Office of Otherwise

Office of Otherwise is an alternate-history workbench for writers, worldbuilders and curious explorers. You ask one "what if?" (what if Buddhism had spread to Arabia? what if the Sahara had stayed green?) and it becomes a history you can scrub through on a 3D globe: dated events with places, causes, illustrated scenes and scenario geography, shown as the world stood on whatever date you pick. The problem: alternate-world ideas are hard to develop and harder to communicate. A chat transcript loses the thread after a dozen turns, nothing checks whether a new idea contradicts what you already established, and nothing shows where and when it happened. Writers end up keeping timelines, maps and mood boards in separate tools, and consistency breaks. How it works: - One history that grows. Each question starts a single alternate history. Drag the timebar to any date and the app suggests what could happen around then, grounded in everything already in the history. - Checked, not just generated. Every suggestion is checked against the existing timeline: it either fits, and is woven in by date with its cause linked, or it conflicts with a specific earlier event. Conflicts aren't silently dropped; "What if instead..." deliberately forks a new history. - Swipe to curate. Suggestions arrive as a card deck: swipe right to keep and weave, left to pass. One click or swipe checks and commits, and a ripple check flags later events the change affects. - See it. Each event gets an illustrated scene and a subject cutout, the globe shows scenario geography as of the selected date, and the Chronicle rail reads the history like a book, organized by era. - Stays on topic. Science, technology, culture and geography only; a model policy check plus keyword rules keep politics and war out. Clone the public repo and run `npm run demo`; add your own Meta API key to explore fresh questions. Every model call runs through a shared client with a hard spend cap. Office of Otherwise is the alternate-history layer for Chronos, an Earth-explorer product I'm building as a solo founder. It is pre-launch: no users yet, and this hackathon build is the first working version of the history model.