The Negentropic Cylinder
By Nelson McKeeby
A Problem with Suspended Animation
The Negentropic Cylinder began as an attempt to solve a problem that bothered me in science fiction. I had read stories in which people reached the future through suspended animation, including Laurence Manning's work, and I knew the older Buck Rogers idea of a gas that could leave a man unconscious for centuries. I enjoyed those stories, but the mechanism never satisfied me. The mind seemed to me to be an active process. A living person was not a machine that could simply be switched off, stored, and switched back on without something happening to the machinery in between. Chemical sleep still required a living body. Freezing created another set of problems. Even at eleven, I could see that preserving a person for centuries by slowing biology was different from preventing anything from happening to that person at all.
I had also been reading science behind science fiction. My notes from that period wandered through many subjects, and I did not preserve enough bibliographic detail to reconstruct every edition or article I saw. The ideas that stayed with me came from thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Rudolf Clausius gave me the language of entropy as a physical quantity associated with heat and irreversible change. Ludwig Boltzmann connected entropy to the number of microscopic arrangements available to a system. I was especially attracted to Shannon entropy because it described uncertainty among possible outcomes. I did not combine these into a valid physical theory. I used them as the basis of a fictional rule: if physical change depends on a system having possible states through which it can develop, then a device that drove that freedom of change toward zero might also drive experienced time toward zero.
Entropy and Time
The relationship I wrote for myself was simple. Normal entropy corresponded to normal time. As entropy decreased, the rate at which time appeared to pass inside the controlled system decreased with it. At zero, nothing inside the system could change. No chemical reaction could advance, no neuron could fire, no cell could metabolize, and no thought could occur. The person inside would not sleep through the intervening centuries because there would be no experienced interval to sleep through. The concept was much closer to removing a piece of a person's timeline and joining the two exposed ends together.
I called that effect a butt splice. The term came from joining two ends directly together. A traveler entered the Cylinder, the door closed, and the next event available to that traveler was the door opening again. From the inside, those events were adjacent. Ten minutes, ten years, or a thousand years could pass outside without producing an internal duration. The traveler did not feel cold, hunger, boredom, stiffness, aging, or unconsciousness. There was no subjective black interval. The closing and opening were experienced as the same moment.
That idea became the permanent center of the technology. I left the actual engineering deliberately vague. The fictional setting could say that the Cylinder forced a local condition in which entropy and therefore internal temporal change went to zero, but I did not try to invent coils, particles, field equations, or a control system that would pretend to explain a machine I could not really explain. The important part for the stories and game was the consequence. Once the door closed, the occupant could not do anything until the Cylinder opened. The machine did not preserve a conscious observer through time; it removed the observer from experienced time.
The Shape of the Cylinder
The visual form came from something much less abstract. My grandfather took me to Ybor City, and cigar tubes were common there. Romeo y Julieta Churchill cigars and Romeo No. 1 and No. 3 cigars came in tubes, and Punch used similar containers. I remember grayish and silver tubes. Older men later gave me clean empty ones to use for crafts when my grandfather took me walking at the Pier. I lined them up. Rows of those cigar tubes became the first physical model in my mind for a room full of Negentropic Cylinders.
My first drawings of Cylinder rooms grew directly from those objects. The proportions were narrow and individual. A Cylinder was a container for one person and the material packed with that person. It was not a large chamber with a crew standing together inside it. Each traveler had a separate unit, and a Project installation therefore contained rows of repeated cylindrical forms. That image survived because it immediately imposed useful physical rules. A person had to fit. Equipment had to fit. Every additional object consumed volume that could have held something else.
The cigar connection also worked its way into the stories. One early story had Project people trading cigars with people they encountered in the future. That was typical of how I developed the setting. I would see or handle something, learn how it was used, and then find a place where it made sense in the fiction. The Cylinder itself began with thermodynamics, science fiction, and a childhood argument about consciousness, but its actual silhouette came from an ordinary manufactured object I could hold in my hand.
One-Way Time Travel
I never regarded the Cylinder as a conventional time machine. Time travel was already happening continuously. Everyone moves forward through time and never returns to an earlier moment. The Cylinder changed the rate at which the traveler experienced that movement. It therefore had no reverse setting and no mechanism for returning to the world the traveler left. A person who entered one accepted a one-way departure.
The date of emergence was also outside the traveler's control. The early Cylinders did not have a dial on which someone could enter a year and expect the machine to open on schedule. A traveler could not know whether the outside interval would be decades or centuries. This uncertainty was part of the idea from the beginning. The machine offered survival into the future without promising which future would be reached.
That constraint solved an important storytelling problem before I thought of it in those terms. Characters did not arrive with a reliable briefing on the world waiting outside. They could know why they entered the Cylinder, what equipment they carried, and what the world had been like when the door closed. They could not know which governments had survived, what languages had changed, what cities remained, which technologies were still operating, or what new dangers had appeared. The player's ignorance and the character's ignorance could overlap naturally. Exploration did not require the game master to pretend that trained characters had somehow forgotten their own setting.
The lack of a return trip strengthened the same structure. Information discovered in the future could not simply be carried back to Project planners so that a better-equipped second attempt could be prepared. A mistake in packing remained a mistake. A missing tool remained missing until the team could acquire or make another one. A dead specialist could not be replaced by returning to the departure point. The travelers had committed themselves to the future, and play continued from the consequences of that commitment.
The Cylinders Before Project Negentropy
The Cylinders were never originally human technology. In the first stories, an ancient culture had made them long before Project Negentropy existed. Alien peoples later acquired the devices and used them for long journeys through space and for landing on planets. That history let the Cylinders appear on Earth as artifacts whose makers and complete operating principles were unknown. Human beings could learn to use them without understanding everything behind them.
This was also the foundation for the earliest hidden history. Breaker LaBatre was enclosed in a Cylinder in 1870. In the story I wrote in 1979, Dustin-Rhodes scientists eventually opened that Cylinder in 1900. The encounter gave Dustin-Rhodes direct evidence that the devices worked and that a person could cross decades without experiencing the interval. The details of Dustin-Rhodes were still sparse, and the organization changed repeatedly in later stories, but the basic relationship was already present: Project Negentropy did not invent the Cylinder. Human institutions found an existing technology and built a program around what they could learn to do with it.
That decision was useful because it protected the mystery of the machine. If Project engineers had designed the Cylinders themselves, they should have known their operating limits, failure modes, manufacturing methods, and theoretical basis in considerable detail. By making them inherited technology, I could keep the useful rules definite while leaving the deeper science unresolved. A Cylinder could have known behavior without becoming a machine that twentieth-century engineers could reproduce whenever they wanted another one.
A Survival Kit with a Person in It
From the beginning I thought about the contents like a Boy Scout thinking about a survival kit. The traveler was only part of what the Cylinder carried. Food, clothing, tools, weapons, books, radios, medical supplies, scientific instruments, and other equipment could travel because they were enclosed in the same zero-change condition. Nothing aged inside. Batteries did not discharge. Food did not spoil. Metal did not corrode. Medicines did not decay. A packed Cylinder therefore allowed the Project to send a carefully selected package of capability into an unknown future.
The finite interior volume was essential. Every person required a separate Cylinder, and each Cylinder could hold only so much. A larger item displaced several smaller ones. A specialist without the tools needed for that specialty could become much less useful. Carrying more ammunition meant carrying less medicine, less scientific equipment, fewer spare parts, or less food. That was not an inventory puzzle added later for game balance. It followed from the shape of the object I had imagined and from the way I was thinking about expeditions.
The model I had in mind came partly from people who treated equipment as something chosen for actual work. Boy Scout manuals emphasized a limited collection of useful tools and the knowledge to use them. The man connected with Jacques Cousteau's Calypso whom I interviewed again in 1979 made a similar impression on me. He was careful with equipment because an Aqualung, an outboard motor, a rifle, or another tool had a specific purpose and had to continue working when it was needed. Project equipment developed from the same attitude. The answer to uncertainty was not to give every character an unlimited warehouse. It was to decide what deserved the limited space.
The Value of Finite Volume
Players soon recognized the disadvantage. A small Cylinder limited vehicles, machinery, fuel, weapons, stores, and spare parts. It also limited the number of people who could be sent. These restrictions were repeatedly challenged once the game entered regular play. The suggestions were sensible from the characters' point of view: make the Cylinders larger, find a way to put several people in one, increase their carrying capacity, or add some advanced energy source that removed the practical restrictions imposed by compact equipment.
I kept the limitations because removing them changed the kind of game I wanted. A team with unlimited transport, unlimited power, unlimited supplies, and an unlimited replacement pipeline would not have to learn very much about the future. It could arrive as a self-contained technological colony. The small Cylinder forced the team to depend on knowledge, repair, trade, local materials, local people, and whatever infrastructure had survived. Project technology could give the characters an advantage without allowing them to carry an entire civilization through the door.
This became particularly visible in vehicle design. Early Pipe Cars had to fit the available transport concept. I physically weighed components and electric motors and worked with a science teacher on the relationship among speed, mass, and power. Even after I allowed X-Tech to improve power output and storage capacity, the cars remained small and consumed electricity rapidly. Players proposed more powerful fictional energy technologies. Those proposals would have solved the inconvenience, but they would also have removed a constraint that generated decisions throughout the game. I kept the weaker, finite system.
The same reasoning applied to Cylinder size. If a vehicle had to be compact because it had to travel in or through the Cylinder system, then compactness created consequences after emergence. A small vehicle carried less. A small generator produced less. A small machine could not perform every industrial job. The team might possess equipment far beyond what local people could manufacture, yet still need a mill, a blacksmith, a dam, a farm, a boatyard, an animal team, or a workshop. Technology opened possibilities while leaving the surrounding world relevant.
Uncontrolled Emergence
Players also had reasons to want control over the opening date. A predictable Cylinder would permit coordinated deployments. Several travelers could enter separate units and know they would all emerge on the same morning. Supplies could be staged for a known year. A mission could be aimed at a specific political crisis. That would make the Project more efficient, but it would undermine the uncertainty that made the Cylinder interesting to me.
I kept emergence uncontrolled because the future was supposed to be encountered rather than selected. A team entered with plans formed in one historical world and had to discover whether those plans still made sense. A settlement expected to survive might be gone. A city expected to be ruined might have become the center of a new state. A road might have disappeared, a river changed course, a language shifted, or a technology been preserved for reasons nobody in the past could predict. The Cylinder did not deliver characters to an appointment. It delivered them to consequences.
This also made time itself a source of separation. People who entered different Cylinders could emerge at different external times. A person could be effectively lost without dying. A team could discover another Cylinder whose occupant had entered earlier but had not yet emerged, or could encounter the remains of a mission that had opened generations before. The technology created chronological distance without requiring anyone to travel backward. It allowed the setting to accumulate layers of Project activity and incomplete knowledge.
Why the Cylinder Stayed Simple
As Negentropy grew, I added thousands of pages of detail to the world, but I never wanted the Cylinder to become a complicated piece of game machinery. Its operating rules were more useful when they remained short. A person and equipment go inside. The Cylinder closes. No internal time passes. The outside interval cannot be controlled by the traveler. The Cylinder eventually opens. Travel is forward only. Capacity is finite. Those rules create most of the situations I need.
The simplicity also kept the Cylinder from becoming an all-purpose answer. It could preserve something, but it could not tell the Project what would happen. It could move a person through time, but it could not bring the person home. It could protect supplies from decay, but only the supplies that fit. It could preserve sophisticated machinery, but it could not manufacture replacement parts after emergence. It could move knowledge forward in books and trained minds, but it could not guarantee that the surrounding society would value or understand that knowledge.
Those limits are why I resisted turning the technology into a general super-science device. Once a fictional machine can solve every logistical or physical problem, every new problem invites another feature. The Cylinder remained more useful when it did one extraordinary thing and forced ordinary reality to resume immediately afterward. The door opens, gravity works, batteries have finite capacity, food has to be grown, wounds have to be treated, machines wear, people disagree, governments have their own interests, and the travelers have to make decisions with whatever they actually brought.
The Cylinder as the Beginning of Play
When Negentropy began regular play in 1980, the opening of a Cylinder provided a natural first scene. Players knew the premise of one-way travel and had usually read some notes, but their characters still had to determine where and when they were. The first adventure, Alpha India, used that structure. The door opening was not merely a dramatic entrance. It established the basic relationship between the team and the setting: the Troubleshooters possessed training and equipment from one world and information that belonged to another.
That opening also made exposition unnecessary. I did not have to give players a long lecture describing every culture, state, road, language, danger, or historical event. The characters could observe those things, ask questions, make wrong assumptions, consult their records, and revise their understanding. A game built around discovery could teach its own setting through play.
The Cylinder therefore connected the science-fiction premise to the role-playing method. It explained why the characters were outsiders, why they had unusual equipment, why their knowledge could be both advanced and obsolete, why they had no easy route home, and why they needed to deal seriously with the people already living in the future. It also gave me a way to keep writing new places. The world did not have to be completely defined before the first game because the team could only encounter one part of it at a time.
What Survived
Many details of Negentropy changed after 1979. The Project became more developed, the future history expanded, the Kindred changed enormously, the BEM and Clicker ideas acquired new classifications, and the equipment system grew from early notes into large sourcebooks. The Cylinder changed much less because its original constraints continued to do useful work.
Its visual origin is still a row of cigar tubes from Ybor City. Its fictional principle is still the butt splice: the closing and opening of the door are adjacent events for the occupant. Travel is still one-way because time itself is one-way. The opening date is still outside the traveler's control. People and equipment still consume finite space. The Project still has to decide what is worth sending, and the people who emerge still have to live with that decision.
The Cylinder began as my answer to a question about suspended animation, but it became the device that organized the rest of the game. It creates the unknown future without requiring backward time travel. It turns equipment selection into commitment. It preserves the travelers' knowledge while making some of that knowledge obsolete. It gives Project technology enormous power while preventing that technology from replacing the world the characters enter. Most of all, it forces the story to continue forward. Once the door closes, there is no reset and no trip home. The next thing the traveler sees is whatever the future has become.