: Maybe I'm out of date on the settings of those chapters, but would the
: player's terminal-interface software even be able to interpret the ancient
: Jjaro calendar functions? Pfhor computer systems may have changed a lot in
: 12000 years as well.
: What I mean is, you could use that as an excuse to leave the date
: indeterminate.
That's an interesting idea, though it would need to be adjusted a bit. In Eternal I interpret the consistent general appearance of terminals everywhere, as well as the fact that everything is translated into English, as a product of a little device I call a "cyberneural adjunct". Basically, it's a program running in either your implants or your armor/helmut (haven't specified which) which does a number of nice useful things for you without you having to think about it - think of it like a subconscious Google on crack. One example of this is that seamlessly alters your vision in various useful ways, such as automatic text translation - you look at something in another language, it scans it, translates it, and shows you the translated version in it's place. I also use this excuse for why chargers everywhere in Eternal are orange/green/magenta instead of red/yellow/magenta (which I changed for aesthetic reasons). For ease of identification, your cyberneural adjunct creates a hue overlay for all such devices it can recognize. The "red bars" in terminals are also created by this program.
But your idea might still work. Your cyberneural adjunct has to figure out the time in some way. One method I'm fond of for time-travel stories is a variant on the stellar positioning system. You look at the stars from wherever you are and, knowing how the stars are arranged in the galaxy, could hypothetically figure out from where the stars would look like they do here, and thus where you must be. If you also know how the stars are moving, and thus can extrapolate past or future stellar positions, you could use the same routing to figure out when you are. But of course, such extrapolation gets more inaccurate the further back or forward you look, or the further from your spatial reference point (as data for further reaches would be less accurate), so you could go somewhere so long ago and far away that the system gives up and says "I dunno where or when the hell we are."
