The Downstreamers or The Old Ones, are a vastly powerful and immortal race of descendants of humankind from the Manifold series by Stephen Baxter. Born in the "primal universe", they are the first and oldest race in the Manifold Trilogy, and are the creators of Manifolds and the descendants of humanity who live some 10^117 years in the future. They survived the heat death of their universe, and seeking to expand their possibilities in regard to the creation of life, reached back in time to send messages to the 21st century, telling their ancestors the "Blue children" of their plans to restructure the Manifoldverse. The Downstreamers then succeeded to transformed their multiverse from an finite to an infinite multiverse and did this with other multiverses as well.
Their abilities and feats include:
- Time travel - they can travel to any point in the past and move between timelines at will, or alter timelines
- multiversal / dimensional travel - they can travel to other universes along the Manifold
- Omniscience - their neutrino computer at the end of time contains all of the information, down to the quantum level, completely describing the history of the entire universe from the Big Bang to the end of time. They have complete knowledge of all possible timelines (megaversal)
- Non-corporeal - they can transmit influence back through time and make subtle alterations to the DNA of organisms like human beings, and also give them their knowledge.
- They can built time portals made out of molded spacetime. The portals can project a field around them that can alter the laws of physics- it's powerful enough to shield someone from thousands of Big Bangs and Big Crunches per second.
- They managed to send back information and genetically reprogram human children under the age of 8 to increase their intelligence enough to build a space/time ship that was bigger on the inside than the outside (like a TARDIS)
- Immune to brute force weaponry
- Can could also send objects back through time to specific coordinates in time and space. In the end the Downstreamers sent back instructions for the children to build a quark strangelet - powered device that induced a vacuum decay, creating an expanding sphere of altered physics that spread across the universe at the speed of light, destroying and remaking the entire Manifold of universes so new life could arise.
See also: