The black sphere, known as the scioptic sphere, is an artifact of incredible power and mystery. Its history begins some time in the future, when a scientist develops a device that can capture a viewer’s physical presence and transfer it into a scioptic panorama (a sort of 3D photograph). It serves as a time portal where the viewer can experience the physical reality of a particular scene taken through the light of the scioptic sphere and interact with the people and objects within.
By using the black sphere together with a classic projector, the user can travel into the projected images. Due to the dimensional schism created during a scioptic transfer, there’s a time limit to how long a traveler can stay within the photograph before it closes, burning everything inside, including the traveler within.
However, you can stay within the picture indefinitely, but only if authorized. If not, the wraith will seek you out and kill you.
When Aron travels inside the 3D space of a photo, it slowly becomes a cinemagraph, where details move to reveal an untold story. Early on, the audience learns that in this world anything can happen and that he is never safe. It's hypnotic, dark, and scary, but he has to experience it to learn the truth.
In the future, humans developed sentient AI. Society became controlled by a human and AI plutocracy.
They invented the scioptic as a tool of state control and surveillance. The first iteration allowed them to enter a physical space and project a 360 degree image of the historical actions within that space from a certain time in the past to the present. Like a 3D hologram, it was limited in terms of size, an area up to a few hundred meters, only possible inside buildings. They could observe transgressions, perpetrators of crime, their victims…everything that happened during the period of recording. It collected quantum traces from the material of the building, then simulated them to replay history.
The second iteration of the device went further, this time allowing physical entry of a person into the simulation itself. A photograph taken with the scioptic sphere, later replayed via a projection allowed the observer to enter in to the other world. Police could take a surveillance image from a recent crime scene, for example, enter the photo, move around, live in the sim as it plays out. No longer confined to the physical space alone, they’re free to roam within the world of the sim to assess the crime. Once they have gathered the necessary information, they return to the real world to apprehend the criminals.
In 1825, at the birth of photography, a man named Nicophore Niepce invented a light sensitive emulsion to capture a photographic image on the back of his pinhole camera, known at the time as a camera obscura. He exposed a mundane image, a rooftop from an apartment window in Paris.
But news of his stunning invention came to the ears of a man who is today synonymous with photography, Louis Daguerre, and soon the two began collaborating.
But it wasn’t long afterwards that Niepce died. Suddenly. Daguerre went on to become a very rich man, but by all accounts plagued with guilt, he bartered the French government into providing a pension for Niepce’s descendants. Niepce’s son never forgave Daguerre for the theft of his father’s invention.
Years later, an archivist discovered some of Niepce’s journals hidden in the attic of an old windmill near Lyons, in which he disclosed some of his secrets, including one so startling it heightened conviction that Niepce must have been suffering from Alzheimer’s before his death (never proven).
He claimed in the journal that he had been visited by a man and a woman (Aron´s parents) from the future who had given him a black sphere, the size of marble, something they called a scioptic sphere, and told him what it could do. The journal entry was written a day before his death.
A nano-shadow form of energy was created called a Reactive Antimatter Hologram (nick-named the Wraith). Any non-authorized personnel using the scioptic sphere and entering a sim would be destroyed.
The wraith is there to detect non-authorized personnel and destroy them before they can possibly affect the future. The wraith emerges from the quantum foam and takes an antimatter, shadow form of the non-authorized person. Contact made, the person disintegrates.
Aron Black was the child of a high level autocrat family. His parents, Daniel and Elizabeth Black, worked in the Department of Scioptic Affairs. But one day Elizabeth discovered a powerful plutocrat was operating a secret program - giant silos with cruel inhuman experiments conducted on thousands of innocents.
Elizabeth and Daniel unmasked the activity but instead of stopping it, the Plutocracy accused them of treason and sentenced them to death. They fled with their infant child and escaped using a new development in scioptic science: ANY photograph could be used as a portal when projected with the scioptic sphere. This allowed them to escape, eventually arriving in 1826 in France where they met the father of photography, Nicophore Niepce.
Elizabeth and Daniel also took with them the nascent technology that could allow travel back out from the photo sims into the REAL TIMELINE at the point the photo was taken (i.e in history) rather than in current time. In other words - time travel.
They brought with them a collection of photographs from different periods in history. Their ultimate intention - to travel to the real timeline in the past and stop key developments that led to the rise of the AI plutocracy. To change the past and alter the future to prevent the AI plutocracy from ever coming into being.
When the AI plutocrats learned of their disappearance, they sent assassins after them. The wraith won’t kill them because the family were authorized scioptic travelers - the family carries an epigenetic nano-signature, which the wraith can detect as authorization. But the nano-signature over time also causes other symptoms…a slow loss of memory and epigenetic changes, some quite deleterious (as well as some quite useful.)
Elizabeth and Daniel arrived in the real timeline with Aron still a baby, and hid in plain sight as Elizabeth and Daniel Nemus. But when 9-year-old Aron Nemus dies from a tree fall, their grief drives them to enter a sim in order to find an alternate Aron so as to reanimate their son. They succeed, Aron’s revived, but Daniel and Elizabeth are dead in the real dimension and Aron has no memories of what happened to him.
Over the story, he will learn of his parents history and his own destiny - to prevent the devastation of the future by stopping the person who will invent a new form of AI - Kate Bergman’s son, Jack.