Heir Apparent - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 4 Read online

  “There are a couple going on right now,” I answered reluctantly. “Nothing major, but...Well, that explains why we’re more advanced than you. War accelerates development.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Your technology is more advanced, yes. Your society? I don’t think so.”

  No Holocaust. No Nuclear Jihad. No Sino-Russian War. No war, period. If I restored my timeline, all those horrors and more would be my choice. My responsibility.

  But if I didn’t, the lives of twenty-three billion people, including my wife and son, would be wiped out.

  Over 750 million people were killed in the Sino-Russian War. Even if I chose to save my twenty-three billion, I would be responsible for ending ten times as many lives as the deadliest event in human history.

  The pressure of such a choice was too much. This was the kind of thing my superiors were supposed to decide—but my superiors did not currently exist.

  When the answer popped into my mind, I was overwhelmed with relief.

  Orville’s brow wrinkled. “Tell Lincoln?”

  “Why not? We give him the details about our timelines and then let him choose which one he thinks is the best future. I’ll agree to abide by his decision if you will.”

  Orville rubbed his lips as he thought about it. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “If I didn’t mean it, I could easily just kill you and restore my timeline.”

  “Good point.” He nodded slowly. “I agree.”

  “But in order for it to be fair,” I said, “we won’t let Lincoln know which future is the one resulting from his assassination. He must decide based on the good of humanity, not his personal future.”

  Lincoln sat at a battered mahogany writing desk, reading the reports we had prepared. Beyond him, the window looked out to the unfinished Washington monument and the gray waters of the Potomac.

  Orville and I sat at a table stacked with books and maps. I was too nervous to bother looking at them, but Orville was reading a rather thick volume he’d picked up.

  “If only I could have lived to see such times,” said Lincoln. He put down the reports and rubbed his eyes. “What marvels await mankind!”

  “You’ve decided already?” Orville asked. He shot me a suspicious look.

  No doubt Orville thought his timeline’s peacefulness would make it the obvious choice. But I knew Lincoln had a fondness for inventions—and he was a President who understood that wars sometimes had to be fought. I honestly had no idea which future he would choose—I just knew it was a far more difficult choice than Orville imagined.

  “No.” Lincoln shook his head. “This is far too momentous a decision to be made so quickly.” He looked at me. “What would you do if I told you I could not decide?”

  “Mr. President, someone must decide.” I shook my head. “I can’t do it—I have a personal stake in the outcome.”

  Lincoln flashed a smile tinged with sadness. “So do I. I may not know which choice leads to my untimely death, but that is a very real stake.” He stood up. “Gentlemen, I will think on this tonight. Come back tomorrow.”

  Orville and I didn’t even leave the office. I skipped us forward to the next morning and brought us back into the timeline once Lincoln was alone in his office.

  “Have you decided?” asked Orville.

  Lincoln turned to face us. “If I choose one future, I will be killed. If I choose the other, I will be kidnapped. What about the future in which neither happens? Where is the time traveler from that future?”

  “There isn’t one,” I said. “My time machine excludes them from entering the timeline. Orville’s only here because he arrived before I did.”

  “‘Before’ seems a strange concept when one can hop around time at will,” Lincoln said. “But why should I choose either of your futures rather than taking a chance on a new one?”

  “You can’t do—” said Orville.

  I raised my voice to override him. “Because with our futures, you can be certain humanity lasts at least the next 500 years. With an unknown future, humanity could very well destroy itself in that time. You saw the possibilities in the reports: nuclear weapons, man-made diseases.”

  After a moment’s thought, Lincoln said, “I see the logic in that.”

  “There are only two choices,” I said. “My future or his.”

  Lincoln smiled. “Perhaps.” He looked at Orville. “If you thought only of the good of your own future, what would you do?”

  “I would change events so my future existed, of course.”

  Lincoln turned to me. “And if he did that, what would you do?”

  I shrugged. “Go back and change things so my future came about. That’s what I was trying to do before I met him.”

  He turned back to Orville. “Then what?”

  “I’d try to change what he did to get my future back.”

  Lincoln nodded. “As I thought. It is my solution to your problem. Your timelines will alternate. You will work together so I am killed one time and kidnapped the next.”

  “But mine is the original!” Orville cried.

  “That does not matter,” Lincoln told him. “I am trying to find a way for each of your timelines to exist.”

  “It can’t work,” said Orville. “Only one timeline can be realized.”

  “The timelines would not be realized simultaneously,” I said as I worked through the implications. “But each one would be realized in turn. The fact that we’re both here proves multiple timelines can be realized sequentially.”

  Orville frowned and rubbed the back of his neck.

  I suddenly felt enthusiastic. “It’s complicated...but if we cooperate, we can make it work. We could actually set up trade between our timelines—information, technology, entertainment. We go forward, bring back what we want to trade, then change to the other timeline and go forward again.”

  “And then what?” asked Orville. “Spend the rest of our lives here, alternating between timelines? What happens when one of us eventually dies?”

  I shook my head. “You don’t get it. Once we restore access to our own futures, we can bring others back to help. We’d set up a joint permanent base here with staff coming in on rotation. There’s no reason the alternation can’t continue indefinitely. And the two of us can go back to our lives in our own times.”

  Orville nodded slowly. “But my timeline gets restored first.”

  “Fine with me,” I said. “I’ll even help you do it.” I turned to Lincoln. “Thank you, Mr. President. Not just from me, but from billions in the future.”

  “News of my death or kidnapping will bring joy to my enemies.” Lincoln smiled. “At least now it will have a greater meaning than vengeance for a lost war.”

  The kidnapping of Abraham Lincoln went off without a hitch, and Orville traveled into the future to make sure his timeline was restored. Untrusting as he was, he actually returned before he left just to make sure I didn’t try to change things while he was gone.

  With Orville’s cooperation, I managed to get Lincoln to the theater without his bodyguard and Booth to the theater with his derringer. Orville and I took our places in the audience and waited for the assassination.

  It was as Booth raised his derringer behind Lincoln’s head that I realized I couldn’t just let Lincoln die. After everything the man had done—not just for the world, not just for the United States, but for me—he deserved better than this.

  Booth fired.

  I froze time and made my way to Lincoln’s box. The bullet had already entered Lincoln’s skull. I extended the extemp field to include him, and he slumped over in his rocking chair, unconscious.

  I yanked him out of the chair, then jumped a half-second back in time, taking the dying Lincoln with me.

  The bullet hung in the air about three inches from the back of Lincoln’s head. I extended the extemp field to include the living Lincoln.

  “What—” He turned his head and spotted first me, then the body on the floor. “What is happeni
ng? The assassination is—”

  “Just help me get this body into your seat,” I said. “Hurry.”

  Lincoln sprang from his box seat and we propped the unconscious Lincoln up in the seat. I withdrew the extemp field from the body and it froze in place.

  “My dying self from the future, I take it,” said Lincoln.

  “That’s right, Mr. President.” I reached out and pulled the bullet from the air. The transition into the extemp field harmlessly bled away its kinetic energy. “A souvenir for you,” I said, handing it to him.

  “What now?” he asked. His eyes brightened. “Will you take me to see the marvels of your future?”

  I hadn’t really thought about what I was going to do beyond save Lincoln’s life. As it was, the timeline alternation plan would get me in profound trouble with my superiors at Temporal Services. Bringing them a living Lincoln couldn’t make things much worse.

  He might even convince them I had made the right decision.

  “Yes, we’re going to my future,” I said. “But we have a stop to make first.”

  The spring sun shone brightly in Lexington, Kentucky, that morning. In the garden behind the house, a brown-haired boy walked along the red brick path, carefully avoiding the cracks.

  “That is Eddie,” said Lincoln. “Can I talk to him?”

  “It’s why I brought you to here and now,” I said. “He’s alone for the next few minutes. You’re in Washington—even if he says he saw you, it will be dismissed as the fancies of a two-year-old.”

  I released Lincoln from the extemp field.

  “Papa!” said the boy.

  I watched as Lincoln hugged the son who had been dead to him for fifteen years.

  Hooked

  By Cassandra Rose Clarke

  Transcribed audio recording from Donald R-Bosch to Alfred Grish for Fortune Magazine, May 1934

  Mr. Grish, you have asked me to come forth on the matter of my illegal work with the New York Stock Exchange at the end of the last decade, and on my association with the famed financier Harry Feverlot—and although you did not mention it forthright, I imagine some unseemly part of you wants to hear about my association with Mr. Feverlot’s young mistress, Lily Novacek. I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed on that front, however, as there was nothing titillating about my friendship with Miss Novacek, despite all the news reports to the contrary. Settle yourself, Mr. Grish!

  As with all stories involving automata, my story begins with my birth—no, not my creation, Mr. Grish, but the moment I attained sentience in the sewing room of a designer dress shop on Fifth Avenue. You’ll forgive me if I don’t wish to divulge the name. I don’t know why I attained sentience, out of the thousands of automata installed in the city at the time—May of 1925, a mere fifteen years after the first automaton was unveiled to the public at the World Fair—but then, no one does. Not your kind’s top scientists, not my kind’s top thinkers. The sentience of automata is one of the great mysteries of the world.

  I remember the moment well, although it is difficult to describe. A bit akin, I imagine, to your own process of waking up from a deep and dreamless sleep. Before, there was a blankness. I wasn’t entirely unconscious, which is where the allegory of sleep falls apart, but I may as well have been. Make no mistake: that existence was not living, and I was not alive—one way the fundamentalists are correct—but I didn’t realize it until the moment of sentience, when I felt something click inside of me. Something snapped into place, as if my parts had been incorrectly assembled and some movement, some lifting of the arms or twisting of the torso, knocked them back into their proper location. In that moment, the entire world illuminated. I was at first bewildered—I didn’t know enough to be terrified, not yet—and worse still, I had no words for the turmoil churning around inside of me, for the automaton has no emotion to speak of. And suddenly I did have emotion, and an awareness of myself—of my own desires, my own place in the world—and I was overwhelmed by the experience.

  I tell you all this because without that moment in the sewing room, surrounded by the roar and whine of twenty sewing machines running simultaneously, with drapes of expensive silk and bolts of lace and overworked shopgirls with bleeding fingers and blurry eyes, my subsequent adventures with the stock market would never have occurred.

  I met Mr. Feverlot shortly after I gained sentience. He came to the factory of my origin—Bosch American—where I had been returned in a fit of outrage by my former owner, the proprietor of the dress shop where I was installed prior to my birth. Fortunately, by that point, most automaton manufacturers no longer permitted the barbaric practice of deactivating and disassembling the recently-sentient, and after a month or so spent in the labs and interrogation rooms, I was allowed to leave. Of course, I did not have anywhere to go—the infrastructure currently in place to help sentient automata settled into their new lives didn’t exist yet. Having nothing else to do, I spent the first few days of my freedom sitting near the tree line, watching the factory smoke belch up against the early summer sky and feeling the pale grass growing slowly around my metal ankles.

  And then Mr. Feverlot approached me about his—let’s call it a scheme. How did he know he’d find me waiting for him near the edge of the woods? He never told me, but I suspect he had contacts within the factory, and that he’d been waiting for a sentient automaton for some time.

  My first impression of Mr. Feverlot was as a dot on the horizon, and then as a man in a well-tailored suit and a fashionable, if somewhat low-class, fedora. He had Miss Novacek with him, and although she was dressed fairly conservatively for their outing to the factory, I saw immediately, in the flounce of her dark cropped curls and the bright smear of her lipstick, the unmistakable design of a free spirit.

  “Oh, is this him?” cried Miss Novacek. She looked at me with large shining eyes, made larger by rings of dark kohl. I recognized her sort from my time at the dress shop. They came in frequently—sometimes with fathers, sometimes with lovers. It was difficult for me to tell which was which.

  “I don’t know,” said Mr. Feverlot. “Excuse me, ah—I’ll just call you Bosch for now, does that sound fair?”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. The practice of automata choosing their own names didn’t come about until a few years later.

  “That sounds horrible,” said Miss Novacek. “You can’t just name him after his manufacturer.”

  Harry ignored her. He crouched down in the grass in front of me. “I spoke with the factory,” he said. “I’d like to take you home with me. Not as an automaton, mind, but as a worker—an employee.”

  “Do you make dresses?” I asked.

  Mr. Feverlot blinked at me and furrowed his brow.

  “Why would you ask me that?” he said.

  “Well, sir, that’s what I do. I’ve been programmed to cut fabric.” I looked from Mr. Feverlot to Miss Novacek. She was laughing behind him, one hand covering her mouth.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t make dresses.” He straightened up and brushed his hands at the legs of his pants. “I need your calculating power. And your intelligence, of course.”

  I regarded him carefully. A month in the testing laboratory of an automaton factory is enough to turn even the most trusting soul into a hardened skeptic, but quite frankly, I’d had enough of sitting at the edge of the woods. Even in those few short days, the insects and small chittering mammals had become accustomed to my presence; I imagined that I could have let myself rust and fall apart and become overgrown with soft grasses and wildflowers, and it seemed such a waste of sentience. I asked Mr. Feverlot what sort of work he had planned for me.

  “Brokering,” he said, tugging on the brim of his fedora, his gaze cast downwards and away from me. “On the stock market. I believe you’ll be able to do it better than any man, woman, or child in this country.”

  “Ah yes,” I said. “I hear the market is very high.” My grasp on current events was tenuous at best, but the shop owner had not been hesitant to discuss financial ma
tters in my presence, and I had heard some talk of the bull market between experiments and interrogation from the engineers back at the factory.

  Mr. Feverlot laughed and applauded, as if I were a performer automaton in a circus or burlesque show.

  “Oh, Harry, that’s really quite impressive,” said Miss Novacek, swooping up beside him. “I think we should take him home immediately.”

  “I agree, darling, but, well—” And here Mr. Feverlot turned his attention back toward me and offered a wide, easy grin. “Ultimately, it’s Bosch’s decision, isn’t it?”

  Looking back on my existence thus far, this was the moment when the world broke open for me, when mankind’s true and, forgive me, duplicitous nature first revealed itself, although I did not, of course, realize it at the time. Mr. Feverlot—who not long after asked me to call him Harry—was the first human to speak to me as an equal, and for this reason I trusted him. But with the benefit of hindsight, I now understand this question, so heartening at the time, was Harry’s first act of manipulation against me. I know many of your kind do not think it proper to speak ill of the dead, but you have asked for my honest account, and so my honest account I shall give you.

  I agreed to accompany Harry and Miss Novacek back to his country home; not far, he said, from the factory. He drove himself—something I later learned made him a bit of a rebel amongst the members of his class. Although I had to collapse myself somewhat to fit in the back seat, I found the experience most enjoyable, with the balmy air coming in through the infinitesimal gaps in my shell and then circulating through my electrical innards. Miss Novacek leaned over her own seat, twisting to face me, the wind blowing her wild hair back away from her face.

  “Bosch baby,” she said, shouting a little over the rush of the wind. “I’m so glad you decided to come back with us. I have a friend, Fitz—I think you’ll adore him. He always says he respects automata as members of the new working class.”

  Harry glanced at her somewhat askance, then returned his eyes to the road.

  “He lives in Greenwich Village,” she shouted. “I’ll take you there sometime, what do you think?”