I tried to get a map even further zoomed out, but openstreetmap will only give two decimal places in latitude/longitude at that scale, and I need 3 to make things line up sufficnetly well.  You can really see the ordered-ness of the structure at that level, especially with the colors I’m using now, which are dependent on the position in the8-cell repeating unit. When I get distribution down, I’ll change the colors to something based on what type of cell we’re gettin. At this point, the basic categories are “No Humans”, “Utterly Alien Humans”, “Recognizably Alien Humans (who share the same antiquity as our time line, that is), “Cultually recognizable non-technological timelines”, “Bombed out Wastelands”, “Profoundly Illiberal modern societies”,  and “Close parallels”.  The assumptions that lead to this are:

• humanity is lucky to have surived the bottleneck roundabout mitochondrial eve’s time, and doesn’t in anything diverging earlier
• the world’s major religions are apparently not the product of actual divine intervention and so don’t occur in anything diverging earlier than their founding
• The industrial revolution was profoundly unlikely, and doesn’t happen in timelines that don’t resemble ours around the time that it did, for the most part.
• Our timeline was surpassingly lucky to have seen nuclear weapons invented during the last throes of a world war.  If they’re invented any other time, their first use is much more widespread and the reaction to them is not that of a world profoundly tired of war, hence the wastelands.
• The more frequent (which does not mean the same thing as more likely) outcome of the World Wars was a second round of fighting immediately with the soviets, leading to their domination of Europe and a considerably less prosperous and more illiberal America.)

I get almost everything that I wanted.  I get San Francisco itself split, I get the Golden Gate bisected interestingly, I get plenty of productive farmland including the vineyards in Napa.  I only get part of the Presidio, which is not a thing since I was mistaken and that one is actually closed down, but I do get an interesting military presence in the form of Travis Air Force Base.  And, as icing on the cake, I get the thematically significantly-named Antioch, right on the outer border of the cell.

Which means it’s time to finish working out the distrbution, and setting up the neighboring cells.  Being entirely willing to fudge things in the near neighbors, I want a highly divergent but not completely alien city in the rest of San Francisco, in the pink cell to the southwest, and in the yellow one to the west of that will be a small fleet of viking-derived people expecting to find a completely different port, and probably sparcely populated neighbors on the other sides.  But I’ll see how things work out when I do have the distribution in hand.

the_starfish_ambassador

Enjoy!

1) The Presidio to be included, because while I want the small military presence the area provides, I don’t want zero military whatsoever.

2) At least one bridge bisected, preferably but not necessarily the Golden Gate.

3)More than one of the larger cities at least partially present in the cell.

4) At least one largeish city bisected

5) No single municipal government clearly ‘in charge’ based on the geography and demography of the cell, and

6) A decent amount of farmland included
It takes an unfortunately long time to generate each map (10-20 minutes), which means finding something close enough to tweak into what I need is going to take a while.  Next up will be either success and the map, preliminary discussion of the alternate distribution problem’s solutions, or a Little Game Chef update, I think.

I may have been a bit pessimistic about planetary orbits.  Depending on how the alternates end up being distributed, Mercury and the Jovian moons may end up merely losing a noticeable percentage of their mass and gaining a bunch of co-orbital companions.  The larger asteroids are still going to be in trouble, I’m pretty sure.

Another thing to consider is orbit.  I’m basically declaring by fiat that there’ll be nothing up there that, now out of contact with the civilzation that built it, will begin to rain down nuclear death or anything like that, but there may be a fair amount of junk up there, since both the technologically advanced and the post-apocalyptic timelines could be represented in that belt, which may cause a debris cascade and close off orbit for a good long time.  Even if not, there may be things dangerous enough up there that they’re best left undisturbed.

Not much going on in the oceans, I’d say.  Big fish-kills on the border from temperature changes, of course, but most of the parallels will probably have richer stocks than the baseline to start with.

Next up will be more on Location and possibly a decision, so that I can get on with the distribution question.

One of the good things, narrative-wise, about this area is that you get a lot of population and a surprisingly tiny military presence, but probably enough industry to gun up fairly quickly at need.  The presence of a lot of cutting-edge biotech companies will help a lot given the disease environment…
Speaking of disease, next post will discuss the immediate consequences of having the universe split into an infinite mesh of city-and-suburbs-sized polyhedra with divergent historical timelines.