Three quarters of the newly discovered were uninhabited, and of the remainder, all but two held only scattered tribes of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. However, the two exceptions were cause for serious soul-searching within (and without) the OSP.
The first inhabited nonpaleo time line to be identified was, of course, time line one, location of the Kingdom of the Gruinmarkt: the version of North America where the Clan originated. (Following the US retaliation on that time line, the East Coast is still unsafe to visit without protective gear and radiation detectors.) The other time line is Nova America four, an ice age version of our world that is dotted with the ruins of a long-extinct high-technology civilization. (This will be discussed at length in chapter 26, “A Bridge to Nowhere.”)
Finally, there are the unknown unknowns, as President Rumsfeld so memorably characterized them. We know today that the world-walkers’ ability isn’t natural, or even evolved. It relies on self-replicating intracellular quantum-dot enabled nanotechnology, controlled by engineered genes and activated by what one researcher described as an “epigenetic hack.”
Somewhere out there in the infinity of branching universes we call para-time, there is (or was) an advanced technological civilization—and almost certainly more than one of them. At least one of these civilizations understood the structure of the multiverse better than the best physicists in America today and built subtle machines to manipulate reality and bend it to their will. The world-walkers of the Gruinmarkt come from a primitive, preindustrial world. Exhaustive sequencing of the genome and epigenome of the few surviving prisoners has long since revealed interesting facts about their world-walking ability, which had been subtly damaged by a point mutation a couple of hundred years ago. Interrogated, they revealed a family history pointing back to a founder who had appeared in the 1760s. From where? Nobody knows. The obvious inference was that he was a fugitive, a runaway, a deserter. He kept a low profile, bedding in deep in the Gruinmarkt, willing to live a life of relative poverty in a quasi-medieval backwater in order to avoid the attention of … what?
Nobody knows; and that fact, taken at face value, is deeply disturbing.