Oni2:Truth Number Zero/Course Of Events
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This is a detailed list of key elements in Oni's canon (and TNZ fanon), their approximate date/time and how they follow from one another.
- For a more compact presentation, see TNZ/Timeline. For a wishlist/roadmap of TNZ-oriented mods, see TNZ/Wishmap.
In line with the TNZ philosophy, new terminology and chronology is kept to a minimum -- keeping the amount of data close to Oni's, with just a few blanks filled in according to Occam's razor.
Divergence & Emergence
If we look for the "roots" of Oni's story, we will soon identify several key entities that make Oni's world different from ours and set it in an alternate history (with a "fork" somewhere in the late XX century).
World history from before the end of the XX century is never referenced in Oni, other than in a broad linguistic/cultural sense (two notable entities from the real world are the United States and the Mafia).
- Interestingly, the closest thing to a weapon of mass destruction -- at the time of Oni's events -- seems to be the "Xiox destruct mechanism", so:
- either the World Coalition Government made modern WMDs a thing of the past, or
- the "fork" between our world and Oni's happened sooner, in the early XX century.
- For what it's worth, the manual mentions biowarfare (and even nukes), so it would appear that WMDs did exist at some point, but were dismantled.
The Network
The ingame-canon "History of the Syndicate" tells us of a "young and agile" organization -- "the faceless Network" -- that superseded the Mafia because it was better suited for the "techno-centric world of the twenty first century".
(We are also told that the Network established dominance "within twelve years", that it was in place by the time the WCG was instituted, and that it "survived the chaos of the world riots" by evolving into the paramilitary Syndicate.)
The emergence of the Network must have started in the late 90s, 2000 at the latest. By 2010 its unbalanced criminal power (and the booming development of Phase Tech) represented a huge risk that prompted the Great Uprising.
Phase Tech
Along with "conservative" technology (vehicles, computers, architecture), Oni's world features multiple instances of what we'd call "sci-fi tech": weapons firing plasma balls or energy beams, force fields, invisibility cloaks, regeneration, teleportation and telekinesis - as well as "mysterious entities" that "seem to exist out of Earth phase". When interviewed, Oni's authors acknowledge the existence of a parallel world, from which at least some of these sci-fi entities and phenomena are said to originate.
- (Among other things, Bungie's writers admitted having considered a plot variant for Oni 2 that would have challenged mankind -- and Konoko? -- with an invasion of hostile/misunderstood Screaming Cells.)
There is no collective term for all the "alien magic" in Oni canon, but a recurrent word when describing various sci-fi items is "phase", therefore it would make sense to refer to the parallel world(s) as "The Phase", and to the technology as "Phase Tech".
The emergence of Phase science/technology is not detailed in Oni, but it would seem that it starts in the late XX century: phenomena that were previously considered "paranormal" become more and more reproducible until, by 2032, Phase Tech has become commonplace and rather well-studied (although heavily regulated by the WCG). In the 2000s, though -- before the regulations kicked in -- it was still a blooming/booming field, holding great opportunity and risk. The Network was about to seize control of Phase Tech (by hogging all the best scientists a) when the Great Uprising happened.
- (The superpowers granted to Konoko by her Daodan Chrysalis are described as "unearthly" by the scientists and, towards the end of Oni, are increasingly perceived as a little-understood otherworldly threat. Even if we dismiss the noisy glow observed during Daodan overpower as "just" a form of St._Elmo's_fire, the telekinetic power of Konoko's final ecstasy tends to classify the Daodan as an instance of "phase magic" -- man-studied, but not man-made -- even though this is never stated explicitly.)
Cyber- and bio-punk
Oni is heavily influenced by cyberpunk (first and foremost Ghost in the Shell). The Deadly Brain from CHAPTER 02 . ENGINES OF EVIL would have been quite at home in Stand Alone Complex, and Shinatama is wired to Damocles in a very GITS-like fashion, too. Many technologies referenced in Oni's data can be classified as cyberpunk: "micromechanical fabrication cells", "theta wave scans", "sub-dermal transponders", "neural links" etc.
All these technologies are fairly commonplace at the time of Oni's events (2032) -- even if some of them still need adjustment, or are still in a cautious development phase. However, we do not know how bar back in time the development of cyber-tech goes, at which point it diverged from modern-world cybernetics, and to what extent it was helped/powered by the emergence of Phase Tech in Oni's world.
Apart from cybernetics and man-machine interfaces, some of the science in Oni qualifies as "alternative/radical biology". For example, Bertram Navarre's "retasking" of human cells is described as biological engineering -- the cells are 'told' to behave differently, which leads to a new "reshaped" physiology, apparently without cybernetic implants.
Konoko's Chrysalis is also presented as a free-running biological process (akin to cancer). Even though it is heavily monitored (including through sub-dermal cybernetic implants), and seems to be at least partly of transdimensional origin, the notion of a "hyperevolved clone" gradually "devouring" the host's organs is fundamentally biological. The key role of "Daodan symbiosis" in Oni's plot qualifies the story as bio-punk rather than the more typical cyber-punk.
Another special mention goes to the Simulated Life Doll concept, which is "an attempt to recreate human physiology with artificial materials" - i.e., synthetic tissue is grown into a human-like neural network, and memories/emotions that are shaped through "brain engrams" coming from a human donor. Another staple of Oni's bio-punk orientation, the SLD technology was seemingly developed in the first two decades of the XXI century (Shinatama was apparently made in 2020 or so), and in 2032 new progress is still being made.