NOTICE: CERTAIN INFORMATION REGARDING THE BSA SYSTEM IS RESTRICTED TO ARCHIVIST TERMINALS OUTSIDE BASELINE REALITY. FOR INQUIRIES, CONTACT ARCHIVIST SARN.
This is a centralized record, compiled by Archivist Sarn. BSA limspaces are extremely interconnected and similar in composition, therefore separate documentation for each limspace is not strictly necessary. Any additional documents composed will be made available from this page.
LIMSPACE SYSTEM CLASSIFICATION
| Survival Difficulty | 3/5 |
Survival is achievable if you carefully prepare for the regions you traverse. Know the time periods and avoid standing out; bringing items to where they have yet to be invented may elicit witch hunts, mob lynching or similar. It is absolutely crucial to avoid regions whose present year is approaching the current year of Baseline Reality. |
|---|---|---|
| Hazard Level | 3/5 | Blue Static America has the same hazards as the Baseline United States, in addition to unique threats such as timeline resets. |
| Chaos Rating | 3/5 | The BSA is structurally complex compared to Baseline Reality, but due to the absence of thresholds, individual regions are considerably more stable for centuries on end. In the final years of each limspace, however, chaos increases massively as the blue static becomes more prevalent. |
| Basset-Frazier Index | 3/5 | Blue Static America poses a challenge unlike any other. If you want to explore this limspace system, you must be resourceful, adaptive, and knowledgeable in a wide range of US history. You must be careful, and you must always have a plan to escape. |
DESCRIPTION
fig 1.0 A man within the Arizona BSA limspace1
Blue Static America (BSA) is a limspace system containing an alternate version of the United States of America.
Explorers of the BSA can only view the reality through dull, monochrome color. Occasional blue discolorations may appear on any surface, which have a coarse, blurry appearance reminiscent of TV static. These effects are believed to be purely visual, having no physical influence or quantifiable form. Furthermore, native inhabitants of Blue Static America see their world with normal color vision, and do not see the appearance of blue static. As a result, Archivists are effectively monochromatic-colorblind, and objects which are affected by the blue static discolorations may be difficult or impossible to identify.
Care must be taken in order to avoid confusion or suspicion among the native inhabitants. The colorless environment can easily be explained as colorblindness, but the inability to identify objects affected by blue static is not trivial to justify. It is advised to actively avoid interaction with these objects, or to entirely avoid discourse with BSA inhabitants.2
The BSA is composed of 50 separate limspaces with independent timeline continuums progressing in parallel, each only accessible within one of the 50 US states. Native inhabitants to each timeline are unable to acknowledge the existence of other timelines and are unable to cross between them.
Archivist Sweeney on BSA boundaries:
An inhabitant who crosses a state boundary will appear to vanish at the border, but only to us explorers. To the inhabitants themselves, other inhabitants don't vanish. They're still there, in another state, and if they're next to each other they can see and talk to one another like we would do back in Baseline. However, when one of us explorers — who isn't native to the BSA — crosses a border, we appear to have vanished to the inhabitants. This is because crossing borders brings you from one limspace to another. So, this would suggest that each limspace of BSA isn't the size of just one state. They're actually much larger, potentially the size of the whole Earth, and we just don't have access to more than those arbitrary state boundaries. How crazy is that?
Given that we appear to vanish when crossing boundaries, I don't recommend crossing a state border unless no native inhabitants are around. It should be pretty easy to tell where the state boundaries are, because the environment will change abruptly. Remember, these boundaries are not just physical boundaries, but also represent a boundary between two completely different time periods of the United States.
Time within the BSA progresses at roughly fifty times the speed of Baseline Reality (50×). For every minute spent within the BSA, less than a second will have passed in Baseline. As a result, years of time spent within the BSA may equate to only a few weeks gone by back home.
Due to this temporal dilation, BSA limspaces regularly catch up with the current year of Baseline Reality, but they never continue on into the future. When a BSA limspace catches up with Baseline, the timeline continuum of the limspace is reset and begins again at the year which the state was first admitted to the Union. Any objects, entities and persons present within the continuum will be lost upon a timeline reset. It is paramount to not be present when a limspace resets.
Archivist Clarkson on meeting alternate versions of people from Baseline:
Since the BSA is mostly identical to Baseline Reality, it is actually possible to find alternate versions of people you know from Baseline within the BSA. But, strangely, they will not recognize you and will deny any relation. This even applies to the alternate version of yourself, who will deny any physical resemblance to you.
This would suggest that explorers will always appear as strangers when meeting people in BSA, no matter what.
It's certainly possible to form relationships with these alternate versions, but I highly advise against this. For a vast majority of explorers who attempt to befriend people in BSA who they already know from Baseline, it ends up very poorly.
Additional Limspace Composition:
- Territory outside the US is inaccessible to explorers; at the US national border is an impassable, invisible boundary. However, external regions are visible, and they appear as desolate, volcanic wastelands, hypothesized to be within a timeline continuum set during the Earth’s early formation.3
- External US territories which are not classified as official states do not have BSA timeline continuums. It is believed that new timeline continuums would be created if new states were to be admitted to the Union, however this has not yet been documented. Similarly, it is hypothesized that BSA timeline continuums would be destroyed were the respective states to successfully secede from the Union, however this is not certain, and the exact mechanisms by which this would occur are entirely unknown.
- Maryland and the District of Columbia exist within the same limspace.
SURVIVAL INFORMATION
If you are near the boundary between BSA limspaces, you will be able to observe the other limspace without being visible to its native inhabitants. This can be useful for watching an event or scouting a location without interfering or taking unneeded risk.4
When entering the BSA, it is advised to bring BSA notes and documentation to aid in survival and exploration. These should be kept very secure and should not be made accessible to inhabitants. If an inhabitant happens to discover this documentation, it is advised to exit the limspace by crossing its boundary.
Be careful when traveling within a vehicle. If the vehicle crosses a state border, it will vanish and you may be flung with dangerously high velocity. It is strongly advised to never enter any kind of aircraft within the BSA system.
PERIOD-SPECIFIC MEASURES:
Pre-1800: Modern medicine did not develop until the 18th century, so it is crucial to avoid severe injury within the 1700s, especially if you are far from state boundaries; you will be unlikely to find adequate medical aid.
Pre-1900: If you intend on entering a state which exists prior to the 19th century, it is advised to transcribe BSA documentation onto traditional note paper by hand to avoid unneeded attention.
Pre-1970: Women and explorers of non-white ethnicity must be particularly careful to avoid many sociopolitical conflicts in American history.
fig 2.0 A horse carriage within the Florida BSA limspace
Additional Limspace Information:
- BSA limspaces are locally non-anomalous, meaning there are no thresholds, limspace gateways, native Archivists or supernatural artifacts. Despite this major difference, the BSA timelines are not particularly divergent to Baseline. The BSA seems to be course-correcting, keeping itself fairly similar to Baseline at any point in time by modifying events to produce similar end results. Identical events may have occurred in both Baseline and a BSA limspace, but for different reasons.
- The boundaries of state limspaces are determined by the present-day borders, not the state boundaries of past time periods.
- "Blue Static America"/"BSA" is an Archivist designation. The country itself is still referred to as the United States of America by native inhabitants of the system.
fig 3.0 The Statue of Liberty within the New York BSA limspace
Important Periods of US History:
- 1763–1789: American Revolution (AVOID)
- 1789–1812: Early Republic
- 1812–1846: Westward Expansion, Industrial Revolution
- 1846–1848: Mexican American War (AVOID)
- 1861–1865: American Civil War (AVOID)
- 1866–1877: Reconstruction Era
- 1914–1918: World War I (AVOID)
- 1929–1941: Great Depression (AVOID)
- 1939–1945: World War II (AVOID)
- 1945–1989: Cold War (AVOID)
- 1954–1968: Civil Rights Movement
- 1954–1975: Vietnam War (AVOID)
- 2007–2009: Great Recession
Disasters to Avoid:
- 1865: Sultana shipwreck disaster, Arkansas
- 1871: Peshtigo Fire, Wisconsin + Michigan
- 1889: Johnstown Flood, Pennsylvania
- 1893: Cheniere Caminada hurricane, Louisiana
- 1893: Sea Islands hurricane, Georgia + South Carolina
- 1899: San Ciriaco hurricane, east coast
- 1900: Galveston hurricane, Texas
- 1904: PS General Slocum shipwreck disaster, New York
- 1906: San Francisco earthquake
- 1928: Okeechobee hurricane, Florida
- 2001: World Trade Center terrorist attacks
- 2005: Hurricane Katrina, south east
- 2017: Hurricane Mariah, east coast
ENTRANCES AND EXITS
In order to access BSA, one must achieve a certain transitory mental state while aboard an active metro or train.5 You must be on the verge of drifting to sleep, face pressed against the window, almost hypnotized by the passing scenery. Distant trees, mountains and lakes, moving slower than the clouds. Closer: fields of crop quickly coming in and out of sight, in a hurry but not a blur. Just beyond the window: the rails, gravel and train signs, shooting by.
As you are about to fall asleep, you notice the skies turning gray, landscapes losing their color. Suddenly you realize, you've been transported. Depending on the current time period of the limspace, you will have arrived atop a horse, in a carriage or bus, or on some other vehicle of transportation.
Returning to Baseline works in much the same way, however, the transitory state can only be achieved while riding a train or metro, making it impossible to leave BSA from a state where neither exists.