Crimes Against History (short story)

Crimes Against History: The "Definitive" Faction Timeline was a 2001 digital Faction Paradox short story written by Lawrence Miles and released as part of The Spiral Politic Database.
The story is told from the perspective of the 51st year of the War in Heaven, the setting of The Faction Paradox Protocols. Notably, the story features more explicit ties to Doctor Who than other Faction Paradox releases, with Miles using his licenses to Marc Platt's Great Houses, Robert Holmes's Sontarans, and Neil Penswick's Yssgaroth.
== Publisher's summary ==
=== First edition ===
What follows is a chronology of Faction Paradox, at least as far as chronology can be applied. Much of the background material comes from the Faction-related books already published, and the events of The Faction Paradox Protocols - the "present" - aren't dealt with here. For anyone listening to the Protocols, none of this information is vitally important: however, some of it may turn out to be significant, which is a different thing altogether.
The dates given are relative to the present as it's perceived by Faction Paradox, and certainly don't relate to the early twenty-first century.
=== Second edition ===
What follows is a chronology of Faction Paradox, at least as far as chronology can be applied. Further details (on most of the subjects covered here) can be found in The Book of the War, while the events of The Faction Paradox Protocols - the "present" - aren't dealt with in this timeline.
The dates given are relative to the present as it's perceived by Faction Paradox, and certainly don't relate to the early twenty-first century.
== Plot ==
=== Ancient History ===
Around 10 million years before the start of the War in Heaven, the first conscious life evolves. Due to its status as the "first self-aware tenants of the continuum", it is more a force of nature or of history than it was "alien" or a species.
They invent stellar technology and complex timeships which give them control of the temporal sciences. This gives their homeworld an unusual relationship with the rest of history, and they begin to regard themselves as neutral arbiters of causality, observing the "lesser species" evolving in their wake.
However, in exchange, they become sterile: both natural childbirth and natural death become passé in their culture. Their society is instead organised into aristocratic bloodlines called Houses, which can occasionally create new members through biological engineering.
The Homeworld is led by a High Council of representatives from the five ruling Houses, overseen by the Presidency, with the purpose of maintaining the status quo. After early experiments punch large holes in the continuum and allowed in monstrous "anti-structures" called Yssgaroth, which are then destroyed in a monumental struggle, a sixth House attaches itself to the primary five as a "security advisor". This is the last change to House political structure for millions of years, and the Yssgaroth incident is remembered as proof that progress is to be avoided.
=== Living Memory ===
1152 years before the War, the Houses Lungbarrow and Dvora produce new offspring on-schedule, but impurities in the birthing system mean the newborns are born with psychological imperfections. Lungbarrow's generation include at least one with signs of insanity, as well as the greatest dissident the House ever produced. Due to the Houses' overconfidence in their own security and superiority, the imperfections in the birthing process are never corrected.
870 years before the War, one of these children of House Dvora, later called the Imperator, becomes Lord President of the High Council. He is initially quiet with his ambitions, only secretly creating the Order of the Weal as a counter-intelligence service; however, when that same Order reveals him as the primary threat to the Homeworld's security, he begins an open revolt against the protocols of the Great Houses, waging a crusade against the universe to build himself a continuum-spanning empire. His army of lesser species lays waste to over a dozen other worlds over the next four years as the ruling Houses remain paralysed by shock and inertia. When they finally act, they return him to the Homeworld and executed him in an instant.
While the Imperator has been defeated, he has brought the Houses to the attention of the lesser species for the first time, and his execution reminds the Homeworlders of their biological reality. Not long after, the High Council reopens the Houses' ancient prison planet and begins secretly imprisoning select individuals from the outside universe. Over the following 170 years, the cracks grow as more and more renegades run away with timeships, and relics of the Houses's biological pre-time-travel era reemerge.
700 years before the War, an interventionist protest movement begins among the populace for the first time, and they are apparently vindicated when the ruling Houses intervene to prevent the Sontarans – a stunted and aggressive homunculus species of hobgoblins – from acquiring time travel technology. The Order of the Weal assesses the interventionists to be the greatest threat to the Homeworld, but the movement grows in size to the point that it can't be contained.
300 years later, covert interventionists have gained so much power that the Council is forced to approve of more and more interference in the outside universe, even the genocide of lesser species, just to avoid a political schism.
At this time, one of the "broken" offspring of House Lungbarrow publicly questions the protocols and begins advocating a more dynamic model of history that would embrace some principles of lesser species, such as change as a good thing. This far exceeded the suggestions of the interventionists, and the Houses reject the rebel, who forms the first new bloodline in millions of years: House Paradox, named to needle the Houses who abhor paradox. The rebel takes the name of Grandfather Paradox, after the traditional title for a House founder.
While the High Council cannot punish the creation of a new House, when he is caught experimenting with non-linear time systems, he is called before the President. He appears dressed in ceremonial armour, a half-hominid half-bestial skeleton from a paradoxical timeline where the Houses lost the Yssgaroth War. Shocked, the Council proves itself impotent and the Grandfather walks free.
The next year, the President of the High Council is assassinated in his 400th year in office. The assassin, a deranged renegade, is quickly identified and believed dead, but the Council delays the process of electing a new President in the midst of cultural crisis.
The 406th President is eventually chosen after five years, but he quickly proves unstable. Based on his temporal research, he claims that the Homeworld is threatened by formless horrors from the early universe and that the coming war will dwarf the Yssgaroth conflict in scale. He creates ambitious plans for a series of colony-worlds, which the ruling Houses disregard, and he covertly allows House Paradox to purchase eleven days of localised history in the first year of his term. Despite the Council's best attempts to spread propaganda emphasising the President's sanity, he commits suicide three years into his term, and his researches are outlawed.
Although the High Council intends to drag out the replacement process, a candidate puts himself forward and takes office through a loophole in the electoral system. Unfortunately for the Houses' dignity, the 407th Presidency lasts only a few days: his inauguration coincided with an invasion attempt by the Sontarans, who had been considered a minor threat but managed to successfully penetrate the Homeworld's separate time-frame and set foot on the planet. The Sontaran fleet is easily dispatched, but it exposes the Homeworld's vulnerability; worse still, some prominent members of the Houses flee to the rarely-acknowledged wilderness outside the Capital, with large psychological effects.
The result of these events is the much-feared schism: a rival Council of the Great Houses breaks away from the Homeworld and establishes itself in normal-time on the medium-technology world Dronid. The attempt at creating a New Homeworld quickly falters, but fragments of the Houses' time technology are scattered around the planet. In the subsequent crack-down by the ruling Houses, Grandfather Paradox is tried and imprisoned for life in the prison-world.
The Order of the Weal investigates the 406th President's warnings of a future War in Heaven and concludes that he was correct. However, preparing for the future has left them neglectful of the Homeworld's current affairs, and the Order disintegrates.
=== Modern Time ===
Around 150 years before the War, an influx of influence from the outside universe leads to the short-lived popularity of robots on the Homeworld, inspiring thoughts that timeships could be given hominid exterior form. Whereas previously generations of timeship were identified by number, with the most recent being Type 88s, a technological "revolution" began with experimental grafts of new systems onto timeships' internal architectures, leading to many nonstandard types like Type 104, Type 128b, Type 161.55, Type n+x, and Type pi-R-760. Upon the debut of the Type 1056771z, the High Council steps in and reclassifies them all as 89-form, regardless of their cross-bred elements.
The 411th President is elected in a surprise close victory which many believe to be rigged by the interventionists. Unusually, she has extensive experience in the outside universe, better equipping the Homeworld for new threats.
Mere months into her term, however, a temporal crisis on 18th century Earth releases ancient forces. This would ordinarily have posed no problem for the Houses to correct, but this incident sends shockwaves to the Homeworld itself, triggering a nervous spasm in the Lady President. In her brief insanity, she sees visions like the 406th President's and releases several hundred inmates of the prison planet.
Grandfather Paradox, freed, promptly slices off his arm with a rusty knife, removing his criminal tattoo and last link to the Homeworld. He refounds his cult as Faction Paradox, borrowing aesthetically from the voodoo cults developing in the West Indies during the late 1700s (unless the voodoo cults instead borrowed from the Faction). He then removes all personal traces of himself from the continuum, leaving no remnants other than his followers and their relics.
The next year, the Grandfather's birth house, Lungbarrow, collapses following the long-term insanity of its members. Its survivors plan to build themselves a new House, but they are generally believed to have died out or joined Faction Paradox.
As the House had fallen into obscurity, this change is overshadowed by its last legacy: the first natural childbirth on the Homeworld in 10 million years, born to an alien who mated with a member of the Homeworld's servitor-classes. This comes as an unpleasant surprise for the ruling Houses, but some wonder whether alien biomass was not a smart addition to the birthing-process.
Four years later, 146 years before the War, another of the lesser species attempted to invade the Homeworld: a machine-species which had been the subject of an earlier interventionist genocide attempt. The Lady President ends the invasion, but it is much harder to repel than the Sontarans had been.
138 years before the War, the coming conflict war becomes apparent: agents in the field began encountering beleaguered House agents from the future, a sign that the protocols of causality were breaking down. The Lady President begins research into new weaponised timeships using "cross-fertilization", and 125 years before the War, the first generation of natural births on the Homeworld arrive.
Many paranoid House members are driven to Faction Paradox, which also begins building its influence, recruiting members from both Great Houses and lesser species without distinction. They begin building themselves a homeworld.
Another of the Lady President's preparations is crypto-forming eight "cloneworlds" of the Homeworld as decoys and bolt-holes against the enemy. Her final orders forbid any contact between the cloneworlds and the Homeworld so the duplicates could be kept "sterile" in case back-up copies became necessary, suggesting that the other Homeworlds' inhabitants don't know their worlds to be forgeries.
Following the creation of these cloneworlds, 95 years before the War, accounts differ regarding the Lady President's fate. On one Homeworld, she remains in office through the beginning of the War. However, on another Homeworld, she appesar to vanish. Her replacement comes from the camp that regarded War as an impossibility, trusting the interventionists to neutralise any enemy before it could become a threat.
Twenty years later on this Homeworld, 76 years before the War, one of the original renegades from the broken generation returns to the Homeworld despite being wanted for many crimes. He presents solid evidence of the enemy to a Closed Session of the ruling Houses. While this convinces many House elites, the Presidency itself becomes more obstructionist than ever, culminating in its attempt, 40 years later, to visit the enemy's "home" and prove its nonexistence once and for all. The project fails: the only trace of the expedition is its leader's remains, returned with the First Message from the Enemy. Panicked, the elite turn to the renegade for guidance and, ultimately, leadership.
Approximately 20 years before the War, the interventionists choose to escape the coming conflict and possible eradication by removing themselves from history on their own terms, thus becoming the Celestis.
Around the same time, the Presidency initiates a research project for creating an experimental organic-timeship hybrid. The experiment fails: the resultant 101-form cannot be controlled, and its fate is concealed by the ruling Houses. Instead, the Presidency commissions the 90-forms, a new generation of timeships designed specifically for battle.
Over the final fifty years before the start of the War, Faction Paradox exerted more and more influence on Dronid, which, scattered with relics of the Great Houses, is a natural fit for Faction infiltration. Its powerbase on the planet takes the form of a crime organisation rather than a cult, but over time this devolves into a purely political organisation seeking power for its own sake. 11 years before the start of the War, a rival syndicate arrives on Dronid: the InCorporate, run by unseen leaders but managed on the ground by Gabrielideans. This sparks a decade-long gang war.
Meanwhile, on their homeworld, Faction leadership begins to think of themselves as untouchable. Godfather Morlock creates a biodata virus that can turn a victim into a Faction agent from birth, and the Faction's agents throughout the intertemporal underworld freely peddle time technology to the lesser species. However, two years after InCorporate's arrival, the increasingly-paranoid Great Houses crack down and wipe out the Faction's homeworld. The few survivors settle in the Eleven-Day Empire, slowly rebuilding their influence, but now through ceremony and cultural infiltration rather than weaponry. Cults dedicated to the Grandfather even spring up among the bored newbloods of the Homeworlds.
On one Homeworld, the former-renegade-cum-adviser officially becomes President six years before the War, although he refuses to take the traditional vestments of office, instead choosing the name "War King". He replaces the old ceremonial guard with a refurbished House Military and begins organising treaties and agreements with time-aware lesser species, particularly the posthuman sects; however, for all his proactivity, he still refuses to allow contact between the Nine Homeworlds. On another Homeworld, the Lady President takes the title "War Queen" just one year before the War.
On Dronid, the InCorporate reached complete dominance over the Faction, which has been hindered by a series of half-insane leaders. However, the Homeworlds takes notice: the InCorporate was the enemy's intelligence-gathering arm, perhaps even the enemy's first physical manifestation. An agent of the Houses is planted among the Faction on Dronid, where he becomes their local leader. For the next year, a microcosm of the future cosmic gang-war is fought on the planet.
=== Current Affairs ===
In the last months before the War, the first organic-timeship hybrid becomes manifest: the 102-form "Compassion", born through "cross-breeding" with a an old, obsolete, but unusually well-travelled model, with the involvement of other technology from the Faction and the Houses' own future. Some elements among the Houses, including the Lady President on her Homeworld, attempt to capture Compassion for study and force-breeding with other timeships, but Compassion and her pilot refuse to allow this. The War King, on the other hand, pursues negotiation and brokers a deal with the 102-form.
However, as the 103-form breeding programme was just beginning, events on Dronid come to a head. The proxy war between the enemy's Gabrielideans and the Houses' Faction agents began its next stage when the enemy abruptly seized the planet. For the first time since the Yssgaroth War, members of the Great Houses have to fight physically against an opponent. The conflict quickly spills over to other planets, including an enemy attack on the Homeworld itself. The Thousand-Year Battles takes place in these first years, and many worlds become irrevocably scarred.
The Celestis, sitting outside of time, are divided over whether to support the Houses or the enemy. Some Celestis technology, like conceptual weaponry, leaks to the enemy, while other Celestis provide intelligence to the Homeworld. Without a stake in the conflict, they regard the unfolding War as a mere distraction.
Faction Paradox, believing the Great Houses to be too busy to pay them any attention, reestablishes its links with hominid cultures through history. On Dronid, a few survivors of the criminal syndicates begin to rebuild civilisation; on Ordifica, a 26th century human colony where Mother Mathara had taken control of the local media, the Faction develops its first human shock troops, the Remote. But after the failure of a Remote attack on Simia-KK98, which the Houses quickly identify with the Faction, the various experimental Remote projects are given a greater degree of autonomy by the Eleven-Day Empire.
The gamble doesn't pay off: the Houses are desperate, not distracted, and in the sixth year of the War, the fanatical Second Wave of the House Military begins its genocidal campaign against Faction Paradox. Ordifica is entirely eradicated, although the Faction removes its agents just beforehand, with many Remote decamping to a new settlement called Anathema.
The Faction's misfortune at the hands of the Second Wave inspires dissent among the ranks, including the formation of a short-lived breakaway sect. Mother Mathara, convinced that abandoning the Remote was a waste of a good resource, visits Anathema in the eighth year of the War and brings a promising member of the Remote to the Eleven-Day Empire, where he becomes Father Kreiner. The greatest indignity comes in the War's 14th year, when the Empire is breached and heavily damaged by a hostile group.
By that time, the War has begun to settle into its "entrenchment" phase: in the 15th year the Homeworld continues to refine its military breeding with the "bio-diverse" Fourth Wave, and the poorly-planned Thousand-Year Battles are left long in the past. Faction Paradox begins its long, slow rebuilding process from the Eleven-Day Empire.
In the 30th year of the War, the Faction begins to step up the training of the Remote. Remote culture has begun to spread on its own: the 19th century warrior tribes have evolved into the influential North Los Angeles Cabal, and Father Kreiner leads a mobile Remote group on a stolen warship. However, the Faction elders choose to cut all ties with the Remote and turn instead towards bio-research. By the 40th year of the War, Father Kreiner's timestream has desynchronised from the Eleven-Day Empire's, and he experiences 1000 years among the Remote without any contact with the Faction.
45 years into the War, the Faction sends its six large-scale warships to destroy the planets where Faction agents had carelessly left behind clues that the ruling Houses might notice.
Justine McManus is recruited into the Faction as a side-effect of a Remote experiment on 19th century Earth, and she is sent to Dronid to apprentice under Cousin Sanjira as a Little Sister. By then Dronid has been forgotten by both sides of the War, and the Faction Mission's only opposition is the criminal Corporation, no longer controlled by the enemy.
In Justine's second year at the Mission, Sanjira obtains a relic: the corpse of a hero of the Great Houses, likely planted in the ruins some time after the first battle of the War. Not realising he had the body of the last member of House Lungbarrow and a bloodline-relative of the Grandfather, whose biodata held invaluable secrets, Sanjira performs the usual ritual of dispatching the body into the nexus of causality. Upon realising his error, he commits suicide.
Justine is brought to the Eleven-Day Empire in recognition of her promise, and, the next year, she is sent to the late 21st century to retrieve the Relic. While she fails, she meets an agent of the Great Houses from the future, several hundred years into the War, when the Houses were all but defeated. This agent recognises the Faction, indicating their survival into that time period. The elders, pleased, initiated 18-year-old Justine as a Cousin alongside her close confidant, Eliza.
The Book of the War is published in the 50th year of the War. Cousin Justine is 22 years old and serving in the Eleven-Day Empire under Godfather Morlock, who has sent Mother Mathara in a Faction warship to the planet Dust, where she is to release his biodata virus into the formative new ecosystem there. However, Mathara finds Father Kreiner and a Homeworld agent from the distant past, who becomes infected by the virus instead. Mathara concludes that the agent could be used by the Faction as a Trojan Horse into the history of the Homeworld.
=== Tomorrow's News ===
As the war continues, 103-forms become common and research begin into a new generation of timeship. Altering regeneration cycles of members of the Great Houses to increase their bodies' military potential, a practice which began in the Second Wave, becomes commonplace. The first stage of biological armour resembled that worn by the Faction, but the final stages transform the soldiers into inorganic war machines.
Both the War King and War Queen establish disguised military garrisons on worlds throughout the Spiral Politic, and the Houses' soldiers replace individuals on those worlds, living out their lives until combat troops are needed. At some stage, the War Queen's time as President came to an end, but her fate is unclear.
Ultimately, the enemy gains enough ground to destroy the Homeworld itself. By that point, eight "substitute" Homeworlds are fully populated by the High Council's agents, with more cloneworlds in the process of being cryptoformed; communication opens between these worlds, with Houses and caretaker-Houses forming a united front on the brink of extinction.
In the future, power-hungry Mother Mathara and a surviving "Eleven-Day Parliament" lead a coterie of the Faction which has evolved far from its original intent, mirroring the changes to the Homeworld's High Council. Rather than using death- and paradox-imagery as a black joke against the Homeworld, her followers are sincerely bloodthirsty and embody cadaverous forms.
Realising that the biodata virus overcame its victim around the start of the War, Mathara and her fleet exploit the "crack" in causality to travel back in time and attack the War Queen's Homeworld before the War began. They summon the 406th President's ancient horrors, which the High Council mistook for the Enemy, and in the chaos Mathara's legions overrun the Capitol and crown a "new (ersatz) Grandfather". However, the infected agent had not been entirely corrupted by the biodata virus, and he destroys the planet.
Mathara's rewriting of history may itself have been unwritten, and the true final outcome of the War remains uncertain, if such a thing even existed in a four-dimensional war.
== Characters ==
* Lady President / The War Queen
* The War King
* Grandfather Paradox
* The Imperator
* Compassion
* The 406th President
* The 412th President
* Mother Mathara
* Cousin Justine
* Father Kreiner
* Godfather Morlock
== Worldbuilding ==
to be added
== Notes ==
* After the initial release of Crimes Against History on 11 November 2001, a second edition was released as part of the general update to The Spiral Politic Database on 14 September 2002. Besides the addition of new material reflecting the continuity established in The Book of the War, which was released three days later, changes to the existing text were largely stylistic,On the Fringes of War: Crimes Against History mirroring the changes to Dead Romance between its Virgin Books and Mad Norwegian Press editions.
* The biggest change between the two editions regarded the ruler of the Homeworld during the first half-century of the War. While the first edition said it was the Lady President – War Queen Romana III from The Shadows of Avalon – the second edition instead featured the War King. This reflected The Book of the Wars deviations from the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures' depiction of the War; at the same time, the wording of the second edition made it clear that the events of the first edition still occurred on another of the Nine Homeworlds. This led to the only contradiction between Crimes Against History and The Book of the War: whereas The Book asserted that the Nine Homeworlds were created by House Lineacrux in the last decade before the War, Crimes attributed them to the War Queen a century prior. Notably, one possible interpretation of the second edition is that the "rumours" that the War Queen moved to a cloneworld disguised as the original without her knowledge are lies spread by the War King to bolster his own power by propagating the idea that his Homeworld is somehow secretly the original despite the manifest falsehood of that claim.
* Like other The Spiral Politic Database entries that were incorporated into The Book of the War, a heavily abbreviated version of Crimes Against History from "Living Memory" to "Current Affairs" was included in the Book after its fourth appendix.
* A parenthetical, out-of-universe footnote in the final section notes that The Faction Paradox Protocols take place in the timeline before Mathara went back and changed history to subvert the War in The Ancestor Cell.
== Continuity ==
* The High Council intervened to prevent the Sontarans from acquiring time technology (TV: The Two Doctors) before the Sontarans' attempted invasion of their planet. (TV: The Invasion of Time)
* Shortly before the 405th President was assassinated, (TV: The Deadly Assassin) he approved the genocide of a lesser species (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) which later invaded Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element)
* Greyjan the Sane believed the future enemy to be ancestor cells from the dawn of the universe. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)
* Since the first conscious life had a humanoid form, as they imprinted their principles on the universe, they allowed for easier survival of other hominid species. Other explanations of the prevalence of humanoids were given in PROSE: Lucifer Rising and AUDIO: Zagreus.
* The Second Wave led to a decline in Faction Paradox's power, which prompted the Thirteen-Day Republic, Clockwork Ouroboros affair, and the fall of Faction Hollywood. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
* Mother Mathara took Fitz Kreiner from Anathema and trained him as a Father of Faction Paradox; he then spent 1000 years on a Remote warship cut off from the Eleven-Day Empire. (PROSE: Interference)
* Mathara's followers came to use the title "Uncle", (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) which had never been used in the Eleven-Day Empire. (PROSE: The Book of the War, AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire, et al.)
* In the last years before the War, cults dedicated to Grandfather Paradox sprung up among the youths of the Homeworld, like Kellen and Kaufima. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)
* Justine represented the Faction at an auction for the Relic. (PROSE: Alien Bodies) Afterwards, she befriended Eliza. (AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire, et al.)
* The biodata virus developed by Godfather Morlock (PROSE: The Book of the War) was received by the Third Doctor on Dust (PROSE: Interference) and exploited by Mother Mathara to attack Romana III's Gallifrey. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)
== External links ==
* Crimes Against History first edition full text at the Internet Archive
* Crimes Against History second edition full text at the Internet Archive
== Footnotes ==
=== Notes ===
=== Sources ===
Category:2001 short stories
Category:2002 short stories
Category:Web-based short stories