Butterfly Machine
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The Butterfly Machine was a temporal spectrometer developed by Küiser Laboratories' secretive DCI-SS division (later Dreams Intelligence) in collaboration with Industrial Occult Systems. It was only ever tested once in 2027, after which it was destroyed. Its purpose was to predict the future, proving the temporal transmission of information possible. Its activation broke causality and introduced a self-propagating paradox that would begin to tear apart the very fabric of reality.
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| Date | 1 January 2027 |
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| Time | 19:13 GMT (UTC+00:00) |
| Type | Exophysics experiment |
| Outcome | Creation of a causality paradox |
The machine appeared as a flat, black “screen” - as big as a large office whiteboard, on which lines would be slowly drawn, and patterns would flash. An audience of sufficient size watching the “screen” component was crucial to the prediction element, according to Dr. Rosetta White, the project's lead. After this process completed, which would take something in the order of multiple minutes, the result would be displayed textually on the screen, showing what it had predicted.
Components
The key component which made the machine function as intended was a kind of tape, which appeared a silvery gold, of which Dr. White was observed cutting into small segments before the experiment began. The material making up this tape was Galraite-306, an extremely rare anomalous superheavy element previously extracted by Nevrin from the Venetian City, an underground Canadian mining colony abandoned after a freak nuclear accident. It was also known that the machine required immense amounts of power, on the order of magnitude of a small city. Special transformers and capacitors were installed on-site for the day the experiment was due to take place, with a dedicated link to a nearby power plant.
Consequences
The primary consequence of the experiment was the introduction of a self-propagating tear in reality that began to spread slowly at first but over time began to increase exponentially in size. Not long after the experiment, Grey realised their mistake, and fearing the consequences, destroyed the machine and all the evidence of the project.
This tear began to manifest over the next few decades as spontaneous occurrences of manifold distortion. Towards the end of the century, it resulted in the automatic activation of a massive Precursor-built machine, known as the Galvatron Array, designed as a failsafe to heal reality. It, however, had an unfortunate side effect, beginning to release periodic electromagnetic pulses that created chaos in the Solar System.