Talk:Strange Day

Background for why the changed happened.

I’m taking the parallel universe approach to this one. I know, really original. As the story goes, in another universe (Universe A), solid state electronics are invented and commercialized around the turn of the twentieth century, which is much earlier than in our own universe. This lead to a huge advance in technology around that time and by the 1940s, they’re at about the same level as 2000 (in Universe 1). Before then, the histories of the two universes are exactly the same.

There is no World War 1, but there is the Great War in 1941. Chemical and biological weapons, along with nuclear are used which leads to the death of over two-thirds of the world’s population, as well as a reduced temperature, due to a large amount of debris in the air from the nuclear explosions and large scale, unmanaged fires. The remaining population bands together and decides that it’s best to try and spread people out over the entire planet in order to best utilize the remaining resources. But transportation was difficult and took long periods of time, so the quest for teleportation technology began.

The development of teleportation technology was vastly accelerated and funded much like the space program of Manhattan project. By 1956 the first working teleporters were operational in major cities, but were only really used for personal transit. The system expanded to more locations and in the scale of objects that could be transported by 1960. It was at this time that there was an accident in the teleportation system. The result was that nearly every person on Earth was combined with an animal. (No people were fused together due to the ability of the teleporters to discriminate humans from other animals and objects.) It’s well documented that many family pets and farm animals vanished during the malfunction. It affected nearly everyone because the transmission lines and teleporters were so ubiquitous. Only people far enough away or isolated in some other way were not affected.

A lot of effort was then put into a way to reverse this disaster. It proved to be much more difficult than anyone had anticipated. Though there were massive investigations, the exact cause of the malfunction and what resulted was never found. Nor was it ever really understood exactly how people ended up as functional anthropomorphic animals.

Though many possible “cures” were attempted, none of them worked, until March 12, 2007 when an experiment was conducted on an isolated and heavily modified transporter grid. The result was the majority of the participants turned into humans. The experiment was expanded, though; it did not work on every single person.

One of the main researchers had an idea as to the reason for this, but he did not share his opinion and instead turned to work on his own experiments on a totally isolated pair of teleporters. Early in the morning of September 1 he conducted another in a long line of experiments and discovered he was right. He turned back into his former self. Instead of turning the people back into humans, the cure had simply switched the bodies of the participants with those of themselves from a parallel universe. Only people who had a doppelganger could be cured or changed. He found this to be horridly unethical and would eventually bring his doppelganger to his own universe to explain this.

With all the evidence mounted and communication between the two universes established, it was determined that everyone who wanted to be returned to their human selves, in Universe 1, would be given that opportunity. The surprise factor was that some people in Universe 1 wanted to be like the people of Universe A. Development then began on a way to exchange bodies for people who did not have a doppelganger.