While we're all in quarantine I'm entertaining myself, and hopefully some others, with some short fiction. You can find my entire collection of short fiction here.
Enjoy!
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Jack Wong was not just an expert on alternate history.
In the year 2080, he was the world’s leading expert on altering history.
Wong’s invention of the Turtledove Drive a decade before, his Ph.D thesis project at the University of Minnesota, stunned the world.
Since then he had succeeded in altering history twice.
First, he traveled from his lab to the 2075 Coronavirus outbreak, reached its Patient Zero, and brought him to a hospital before he could infect others. Three years later, from the front of his Minneapolis classroom, his team prevented the 2001 World Trade Center bombing by shooting the terrorists before they reached Logan Airport.
When New Yorkers woke up, on a fine spring day in 2079, to find two 120-year old buildings instead of one 65-year old one, it was a shock at first. Then the mass psychosis took hold. The attacks had never happened. The Twin Towers had always been there.
It was magic.
Now Professor Wong was Time’s Man of the Year, which meant even more was expected of him.
Still, he was firm. He was dogmatic on this point. He insisted that any move into an alternate timeline had to be studied thoroughly beforehand. He insisted that any change made had to be minimal, focused solely on the event at hand, and that nothing should move a traveler off that track for fear of doing larger damage. The further back one went, the easier that would be. Thus the lighter the touch that was required.
Dr. Wong’s next lecture would take place in the school’s basketball arena, known as "The Barn." Once the season ended, with a thumping loss to Northwestern in the NCAA’s Second Round, workers descended on the space. In two weeks, they turned it into something more like a rock arena, making the 3-D scoreboard into an interactive whiteboard, connected to both a graduate student in a pit below the stage and fingertip gloves the professor could wear during his presentation.
The good doctor’s students would work the presentation from under the stage, and there was a nosebleed section of UMN students paying nominal sums. The rest of the seats were sold at thousands per head, the money to go toward the department and to undergraduate scholarships.
The April morning of the lecture saw a beautiful spring day. The temperature was in the 70s. The high was expected to be no higher than 80. There was a pleasant semi-tropical breeze coming in from the river to the south. A month from now it might become too hot to go outside.
Whole swaths of the country had been abandoned to the new climate reality. The Great Wall was still holding in New York Harbor, but the loss of Florida and southeast Texas was still being felt. This had been offset, slightly, by the return of three-toed sloths, aurochs, and sabre tooth tigers to the Canadian plains, and the hope that global temperatures finally looked ready to start falling.
Dr. Wong knew what he was going to talk about. Before an audience of thousands in the arena and millions on Facebook, the state-owned cloud utility, he planned to announce his next, his biggest, his most ambitious project to date.
Preventing Donald Trump. (To the right, Elizabeth Christ Trump, founder, E. Trump & Son.)
No monster, not Hitler or Napoleon or Genghis Khan, has done the world as much damage as the United States’ 45th President, its first (so far only) dictator. The Civil War that overthrew him in 2030, leading to the Second Constitutional Convention, had left America a veritable wasteland. Loans to rebuild had come from China, Africa, and India, at very high prices. Even Wong’s own inventions were mortgaged, like everything else in the Patent Office, to the highest bidder – in this case Kenyan interests.
But at least American ingenuity had returned. Gradually, authoritarians were being pushed back. Even the Chinese Communist Party, after the death of Emperor Xi Jinping, had put in some term limits. There was now a limited voting franchise to select local Mandarins. Regional selections, done online, would begin in about a year.
An electric limo, with bulletproof glass, delivered Wong from his home in Eau Claire to the arena. The glass was necessary because not all guns had yet been confiscated under the Second Constitution, and the government still didn’t have the money to go after them all. Fortunately, Wong was able to get some work done as the car glided down I-94.
On arrival on the ground level of the arena and seeing the giant steel doors close behind him Wong closed his eyes, mindfully. He took three deep breaths and said a prayer to his ancestors, especially the biochemist, comic and civil rights hero Joe, who had brought the family to America almost a century ago. Then he ascended the stairs, having memorized their number, and appeared on the classroom stage to a deafening roar from the crowd and D.J. X’s latest hit, based on an old KoreaPop tune from the mid-century. He nodded politely, his face appearing on every screen, in the arena and online, at the same time.
He made a slight bow. Then he began.
“The further back we go into the past, and the greater the task before us, the smaller the change we can make in order to effect an outcome,” he said. This statement, known as Wong’s Law, was obvious to everyone.
He looked toward a corner of one glass lens to check Facebook’s collation of comments and continued. “We are talking here of a man who was born almost 135 years ago, in 1946. But, as you all know, you can’t stop a man’s work just by killing him as a baby. You can only stop him by keeping him from ever being born, by keeping his parents from even meeting.
“It’s difficult in the case of Trump, because he was born into wealth. However, psycho-historians offer clues. They have taught us that the poisonous ideas which made him what he was came directly from his father, and that the sociopathy that brought him to power dated even further back, to his grandfather.
“So let us examine the grandfather.
“Frederick Trump came to the United States illegally, in 1885, because he hadn’t given his military service to the Kingdom of Bavaria. After working as a barber for some years he moved to Seattle, where he opened what one would politely call a house of ill repute in Pioneer Square.”
The crowd laughed, for they all knew the story, and Wong continued. “He opened another such establishment in nearby Everett, to serve a mineral strike, then paid miners to stake a gold claim for him in the Klondike and opened yet-another such establishment in Seattle.” More laughter. “I can see you’re detecting the pattern.
“After cashing in his claims, he moved to the Yukon, opening yet-more brothels, selling out to his partner just before the law moved in. He moved back to his birthplace of Kallstadt, in Germany, married a young German woman named Elizabeth Christ, the real matriarch of the Trump family fortune. The couple returned to New York, went back to Germany because she was homesick, then returned for the final time when Germany took away his citizenship for skipping the draft, returning to New York in 1905, and dying during the Spanish Flu pandemic. Enormous irony there.” The arena exploded in clapping and cheers.
Dr. Wong lowered his arms to quiet the hall. “All along the timeline there are opportunities. We could alert Bavarian authorities to his flight and have him arrested there so he never emigrates. We could have him arrested, and deported, for his prostitution businesses. We could create an incident at one of his barbering jobs. All these involve either violence or the introduction of variables, the actions of people who lived two centuries ago.
“Thus, I have concluded the best opportunity lies back in Seattle, on Pioneer Square. I choose it because that city, while crowded with miners and lumberjacks in 1892, was not nearly as dangerous as the Klondike or early 20th century New York would be, for a Chinese time traveler.
“The insertion will go like this.” The crowd held its collective breath.
“I will arrive in Seattle on November 7, 1892, the night before the Presidential election, where Frederick Trump will vote for the first time as a U.S. citizen, at 9 PM. I will find him hosting a large gathering at what he called the Dairy Restaurant, on behalf of his chosen candidates. In my pockets will be $50 in counterfeit bills, $10 in counterfeit coins, and a syringe. I will splash out the cash, buying a round of drinks and calling on Mr. Trump to rent me a room, that I might visit one of his ladies. Then, when his back is turned, the needle will go quickly through his trousers, into his rump, and deliver its payload.
“I will disappear from Seattle at precisely 9:30 Pacific and return to this timeline.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Frederick Trump died of syphilis on May 12, 1893.”
