The WhereWas Eye

[agorski]

Here's a found object with mysterious capabilities.

This appears to be a large screen tablet. Holding it up in front of the user like a smartphone camera, it displays the scene in front of the user except that all lifeforms are missing. A forest looks like empty terrain. Useful for finding those ruins in the jungle.

The displayed image is not shown in the correct colors, as if designed for a sophont with vision different from humaniti.

Still holding the tablet, controls allow viewing the current scene at different times in the past. Scroll(?) back while viewing those jungle ruins that are now a pile of rocks and see what was originally built.

 

[willtron3030]

Ooh, step aside Mr. Night Shylaman, daddy has a twist to add:

Time travel, we all know, is impossible[1]. This device is peering into the present of alternate realities where time proceeds at rates different from ours. The device always picks an alternate reality whose present time best matches the time from our own that the user has selected, but optimizes for least energy required to make the observation. That usually means that what's happening there very closely matches what happened here. But you're always seeing the Temu version, so your results may vary.

... Oh, nuts. It just dawned on me that idea I picked out of the recesses of my skull just now wasn't mine. It's an echo of something I read recently.

::15 min later:: It feels like something Moe Lane would write, but I've gone thru a couple of months of his Patreon work and nada.

::15 more minutes:: It was "The Historians", by K.M. Sykes, published in "The 2024 High Caliber Awards" story collection, by Cannon Publishing. In the story, the reality shown is the closest match to the expectations of the viewer.

::5 more minutes::
My confusion about Moe Lane was because he recently published an RPG sourcebook about a setting where time travel is no longer possible (skepticism optional), and the PCs are tasked with cleaning up the aftermath of the Time Wars which inadvertently produced that result.

[1] Yeeah, right. Nonetheless, any sophont race with robust philosophical foundations and inventive dystopian storytellers would prefer to keep believing that it is not, in fact, possible.

 

[Spinward Scout]

Reminds me of the device in the first Guardians of the Galaxy when Quill was looking for whichever object and it showed him what the area looked like in the past. But it had living people/things on that one.

Cool idea!