Errata

Description

The nature of reality is to repeat itself. This has never been more true than with the existence of alternate realities, which are echoes in and of themselves. These repeating places and events create errors when they interact with one another; tiny echoes of the past and future that appear when the fabric of multiple realities overlap. Sometimes, an object exists before it should physically be able to. Other times, premonitions of the future can change the course of history— and guide it towards the events that they predicted.

With the Eclipse of the 21st century, a term was created to define and categorize these little paradoxes: Errata. The idea extends to objects, places, and even living things. Importantly, unlike fictional paradoxes, errata tend to stick around. In fact, there is nothing paradoxical about them. They are the result of other realities interfering with ours, often on levels that we cannot possibly understand. This makes them very difficult to predict— and impossible to prevent.

Mechanics

On a theoretical level, errata are created when the flow of information goes backwards in time. After all, other realities do not share our singular sense of "right now." They might exist in the far future of our own reality, or even be dissociated from our timeline entirely. When information— carried by physical things, like books— travels across that timeline gap, it creates the illusion of "impossible knowledge" with its existence. It's the little details that betray what's really going on: Cross-reality texts will recall history that never occurred, cite people who were never born.

These inconsistencies are usually enough to discredit the source.

The issue is that errata often have the potential to make their proposed future into a reality. This should not be possible. The items themselves do not have any magical or interreal properties. However, in the majority of cases, the information contained within errata turns out to be true. There is something about the way that these ideas cross between realities that sets their prophesied events into motion. It's possible that the information itself is charged, somehow, when it arrives in a reality that it's not supposed to be in. If that were the case, then these items are somehow the catalysts for the event— as though existing in this place inspires the future to occur.

And yet, there were no errata that predicted the Eclipse.