Revised police time travel thing

[ffutures]

Revised taking into account the points doctor_toc made, and adding a scenario idea. Comments please!


Police use of Time Ships is reserved for the most serious offences; murder, treason, and the like. Since 1895 Scotland Yard has had a Temporal Crimes Bureau, set up to help police from the future. Typically a small group of officers land discreetly, identify themselves at the bureau, then make their way to the crime scene with "local" help. They lay in wait for the criminal, interrupt the crime, and identify the criminal. If possible they will prevent the crime; even though changes in the events of the past don't change the present, it's not in the nature of most officers to let someone get away with a serious crime. All of the evidence including statements from the victim etc. are then taken back to the present. Note that this alone is not sufficient to obtain a conviction, since the defence can (and has) argued that since changes in the past do not affect the present, it's possible that what was observed in the past was somehow different from the original sequence of events. However, the evidence gathered by this technique can be used to obtain search warrants, and to justify forensic work, autopsies, exhumations etc. in the present.

On a few occasions this technique has failed; criminals aware that they might be caught by these means have prepared elaborate deceptions in which someone else appears to commit the crime, or obscured the date and location of the crime so thoroughly that they could not be traced. Fortunately few criminals are bright enough for this. In one case the victim actually lied in her statement to protect the murderer, despite seeing photographs of her own body, but fortunately said just enough to allow the police to find more evidence in the present, and thus solve the case.

The legal implications of this method are a minefield. One defense - that a crime has not been convicted because it was prevented in the past - has already been eliminated by the Law Lords, in a landmark case which established that events as perceived in the present must be the only criterion, with any tampering in the past irrelevant. On two occasions the defence has bought the victim to the present as 'proof' that the crime did not occur; in both cases a conviction was still obtained, since the prosecution could prove conclusively that the murder had taken place.

Scenario Idea: Ripping Yarns Even though they pre-date the Temporal Crimes Bureau the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 are an obvious target for investigation by this method, but the police seem to be curiously reluctant to make the necessary moves. As a result of recent questions in Parliament there is a general feeling that something needs to be done. Why are the police dragging their heels? Could there be any truth in the rumours of Royal or Masonic involvement?   As the debate continues and the police excuses get less believable a gentleman sportsman proposes to take a hunting party back, entirely unofficially, and get the evidence needed to solve the case. Are the adventurers interested?   There's one tiny snag... the Ripper is aboard the ship, and plans to make sure that the hunt will be unsuccessful. To play fair, he (or she) should be someone known to the adventurers, either as another member of the hunting party or as a member of the crew, criminologist along to study the case, etc.   For more on the Ripper murders see numerous books, web sites, etc., e.g. A web site outlining the facts that doesn't attempt to draw conclusions. The official police site on the case.   The Wikipedia page on the case.

Comments

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

Your a brave brave man trying to run any kind of game with time travel in it.... I won't touch that with a barge pole. It only leads to trouble....

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

Have you read "Corrupting Dr. Nice", by John Kessel? If not, you could probably do with reading it as it has a lot to do with your temporal physics. In that book, time travel to the past creates "moment universes" which diverge from whatever sliver of time the traveller arrives in. These divergent realities are totally insulated from "mainstream reality", and so can be exploited fully without fear of buggering up history. In the novel, the past is treated like a third world country, with big business milking it for all its worth, stripping it of natural resources for shipping to the future, and past "celebrities" like Hitler, Buddah and Christ being dragged into the future multiple times.

The changes are nice. The physics raises some intriguing questions. Do the time travellers know that the realities they visit vanish after they leave, or do they simply know that they can't get back to them again? What happens if you leave a member of your party in the past? Can you reach them again?

The Law Lords ruling is still problematic.I would suggest that legally, evidence obtained by time travel is only admissible if it relates to events that could not have been changed by the presence of the time travellers. For example, a time travelling officer recovers a document identifying a killer before the killer destroys it. In order to be admissible, the document would have to have been written before the arrival of the time traveller, otherwise the defense could argue that the document was the product of the traveller's deliberate or accidental interference, and has no actual bearing on the reality in which the crime was committed. One side-effect of this is that it would force time travelling officers to place their point of arrival as close as possible to the time of the crime in order to minimise the possibility that they could influence the criminal in any way.

Here's the legal kicker; since preventing a crime counts as interfering in it, situations in which an officer from the future is involved in the prevention of a crime mean that even if the murderer is caught red-handed, that can't be used as evidence to convict him. The prosecution needs to prove that the accused intended to commit the crime before the arrival of the police from the future, otherwise the defense could argue that the reality the police observed was the product of their presence and bore no causal relationship to the "actual" past. This would make so-called "crimes of passion" almost impossible to prosecute using time travel.

The fact that people can be brought from the past to the present is interesting, but it presents some sticky problems. If the dead can effectively be "resurrected" by time travel, where does it end? Would a grieving father or mother really stand by and weep when they know that little Timmy can be summoned out of the past whole and healthy?

Since a murder victim can be brought out of a divergent past to replace the version that died, how can the prosecution prove he was killed? Habeas Corpus requires a body, but if time travel allows you to produce multiple identical copies of a person, not only can you not prove that the body in question is the person who the criminal is accused of killing, you also can't prove that the person in the dock is the specific person who committed the crime, no matter how compelling your evidence. This brings the law dangerously close to holding people responsible for the actions of all their divergent selves. There are issues relating to jurisdiction here too. Does the power of the court extend to possibly divergent pasts?

The scenario is interesting. For some reason it reminds me of "Killing Time" a Winwood & Cord comic strip from 2000AD, though the resemblance is purely superficial. It's a cool idea.

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

Another interesting possibility is the opportunity time travel gives to serial killers. Serial killers are all about repetition; each successive killing is either an attempt to "perfect" the killing experience, or to recapture the rush of their first murder. With time travel, a serial killer could kill the same person over and over, whenever they wanted. Maybe the Ripper's intention isn't to prevent his own capture and obscure the evidence. Maybe he intends to murder his past self and take his place so that he can commit his murders again, but this time with foreknowledge, allowing him to "do it right this time".

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Okay - you figured a lot of it out. And yes, Dr. Nice was an influence...


Don't read on if you want to play in this setting!

As far as people in this world are concerned it looks like you can go back in time, do what you like, etc. without affecting history. That's because there's no way for them to see what's really happening. Some theoretical physicists may suspect the truth, but it's impossible to prove it.

Every time trip creates a new universe, an offshoot of the existing time line, with the time travellers in it. But they also exist in the original time line. There's no conservation principle and you don't get time lines merging, or any way to travel between them. So at the first stop the referee rolls the dice, to decide whether the adventurers are now part of the original time line or the divergent one. And at the next, and the next, and so forth. Say you make four stops and the odds are 50-50, there's a 1 in 16 chance that you return to your original world. The "original" time line (or more likely one created by a time line split so long ago that nobody remembers it) thinks that time travel can't change things, because in that time line it hasn't. But in the world next door where someone just got saved from Jack the Ripper they're suddenly aware that time travel can change things. And then there are the worlds that have the cumulative effect of multiple changes (remember the cruise mentioned in the original post?), e.g. legends about the strangers from the floating island who warned everyone to stay out of Pompeii, turned up and gave Good Queen Bess some interesting gifts just after the Armada, abducted loads of villagers, murdered Mahommed, etc. A lot of them with VERY weird cargo cult religions.

I think I'm going to have to say that the courts are still struggling to deal with the implications of time travel - it's about a 14 year old invention as described in the campaign, with the first couple of years mostly experimentation, so I think it's likely that a few of the more interesting cases are still to come.

[doctor-toc.livejournal.com]

Nice!Don't feel bad about me figuring this out- I think about this sort of stuff all the time.:-)

I think I'm going to have to say that the courts are still struggling to deal with the implications of time travel - it's about a 14 year old invention as described in the campaign, with the first couple of years mostly experimentation, so I think it's likely that a few of the more interesting cases are still to come.

Makes sense. In a longer campaign, actually roleplaying those cases would be (IMHO) fun.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

See the comment on your original post!

Given what everyone in the game world thinks they know about time travel staying in the past is not a good idea. Killing yourself (or someone else) again and again is entirely possible, taking your own place is apparently a VERY bad idea.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

One interesting legal implication, and a reason why Roosevelt would be very reluctant to have assassinated Presidents being brought back from the past:

What happens if President McKinley is brought back? Roosevelt only became President because McKinley was assassinated. Would he lose the job if McKinley was suddenly alive again?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think I'm going to have to go with Chris's suggestion on the previous post and say that anyone bought from the past is treated as a separate person, not the old one. But I think I'll also add this to the Lincoln scenario, it's a VERY good idea.

Which reminds me I need to change the Lincoln scenario...

[dsample.livejournal.com]

If someone brought back from the past is a separate person, is anyone responsible for getting them started again in their new life? Finding them a place to live, a job, etc.

Other time crimes

[dsample.livejournal.com]

If your time travellers went back a hundred years, and stole a copy of the Mona Lisa, has a crime been committed in the present? The Louvre would still have its copy.

Or they could go back to the early sixteenth century and *buy* it for the equivalent of a few thousand dollars in gold. Then they could bring it back, and have a better copy than the one the French have, unscarred by the ravages of time, or the various "restorations" that have been done to it over the last 500 years. Which painting would be more valuable?

They could pick up the Venus de Milo, while she still had her arms, Buy the wall that da Vinci painted the Last Supper on, before it started to deteriorate. Van Gogh's paintings could be bought for peanuts during his lifetime.