Every century had it's own Temporal
Breakwater Tower. It wasn't quite in physical space, but at some
level it was anchored to it, and it kept to a relative position in
time. Outside of it were a web of Temporal Buoys that reached out,
in decades, 50 years in either direction. In this network was an
exhaustive record of everyone and everything that was supposed to
happen in a 100 year radius. As temporal events happened – there
was another direction to time-space that kept them from happening all
at once – this system settled the changes and prevented any runaway
effects from cascading.
At the 'top' – or really the most
prominently detectable – portion of the tower was a
lighthouse/magnet. Anyone attempting to visit a certain time in the
domain would first be drawn to it – and outside of normal
space-time. What they would find depended on both the era being
visited and the era the craft made it's initial jump.
It was part tourist guide, instruction
manual, decompression chamber – time travel put enormous stress on
entropy related systems – and warning.
Initially, if such a word means much
outside of normal space-time, these were natural whirlpools of
space-time, taking away significant memories and disruptions of
events and replacing them with whatever the swirling miasma of the
local culture had dreamed up. Alien visitors for late 20th
century people, monsters and nightmares for more primitive cultures.
Cross-pollination from different times
and people refined the process to the point where a recognizable
human structure was more noticeable that the natural effect.
Ironically, the shorter the time trip, the more built-up the
structure appeared to be. Visits from farther away in time resulted
in a more natural appearance, and more work needed to shore up the
quantum underpinnings.
This again worked out for the best.
Crude devices were offered the most help and more complex ones had
more control over the workings and tolerances of the tower.
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