ScottishMongol's Writing Thread

[ScottishMongol]

As a Disclaimer: This scenario is based on a conspiracy theory website called Reformation.org You can look it up if you want, but it's so full of virulent Islamophobia, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and general tinfoil hattery that I wouldn't recommend it - I'm just telling you so you know I'm not bullshitting.

Reformation.org is a conspiracy theory website whose premise is so out-there I decided it was basically an alternate history. Apparently the British Empire has been crypto-Muslim since the 1500s, the Jesuits are an order of Super-Scientists, and the American Civil War was a plot by the Hapsburgs to take over the American South.

Oh, and Margaret Thatcher did 9/11.

So. The world of Reformation. 90% of this is somewhere on the original website.

***

TTL diverged from ours when Queen Elizabeth I converted to Islam, becoming Sultana Elizabeth I. It took a while for Islam to "trickle down" to the rest of England, so there were still a ton of English Protestants by the time the Americas were colonized.

The British and Ottomans ally to split Europe between them, and the European Wars of Religion are a lot messier with Muslims walking all over both Catholics and Protestants. Thousands of Protestants flee to the New World, and the Anglo-Ottoman Axis splits Europe between them - the Ottomans get southern France, Spain, and southern Italy, Britain gets northern France, the Low Countries, and bits of Germany, and the Papal States become a neutral buffer. Austria becomes a British puppet and snaps up all of Latin America after Spain and Portugal are conquered (though later the monarchy moves to Mexico).

The Catholic Church is pretty badly hit by all this, and after spending the proverbial 100 years in the wilderness seizes on the doctrine of Christian Science - basically, God created an orderly and rational Universe and by understanding it, we can seek to understand him. The Jesuits morph into a primarily scholastic order and lead scientific innovation for the next few centuries.

The American Civil War is fought over slavery, but due to British meddling (a British spy shoots Lincoln) the South breaks away entirely, only to be snapped up by the Hapsburgs, who fold it into Mexico proper (South America is ruled as a collection of Hapsburg "Commonwealth Realms"). The British get the Pacific Northwest, California, and Utah (there are still Mormons ITTL). The rump US becomes increasingly fanatically Protestant, committing total ethnic cleansing of Plains Indians, Jews, and "Muslim" African-Americans.

In the first half of the 20th Century, the science begins to build on the existence of trans people, and the Catholic Church allows trans people to join monastic orders (provided they fully transition). The doctrine basically boils down to "a feminine/masculine nature of a person's soul may not be reflected by the flawed body they are given in this fallen world".

There are two wars fought in the early half of the 20th Century by a Catholic German monarchy attempting to reunite the Holy Roman Empire. After the second, Germany is officially split into a handful of states divided into British and Ottoman spheres of influence. Around this time Britain backs communist revolutions in China and Russia, the only two nations who could conceivably oppose the Anglo-Ottoman Axis. Mao and Stalin are just as bad as IOTL.

In the 1960s the Jesuits also discover that carbon emissions are warming the planet and strongly encourage the British, the Ottomans, and Mexico to transition to clean energy. They choose atomic energy, and with Jesuit help the three countries develop nuclear programs and more or less totally convert to atomic power, averting global warming.

The first atomic bomb is detonated by a Jesuit program.

The British, Ottomans, and Hapsburgs develop their own nuclear arsenals, but things quickly spiral out of control as the Americans develop their own arsenal. Argentina (also including Chile ITTL) fights a war of independence against the Hapsburgs under Che Guevara. Following independence, they obtain a nuclear energy program with Jesuit help, as do the Chinese, Russians, and Japanese. Naturally this leads to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the world gets a lot more tense.

Mexico under Prime Minister Fidel Castro (from the state of Cuba) enters a nuclear Cold War with the US under President John F Kennedy. When the British assassinate Kennedy to prevent him from pushing the button, America really goes off the deep end, renaming itself the United States of New Israel. Castro's government is soon after voted out and Castro is replaced by Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Today the Anglo-Ottoman Axis continues to rule the world, with the Hapsburg Commonwealth remaining firmly in the neutral camp - the British Empire federated in the 80s, and now the center of power is shifting away from England towards the former colonies. The Soviets were eventually toppled by a nationalist dictator, Vladimir Putin, but following his assassination by British intelligence and the installation of a more friendly regime, rapprochement with the Axis may be forthcoming.

However, the Chinese are beginning to surpass the Ottomans to become the #2 world power, and with the help of the Argentinians and Japanese are starting to challenge Britain on the world stage. The United States of New Israel remains a crapsacky dictatorship, plagued by (British-backed) terrorism and increasingly repressive.

Most Catholics live in the New World, although there are growing communities in China and Japan - the two countries have larger Christian communities than IOTL, while China has more Muslims. Most of China is still Buddhist, which is more centralized ITTL - the Dalai Lama is Chinese. The British Empire has significant Catholic and Hindu minorities, while there are a lot of Jews still living in Ottoman Palestine, Poland, and Russia.

Antarctica is home to a couple frigid British outposts and some Jesuit research facilities.

Culture was pretty capital-R Romantic for a while, due to British and Ottoman dominance, but lately there's been a cultural shift as the former colonies get more skeptical of the imperialist legacies of the two big empires, and the new-wave culture coming out of those places is starting to look pretty punk. Mexican culture is heavily influenced by African-American culture, and Japanese animation is getting pretty big.

The Catholic Church generally trends towards being more socially liberal. Currently, priests are allowed to marry, women can be priests (but not Bishops), gay men can be priests (with at least one gay Bishop), and trans men are treated the same as cis men in terms of Church promotions - one of the more recent Popes was a trans man.

Technology is more advanced than IOTL, particularly in the field of bioengineering - most meat is now grown in labs for consumption, as are wide variety of organs, and Jesuit doctors can do wonders with transplants. Trans women can now get viable uterus transplants. Genetic engineering is starting to eliminate a number of congenital diseases, and cloned "designer pets" are all the rage. In addition to most of the world being powered by atomic energy, almost everything is electric, automated, and connected via the Internet.

The Jesuits dominate space travel, although they have a joint space program with Japan. China, the British, and Mexico have their own lesser space programs as well, and there are permanent communities in orbit and bases on the Moon and Mars. There are plans in the works for the joint Jesuit-Japanese space program to being asteroid mining soon. The United States of New Israel does not have a space program, because official state doctrine declares that the Earth is flat.

Barack Obama is a Muslim, and is most well-known for serving as President of Kenya, a member of the British Federation.

 

[ScottishMongol]

I actually started this after the original series was released on Netflix, but with the announcement of its renewal I was motivated to finish and release this. See if you can spot all the references!

***

You're holding a ticket, one that will admit you to a timeline where space and time are not as well defined as they should be; where imagination and reality are confused; where the alien is more human than you realize. Prepare to visit...

the Twilight Zone

Time has holes in it. Most of them are discovered by accident - a man driving down a highway may find himself in the past, or a plane can hit a jet stream and find itself flying over the Mesozoic, while a fighter pilot from WW1 may fly into a cloud and appear in the present. There are various ways of intentionally jumping about through time - time machines are quite well-known, and of course there's bargains to be made, should one want to sell their soul...

Of course, going back in time won't do you any good; history is quite stubborn in its arc, and while the lives and fortunes of individuals can sometimes be altered, the timeline inevitably corrects itself, erasing people from history if need be. Trying to warn people of future events ends with accusations of fearmongering or insanity, joining battles attempting to alter them results in your death, and trying to cheat your way into success using time travel backfires in the usual karmic manner. If you're lucky, changing the past just ends up being a sort of self-fulfilling deal.

Some scientists believe that, due to the subtle consensus nature of reality, changing history in meaningful ways is impossible because everyone knows how history went. Altering time would mean altering what people knew about history, and well, only the authoritarian regimes of the post-atomic era would have attempted that, had they been familiar with the concept.

There are no branches of this timeline, but there is a mirror universe opposite it, which we only really know about due to the doppelgangers which keep slipping in and trying to eliminate the local versions of themselves and take their place. The mirror universe seems to be just like ours with the serial numbers filed off, and most doppelgangers are kind of dicks.

Powerful figures walk the Earth; thankfully, most of them seem benevolent. Mr. Death is a quite friendly and comforting fellow to most people, Mr. Fate seems chiefly responsible for the universe's general arc towards justice, Santa of course uplifts the meek, Genies are mercifully not the dickish kind, and of course there's the Association of Guardian Angels, looking out for most of us poor sinners.

Granted, there is the literal Devil running around. While he's been captured more than once over the centuries, he's never stayed locked up for long, and even the Guardian Angels have trouble keeping him from doing what he pleases.

Thankfully(?) Satan spends most of his time trying to ensnare individuals in contracts in exchange for their souls, some of which can escaped from with the right rules-lawyering – still, it's not recommended one lets him try and convince you to do anything, and if you suspect that you may be talking to the man himself, contact the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs immediately.

Hell is real - particularly cruel and selfish people will get consigned to their own karmic eternity of suffering, and the Devil's main role of luring people into Hell has convinced some that he, and not Mr. Fate, is the one responsible for the universe's arc towards justice.

Comfortingly, Heaven is also real, though Angels don't seem to be associated with it. A few people can refuse to move on to the afterlife, but this is a miserable and repetitive existence. Occasionally individuals can be temporarily called up from either Heaven or Hell through various means, and we've learned quite a good deal about history this way. Occasionally ghosts show up to complete some unfinished business, and full resurrection is occasionally possible, but very difficult to do intentionally.

Hitler's Ghost ranks high on the Supernatural Most Wanted List, second only to Old Scratch Himself.

Queen Cleopatra is still alive, having been draining people's youth for the last few thousand years. Currently she lives in South Africa as a model. There aren't many other immortals around, and they're mostly unaware of each other - immortality is kind of crapshoot and usually require a deal with the Devil or some sketchy magic, and besides medical science these days is getting pretty good at keeping people alive and healthy past the century mark.

There's lots of aliens living on Earth, but since most of them look basically like humans it's hard to tell.

The galaxy in fact is pretty crowded with aliens, and while some are bigger than us, some are smaller, and some have extra limbs or heads or eyes, genetically they're all only a step or two away from Homo sapiens, and while some Earthlings are sure that we were the birthplace of humanity, the evidence is increasingly pointing towards Earth being colonized from space, possibly from multiple sources.

Earth's position in the interstellar community is…tense. There were some diplomatic snafus when humanity sent out her first tentative explorations into the cosmos – fingers of various sizes are still pointed a lot during negotiations with the Brobdingnabs and the Liliputians over the messy incidents of our respective first contacts.

Earth was invaded four times, and while the Martians and Venusians fought each other more than they fought us, we still took a beating in the 60s. The Kanamits turned out to be complete monsters but at least once the news broke in the 90s we at least managed to hang on to the tech they gave us. The retaliatory invasion by the Liliputians was little more than a nuisance, and given the way we treated their colony it was hard not to see where they were coming from. The fourth invasion was foiled due to the fact that all their spies wore the same leather jackets. Earth is still rather paranoid, and xenophobia is common, though the witch hunts have largely stopped now that most immigrants have pretty well assimilated.

When humanity made contact with an empire of what were (to us) quite ugly aliens who kept their (again, to us) conventionally attractive minority segregated in ghettos, there was quite a lot of immigration as the "pretties" moved to Earth, happy to be somewhere they could be themselves. There was very little movement the other way, of course.

By the 2020s, humanity could at least hold our own. Aside from a few defensive conflicts, the only interstellar war Earth has taken part in was a retaliatory conflict where the Kanamits were the ones who got served . Even today though the Sol System is tense, as Earthling, Martian, and Venusian ships all try and give each other a wide berth. It took the Martians quite a while to return the (now rather old) human they had put in their zoo.

Colonization of space has not been as advanced as you'd think, though. Turns out all the good planets are taken up, and most colonies are restricted to miserable desert planets or asteroids, and a number of colonies were abandoned during the post-atomic period – although the American autocracy did manage to create a few penal colonies in the asteroid belt.

One of the issues is that up until very recently nearly all the alien races were more advanced psychics than humanity.

All humans have latent psychic abilities. In most cases, this can allow for things like telepathy, hypnosis, and, illusions, but more powerful individuals can move objects with their mind and even make things appear or vanish at will.

Of course, the very interesting applications of psychic powers are outright reality warping. "Mind over matter", "the power of will", even "clap your hands if you believe", all of these phrases have been used to describe psychic reality warpers, but most scientists have settled on the concept of "consensus reality". The universe is influenced on some level by the collective minds of all psychic beings, latent or not. As most humans are only weak psychics, this doesn't change much, but occasionally a person comes along who has such firm belief that they can change the course of events in observably supernatural ways. This kind of psychic power is rare and manifests in a very small number of people, usually children or those with obsessive personalities.

This level of psychic influence usually happens subconsciously and becomes substantially messier if forced. For example, some people can become young again by acting childish, but those wishing to avoid death inevitably spend more time thinking about it more than being young again and so hasten themselves to an early grave. The most powerful can create their own realities, literally escaping into fantasies or ruling over their own little worlds like gods.

The Peaksville Anomaly continues to be secured under a heavy cordon manned jointly by the US Army and the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs.

"Magic" also seems to work, of the type practiced by witch doctors and folk healers and edgy goth teenagers, and the general consensus is that the framework of ritual strengthens psychic belief, but in this scientific age magic has fallen out of practice except in some very backwards places.

Before the 1970s, most psychics were latent, with only a few spontaneously discovering their abilities or manifesting reality warper tendencies. Today though, most humans are practicing psychics, if only on the level of using telepathy, though it does make one much less susceptible to hypnosis and illusions. Practical applications are varied, but some people make themselves look more attractive or more talented, or even making their loved ones more capable through sheer belief in their abilities.

Some scientists now believe that entities such as Mr. Death or Mr. Fate – or even Santa, the Guardian Angels or the Devil – are somehow constructs created by collective belief in those concepts. For some reason, trying to explain them scientifically doesn't make people believe in them any less.

There loads and loads of cursed objects floating around - dolls, masks, clocks, fortune telling machines, pianos, cameras, slot machines, typewriters, cars, televisions, samurai swords, etc - We're pretty sure the Devil keeps making them, and the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs spends most of its resources tracking them down and putting them in warehouses guarded by Top Men.

One of these cursed objects happened to change history when Premier of the Soviet Union Nikita Kruschev was convinced while on a diplomatic trip to America to purchase an antique Model T which, as it happened, made the owner physically unable to lie.

The military coup failed to move quickly enough to prevent him from spilling at least a few big and uncomfortable truths about the USSR's leadership, and in the civil war that followed the true ideologues of Soviet Communism came to power, and things went really poorly for everyone involved after that.

In the 1970s the balloon went up and there was a full nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Russia, China, Europe, and the USSR were reduced to fragmented, radiation-scarred wastelands dotted with clusters of survivor enclaves and warlords, including stranded soldiers from the doomed and desperate invasions of North America and Eastern Europe. A wave of revolutions swept the Third World as previous regimes went under without American or Soviet backing. Nuclear winter set in. The global population was halved.

The regime that eventually stitched itself together from the remnants of the US military turned out to be a nightmarish autocracy of such Orwellian proportions that for a time they even experimented with making all citizens look alike through mandatory plastic surgery. Eventually though, rot set in, and a series of coups combined with stubborn resistance by the populace eventually brought democracy back to North America in the 90s. In the meantime, the global centers of power had moved to south, to Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

Things slowly, steadily, carefully moved towards the better. Humanity had gotten its hands on some especially good alien tech, whether from cooperative castaways stranded on Earth, reverse-engineered from would-be invaders, or traded with some of the friendlier nations. Starvation and disease are unknown, energy is clean and free, and most elements can be synthesized (which incidentally makes previously precious metals worthless now). There are also lots of robots.

Artificial intelligence has been since the 60s, and humanoid robots were in fact developed independently multiple times.

The issue, at least in the early days, was that scientists kept doing dumb shit like making them look identical to humans or not telling them they were robots. While this led to lots of pathos and most early models being scrapped, it didn't lead to any robot uprisings, and after the post-atomic age humans started finally coming around to the idea of artificial people who looked and acted just like us. It did, of course, take longer for governments to come around to the idea that intelligent robots were people and not just human-shaped tools, but the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.

It's now illegal for robots to be programmed with the memories of persons real or deceased, and robots have the right to form their own identities outside of their programming. Today robots are contributing members to society, and are useful in jobs humans can't do such as work in space or in deep-sea conditions. Robot-human marriage is legal in about a third of countries, and they have their own sports leagues.

There is no unified Earth government, but the Earthling nations have clustered pretty close together, and the United Nations does the bulk of diplomacy with alien races, as well as operating the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs. Earth is also surprisingly demilitarized – in addition to not really needing weapons to fight each other, warfare in an interstellar community where most people are psychic takes the form of hypnosis and illusion, mind-reading and infiltration. The intelligence community has levels of paranoia that we could only dream of.

The general arc of the universe bends towards justice. This isn't just a philosophical statement, science has empirically shown that the selfish, greedy, and cruel are four times more likely to get involved in supernatural trouble that leads to karmic comeuppances.

This has rather shored up religion, although there are fewer fundamentalists of any stripe and Buddhism and other religions that incorporate karma are quite prevalent. Of course, there's always a "rational" explanation, with some chalking it up to the influence of Mr. Fate or the Devil, but recently most scientists have come around to the idea that karmic justice is heavily related to the nature of psychic abilities – most people believe, deep down, that there is a sense of justice to the universe, and that assholes will eventually get what's coming to them.

All of this has not, of course, prevented people from being shitty, as people will always find ways to justify bad behavior, but it does mean that eventually exploitative and manipulative people will run out of luck, and their victims usually come to good ends. The downside of this is that if you're having a hard time people will assume that on some level it must be your own fault for something you did, and the only people who truly suffer are the ones who have tried all their life to do good and feel that they've never quite done enough.

At the very least, it's a world where most unfortunate and down-on-their luck people will catch a big break one day if they're honest and good-hearted, and for most people things always seem to work out alright in the end.

...

An interesting timeline, if one can believe it. A world where power comes not from the gun or the bomb, but the mind. Indeed, the mind is the most powerful thing we have in our world too, and if you know how to use yours, you too can imagine a world like - the Twilight Zone.