Heir Apparent - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 4 Read online

  Shaking, Cantwell grabbed his nearby coffee cup. He drew down a swallow of strong coffee, but he couldn’t have been more awake than if he’d taken a fistful of screamers.

  L3 waterspouts? He didn’t even know there were L3 waterspouts.

  Seconds passed. At the quantum level, and at quantum speeds, it must have been an eternity Up There or Over There–or wherever it was that his mother was posting from.

  If it was his mother.

  However, he’d turned off his monitor...but not his computer. She was still there; the messages were still coming in. Another chime sounded out and Cantwell almost had a coronary.

  Did he dare turn the monitor back on? Breathing heavily, drenched in sweat down to his socks, he waited. Please go away. Please go away. Please go away.

  It seemed to work. After a few more seconds of waiting, no more messages came through. He started to calm down, breathing easier.

  At that point, Cantwell heard someone in the cubicle farm of Cosmi-Tech International shout out, “Hey, something weird’s going on with Facebook!”

  Someone from another quarter of the room shouted out, “I just got a request to become friends with my old professor at MIT!”

  Someone else said, “Is anyone else getting incoming messages on Facebook? I mean really bizarre incoming messages?”

  “Hey, I just got a friend request from my Dad! He died last year!”

  “Who’s fucking with the computers? Hey, Ed?”

  “It’s not just Facebook! I just got an e-mail from my dead first grade teacher!”

  One by one, the employees of Cosmi-Tech—those who were between calls—were getting messages from long-lost friends and relatives.

  Supervisor Edward Steinhoff, standing like a red-haired, flattop Marine guarding the doorway beneath Cosmi-Tech’s Egyptian messenger bird logo, lowered his com-pad and said, “Quiet down, people. Nobody’s doing anything to your computers.”

  “Listen, Ed,” someone else called. “You gotta see this. Remember I told you I met Courtney Rogers of the Pittsburgh Pirates three years ago before the World Series? He wants me to be his Friend on Facebook!”

  “Can’t be. Rogers is dead,” someone rejoined.

  “Says here he wants to be my Friend.”

  Cantwell touched the power button of his monitor as voices began to rise in the service center, computer screens lighting up with messages, e-mails, and God knew what else.

  A message was waiting there for him, but it was not a message from his mother this time.

  It was a message from Roxy.

  Hi, Russ. Roxanne Kissler-Underwood wants to be Friends with you on Facebook.

  “Jesus Christ!” Cantwell screamed.

  He knew he was on the verge of a heart attack. At the age of twenty-nine! He just knew it.

  Quaking like one of Denver’s last aspens, Cantwell reached out to touch his screen. He pressed “Accept” and waited.

  Around him, he heard:

  “It’s my old uncle!”

  “My brother, killed in China!”

  “My old schoolteacher, Mr. Hochstettler!”

  “Who’s doing this? Is this a joke?!”

  “Oh, my God! You’ve got to see this! It’s my great, great grandmother, Britney! Look at her tattoos!”

  Another chime sounded out closer at hand. A message. Cantwell clicked on it as he thought of polliwogs, enema songs, and pierced nipples. It was an announcement:

  Hurricane Season Is Over - Join Lama Underwood

  For a New Age Carribean Cruise!

  Visit Free Havana!

  Sit with Guruji-Roy!

  See your future and feel His Mahanam!

  And bring a bathing suit!

  Iberra squealed with delight. “Hey, look at this! Russell, you’re right! It’s my Granddad Hank online! Hey, Russell—”

  Cantwell was already on his feet, running. He dodged past his supervisor and crashed through the door, bound for the stark Denver sunshine outside.

  Ed Steinhoff, who was now getting strange messages on his own com-pad, looked over at Allison Iberra.

  “What the hell was that all about?”

  “I think he saw a ghost,” she said with a smile. “A good one, too.”

  A Lincoln in Time

  Eric James Stone

  Booth raised his derringer, but it was too late—Lincoln had seen him coming. With an agility that belied his gangly frame, Lincoln sprang from his box seat, turning as he rose, and in one smooth motion drew a Smith & Wesson revolver and fired a bullet into Booth’s right eye.

  I shook my head. The patrons of Ford’s Theatre began their usual panic at the gunshot. Ignoring them, I made my way to the box. Lincoln was comforting his wife as I stepped through the curtain. His hand moved for his gun until he recognized me.

  “We need to talk, Mr. President,” I said, stepping over Booth’s body.

  He nodded, so I activated the extemp field. The noise of the crowd vanished as they froze in place. I extended the field to include Lincoln.

  “I must admit to being surprised by the accuracy of my shot,” he said. “Not that I was aiming for his eye, but I thought my moving might make me miss him entirely.”

  “Why did you shoot him?”

  He shrugged those long arms. “After you told me, I just felt like I deserved a chance to defend myself.”

  Frustration welled up inside me. “I asked for your help because it’s what has to happen.”

  “Why?” Lincoln held his hand up to forestall my reply. “I know that is what happened in the past of your future.” He frowned. “I confuse myself just thinking about how that makes sense. But if my death really is destined to come now, why has Booth failed every time—even when I do not shoot him?”

  I clenched my fists. “My entire world will never exist unless I fix the timeline. Billions of lives are at stake—I thought you understood.”

  “It is one thing to understand it at the intellectual level, and another to feel it in the heart,” Lincoln said. “‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ You are asking me to die for people who are an abstraction at best.”

  “Abstraction? I have a wife, a son. They aren’t abstractions.” I wished Temporal Services regulations had allowed me to bring back even a small photo of them. “Their names are Desiree and Danny, and unless you help me, I will never see them again. Do you know how that feels?”

  Lincoln’s face darkened. “My wife and I have lost two sons. And now you want me to make my wife a widow?”

  In my desperation, I had pressed him too far. I withdrew the field and Lincoln froze.

  After my first five attempts at repairing the timeline had failed, I had come up with the idea of getting Lincoln’s cooperation. At least it ensured he would get to Ford’s Theatre without his bodyguard—that had happened only once in the first five times, and it had ended with Booth failing to show up for some unknown reason. Assuming I ever repaired the timeline and got back to my own future, I’d have a blockbuster paper to write on just how unlikely Lincoln’s assassination was.

  This time, Lincoln had given his bodyguard the night off and I’d managed to get Booth to the theater with a derringer rather than the bulky pistol he sometimes chose. And then Lincoln had to pull a stunt like this. He might understand the idea of repairing the timeline, but it was asking too much that he go like a lamb to the slaughter. There was no point in taking him back to try again.

  I needed a new approach. I set my destination to two months back and jumped.

  Dr. Samuel Mudd shook his head gravely. “It could be consumption.”

  It wasn’t. Since coming back, I’d heard enough people with tubercular coughs that I could fake one pretty well. But the act gave me an excuse to see Mudd—Booth’s co-conspirator.

  “Actually, Doctor, I am here on another matter.” I gave him what I hoped was a meaningful look. “Concerning the President.”

  Mudd’s eyes flickered. “I don’t—”

  The door crashed open
and a well-dressed man strode in, ignoring Mudd’s assistant, who was telling him the doctor was with a patient. The man looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

  He looked at me and said, “I beg your pardon, but I have an urgent matter to discuss with the good doctor. In private.”

  “Who are you?” Mudd asked. “You can’t just bull your way in and demand to see me—”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “We can continue our discussion later.” I rose from sitting on the examination table and stepped out of the office, closing the door behind me.

  I activated the extemp field and moved through the wall back into Mudd’s office. I then withdrew all but an observation portal from contact with the timestream and started moving forward in real time.

  The stranger assured himself I had left the room, then turned back to Mudd. “I know you’re part of the plot to kidnap Lincoln. Don’t bother to deny it.”

  Mudd turned and walked to his chair with slow, even steps. He sat. “Who told you such a thing?” His voice trembled slightly.

  “Dr. Mudd, you are a man of science,” said the stranger. “You have seen the progress science has made since Newton. Surely you believe science will continue to progress—that the future holds marvels as yet undiscovered.”

  Mudd nodded.

  The stranger leaned forward, resting both hands on Mudd’s desk. “This may seem incredible to you, but it is true: there will come a time when men voyage from the future to the past more easily than you can sail to Europe. Unfortunately, such voyagers can change the course of history.”

  I stopped the timeflow. How did the stranger know about me? Suddenly I remembered where I had seen him before: in the box next to Lincoln’s at Ford’s Theatre. Was it possible he had accidentally been included in the extemp field? It shouldn’t happen—the field is under my direct neural control—but then again, the field shouldn’t have collapsed the way it did, forcing me into the timestream and changing history.

  I started forward again.

  “You’re mad,” said Mudd.

  “Am I? Have you ever seen a photograph like this?” The stranger pulled a device from his coat and projected a holographic family portrait of himself, a woman, and two young boys.

  I stopped the timeflow to give myself a chance to think. The time machine implanted in my skull was supposed to automatically exclude other time machines from attaching to the timestream while I was here. If the stranger was a time traveler, obviously my time machine was malfunctioning even more severely than I had thought.

  I shook my head. Had the stranger come back to save Lincoln? Perhaps his interference was derailing my attempts to restore the timeline.

  We had to talk and I didn’t want to bother with the rest of his conversation with Mudd. I extended the extemp field to cover the stranger.

  When he saw Mudd freeze, the stranger turned his head until he spotted me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “You! You’re the time voyager?”

  “I’m from 2367,” I said. “What about you?”

  “That’s impos...No, I guess it isn’t.” He rubbed a palm against his forehead. “This is worse than I thought. In my history, the timeship was not invented until 2401. I come from 2410.”

  I felt a chill. Other than my inability to return home, this was the first evidence I had that my damage to the timeline had extended all the way forward to 2367. Minor changes have a way of canceling themselves out over the long haul, but Lincoln’s survival was not a minor change.

  “Time travel was invented a hundred years earlier in my timeline,” I said. The historian in me couldn’t help adding, “I wonder why Lincoln’s assassination accelerated the development of temporal physics.”

  He pointed an accusing finger at me. “So you are trying to kill Lincoln!”

  “I don’t want to! But it’s the only way to restore the timeline.”

  The stranger reached into a pocket and pulled out a gun made of some blue, translucent substance. The barrel had no hole in it, but it was a gun all right.

  “Take me to your timeship,” he demanded.

  I withdrew the extemp field from him, except for his hand. He froze. I walked over, pried the gun from his grip, and stepped back. He was lucky I didn’t want to hurt him—a brief period without circulation would not damage his hand, but if I had taken the gun away with his hand outside the field, his fingers would have been broken or possibly sheared off.

  I re-extended the extemp field.

  He blinked, then looked at his empty hand.

  I waggled the gun at him. “Don’t be dumb again.”

  He sat down on the floor, put his head in his hands and began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to restore the original timeline.” During training, that was the first thing they drilled into us: no matter what, restore the original timeline.

  “It’s all my fault,” he said. “I didn’t think it would do any harm.”

  Maybe the history change wasn’t my fault after all. “What did you do?”

  He sniffled. “I posed as a newspaper theater critic and interviewed John Wilkes Booth.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You intentionally entered the timeline and interacted with a major player?” Of course, I had done that myself, but only in an attempt to fix the timeline after it was broken.

  “I didn’t know he was that important. You have to understand: it was for my thesis.”

  Remembering my grad school days, I could almost sympathize. Almost. “How could you not know Lincoln’s assassin was a major player?”

  “That’s just it: he wasn’t. He only had a minor role in the kidnapping. I changed things so he killed Lincoln.”

  I dropped him out of the field. I needed time to think.

  If it occurred to someone at Temporal Services that our timeline was the result of a changed history, they never mentioned it to me. I always thought of my timeline as the “real” one and considered timelines resulting from changes as merely distorted shadows of reality. That’s why minor changes always tended to cancel themselves out—they were being drawn into sync with the “real” timeline.

  No matter what, restore the original timeline.

  I’m sure they probably meant “restore our timeline.” Restore the lives of twenty-three billion people on fourteen planets in ten star systems. Restore my wife, Desiree, and my boy, Danny.

  That was how I justified helping John Wilkes Booth kill Lincoln. Putting history back the way it was did not make me responsible for what happened in that history.

  But now?

  If Lincoln was not killed in the original timeline, could I justify killing him to implement my distorted shadow of reality?

  If so, was I any different from John Wilkes Booth?

  The stranger’s name was Orville. He didn’t resist when I told him to take me to his “timeship”. Either my demonstration of superior technology had cowed him, or he was just waiting for the right time to attack me.

  “It doesn’t look much like a ship,” I said. We stood in the warehouse space Orville had rented. The contraption looked more like an elevator without a shaft.

  Orville pressed a button and the door slid open. “The name’s from a 19th-century novel: The Timeship, by George Wells.”

  I chuckled. “The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. Funny how the fate of Lincoln would affect that.”

  Orville dashed through the door and began punching some buttons, obviously hoping to timejump away. I activated my field and everything froze. I sighed. All I had to do was jump back, kill Orville and then restore my timeline. Without his interference, I should be able to make sure Lincoln’s assassination took place.

  But I didn’t want to kill Orville. Restoring the timeline was different from just plain murder.

  I extended the field to include Orville, who continued punching at buttons until he realized he was no longer able to affect them. His body sagged as he turned to look at me.

  I shook my head. “How many
humans are there in your time?”

  “Eight billion,” he said. “Yours?”

  “Did you have a nuclear war or something?” Only eight billion? “We have twenty-three billion.”

  “Impossible. Earth can’t support that many people.”

  “Earth only has five billion. The rest are on other planets in other star systems.”

  Orville was silent for a long moment. “You’re trying to convince me your future is better than mine.”

  Nodding, I said, “Our tech obviously advanced more quickly than yours.”

  “Obviously.” Orville studied my face. “You’re being honest with me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You mentioned a ‘nuclear war’.” He pronounced the term as if he were unfamiliar with the concept. “Has your timeline ever had one?”

  I winced. “Two: the Sino-Russian War and the final Arab-Israeli war. Well, three, if you count the end of World War II.” I didn’t mention the terrorist nukes because they weren’t exactly wars.

  His eyes went wide. “Your entire world was at war? Twice? With another planet?”

  “No—with ourselves. Maybe you just had the first one? The Great War, in Europe around 1914?”

  He looked at me like I was nuts. “There were tensions in Europe at the time, inflamed by the kidnapping of an archduke, if I recall correctly. But the British smoothed things over. And the Pax Britannica was followed by the Pax Americana and the Pax Abrahamica.”

  “Abrahamica?”

  “Jews facing persecution in Europe during the mid-20th century fled to the Islamic world.” He frowned. “You mentioned an Arab-Israeli war?”

  “Several.”

  Orville shook his head. “The Nation of Abraham was a joint Islamic/Jewish state. They controlled most of the world’s oil supply. Anyway, during the age of the supernations, any nation attacking another found itself immediately at war with the major powers, not to mention cut off from all trade. Then the World Democracy was established in 2076, and even civil wars were outlawed. We haven’t had a war in 300 years. How long has it been for you?”