"Well..." you say, pausing for a minute. "Now that I'm standing in front of the machine, I'm wondering if, maybe, we should test out the machine's abilities."
Tess scratches her head. "Right... time travel."
"Well, yes. Time travel. But don't you think we're limiting ourselves by only considering things that did happen? What about timelines that may have happened? Or didn't happen at all?" you say. You can feel the gears in your head spinning rapidly. You're surprised the thought never occurred to you before. But... yes, even with the current setup, you think you'll be able to play with your destination a bit.
"You're... not making much sense" Tess said. "How can we go someplace that hasn't happened? If it doesn't exist, and we exist, how can we go there?"
You smile down at her and pat her head with a finger. "Don't worry too much about it. Your brain is, like, the size of a pea. You wouldn't understand" you say, teasing her.
"It's not normally!" she protests, but you ignore her. You set her down on the counter and turn your attention to the machine. You begin turning dials and fiddling with knobs.
---
You smile as the diagnostics screen lights up. It prompts you to pick a location and enter a time as usual, but, to your delight, the map on screen is totally different than the one you're used to.
"Tess" you say, staring with glee at the screen. "I think I just became the first person to break the barrier between different timelines." You grab her up in your hand and set her down on the console, and the two of you begin scanning the map and asking the onboard computer to give you detailed information about this brave new world.
It's different. Really different. From what you understand, oil was never discovered in this world, and, as a result, steampower became the driver of progress in this world. Some of the details are lost on you - you're a scientist inventor, not a historian - but, from what you gather, it seems that sometime in the 1850s steam technology exploded, and rapidly reshaped the world.
America - or, as it's called in this timeline, the Perpetual Union of Columbia - seems to have developed steampower engines and devices rapidly, and used their technological prowess to really build up the old east coast and to expand into the west. You see cities like New York, Baltimore, and Boston, all filled with dark art deco skyscrapers, with lots of weird looking steam technology. Blimps float through the air, while speeding trains take people from place to place. The people inhabiting it look like they're culturally stuck in the middle of the 19th century, though they wear flashy suits covered in buttons and what looks like bronze gears. Jewelry? You aren't sure.
The computer shows you the west. To your suprise, everything west of what you call Utah is still uncolonized, and the map displays several territories belonging to indigenous groups and confederations. Utah doesn't exist here - instead, it's a huge swathe of territory called Deseret, and it appears to be some kind of subject colony of the rest of Columbia, though not Columbia proper. Odd. You zoom in on it's capital and see what looks like a highly-advanced old western town. What appear to be gunslingers walk through beaten-down streets, though, much like the more wealthy residents of New York, they too are adorned in odd-looking clothing.
"This... looks exactly like a steampunk video game" Tess says. You nod in silent agreement. It... kind of looks like Bioshock Infinite?
You look at a few more locations on the map near there. To the west, in many of the native confederations, you see what appear to be typical old west scenes, but, again, they feature advanced technology. Steam-driven caravans take settlers west as gunmen with repeating rifles made of copper and bronze try to claim territory from the natives. Local saloons are filled with vast, swirling bronze and copper machines of strange design.
You scan a few more locations and try to figure out which country is which - most of them have different names and borders, and you're not sure how different they might be. Canada is gone. Instead, it appears to be divided into three autonomous states - Quebec, Borealia, and British Columbia. It looks like central America is dominated by Imperial Mexico and Gran Colombia, while South America is dominated by the United Portuguese Monarchy and several independent former Spanish colonies.
It's all so overwhelming. You pick something you think is going to be a safe bet, and decide to go to...
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