#I don't want to start anything with bringing up the star trek reboot

[requirecookie]

What Happens When You File Off Serial Numbers

Ok, had a couple of people ask about this, so figured I'd just make a big, self-indulgent post.

Hi. So. I'm Stormy, and in 2003 I wrote a Matrix fanfic. Then like 40 more. It started pre-Reloaded, and was intentionally already massively canon-divergent, so the content of the sequels didn't really matter to what was going on (though exiles are eventually introduced).

It came from the basic concept of: Rebels recruit humans, why wouldn't Agents?

So, started off with that. Had Smith recruit an OC, Stef, who is the main character of the series, so we have someone new to everything to experience this through.

The Agency is basically split into three - Field (Smith), Combat (Jones) and Tech (Brown).

(*I...fucked up at the beginning and switched Brown and Jones' names, but will refer to them by canon names for ease of understanding - this, however, comes back later.)

Stef goes into Field, and she's this really smart hacker who I wanted to sort of model off Spider-Man in the quippy one-liner sense (as befit her hacker name of "Spyder"). She hears both sides of things, but genuinely wants to protect the Matrix with the attitude of "just because it's code, doesn't mean it's not real", "if I'm nice to someone, that's real, if I'm mean, that's real, reality is a formality".

Oops. She fuckin' dies and gets upgraded to an agent.

Time goes on, I add a co-writer, we add more OCs, I start to really just love the stuff I created and it's already so wildly divergent, I go "lol, how about I just rewrite this as original content?".

Lots of worldbuilding happens. I do a bunch of full/almost complete first drafts playing with various degrees of cyberpunk and other genres - the original versions were the closest in that it was a simulated world, but as compared to the Matrix, a benevolent one.

Earth is dead, and the only thing known to be reamaining there are a bunch of server farms with various sims showing sections of human history (Stef's world would run from like 1850-2050, then reset).

But that still felt too close, and I did keep getting the urge to play with other genres, and since it wasn't necessary the "simulated world" part of things that I wanted to keep, I let myself start to go "ok, well, where else can something like the Agency work?".

But...fantasy.

So iterated, rebooted a few times, and as of 2025, this is where we're at.

The Agency has offices in most major cities around the world, and outposts in smaller locations (these satellites report to their closest major city, and its Director). Their job is to "protect the masquerade", ie, to stop humans from finding out the fae, Faerie and anything weird exists.

This is achieved with a combination of information supression, misinformation, "yeah, it's fucking real, but don't tell anyone", memory modification, and fae usually wanting to avoid bringing uncessary attention to themselves while they're on Earth, as that only brings danger.

The Agents are still program people - for brevity's sake, we'll just say that what became the Agency as we know it grew out of something set up by god/aliens that may as well be the Q from Star Trek. (This history has very little impact on the day-to-day of the stories, however).

They're made of a nanite solution called "blue", and in System territory, are pretty much immortal (with magic/magic weapons still being dangerous), in areas more saturated with magic ("blackout zones") or in Faerie, they're as vulnerable as humans to even normal guns.

Agents can "Require" - conjure pretty much anything they can think of or imagine (*some restrictions apply, you need special clearance for a lot of medical stuff or weapons outside of the norm), and "Shift" - teleport themselves anywhere within System territory.

Fanfic Tangent: Both came from the fic days - it always bugged me that it seemed like Agents couldn't get request whatever from the System on an as-needs basic. ("You're empty"/"So are you" - Why the fuck can't he just require another clip and headshot Neo right then and there. Respawning obviously gives an agent a full loadout - new gun, new sunnies, fresh suit - and spawning even one more bullet into the clip should only take a fraction of that time, so, mechically, I couldn't understand/didn't like that, so invented requiring).

Shifting. While I do get that it both increases the fear factor of looking at a Bluepill, and that it might make rebels more hesitant to shoot, knowing a civilian will be sacfriced, there's...just not always going to be a Bluepill available when and where you need one, so...just open up Google Maps in your head and reposition yourself?

Personality and personhood-wise...while there's variation, every Agent is capable of emotions, though some naturally develop less, whereas some get an excess.

There's also a...deadening of it, in that while you can experience the wonder and beauty of life or sadness and grief, it's expected that you won't let it interfere with your Duty, so they (tend to, are programmed to, don't always) get over things faster - sadness over a break-up lasts a day, not a week; you could lose a recruit, and still turn up for work the next day. Duty first, always, freedom where you've got time for it.

"Break-ups?" Yep. Most Agents have romances or families - also, the vast majority of them are queer (both in gender and sexuality) (Examples later).

The Agency fights The Solstice. The Redpills/Rebels have a valid point of view, The Solstice do not. They hate magic, they think it's dangerous, needs to be destroyed, and spend their days and nights trying to achieve that, generally by lying to their new recruits, and presenting themselves as something more akin to monster slayers/the BPRD. A lot of people join, because they want to be heroes, want to protect their families, and, at least until they've bought into the rhetoric, are only shown the horrific side of magic, and the least human-looking fae to just drive in that "this is different, this needs to die".

The Agency Org Chart - for a major city Agency, it generally looks like this:

1 Director

1 Field Agent + 1 Aide (Recruit)

1 Tech Agent + 1 Aide (Recruit)

1 Combat Agent + 1 Aide (Recruit)

1 Medical Agent + 1 Aide (Recruit)

1 Liaison Agent

Some miscellaneous staff agents

Well. Uh. Brisbane* has. Uh. Some of that when the first book starts.

Brisbane, as an Agency is...the kind of place that ends up towards the bottom of "Top 100" lists and gets a "Oh. Them." kind of reaction. They are not well-regarded, their scores and metrics are usually pretty bad, and more than once, there's been at least the idea of just tearing it down and starting from scratch.

(*Sue me, I wanted to set my book series where I was born, and where I was living until a few years ago :P).

They have:

1 Director (Comatose for decades at this point)

1 Field Agent/Acting Director

1 Combat Agent + Aide

1 Tech Agent

2 Medical Agents (Twins) (Menaces)

1 Liaison Agent (Asshole)

Some miscellaneous staff

So let's meet our babies.

Agent Ryan (Field Agent/Interim Director)

So, whatever charcterisation we had for Smith just...took a flying leap at some point, and this man became 100% Pure Dad. Not Daddy. Dad. Cut him open and you'll just find his code says "I want to look after people"/"I'd love someone to mentor"/"Please, I just want to read fairy tales to someone".

The beating heart of the series is the fact that Ryan looks at Stef in book #1, goes "this is the saddest fucking creature I have seen in my entire life, It's Free Daughter" speedruns Found Family, and loves someone who's never been loved before.

He's stressed out, he's overworked, he's given up any semblance of a personal life juggling the two roles without the assistance of an aide (when, at minimum, he's entitled to two). Just trying to hold things together enough so that his little, unimportant Agency stays just functional enough so that he and his fellow agents don't get recycled for parts.

Grey-Ace. Divorced. Much happier by himself than essentially having his father-figure/director encouraging him into relationships and basically..."comp allo"? (Yikes, Director, yikes).

(I have other art, but this piece of fanart remains one of my favourite depictions of him).

Agent Taylor (Combat Agent)

I mean, one look at Agent Jones and you go "well, that's the party tank", so that's what I made Taylor. He's the angriest goddamn redhead to have ever lived, and someone recruits make Chuck-Norris-style-jokes about.

A bit younger than Ryan...but also not really. About 20 years prior to the series starting, he got horrifically injured and died. As soon as Agents die, their code starts to degrade, dumping data and memories, so that it can't potentially be used against the Agency.

But his friends couldn't stand that he'd died, so immediately tried to start resurrecting him, but in the few minutes he was gone, that was enough for pretty much all of his memories to go, so when he woke up, he was basically starting with a blank slate. Thinks of his past self like the Doctor thinks of his past regenerations, the "that was me, but that's also another person that I am not".

But he'd rather punch people and snap necks and depersonalise to an unhealthy degree than get any amount of therapy.

I generally call him "kratosexual", if you're strong, he could be into you.

Agent Jones/Andrea Jones (Technical Agent)

So, this is where the name fuckery comes into play. For the entire fanfic run, we called Brown, "Jones", and well...it was the one name I couldn't stand to lose ("Jonesy" is so much fun to say), and the one name I decided it was okay to keep.

The youngest of the Agents (as he's a replacement for the previous Tech, who died) at just somewhere around 30, he's a lot of recruits' favourite agent, as they're the least intimidating, especially when she's smiling. While Taylor is terrifying, and Ryan is just...blank-faced and seemingly pretty emotionless, Jonesy is a Gamer who raids with his recruits, holds movie nights, will actually sit and talk to you about your problems, and has multiple recruits who actually contribute little or nothing, because he just wants them to have somewhere safe to live. (This is fine, Agency resources are basically infinite).

Tech is just also full to the brim with queer recruits, who revel in the fact that their boss is a bigender hottie who can basically swap between long-haired bishoenen and sexy librarian with a tap of a button in their HUD.

Agents Parker (Medical Agents)

The only main agents without a direct parallel, but a role I felt was necessary, if I was going to have human recruits - in the fanfic, Parker was a single agent, in the series, I wanted to explore what twin agents would be like.

The answer? Weird.

Twins cannot be created on demand, and only occur as a glitch during agent generation, and are usually amazing at whatever role they were created to do - the function as two halves of an indivudal, so in surgery, it's one person with four hands. They're always in each other's thoughts, and if deprived of this connection (ie, through a blackout or magical interference), they are basically debiliated, and cannot function.

The Parkers (Parker-2, left; Parker-1, right) do show different parts of their personality, with Two being openly brash, hostile, and likely to threaten medical experimentation if you piss him off; whereas One is known for the better bedside manner, and being the "better half" of the couple.

(They make Jamie and Cersei look like amateurs, they're on a level of twincest unimaginable by mortal beings, and that's as NSFW as I want to get).

Stef Mimosa (Recruit/Secondary Field Agent)

So what happens to an OC that you let percolate over multiple variants and twenty years? You get the wibbliest little of anxiety ever put to page.

Anxiety. Depression. Self-harm thoughts. Crippling lack of self-worth. DID. (And that last one's not played for jokes, she's a median system, and it's probably the only reason that she's even as barely functional as she is when she starts the series, because it's the voice in her head that will say "You haven't showered in a week" or "You haven't slept in two days".

Before the series starts, she basically spends all day sitting around writing bits of code, or just staring at the internet and until it's time to sleep again.

And then she meets Ryan (for the second time, there was an incident when she was a child, but you should read the book to find out about that), and...with the first bit of love and encouragement she's ever had in her life, she starts to slowly change and grow a bit.

Curt O'Connor (Field Recruit/Aide)

In the fanfic, about halfway through, a recruit reveals themselves to a rebel plant (a Bluepill working within the Matrix, because you would need some people like that, some people would need to be there full-time).

Hi Curt, Bye Curt. You were just there so I could make a reference to The Lizard, as a companion to Stef's Spider-Man.

Then I started all those drafts that I alluded to all the way at the top of this post. Curt's role got a bit bigger, but every time, maybe a third of the way through the book, he dies, usually being Stef's first kill.

And I just started to feel sorry for him. Like, I'd probably murdered him like twenty times by this point.

So the next time through, I went "Nope, you live this time", but kept the rebel/Solstice thing, and made him someone who had defected to the Agency after seeing the truth of what the Solstice did, and now has to survive with a bunch of recruits who have to keep themselves from attacking him in the hall, working for agents who...don't have much hope that he'll achieve much in his recruit career, as Solstice turncoats usually don't.

But he was useful, because it gave someone Stef to talk to that wasn't Ryan (who can't babysit her all the time, he has work to do), and someone who is surprisingly, imediately able to pick up on "oh, she's not neurotypical" and let Stef go at her own pace, even rigging an emergency AAC board when she has a bad moment and shuts down.

I remain very glad I decided to rescue him from the murder pile.

Our one goddamn straight guy.

Magnolia Hammond (Combat Aide)

Even more so than the Parkers, Mags doesn't really have a fanfic counterpart, and is one of the ones who takes the most advantage of being in a fantasy story, as she's half magpie.

(One of the violent, swooping, will-attack-humans, Aussie magpies, not those cute little things other places have).

Also, because Taylor largely likes to communicate in grunts and glares, she's the public face of the Combat department, and keeps things running.

She's competent to a point where, on more than one occasion, she's basically given an order to Ryan, which he's followed because he's not going to question her area of expertise.

As bisexual as the day is long. May absolutely be in love with Taylor, but isn't going to bother him with that, so keeps it professional.

So...wanna read it?

Happy to read online? Read it on our site, or Royal Road.

Want an ebook? Amazon and Other Retailers (or DM me)

We also have an in-progress audio adaptation, if that's easier.

At the moment, there are three full novels and a handful of short stories - Book #4 is on hiatus at the moment (and has been for some time) while I work on another project. (Which...might also be of some interest, but that's another post for another time).

[kineticallyanywhere]

so, you've talked about bad time travel storylines, do you have any examples of time travel storylines you thought were really well executed?

That’s really hard to answer because most of the time I hit a time travel story I like but then the story keeps going and the longer it goes the less I like it (see The Flash, see Homestuck) usually because they pull a retcon where multiple characters get character development we don’t actually get to see (The Flash s3, the retJohn). I want to go on about RvB’s use of time travel, but I’m hesitant to because they’re not done using it and part of me is still waiting to be burned (though I doubt they will, and even if they do the strength of every RvB character would carry me through it easily). All this thinking about it recently though has gotten me to realize what elements keep me in a time travel story:

Don’t skip out on character progression. Characters are allowed to start off as killers and end as pacifists, but for pete’s sake I want to see it. Convince me of it. Maybe you can do this to a character in the background, but don’t slide major protagonists in and out of entire relationships with characters they’ve spent years despising on a whim and a montage without expecting some readers/viewers to throw up a lot of question marks. (Time travel with great great character progression: Legends of Tomorrow.)

Ask not just if you can, but if you should. This is my most subjective point, I think, but if you’re not asking this question, even in passing, then why are you making your writing life this difficult? Why are you using time travel at all? And don’t just leave the question hanging, give us your answer. If you think that if we have it we should use it, they yell it from the rooftops. If you think that trying to change what we’ve already done is a waste of our energy and there’s a reason we don’t have time travel irl, then lay it on us. If you’re not getting philosophical even a tiny bit, you aren’t having enough fun. (Time travel that lays this out in one of my favorite speeches of all time: Red vs Blue)

Stick to your own rules. If your time travel created a new universe, keep making new universes. If your time travel works in loops, complete all your loops. If you’re changing your own universe, for the love of CRAP decide whether you’re making duplicates of yourself when you do and stick to it. (Honestly, this one mostly just annoys me. If 1 and 2 are done well enough, I’m usually willing to let this go.) (Time travel that plays by it’s own rules: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

I know how this might sound to some people, but I think the Star Trek reboot movies actually do these. It’s been a while since I’ve watched them, but they (#3) make new universe out of the new timeline, and they stay in it. They live with that consequence. (#2) Old-Spock being around makes you wonder what of his knowledge of the old timeline still applies. Should they even use it, or have things already changed too much for most of it to be relevant? (In Kahn’s case, at least, it comes in handy.) I don’t remember if they go into this much, but the question is still there. (#1) Finally, none of them suddenly become different people than the ones that were introduced at the beginning of the movie “because time travel”. The characters change from the original series because the timeline has changed (some characters are dead, new historical events have happened), but after that there’s no jumping around. Reboot-Kirk doesn’t suddenly become Old-Kirk just because now he knows there is/was a timeline where he got to know his dad.

I also liked the 9th and 10th Doctors on Doctor Who, the 4th Pokemon movie, Meet the Robinsons, Interstellar is a mind-bender but I liked it, Gravity Falls had some fun time travel, that one Kim Possible movie, Danny Phantom: Ultimate Enemy, I liked the show Heroes but I’d have to watch it again to tell you if it counts as good time travel overall cause I remember it being kinda sketchy, Madoka Magica, and then I haven’t watched it myself yet but I’ve heard great things about Steins Gate, and probably like six other things that I’m forgetting.