do some objects survive?

Can a Correction be stopped?

Can one be reversed?

And if it can... should it be?

If history can be rewritten, survival may not be enough.

You have to be remembered.

Three new chapters of WARP are landing this week.

Lyra survived Nocturna.

That may not mean she's safe.

The aftermath of THE DEEP CURRENT begins to reveal what her connection to the planet has actually changed — and what might now be changing inside her.

A new world.

A desert civilization preparing for something much larger than a storm.

A predator beneath the sand.

And answers about someone aboard Noctilion who may not be who he claims to be.

KHEVARAH begins today.

This week we launched an entirely new WARP universe.

Aliens are real.

The secret is over.

Now comes the difficult part: figuring out what happens next.

If you missed our special WARP BREAKING NEWS transmission, this is where the story begins.

A quick look at what we're building next.

Part I opens the next phase of Lyra's story.

Part II takes it further.

No date to announce yet.

But it's coming.

The second half of Khevarah is already written and mapped.

What begins in the desert doesn't stay there.

They aren't machines.

They grow.

They react.

They can bond with their pilots.

And their relationship with Nocturna may explain why humanity has never managed to reproduce them.

The next VOSS FILES will take a much closer look at the living ships of Nocturna.

You made it through causal rewriting, erased civilizations and the possible unreliability of reality itself.

That deserves something slightly easier to understand.

No Corrections.

No gods.

No metaphysical crisis.

Just Iona finally getting a night off.

Probably.

Until next transmission,
Ian B. Kay, WARP ORIGINAL