Stealing History

The question “Ow eez your late Americain?”  popped in a thick French accent by my shoulder like a champagne cork on New Year’s Eve.

Being up to my skull in regressive correlates, the interruption startled me, and I dropped my AirMouse from pointing at a graph shimmering on the rear wall screen. Of course, the sneaky little thing scuttled across the floor before settling under the back of my desk.

I fear it now lurks beneath some creepy dust bunny I must contend with later.

Sighing, I swiveled my chair and tried to contain my annoyance—and embarrassment. Sure enough, Professor Lemieux filled my door, somehow having gimped up behind me without the usual swoosh of him dragging his bad leg.

Any other time, he stood at a slant, a cane propping him like some desperate attempt to keep the Tower of Pisa from falling over. This time though, he seemed buoyed, almost vertical.

I dredged for memories of my mother’s tongue while stalling on his question by repeating it.

“My late American?”

The words of my lost childhood felt odd, rolling around in my mouth.

A curious fact, this blast from the past suggested a pattern because yesterday, he asked me how much I knew about the last US election.

A pair of related inquiries from out of the blue.

Fair to say, I’m a little hazy with the phrase, ‘out of the blue,’ but from how a few of the older folk use it, my theory involves something unexpected from the sky.

Like planet-killer comets or nukes.

I should add I possess no experience with the sky because I was born and raised in the catacombs of CERN—a pure Tunneler, as we call ourselves.

Hence my haziness.

Lemieux realized I wasn’t going to answer his question any time soon, so he grunted and pointed his chin at the analysis he interrupted with his stealth trick.

“Does the provided data confirm the proposed explanation?” 

I paused a moment more, preparing for other questions but also a little to appear thoughtful. When he appeared on the edge of exasperation, I straightened my back and nodded before answering in Deutsch.

“Confidence is above five-nines.” 

He smiled, but his eyes were melancholy.

I seldom see anyone express conflicting emotions. Around here, the standard mood is sadness.

Still, I’ve been raised to be a scientist, so I set about hypothesizing. About a half second later, I decided he was happy with the experimental proof, but from what I understood of how the world used to work, he was also mourning.

No accolades for the marvel of our producing superluminal particles beneath the Alpine foothills. No peer reviews. No place in any history book. No inquisitive hordes of reporters sharing the news with billions of curious people.

It turned out I hypothesized with flawed assumptions, but we’ll get to that.

Lemieux cocked his head. “You never answered my original question. How’s your late American?”

Like it mattered, but the rusty circuits kicked into action anyway.

“Well, Professor Lemieux,” I replied in my mother’s tongue, “I reckon pretty good. For sure, better than my Mandarin.”

Another dead language.

Lemieux nodded.  “Report to my office at 1600.”

“Jawohl,” I affirmed and waited until he limped out of my cubicle before returning my attention to Tachyon Run 665.9.

First, though, I had to retrieve my AirMouse. A gross expedition, and enough said. Back in my seat, I paged to the end of the data, where I discovered a scanned handwritten note.

10 cm ER bridge sustained for eleven seconds.

A wormhole? To where? More tantalizingly, to when?

⬥ ⬥ ⬥

That afternoon, I treated myself to a warm mug of algatrate over at the district mess hall. With time to kill, I strolled past the Fusion Reactor level and, feeling the need for some exercise, climbed the six flights of stairs to hydroponics near the Surface.

It’s quite a sight. Under radiation-blocking glass, sunlight glints on stainless steel trays, marching into the distance as far as the eye can see. Thousands of containers holding a flow of nutrient broth, gurgling through pale roots rising to a field of greenery. 

A soup made from organic waste, the lot closed-loop recycled as much as inhumanly possible.

When I was a kid, my mother used to bring me up here, along with one of the old-fashioned books she kept on a shelf in our apartment. In reality, a middling-sized closet configured with brutal efficiency to within a millimeter of claustrophobic insanity. Still, it was the only home I knew.

On occasion, she showed me hard-copy photos of her life From Before.

One picture, in particular, always tugged on my curiosity. A much younger and heartbreakingly beautiful version of my mother posing on the hood of a sleek convertible parked against the backdrop of the Pacific, stretching to infinity.

“Your father took this photo on our honeymoon in California,” she always said with a faraway expression.

The most she would tell about him was they planned for his arrival at CERN a few weeks after her, but the end of From Before intervened.

Now, all we have is What’s Left.

Closing my eyes and inhaling, I savored the aromas of all those plants busy photosynthesizing. It moves me, breathing molecules of my mother among the thousands of compounds. Tickling my limbic sub-brain, evoking memories of us sitting together on a steel step, her reading The Wizard of Oz to me.

My optical augment beeped once while putting up an overlay reminder. 

Follow the projected route starting within one minute for your appointment with Lemieux at 1600.

Jawohl.

⬥ ⬥ ⬥

The door stood ajar, and I entered. 

This was my first time in Professor Lemieux’s office, and I paused, astonished by the size. A whopping ten-meter square, if I am correct.

I subvocced a query to my optical augment, which confirmed my guess before going offline.

“No peeking,” he said from behind his desk.

I flushed red. “Sorry, sir.”

Standing, he approached me and gestured to an old leather sofa by the wall.

“Let’s chat.”

Sitting at one end, he patted the center seat. 

“Come on, I won’t bite.”

He took me beneath his wing six months ago when my mother died after an electromagnetic shield fluctuated for a millisecond on the main particle accelerator loop. A blast of pions, moving at a whisker under the speed of light, escaped, irradiating her and two other researchers.

The marginally better news was the reclamation department could separate the radioactive residue enabling the corpses to be recycled. The elders always protest, but the alternative is losing faster to entropy.

I sat and faced Lemieux, waiting for whatever was in store for me. 

“First,” he began, “while I am not your parent, your mother was a valued friend, so I am the closest person to a relative. On that basis, may I call you Jeanetta?”

“I prefer just Jean.”

“Fair enough, and in the same spirit, please call me Henri.”

“OK, Henri.”

“Now, you are wondering why we are having this conversation.”

More than wondering. I nodded, with perhaps a little too much eagerness.

“I think earlier today,” he continued, “you understood from the data we assigned you to analyze that we accomplished a remarkable achievement.”

My expression told him all he needed, and leaning toward me, he lowered his voice.

“What you are about to learn is an enormous surprise to all of us.”

‘All of us?’ I repeated to myself.

As in the paltry two hundred and three of us at CERN, who, as far as we can determine, is the remainder of humanity. A last few, whose broadcasts are never answered from anywhere, by anything, on a lifeless, devastated, radioactive Earth.

Welcome to my world. The only one I’ve ever known, and to put it in Late American, it totally sucks.

⬥ ⬥ ⬥

I try not to dwell on this. The more optimistic among us think we can succeed by multigenerational bunkering. Long enough to ride out the number of radionuclide half-lives needed to eventually re-emerge, make our way to the Seed Vault in Spitzbergen, and start over.

No word on whether a Noah’s Ark of DNA is also stashed somewhere. If so, old videos of dogs promise much-needed joy.

Instead, I’m trudging alongside Henri, taking a series of corridors and elevators to some place in CERN far beyond my wildest imaginings. My optical augment reactivated when we left his office, and now it’s fire-hosing me exabytes of data. 

Floorplans, personnel, projects.

One is called Project Hope, and I’m absorbing information in a way I didn’t know was possible. the onrush dizzies me, and I stumble. Henri catches me by my arm, almost falling too, but he steadies me and whispers into my ear. 

“Throttle upload to comfort rate.”

The tsunami eases to a tolerable din and he peers into my eyes.

“Sorry about that. Can you walk now?”

“Yes, I think so, but what is happening?”

“You, my dear, may well be our salvation.”

⬥ ⬥ ⬥

We enter a room exceeding any I’ve seen in real life, except for the hydroponic level. This is like a control room in old movies I’ve watched From Before when people did things like send robots to Mars.

Now, we can’t even deploy a robot to explore the nearest kilometer of this world because, in a few hours, its electronics fry from the radiation.

In this room, though, almost everyone is present, and they all turn to me, applauding.

Thanks to the optic augment, I now understand and comprehend what they discovered—and how I fit in.

The tachyons allow us to examine alternate timelines. Some Copenhagen interpretation, solving the paradox of whether time, matter, and energy are particles or waves, the answer being “yes.”

The scary part is the multitude of timelines, but only a few where humans evolved. Trillions of deviations distant are groups of timelines hosting something like us, but they’re GMOs farmed by dinosaurs who survived their asteroid catastrophe and became sentient.

Roast primate for happy families of Velociraptor Sapiens.

Closest is our miserable timeline, where we’re verging on extinction from our self-inflicted disaster.

One other oddball is elusive, ghostly, and hard to pin down. Pulsed existence as if rapidly opening and closing the lid on the box containing Schrodinger’s Cat.

Deadalivedeadalivedeadalive.

But Project Hope has been able to get enough of a glimpse.

The ghostly timeline and our path, lit by a terminal glow, diverged less than two decades ago.

And at the fork where lies the path not taken, me.

⬥ ⬥ ⬥

A lifetime earlier, or my lifetime hence, I stepped—will step?—through a four-shot, portable wormhole generator strapped to my wrist. While my wearable picotron is high physics, the crude and mundane dominates.

I find myself in a janitor’s closet rife with the stench of chlorine, soap concentrate, and a smelly old mop.

It’s From Before, at 01:15, early November 4, 2020. It’s also a few years before my birth, and I’m in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena in the Late, Great US of A.

In a moment, I crack the primitive WiFi, null my image on the security cams, and peek out the door.

There’s no one around, so I step into the corridor.

Yup, indoors, no sky overhead. Lemieux warned I “might experience a reaction” if I go outdoors.

Agoraphobia. Fear of infinite headroom. The thought of it flutters my stomach.

Stay on mission.

My visual overlay tells me to go right, twelve meters, turn left, then left again, and find the door to a vast room where vote counting for the Last US Presidential Election is in progress.

I walk in and am assaulted with the stink, noise, and colors of workers bent over tabulators and ancient computers. No one scrutinizes my arrival. I’m too young to matter, and they’re too tired to pay attention to me.

Everywhere, stacks of delightful, tactile paper. From fresh-killed trees.

It’s 01:33, leaving me one minute to alter the next data dump of vote tallies before it congeals from electrons to hard-copy print.

Ah, I found it, the primary communications bundle, snaking across the floor.

Pretending to drop a notepad I lifted seconds before, I crouch next to the cable and, using my augment, blink into the data stream. In a moment, I inject a self-extinguishing malware package and stand, leaving it to modify the totals so no one can detect my perfidy. 

Back to the closet where my picotron whisks me to my next alteration before 03:42 in the future wasteland of Wisconsin.

From there, scant minutes to wormhole over to Michigan. More interference. Now, I have a few hours before my final historic edit at 06:31, elsewhere in Michigan.

My tampering complete, I wander to a window, press my nose to the glass, and witness the sunrise.

After that sublime miracle, I locate and, with discretion, hack an ATM. I’m savvy enough to know I need the purloined currency to buy breakfast.  The food comes in unrecycled, delicious, wasteful, disposable wrappers, accompanied by a drink, coffee, instead of algatrate. 

Incredible.

Over a crazed week, electoral tallies coalesce, and the confident incumbent who I originally learned won reelection loses and goes nuts.

⬥ ⬥ ⬥

The next significant divergence I noticed was the insurrectionist riot that exploded two months after the election. A nasty business, but they were right.

Somebody did steal the vote. 

Me. 

I worried for a few weeks after discovering a sophisticated analysis online, uncovering some statistical anomalies. 

Oops. 

⬥ ⬥ ⬥

Two years have passed since I took my one-way journey into this strange new world. I’ve learned to walk outdoors, under the blue sky, without collapsing to the ground in fear. 

Things have quieted down, and while the new (for me) leadership isn’t perfect, they’re infinitely preferable to those who killed my original timeline.

Case in point, there’s no talk of repealing the 22^nd Amendment or suspending elections. 

I remember my mother, or a version of her, telling me after those ideas solidified into policy, the US of A became a rogue and, then, a pariah state under crushing international sanctions, destabilizing the world. 

Inevitably, someone got fatally stupid, and lots of nukes started coming from out of the blue.

⬥ ⬥ ⬥

It’s now six years, and I have trouble remembering my former history. But I do know my parents will meet in a few months and conceive me, two-hundred-and-eighty days before my birthday.

There’s talk of implementing a national DNA database, so I must leave the USA before some awkward questions get asked. Like how I, an adult, am genetically the child of my retroactively-estranged parents.

I keep tabs on Henri, and when I read between the lines of his research, he’s working on tachyons. Perhaps I can get on his research team. I wonder if he would believe my origin.

Also, keep an eye on my parents when they should both make it to CERN this time. 

Definitely make sure the steering magnets are OK when my mother is around.

Perhaps be an aunt to my younger self.

Crazy, huh?

Truly, though, do I know what this different future will bring? No, I do not, and neither do you.

No one does, but so far, it’s looking much better than the one that I alone could fix.