Synchronicity: Teenage Time Pilots and the Older Self Hunting Them

In 2023 a scientist builds a time machine that works. The moment it switches on, linear time stops being a thing you can count on. The government takes it over, and because adults can't hold up under a jump, the people it sends are teenagers.

That's Synchronicity. It's the most rule-heavy idea in the drawer (only Continue? and its three-credit rule come close), and most of the notes are about the rules.

The premise

The secret program is called the Epoch Project, and it runs out of an underground facility the notes call "The Voltaire". Its lead pilot is Griffin "Duo" Rockwell II, seventeen, who happens to be a clone of the scientist who built it. He's confident, a little reckless, and carrying the weight of living up to his original.

The job is repair work: go back, patch the damage, don't make it worse. Then the team runs into an older Duo, a version of him who has mastered time and can speed it up, slow it down or stop it. He wants time travel to never have been invented, and he's willing to kill his younger self to make that happen.

The rules

This is where most of the thinking went.

Rule	How it works
The Chrono-Censor	A cosmic force that auto-corrects big changes. You can chip history onto a new path, but you can't kill someone important or stop a major event.
Under nineteen	Adult brains can't hold what a jump requires, so the pilots are kids.
No future without a past	You can only jump to a future point if someone has already come back from it and opened a "slot".
The open slots	Someone has already opened slots for the team. Who, and why, is the central mystery.
Tethering	A one-time pull that yanks the whole team back to the present, with side effects nobody can predict.
The core	The machine runs on a contained, fusion-powered black hole. The Censor doesn't exist inside it, so it's the one place a time traveler can really die.

The rules keep the missions small. Nobody gets to assassinate a dictator or stop a war. The team has to chip away at the past with small changes that don't trip the Censor.

The team

• Gwen Anderson, nineteen, a psychic who sees twenty seconds ahead and is worn down by it.
• Chance, an android from the future, found on a jump and refitted to record events. She's getting more human the longer she's with them.
• Ethan "King" Kingsley, nineteen, a cyborg with a Special Forces past who takes the worst jobs and hides how much he cares.

Early missions start simple, like fetching documents from a 2006 lab fire, which turns out to have been set on purpose.

Where it stands

There's a five-act plot, a character file, a worldbuilding doc and a reading list (Brian Greene, Hawking, Kip Thorne on black holes, plus 12 Monkeys, Primer and The Terminator for tone). The first notes date to July 2024, and I pulled it all into a bible this June.

It's still a plan. A few things aren't settled:

• The names moved. The earliest notes had a different inventor, a different clone and a psychic without a name. The bible keeps a table of what changed.
• The outline is thin. There's an early four-chapter outline that squeezes five acts into four chapters. It'll need rebuilding.
• Where it lives. One summary of the project puts the program at Area 51. The bible puts it underground in Virginia. That needs a decision.

Note

Next up is a real chapter outline that matches the five acts, with the names and the location settled before any of it gets written.

Update: this one has a working page now, and the chapters will show up there as I write them: Synchronicity.