User blog:Seieireppa/God Eater: The Butterfly Effect, chapter 3: Renewal Project

The Renewal Project was what I came up with. If Operation Looking Glass was a plan to peer back into the past, the Renewal Project let us do the exact opposite. Instead of gleaning information from the past, the Renewal Project let us do the exact opposite—we could send information from the present TO the past. In essence, it is a refined, yet incomplete, form of time travel. However, in our folly and our desire for more, we attempted to send not just information to the past, but also people. Human beings. And the results were, well… less than favorable.

Every time we attempted to send someone back, the results were invariably the same:  the subject would arrive at their intended destination… but their body was irreversibly damaged, converted entirely to a jelly-like substance.

“Human is dead. Mismatch.”

This was the conclusion we arrived at, again and again. Those words can be found at the end of every report from the Renewal Project’s early days, and as a result the project was closed indefinitely… until we came upon the enigmatic timeline where Isaac Feldman does not exist, and where the creeping darkness of time shrouds all after early 2183.

I realized that we alone, in this time, would not be able to uncover the mystery of this strange darkness… so, in secret, I sent a certain message into the past to make a certain man aware of our situation.

This man was none other than Willard Knox himself. I sought to plant a seed in his mind to come to our aid when the time was right—and now that time has come. With the knowledge of our predicament, I sought to mobilize Willard to travel throughout time once again and aid us in uncovering the truth behind this particular timeline.

But how would he accomplish this, you ask? And how would he overcome the Renewal Project’s huge barrier?

The answer, as it would so happen, lay in files retrieved from some old ruins hundreds of years ago, files dated to the early 22nd century that we only recently touched upon. Through examining them, we discovered writings of a certain man known as Johan from the year 2117. In these writings, he documented research and development of a certain… scientific principle, if you will, pertaining to the effects on the fabric of space and time of highly compressed and spun Oracle cells. This principle, wrote Johan, if properly applied, could allow for the sending of matter to and retrieval of matter from any point across space and time.

Of course, one key problem persisted—the individuals known as God Eaters only existed in records of the distant past. In this centuries-long era of peace, humanity had no need for such super-soldiers to protect against some sinister threat. It was for this reason that I sought to plant the seeds of this technique’s employment in the mind of Mr. Knox in the distant past, so that he might be able to utilize our Renewal Project data to travel through time and come to our aid. With our research and technology and his abilities as a God Eater, we should be able to thoroughly comb the timelines ourselves in order to find out the root cause of this encroaching darkness.

Now, here’s where I must delve into the specifics of how the Renewal Project works, and how it is used to send information back in time. Essentially, all information, and all that is at all, can be seen to be encoded as “bits,” with certain things having a larger “file size” than others. The smaller the file size, the easier it is to send. The process itself involves essentially “transposing” the data from one time to another, removing it from this time and reconstructing it in another. Our errors initially—the mismatches—were a result of our own lack of understanding as to the particulars of this mechanism; the gelatinized subjects were a result of data corruption in transfer. However, once I discovered the truth, I figured out that the same principles could be used to transpose mere data into the past to achieve similar results. By planting a seed in the past, one could stir others to action.

And so this is what I did with our friend Willard Knox. Using the Renewal Project, I implanted two pieces of information in his mind in the past. One of these was the knowledge of the plight facing us in the future he created, and the other was the method through which to utilize the aforementioned technique of timespace displacement. Knowing what he would now know, surely he would come to our aid. Surely…

Anyway… I should be cutting this short. Preparations to be made and all. With any luck, Willard Knox should be arriving soon. I’ve got to get ready…

Truth be told… I had been planning to shack up in Glasgow at first. All I wanted was to settle down and live a normal life…

…well, as normal a life as a God Eater could, at least.

But it would seem fate—and time—have got something else in store for me.

Anyway, keeping a long story short, turns out civilization had flourished just fine in the centuries that had followed after our little spat with Feldman. And now, folks in that future had discovered something off about one of the past timelines… said they’d explain everything once I got there.

But this technique… isn’t it…

Haven’t I seen it somewhere before?

That girl… she used something like it, didn’t she?

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