Leigh Kimmel says:

Eight years and ever so much distance in paratime separate them. It’s the curse of transtemporal clairvoyance, that watching the videos of the horror that engulfed Lower Manhattan a decade before I was born should throw my consciousness across time to another horror in that same place, but unfolding differently.

Here, in our world, America was already involved in what historians call the Energy Wars, but we were still thinking in terms of nations fighting nations on a defined battlefield. To be sure, we should’ve been aware of how the game was changing after the Cowardly Blow, the terrorists attack on the Kremlin that broke the false peace at the beginning of the Energy Wars. But we still thought ourselves too far away — until an LP tanker sitting in New York Harbor exploded.

At first everyone thought it was a horrible accident, bad handling procedure like the Grandcamp down here in Texas. But it didn’t take long for the investigators to discover clues that pointed toward a deliberate act. Someone who wasn’t quite as fanatical about things as he thought, who decided those seventy-two hot babes could wait — and got picked up as he tried to slip through New Jersey, where his story unraveled right quick.

Over there, in that timeline, everyone thought the situation in the Middle East had been settled a decade ago, and carefully overlooked all the simmering hatreds, assuming the rhetoric from certain countries to be so much hot air. They learned otherwise that horrible morning, because it wasn’t just one strike. When the second plane hit the other tower, everyone knew they were looking at a deliberate act — which in an awful way was good for them, because they don’t have telepaths. They’ve found out since that there were several other teams out there that simply slipped away when the entire US airspace was shut down for civilian aviation.

Here, the issue was settled two years later, at the cost of three cities vanishing in artificial sunfire. Over there, things are still simmering, pressure building up like an old-fashioned riverboat with the pressure relief valve on its steam engine tied down. The bad guys keep the atrocities small enough for their enablers to cry about “disproportionate” responses. So US forces knock off a few rotten leaders and blow up some weapons sites, but stop short of actual victory.

What will it take to awaken the necessary resolve in that world’s America? Transtemporal clairvoyance is not precognition, and even that can only see the possibilities until decisive action breaks the amorphous mass of maybes into clear timelines.