Continuum Archives
The Continuum Archives are the principal repository and authentication authority for records across the Continuum Universes. They function as a cross-reality archival complex: a place where information, artifacts, and verified histories are preserved, indexed, and made retrievable even when worlds diverge, collapse, or rewrite their own timelines.
In practice, the Archives serve as the “source of record” for Continuum scholarship—especially for standardized bodies like the Continuum Biological Registry.
Purpose and function
The Archives exist to solve a brutal multiversal truth: history does not stay put.
Core functions include:
- Preservation — storing documents, specimens, and encoded memory records in redundant, reality-hardened formats.
- Authentication — maintaining provenance chains so researchers can tell the difference between original records, local copies, and timeline-edited debris.
- Indexing — providing stable identifiers and cross-references that survive changes in language, taxonomy, and even physical law.
- Translation and equivalence mapping — reconciling records from worlds whose concepts of time, biology, or matter do not align neatly.
Structure
The Continuum Archives are commonly described as a single institution, but field accounts suggest a composite structure:
- Anchored access points — entry sites that manifest differently depending on universe conditions and local metaphysics.
- Vault stacks — deep storage for high-integrity artifacts and restricted records.
- Index engines — catalog systems that maintain persistent crosslinks (often using registry codes and revision histories).
- Sealed wings — quarantined sections for hazardous knowledge, memetic contamination, or unresolved authenticity disputes.
Relationship to Continuum taxonomy
Because multiversal biology can produce overlapping names and wildly incompatible “life” definitions, the Archives host authoritative copies of:
- CBR revision logs and deprecated synonym lists
- taxonomic type specimens (or their Luxiva/Carbonia equivalents)
- biosignature baselines used to verify field reports
This is why many taxon pages cite the Archives indirectly via the Continuum Biological Registry.