A quote: “We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.” ~~ Fulton Oursler
I’ll start with a story …
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She sat in the first row of the lecture hall, her face bright and open. I recognize her from old pictures. I try not to stare, looking down at my papers.
“Good afternoon, class. Welcome to intro to quantum mechanics …”
First trip out and I go rogue. As our clandestine team had been feverishly running the last tests, I planned to betray the mission. Their mission, not mine.
I remembered her in years much later, when her eyes were sad, her face gray and lined. Grandfather, mother and I, a mutual safety committee who kept dad at arms length. Dad – a mid-level Party bureaucrat with all focus on advancing. And his family was to be the perfect Party family. No scandals, no dissent, no forbidden books.
And grandpa had most of them. I learned them all. Before physics restrictions.
What really happens to time travelers? Do we interfere and :::poof::: we’re gone? Or, as Heinlein thought, every change is a fork in the road.
I should be killing Hitler. But I want mom to have the life she deserved. I’m getting dad expelled for cheating today. They’ll never meet. Let’s see where I wake up tomorrow. If at all.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Trogluddite says: Love these; the stage setting in each of them is very creative.
It’s called transtemporal clairvoyance.
I still struggle to control it, but if my mind gets in the right state, I can look across time to worlds where things went differently. Worlds where the Chinese emperor didn’t order the treasure fleet burned, but continued the explorations until they forged connections with Europe and the New World. Worlds where the Mongols headed eastward across the Bering Straits and established khanates in North America. And of course your garden-variety alternate history fodder: the Alternate War for Independence, the Alternate Civil War, and the alternate versions of the various wars of the Twentieth.
Our lit professor is going on about the standard time travel tropes, especially the hero going back in time to kill off one or another crazy dictator when he’s just starting out. National or international, the socialist regimes of the Twentieth managed to fill mass graves with a speed and efficiency that would’ve been the envy of any pre-modern conqueror, so the idea of averting those horrors by eliminating the men who led them is very inviting.
Except it’s not so easy, as I’ve seen in altogether too many visions. Ever heard the saying “oft evil will shall evil mar”? How frequently those men’s obsessions made them into their own worst enemies, and thus actually limited their ability to do harm. Even if they fall to natural mischance, there’s a risk that a more competent wickedness will arise in their place, and do more harm before they can be stopped.
Take for instance the world I’m seeing now. A tiny change: an Austrian customs inspector is fired — unjustly, in his mind — so he takes his family and emigrates to the New World. Butterfly away his infamous son, and when the horrors of the Great War leave Germany defeated and in disorder, we see the rise of someone who isn’t driven by racial obsessions and hatred of the Chosen People, so he can focus the country’s resources on military conquest rather than genocide. I’m not sure I want to see this vision through to its end, because things that were close-run to the Allies are turning ever so slightly in the tyrant’s favor. Like seeing to it that the British forces don’t escape at that world’s version of Dunkirk, which means the UK is going to be in a much worse position when the Battle of Britain starts.
Maybe we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but more and more I think that we may well live in the least bad. A minimax world, if you will.
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