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The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river -T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men In the 25th century, the final mysteries of time and space lay within our grasp. Mankind’s last hope to avoid annihilation is a desperate plan to save the future by modifying the past. The Paragon Project was undertaken to observe the flow of time, study the cause and effect of history, and identify the turning points where humanity had chosen the wrong path. Of the thousands screened for the project, only the strongest in body, mind, and conviction would be capable of adapting to the radical modifications necessary to survive the transit through the temporal estuaries. Only the elite were considered, and from them a mere handful were chosen. Selected for their strong sense of identity, only they would be able to withstand the psychological impact of the necessary cybernetic conversion, and the monumental tasks that lay ahead of them. They would be the architects of humanity'’s salvation, able to rewrite the squandered choices according to a greater design, paragons in the most literal sense. To withstand the punishment that temporal transit would inflict upon them, they underwent cybernetic conversion. Their bones were replaced with hybrid steel, muscle with fibrous polymer, and organs with cyberware. Eighty seven percent of what made them human was replaced, and what little remained lay buried beneath the artificial. Through implants and conditioning, logic structures were forced upon their unconscious minds, attenuating them to the fabric of space-time. Unconsciously they were aware of the flow of time and space, allowing them to see all possible results of every action before they happened, and to select the most favorable for their purposes. Scattered through time, they observed and reported their findings to the project supervisors. Rigidly monitored and evaluated, the project committee ensured that no harmful action was taken to disrupt the flow of time before they were ready to proceed, keeping a tight leash on all of their agents. Contingencies were in place to correct errors, even to the point of maintaining retrieval teams in the unlikely event that an agent went rogue. In the minds of the Paragon Project Committee, every possibility had been accounted for. No one realized just how wrong they could be. Unknown agents have scoured the Paragon Project from time, deliberately erased as if it had never existed. The Paragons's bonds have been loosed, and they are free to chart their own destiny. With godlike powers at their disposal and no one to stop them, will they follow their orders and stay out of history's way? |
