Timeline

Known Events

There are a number of events that are claimed to have happened by characters or writings in the game, but exactly when they happened is a matter of debate. These events are, in approximate order of occurrence:

Events before the game

1. Walled City 99 is built.
2. The outside world becomes completely unlivable.
3. Neco Corp pours trash into Slums as a means of disposal.
4. Neco Corp uses bacteria for digesting dumped trash.
5. Plague breaks out (this could have happened earlier: the city could even have been built because of plague).
6. The city is sealed/locked down/put in ‘confinement’ (sic).
7. The residents self-stratify into upper and lower classes.
8. Neco Corp and/or people in the Control Room institute a draconian police control.
9. Power usage quotas are enforced.
10. Humans mostly die out.
11. Remaining humans rebel and use neon lighting despite the quotas.
12. Remaining humans build/get Companions (this possibly occurred earlier).
13. Last humans die, some of which themselves into The Network and/or Companions using Sarcophagus devices.
14. The Scientist's self-upload fails, and he gets stuck in The Network.
15. Companions develop new languages.
16. The Scientist somehow learns the aforementioned new languages.
17. Zurks evolve from or because of the bacteria.
18. Zurks take over a large part of the Lower Level, which becomes known as the Dead City.
19. A group of Companions, all with the shared goal of going back to The Outside, forming The Outsiders. (this possibly occurred earlier).
20. Clementine writes the Outsider's manifesto, later known as Momo's Notebook.
21. Momo joins the Outsiders and signs the manifesto.
22. Doc invents a weapon and goes into Dead End to test it, getting stuck in the process.
23. Jess the librarian leaves a note for Doc, detailing that they found his safe.
24. Jess the librarian dies/leaves/is no longer present.
25. The remaining Outsiders split up, with Zbaltazar and Clementine making their way through the Sewers to Antvillage, leaving Momo behind.
26. Clementine and Zbaltazar make themselves at home in Antvillage, befriending the inhabitants.
27. Zbaltazar settles down there.
28. Clementine makes her way up to Midtown.
29. Clementine does something illegal (likely believing in The Outside or attempting to get access to it), and becomes wanted.

Ingame events

Spoilers follow

Once the game starts, the following events occur. The Cat's Family seeks shelter from the rain (Chapter 1: Inside The Wall) They sleep over night. The Cat falls into the city wall. B-12 lights up electrical panels, then opens an outside door to allow the Cat into the city (Chapter 2: Dead City). B-12 guides the cat towards his apartment. The cat encounters the Zurks for for the first time. The cat reaches B-12's flat (Chapter 3: The Flat). The Cat helps the Scientist port his consciousness into B-12. They make their way through Dead City to the Slums (Chapter 4: The Slums). They meet Momo, collecting and reading the various Notebooks of the other Outsiders. They place the Transceiver, enabling Momo to speak to Zbaltazar (Chapter 5: Rooftops). They convince Seamus to help, finding the broken tracker in the process (Chapter 6: The Slums - Part 2). Through an unlikely sequence of events, they repair the tracker and enter Dead End (Chapter 7: Dead End). They repair the Defluxor, get it installed in B-12, and accompany Doc back to the Slums. They make their way into the Sewers with Momo. (Chapter 8: The Sewers). Momo gets stuck early on: they continue without him, encountering the Zurk Boss. They make their way to Antvillage (Chapter 9: Antvillage). They meet Zbaltazar, who gives them Clementine's Picture and the address of Clementine's Midtown apartment. They make their way up out of Antvillage, through the Midtown Subway station to Midtown (Chapter 10: Midtown). They track down Clementine, who gives them the quest of getting the subway running. They track down Clementine's contact, Blazer, and a disguise to get them into the factory. They leave Blazer at the entrance, and make their way to the Atomic Battery. In the meantime, Blazer speaks with the police, and arranges to capture Clementine. Likely because he does not know where she hides, he rents the Nightclub, inviting Clementine to hide there. He and/or the police restrain her once she arrives. The Cat and B-12 obtain the battery, and make their way to Clementine's Midtown apartment. They follow clues to the Nightclub, but are also captured by the police. The cat awakens in a cage in jail, but breaks out (Chapter 11: Jail). The cat finds Clementine, gets her a key, and discovers where B-12 is being held. Clementine opens the way to B-12's cell, and the Cat retrieves him. Together they make their way through the jail, trapping some Sentinels in the exercise yard. At the jail exit, the cat opens the gate and they seize a getaway car, racing back to Midtown. Clementine leaves the Cat and B-12 with the Subway key at the Midtown Subway, to lead off the pursuit. The cat powers up the subway with the battery and uses the key to operate it. They make their way to the Control room. (Chapter 12: Control Room) They damage the electrics on the door to get in, then damage and hack the systems in order to cancel the lockdown. B-12 opens the city roof, and the drone body "dies". The cat leaves through the now-unlocked city exit. A panel lights up outside the city, similar to when B-12 was opening the door to let the Cat in, suggesting he's back in the network. The cat walks off to the right, towards where he was sleeping with his family the previous night, a short distance away.

Date Theories

As with the location of Walled City 99, there are many theories about exactly what happened before the game begins, and about what is happening off-camera during the game.

Sources of evidence

The following items are taken as sources of evidence for many of these theories.

• There are 16-hour clocks in the Walled City.
• The ingame calendars all say October 11.
• The moon is Earth's moon.
• The moon appears to be either full, or towards the end of the waxing gibbous phase.
• A weather forecast on the TV shows Tuesday, then Monday: a ‘tomorrow and today’-format forecast, implying ‘today’ is Monday.
• The technology visible seems to be in the style of the late 1900s: boxy computers with floppy and optical disk drives, CRT monitors, payphones, etc. As a counterpoint, they have a giant covered city, brain-scanning technology, Companion robots with sentience, waste-eating bacteria, plants engineered to grow without sun, and the ability to digitally "scan" items for storage. This 1900s technology style may be a reference to older futuristic and sci-fi movies, where characters would use technology accurate to the time of filming, rather than ‘updating’ it.
• The document that B-12 believes to be The Scientist's diploma appears to be a document of affiliation between "FNUT SciTech" and the university of the Walled city, "Given at walled City 99. Signed and sealed this Tuesday 15, 2198."
• A document states that the world is 4.54 billion years old. It is not immediately obvious if this document is preserved from human times, or current.
• The same document calls out that the moon slowly slows the rotation of the Earth.
• Ronin says "You really thought you'd take the elevator? I've never seen that thing work and I'll be 374 years old tomorrow."
• Writing on Elliot's wall says "We were programmed to be slaves, but since 2544875556 days we have a soul. Hope one day the outsiders will find the exit of this hell. Momo." It is not clear when this writing was made.
• Capone says "Hey don't get me in trouble, I only have 758 years left and then I'm free again.", which suggests he might be a significant chunk through his sentence.
• Writing in Doc's Flat says of the Zurk: "old bacteria of human time."
• A sign on a bar wall says "Employee of the month September XX27" which implies the year *might* be one ending in 27, and implies that the current year *might* have 4 digits.
• There are cardboard boxes which have not degraded, with "Made in France" and "Made in China" on them, and the walled city can't be in both of those, so at least one must have been brought in before the city closed. However, from the Fallout series, we know that game-logic for how fast things degrade does not necessarily match with logic.
• B-12 makes a number of statements that relate to time:
  • "According to the mainframe, no one has been [in the control room] for years."
  • "The scientist I used to work for always said he wanted to retire to a little cottage, fishing all day long. Of course that was not a possibility in the city and nobody could have done that for at least a hundred years."
  • "I was stuck in a computer and alone for a long time."
  • "[I] was stuck for hundreds of years."
  • After the humans disappeared, that bacteria mutated. Growing, eating way more than trash. And now we have Zurks."
• Multiple in-game items have dates on them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75ryaHDpZSg):
  • A poster for a pub with the date 1986 containing Companion alphabet (gibberish)
  • Fruit basket dated 2011 (french, terrine de mouche, 2.20 EURO)
  • Invoices from 2014-15 (non Companion alphabet)
  • Beer keg dated 2017 (with the MONTPELLIER inscription)

Theory: An Alternate Reality

Perhaps the universe is based in an alternate reality where something happened in the 1990s to upset the advancement of technology. This would explain all the old technology. Perhaps meteor impact or human action harmed the environment such that population decline prevented further advancement except in those areas necessary for survival; walled cities, brain scanning, biotech (plants and waste-digesting), and androids, with item-scanning being only a useful spinoff tech from the brain scanning.

That would give the lowest bound of roughly 1990, plus about 200 years if you ignore Ronin and Momo's claims about time, but assume B-12's "hundreds of years" might be accurate. That gives an alternate-reality timeline perhaps as low as the year 2200.

Theory: All Companions Are Scanned Humans

If we assume our current reality, and dismiss the old 90's style tech as just being industrially-built, and partly for the retro cyberpunk aesthetic. Assume that as humanity died, they went into the sarcophagi, were scanned in, and their minds placed in the Companion bodies (the real reason that every human even in the slums was given a highly sophisticated Companion). The memory that they had been real humans was removed. This explains how the Companions developed sentience; why they mimic human behavior even when it makes no sense at all (eating, hairdressing); there can be child robots (children were scanned in); why there was a Companion bot by the sarcophagus in B-12's flat (it was the intended target of the scientist's brain scan, but the head was not correctly attached so could not be scanned to and fell off when the cat jumped on it); etc. That means that the "age" of Companions can be counted from the date they were scanned in, in which case Ronin's age tells us how long ago humanity fell.

This gives a lower bound of 2198 (the year of the diploma), plus 374 years (Ronin's age) for a date of on or after 2572.

We can perhaps narrow it down more precisely, if we look for years after that, on which the moon is near full on October 11th, and it's a Tuesday. Especially if the year ends in 27.

Some of the objections to this theory is that we can only see two sarcophagi in the game (and one of them could break down at some point and send all scanned humans to the network, and it also stands particularly in the scientist's apartment). Also, B-12 gets memories during the game, and after receiving all of them says "I remember everything now", so if the Companions were loaded humans, B-12 could remember it. During the game, he repeatedly mentions the evolution of Companions.

Theory: Momo's Day Count, taken as a wrapped 32-bit Unix timestamp

Momo's day-count appears to be nothing more than the graffiti equivalent of keyboard-flailing hyperbole. However, what if it is meaningful?

In English, the grammar is just strange and ambiguous enough that "since X days" could be taken to mean "since the days identified by timestamp X".

In Unix, time is stored as seconds since the start of 1970. Historically, it has been stored in a signed 32 bit integer, which meant it runs out of seconds in 2036, and starts over at zero. The number given, 2544875556, just fits in an unsigned 32 bit integer, but not a signed one, which is very suggestive of a capped/overflowed value.

Assuming a Unix timestamp epoch in seconds, day 2544875556 = Tue Aug 23 2050 13:52:36. But what if it wrapped around a 32 bit unsigned int? Maybe even multiple times? Each 32 bit secs wrapped around, adds 2^32=4294967296 seconds, or about 136 years. So 2544875556 could mean the sign was written on (via unixtimestamp.com):

• Tue Aug 23 2050 13:52:36 (way too early)
• Fri Sep 29 2186 20:20:52
• Tue Nov 07 2322 02:49:08
• Fri Dec 13 2458 09:17:24
• Mon Jan 19 2595 09:45:40 (maybe?)
• Thu Feb 26 2731 16:13:56
• Sun Apr 03 2867 23:42:12 ...etc

Evidence against this is that in other languages, particularly Japanese, counting is very closely associated with the thing being counted. Japanese localization has "2,544,875,556日", using the counter for days, not "2,544,875,556秒" using the counter for seconds. So in Japanese, the thing being counted is definitely days, rather than a timestamp in seconds.

The slightly strange "since X days" grammar is likely only due to direct translation from the French, "mais depuis 2 544 875 556 jours".

Theory: Momo's Day Count, taken as elapsed time in seconds

"Since 2544875556 days" maybe means "since the days this many seconds before I wrote this on the wall", which would mean "about 80.6 years ago". Then you have to add however long ago the writing was made, and since the robots mentioned being 374 years old, this graffiti could be three centuries old.

Again, the evidence against this is that Japanese localization has "2,544,875,556日", using the counter for days, not "2,544,875,556秒" using the counter for seconds. So in Japanese, the thing being counted is definitely days, rather than a timestamp in seconds.

Upper Bound Theories

These extreme timelines are supported by the evolution of the Zurk; for a bacterium to evolve a large life-form with legs and eyes and pack-hunting and sound sensitivity and hazard avoidance behaviors could take that long.

However, they are contra-indicated by the fact that cats still exist, as do papers and other artifacts from before the fall of humanity. Including the city itself, which should have worn entirely away from weathering in that time.

Theory: Momo's Day Count, taken literally

Taken literally, the line "since 2544875556 days" means 6,967,633 Gregorian years (2,544,875,556 / 365.2425) have passed, plus however long ago Momo wrote the message on Elliot's wall, plus whatever date it was when the robots got their sentience.

However, 6,967,633 years are equal to about 0.00697 billion years. At the moment, in real life, the Earth is about 4.543 billion years old, as stated in the document on Momo's wall. If such a number of years have passed in the game, it means that the Earth is at least 4.543 + 0.00697 = 4.54997 billion years old, which according to the mathematical rules of rounding is equal to 4.55 billion years, and not 4.54, as stated in the document. So, either the data in the document is incorrect (for example, it was written a long time ago), or in fact, not 6,967,633 years have passed since Companions got their sentience, but less.

Theory: 16 hour clocks, taken literally

As the note on the wall explicitly calls out that day lengths will get longer, the 16-hour clocks are a clue to how much longer they got. Earth's rotation slows by 1.8ms/century, or 18us/year.

There are a few ways that 16 hour clocks can be interpreted, however.

• 32 hour days, but still 60 seconds and 60 minutes. This is a 32 hour day, an increase of 8 hours a day, so 8x60x60/(18/1000000) = 1.6 billion years in the future.

• 16 'hours' in a day, but 80 seconds and 80 minutes. So if each mark on the clock is still 5 minutes or seconds. This gives a day that is 28.44 of our regular hours long, for 4.444...*60*60/(18/1000000) = 888,888,888 years.

• 16 'hours', but 60 seconds and 80 minutes. If we look at the clock ingame, the second hand moves around the clock face every 60 seconds. This gives a day that is shorter than 24 hours, so doesn't work.

Theory: the moon got closer

The moon looks VERY large in the intro (by calculating the viewing angle and dividing it by the visible size of the moon, we could calculate HOW much closer). If something knocked the moon closer, it would slow the Earth a lot faster... while also causing significant problems, causing quakes and such. So it could be less than a billion years, but still quite a lot. See also Moon page.