Chronivac Fanthropology

1

I had an idle thought this morning about Chronivac as a story element in TF, so my Tumblr followers and I did some digging. Mostly, I was wondering how it emerged as such a complex, and yet universally understood, element in our subculture. I don’t know of any piece of mainstream media it’s referencing, which is the origin point for other TF kinks like flubber, The Mask, and ghost possession. It’s also not inherently linked with a hardwired kink complex (musk, feet, piss, etc.), except insofar as it relates to transformation and retconned changes, which is a pretty derived kink already.

Basically, I’m wondering if anyone here has any info on where Chronivac as a name and a set of characteristics–a magitech device that allows the user to change reality with subjects either aware or unaware–emerges from. I was able to trace it back to a Geocities account connected to a man named Mark Kwestin and a story called The Chronivac Diaries, but most of the site wasn’t crawled on the Wayback machine, so I don’t know if he refers to any other sources. I’d welcome any information on that, if only so that we can recognise Mr. Kwestin if it was in fact his original idea, and hopefully read some of his writing!

3 Likes
2

There’s Chronivac and the closely related Sk8r Dreams with its Maker device by Reaver.

Reaver’s Playing the Maker (1999) on Nifty “was inspired by Jr Parz’s story Master PC”

CYOC (2002) had the Maker/Sk8r Dreams stories added to the Chronivac interactives.

I contributed a guest chapter but many of the subsequent storylines devolved into underage material that I found obnoxious, to say the least.

https://www.cyoc.net/interactives/story_24.html

1 Like
3

Okay, that’s weird. I distinctly remember finding those original Chronivac stories a few years ago. I also saw the acknowledgement in the CYOC page and Waybacked it. At the time, 2 of the 3 links still worked. It’s sad that they seem to have gone.

As to the story itself, I do remember some of it. Firstly, the original Chronivac machine was actually quite limited. It could make you younger or older; that’s it. The clue is in the name: Chron- (‘time’) and -vac (‘vacuum’). You could set it to either suck a desired number of years off the target (yourself or others) and reverse it to age back up.

I wasn’t able to read the whole thing at the time, so I don’t know if the machine stored ‘your’ years as ‘yours only’, or whether you could steal/give your excess age to someone else.

(I haven’t thought about this story in ages, but now that I’m typing all this, it’s all coming back to me.)

IIRC, the main character is a thirty-something called Jake, who is tall and broad and hairy, and absolutely hates it. He misses the body he had in high school, which was slim and hairless. (See the title: “Li’l Jake”) I think the story opened with him having a lovely dream where he still looked like that, and he’s miserable when he wakes up in his body. (Oh look; body dysphoria. I didn’t know about that term when I last read this story.)

The other characters are his best friend, and the lady he rents from. They are all friends, about the same age. (I think there’s a scene where they’re all having pizza while watching TV together; to establish character, you know.)

Then the Chronivac arrives, and Jake experiments with it, and it’s all his dreams come true. He uses it on the other two characters. They’re suddenly all about 16* and have sex. (I think.)

As I said, I wasn’t able to read the whole thing at the time, so I’m doubtless missing a lot of detail.

*I’m not sure. I’m fairly sure they were younger than 18, but not by much. It wasn’t like the CYOC Chronivac, where it seems like every other chapter involves 12 year olds. (As opposed to actual adult minds temporarily in teenage bodies.)

But as to the Chronivac concept, I’m not sure why it evolved the way it did. These days, it seems narratively little different to JR Parz’s Master PC. Perhaps there was a niche for the more powerful Chronivac because so many of the Master PC stories were hetero harem fantasies.

You know the formula; some flavour of late 90’s/early 00’s nerd stereotype discovers the Master PC and makes himself into the author’s power fantasy. He then uses the WORLD-ALTERING DEVICE to get revenge on his bullies/ abusers, and turn a handful of women into comically big-breasted sluts (these two categories frequently overlap). They routinely have no agency in the story, and are there to sate the sexual urges of the main character, either directly or by having male-targeted Steamy Lesbian Sex with another harem member.

Of course, I’m oversimplifying. The more interesting Master PC writers, including JR Parz himself, explored the concept more deeply, or at least made all the named characters actual people.

2 Likes
4

Oh that’s fascinating, thank you so much for sharing! Now that I think about it, Chronivac as a term originating in age change stories makes a ton of sense :sweat_smile: And the fact that there was a concept that is functionally more aligned with the contemporary Chronivac in the Master PC is certainly very interesting. Now that I think of it, I think BRK over on Metabods has some stories about world-editing programs where he also invents new terminology for the idea.

Again, thanks for sharing what you know about the story! I’m not really one for age regression stories, but I can see why the concept caught on in the specific way it did on CYOC. The melding of the name with the concept of the Master PC makes sense, if the Chronivac was initially associated with gay erotica, while the Master PC was often about straight power fantasies.

5

Now that I think about it; Chronivac’s evolution may be directly linked to sites like CYOC. People collaborating on an interactive story might be more likely to take it in new directions. In contrast, Master PC was relatively centralised*, and people wrote separate stories. The original story attracted people with particular preferences/fetishes. They write more stories in the same vein, which draws in more like-minded people.

*I had to go looking, and the index is still preserved on the Alt Sex Stories Text Repository (ASSTR). If you’re interested, I found the Index page here. The two hyperlinks in the first section (directly above the first story listing) give JR Parz’s inspirations, and his guidelines for writing your own Master PC stories.

1 Like
6

This is interesting, I’ve always wondered about the origins of a lot common constructs of the TF space (Chronivac, Great Shift, Medallions, etc.) but given the nature of this type of stuff, a lot of the source material is either tough to ascertain or completely lost and only exists in memory. Especially since a lot of these ideas are fairly unique to kink spaces and don’t pop up much outside of it, despite the ideas themselves not necessarily being inherently sexual and having a lot of interesting potential.

Wherever they originated, I do heavily associate these types of tropes with interactive fiction and I feel like those types of stories are mainly responsible for their continued proliferation. Prefab concepts with broad use cases naturally lend themselves to an interactive format because it supports a “yes and” style of storytelling where people don’t really have to worry about structure a story and can just play around with ideas.

1 Like
7

I’ll add that what was written above has also been my impression of the history behind the Chronivac as a concept. (I got curious about why it’s called the Chronivac too, some time ago, and went looking to see if I could find the origin point of the name. :sweat_smile: )

I 100% remember reading gay MasterPC stories 20 years back, and there weren’t too many of them at the time which were gay. (Actually, our own @MonsterMash62 contributed some key stories to this genre, though most of them are Amazon ebooks and not on the site.) But that point was the first time I’d ever seen ‘reality-changing program’ as a trope. Interestingly, nearly all the gay MasterPC stories that I can think of from that era featured some elements of turnabout, which is a trope I think of as key to the Chronivac genre. (Aka, it starts out like a power fantasy, and then someone else gets control of the program and flips the tables on the original character.) I’m not sure if the straight MasterPC stories featured that as heavily.

My vague impression—which may not be accurate, tbh!—is that Chronivac was an unrelated trope for a while, which initially focused entirely on age-related changes. (I think I also did find that original story when trying to find the source of the term.) Then it seems like it drifted to CYOC as a concept…? And, as more and more people got their hands on the concept, they didn’t realize it was meant to change only ages, so it kinda mutated to mean any changes? So it essentially became MasterPC by a different name.

I think a big shift actually happened with Tumblr, tbh, from like 2013 to 2017. Smartphones were more a thing by then, and pre-porn-ban Tumblr had a ton of blogs who mainly wrote Chronivac stories where the program was now an app on one’s phone, instead of a computer program. (A lot of those blogs got purged but absqrst is one who comes to mind, and Jake Landry, and a number of others…) Those stories were often from the POV of the person who gets controlled, too, which is a big shift from many MasterPC stories. And they played with obliviousness a lot. My feeling is that this era on Tumblr, and those stories, really defined the contemporary idea of the Chronivac in gay erotica.

An interesting difference, for me, between MasterPC and Chronivac is that I’d often see stories where MasterPC was running on some super-old computer, and you couldn’t transfer it to a more modern computer. So there was this aspect of MasterPC being this weird retro magi-tech, and one that’s often tied to a specific location too (like, a specific room in one’s house). Since an older PC is not terribly portable. And also, as it’s easier to leave a computer unattended, another trope I saw occasionally with MasterPC was the original controller setting ‘traps’ in the program for anyone who tries to access the PC without permission. So if someone else tried to use the program, the ‘trap’ would activate and transform them in some way (like, into a dumb sexpot), and stop them from making further changes.

Chronivac meanwhile became increasingly synonymous with being a phone app, and a lot of stories would begin with someone downloading it onto their phone. It also meant that, since it’s not a clunky PC in another room, the controller could continue making changes to reality mid-sex… since they’re just holding the phone in their hands. I feel like that added a lot of fun to stories that played with obliviousness, in a way that wasn’t as easy to do with MasterPC.

On the other hand, all smartphones have that auto-lock feature, and rarely leave one’s hands, so the older trope of “I need to set a magic booby-trap in case someone else gets their hands on this program when I’m away and tries to use it” faded out of the lexicon, for the most part.

I don’t really have sources to cite here, also. I may be getting a lot of exact chronology wrong. :sweat_smile: Just my vague, vibes-based recollections.

6 Likes
8

Wow. So interesting to read all of this.

Nu’s thinking seems to be close to what I would guess happened, based on my own memories.

I don’t think I went down any CYOC rabbit holes far enough to get to any ick age stuff, and by the time the Tumblr stories started up, Chronivac and MasterPC were similar concepts in my own mind. But they didn’t start that way. I always wondered why it was called the Chronivac and now I know (because it was age changing).

JR Parz particularly didn’t want gay sex in his universe so that’s one reason MasterPC doesn’t have a lot of gay stories. I loved the Maker / Sk8terdreams stories when I read them years ago, but Maker as a program name was so generic when I started writing that I didn’t want to use it. I also couldn’t differentiate it from MasterPC. I think that’s why one of my stories uses something called MasterMaker - I didn’t want to use MasterPC but wanted to hint at it.

Wow, this has been an interesting discussion. So glad @Nu-and-the-Nus did an at for me or I probably would’ve missed it.

5 Likes
9

Thanks so much to everyone for commenting and adding your experiences! I’ve collected the info and written up a post on tumblr that credits all of you <3

Since I didn’t get into mc/tf until 2017 or so, I never interacted much with CYOC or other TF websites. I’m always interested in learning and collecting more historical information. It’s not exactly easy to find on your own, so thanks for indulging my curiosity!

1 Like
10

I forgot to add the Nifty link to Sk8r Dreams which starts in 1999.

1 Like
11

Wow! what a neat history lesson haha

Since I’ve mostly written Chronivac-related stories I feel I can chip in.

I’m somewhat new to writing, but I’ve been reading stories for over a decade (almost 2!) , and can attest that the shift from Master PC to Chronivac happened sometime in the early 2010’s.

Just like Nu-and-the-Nus eloquently explains, there is a marked difference between the type of stories related to either Macguffin, with MasterPC being a tad slower paced, while Chronivac ones are more snappy (hence a bit more popular nowadays)

There are some GREAT MasterPC stories out there, a personal favorite being " Big Red’s Little Amsterdam" from author [Dabbler.X] which is a prime example of a Master PC story transitioning from a home PC to a portable device. (The story is from 2009)

In any case the evolution has been interesting to say the least. I love gimmicky stories, especially if there are several rules to them that the characters must abide by.

Master PC has far more rigid rules, while Chronivac flip-flops. Both have their unique charm in my opinion.

2 Likes
12

For me it was the other way around: I started reading Chronivac stories in 2002, years before I encountered Master PC in the Dabbler.X story (also a favourite) of 2009.

Chronivac was well-entrenched on CYOC from quite early, sprouting many many story lines.

1 Like
13

This is pure speculation on my part unrelated to the diligent historical research that has been happening in this thread, but I do think that this trope/genre does have a Media tie in that I think makes it compelling. For me the Chronivac stories always felt directly inspired by what it’s like playing The Sims. The sliders for maniputating body type and facial structure, ability to select a subject and edit them, just the overall control over reality that you have as the player in the sims franchise. The sexual thrill that awkened in me as a teenager is the exact same thrill that chronivac satisfies for me. In fact, one of the most prolific mods for both sims 3 and 4 is called “Master Controller” and were originally meant to emulate having something like a MasterPC style program in the game, but then became much more of a utility mod for micro-managing your save files to a finer degree then the vanilla game allows.

4 Likes
14

If I really wanted to go back in time for reality-altering devices, then it would be to Jack Chalker’s Well World novels of the 70s which were full of sexually related (mostly) nonconsensual body transformations. He used this theme in other novels, but it was absolutely central to the Well World books.

There were also a couple of Green Lantern stories where the ring was used to alter body form.

All of these had dog-eared pages I’d return to as a teenager…

2 Likes
15

It’s become like a global community buzz word.

Everyone knows what the “Chronivac” means, and it has — as a concept — saturated the zeitgeist (of erotic transformational fiction).

I certainly owe some percentage of it to my own development, back when I was dashing through CYOC, with my eyes bulging, dizzy and aroused from how much of a turn on written erotic fiction could be.

16

I probably haven’t even been pronouncing it correctly.

Now that I observe each letter, it’s probably “Chron-eh-vak.”

2 Likes