The Great Incident (Spoilers?)

[Jobediah Timberman]

If this turns out to be an accurate theory, then this would be considered Spoilers, but I leave that up to the community.

Even if you don't like the idea of spoiling anything, this theory raises even more questions, which is one of the many reasons I pursued it. While writing and editing is not a new skill to me, creative fiction is, and it's not even something I'm trying to get into. If this ends up being one of the only stories of it's kind that I ever write, so be it. It just had to be done, even if just to lead someone else to a better explanation. 

I'm just trying to make sense with the evidence that we have, using as much Scientific and Spiritual inspiration as possible. People have been digging up stories from around the planet that are even more baffling than all of this. I actually wonder if maybe the Truth really is stranger than Fiction. There are ancient texts and archaic symbols that contain Science that is new to us. If only we will humble ourselves to the possibility that we don't know what we don't know. If anything, mythical or not, it makes for good inspiration, and perhaps the Imagination itself is the true Agartha.

Please keep your arms and legs inside the Translocator at all times, and enjoy the ride.

Spoiler

So much of our ancient history still lies to be uncovered, but over time, the Temporal Storms and Drifter Invasion have been decreasing their intensity, and we have had opportunity to make progress in excavating the Ruins of our past. 

It wasn't until the first Storms began to fade that our greatest Explorers, Scientists, and Engineers have been able to research into the origin of the bizarre and confusing creature known as the "Drifter". What in the World of Worlds could have happened? What could have triggered the Translocators to manifest such terrible anomalies throughout all of reality itself? 

Because one thing we do know for certain: the bewildering hyper-dimensional Science of these ancient contraptions must have been involved somehow. Phenomenon this incomprehensible was most likely connected to some kind of accident regarding these antique technologies. Or potentially some kind of malicious sabotage, but what foolish criminal would have the capacity to conceive of this result? And for what intention or purpose? 

While there are several avenues of hypothesizing, each with reasonable probability, those with a Scientific Mind have developed a fairly solid possibility which may be the key to unlocking this mystery. The theoretical course of events is as follows:

There are stories of a great experimenter long ago. Most called him just an Inventor, some a benevolent Lunatic, others a Mad Scientist, and was lauded as ingenious as often as he was dismissed as genuinely insane. No one really knows what happened to him ever since the Great Incident, as life became too maddening for everyone for so long. And while the intensity and frequency of the Storms have waned, relatively speaking, solving the riddle of it all was the least of our worries. Some didn't even want to know the answer. 

After all, curiosity is dangerous, as many late cats have learned. The age-old phrase hardly needs quoted, as it is something most spelunking Seraphs live by just as often as they die by it. The Unknown and The Uncharted are far too attractive to a complicated and over-active mind. To describe something as "Unseen" is a temporary status in their eyes, and one that begs to be changed. For them, the big questions need to be answered regardless of cost. 

And what question could be more confounding than the Translocators? Ever since the Inventor re-assembled the first machine we managed to uncover, and became the first sentient being crazy enough to travel through it, he was enamored with the concept of Translocation, especially the breathtaking split-second that one experiences during the Warp. That moment of blissful freedom outside the confines of Space and Time was almost "calling" to him. But the "message" may have been lost in translation, and his blind excitement may have deafened his interpretation. 

One morning, while wandering around his imagination in the bathtub, he stumbled upon a potential method of extending one's stay in that mysterious "realm" beyond solid matter. He decided to forego the standard celebratory ritual of shouting "Eureka" sprinting half-naked through the streets, and kept his plans to himself. Instead, he loaded up on tools, and an extra-large backpack, and set out through a Translocator. On the other side of the Warp, he disabled the destination, then disassembled it, and brought it back to it's source.

With a bit of crafty construction, he combined parts from both Translocators into one singular machine, allowing both machines' beams to cross the same coordinate of the Creation Lattice. With some re-calibration he believed could reverse the rotation so that the machines worked in parallel. The result is that the object and/or living being caught in-between to be teleported into it's own location, in an endless feedback loop. 

Dramatization - Do not try this at home:

Spoiler

As anyone with some amount of common sense would do, assuming that this was a sensible endeavor in the first place, he started by testing it with several inanimate objects, followed by some simple plant life, and then some small insects. He thought nothing of the result, because from his point of view, there didn't seem to be any. 

But Time was moving much differently for him, due to all his Adrenaline-charged excitement. From his perspective, he waited too long as it is: he was standing before be the ultimate "Treasure Chest". It felt as if he finally found what he had spent all his years searching for, and he was far too eager to wait a millisecond more. 

After steadying his nerves, he made up his mind one last time: to blindly go where no one had gone before. Standing in the base of the World's first self-Translocator, their dual Beam Generators synchronized to engage the Warp at precisely the same instant. 

The reaction would have been quite a sight to behold, but the beholder may not have survived. Yet upon escaping from the Material world just before the blast, the Inventor "lived", and his experiment unfortunately worked, from a certain point of view.

During the next few moments, he was lost for years. Epochs and eons flashed before him. He was, and still is, unbound from the confines of Time and Space. He felt as if he was motionless, and yet he was free-falling through the void, as if towards an ever-changing gravity source, his velocity accelerating upward to infinity. Without the passage of Time, his bodily processes were paused, as far as nourishment was required. Yet the endless movement put strain on his body, reducing him in size, and becoming covered in an elderly gray fur. 

Meanwhile, during this split-second eternity, the machines were still spinning, continuously weaving threads of Time and strings of Space together upon itself. Out beyond the limits of linearity, it was as though he began leaving the portal before he entered while simultaneously entering before he departed. Logic itself had been left behind in what was now an alternate dimension. 

The machines were not quite built for this, and the excessive activity caused them to amplify their energies into each other exponentially. As their destination coordinate mechanisms broke down, their outputs were misdirected thousands of times a second. The self-resonating feedback loop seemed to emanate a massive shockwave of energy outward in all directions to all the other Translocators, but in essence, it happened everywhere, all at once. 

The infinite loop resulted in the Inventor accelerating to infinite speed. Pushed outside the limits of physics itself, he was now located in infinite places. His physical being was split into endless duplicates of itself, and propelled "him" into becoming "them", one person in countless locations in Time and Space. A seemingly infinite number of "Dimensional Rifts" were opened every-where and every-when, and multitudes of "them" were sent Drifting out of Higher Dimensions and into our World. Various regions of physical Space, in numerous points in Time, began descending in-and-out of Temporal Distortion, even disrupting the very Magnetism which allows the building Blocks of Matter to hold onto itself. Some Translocators were affected more than others, and simply exploded, while others were left disabled with crucial pieces missing. 

Regions where Temporality was weaker became the targets of the self-Translocator's output, causing the apparent horde of Dimensional-Rifters to leak out of the higher plane where he still resides. In many cases, after phasing through these "portals" back into the third dimension, the physicality of these "Drifters" became corrupted, mixed with various non-living objects, which merged with his extra-dimensional "body". During the most extreme Temporal Storms, these duplicates are still vibrating at such a high frequency, they rapidly flicker in-and-out of the physical plane of reality. 

Many experienced a strange "Rot" or "Rust" seeming to spread from these unstable locations. And have found that spending too much time in these Temporally negative regions will cause beings in the physical world to begin phasing into this other dimension, which is widely known as the "Rust World". 

As far as many were concerned, this Rust was the cause of these conditions, rather than the side effect of something larger. The Rust was also assumed to be the culprit in mutating a previously advanced species into Drifters. But this could not explain the simultaneous emergence of so many Drifters in so many places at once, over all this time, without any trace of Drifter young-lings. More importantly, there are no Drifters that appear to be remotely effeminate, let alone motherly. 

And what's more, upon "killing" these creatures, they vanish in a cloud of dust, leaving behind no trace of a physical form. Most confounding is that along with dropping fibers of string, and theories struggle to explain why, but occasionally they have been found carrying one of the Temporal Gears, a fundamental component of the Translocator devices. And to top it off, despite how many Drifters have been killed, and the seemingly never-ending supply of them, no one has ever tasted Drifter meat. 

It's no wonder that nothing about "them" made logical sense to us until we could understand him. It seemed like the Incident should have been temporary, but this literally defies the definition of Temporal, and so the phenomenon continues, long afterward. He no longer knows where he is, or who he was, and what's worse, his perception is no longer singular. At every moment he perceives all of his parallel existences as a kind of "hive-mind", resulting in massive confusion. He always appears to be hostile, which makes sense for those with Corrupted physicality. But as for Surface Drifters, his aggression might simply be the possibility that he is always being "attacked" by some-thing, some-where, some-when. His behavior was completely incomprehensible to us, because he actually wants us to "kill" these instances of him, and send another fragment of his essence back into unification. 

This is not at all to say that the Drifters are any less of a threat, far from it. But there is a vast difference between a threat and an enemy. We couldn't understand their behavior, and with a total lack of self-preservation instincts, it appeared they were operating under some kind of manipulation or mind-control, or simply possessed some kind of mental corruption on the level of lunatic or psychopathic. 

If anything, this knowledge allows those with heavy conscience, who feel it is wrong to "kill" these so-called "beasts", to ignore their innate sympathy, and protect each other from these dangerous anomalies at all costs. Technically we're not actually killing hundreds of hostile creatures, we're doing him a favor. 

And so, through our discoveries, we have united more than ever in our quest to defend ourselves, and as the Temporal Storms gradually lessen, we keep up our hopes that some day this supernatural technological terror will finally end. 

As for what the Inventor may have experienced, it may have been as blissful as he hoped. When he escaped from the confines of the 4th Dimension of Time, he essentially went immediately to extreme old age the moment he entered his contraption. And in the new form of the Drifter, his physical being having been fragmented Temporally into countless copies, he seems to be less conscious than simpler Animals, and maybe only as sentient as an Amoeba. 

Maybe the best evidence is that a large percentage of people feel a strange fondness for the Surface Drifters, despite being such a threat to our lives, sometimes even describing them as "cute". What's more, those who have managed to observe them for extended periods have found they do seem to have very, very limited language capacity, but it is a capacity nonetheless, which is what truly humanizes them to just about anyone. After all, any ferocious beast looks cute in a cage, but if they can tell us their thoughts, they are no longer so alien to us. 

Many have tried to de-crypt the possible word or words underneath the groaning of the Drifters. Most assume it's as incomprehensible as it sounds, which is all one expects from their level of intelligence. But those who have faith that he's not entirely a beast still cling to this word that the Drifters seem to repeatedly moan. If the most widely accepted translation is true, the next step is figuring out what category of thing this even is that they are searching for, or running from. Then we can identify who, or what, or where, is this... "Maven".