Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “Of course what we observed—the robot staying in the chamber and not going anywhere—looked exactly like what we’re seeing now,” Carson said.

  “Well, okay,” Rebecca said. “But I’m not a robot. I don’t need to be programmed; I can make my own decisions. Say this causality violation device worked. And I wanted to go back into the past and stay there: I’ve decided on it, and that’s that. What’s to stop me?”

  “You have free will—at least that’s a statement that you could get some philosophers to agree with you on,” Alicia said. “But your mind is a manifestation of your body, your body is composed of matter, and that matter is subject to the laws of physics. If you do push-ups to the point of failure, all the wanting in the world isn’t going to let you lift yourself again, because your glycogen’s been depleted and the energy source for your muscles just isn’t there. Free will has its limits.”

  “You’d probably have to return,” Carson said. “There’d be no other way. Maybe after a little while back in the past, you’d inevitably change your mind. And you’d think that change of mind would be your own decision, but that would be an illusion: it would just be physics acting on the matter that composes your body, as it must.”

  “But if I were to go back in the past. Wouldn’t I, like, remember that? That would be a hell of a thing to forget.”

  “Here’s what we think that might be like,” said Alicia. “Have you ever had a drinking blackout?”

  “Maybe once or twice,” said Rebecca.

  “I did once during my freshman year of college. The most embarrassed I’ve even been, afterward. Not the least bit funny. But we think that if a human were to violate conventional causality—”

  “By time traveling—”

  “Please, please don’t call it that. If a human were to violate causality, the experience from her point of view would be similar. You would act while in the past, but not be able to recall your actions later, because that period of time for you would be lost between histories: the old one you left and the new one to which you would return. It would exist outside of the normal course of events. It would be, in a very real sense, lost time.”

  By now Rebecca’s untouched steak had gotten tough, and her eggs had gone cold and rubbery. Carson’s French toast was covered with a congealed layer of maple-syrup analog. Alicia had, of course, finished off her pancakes.

  “So,” Rebecca said, rubbing her eyes. “To sum up. Suppose a person were to use this thing to travel back in time. Deliberately.”

  “To violate causality,” Alicia said.

  “No, I think we can just go ahead and call this time travel—let’s not mince words. I go back to the past. I alter the past, and by doing so I change the future. Then I return to the place I left, because physics basically says I have to.”

  “Then you would have acted to change history, but you would have replaced one history with another. You would not be able to know what past version of history you would have altered, because that history would never have happened. Nor would you be able to know what you had done in the past, or that you had done anything at all in the past, or that you had even been to the past. You would not be able to compare histories in your mind; if you entered the causality violation device knowing this, then you would realize that you would be trading one set of memories for another, and that there would never be any evidence, in your mind or in the world, that you had done this.”

  “And you’re telling me this because I went into the machine. But I’m telling you, I didn’t see anything crazy in there. No crazy lights, or the Ghost of Christmas Past, or anything like that. But it’s really hard to imagine that if I did end up going a few years back in time, I wouldn’t take the opportunity to, you know, look around.”

  Rebecca pushed her plate away. “This is scaring the hell out of me.”

  “We have no way of knowing what iteration of post–Point Zero history we’re in,” Carson said. “Everything that happened before the establishment of Point Zero has to have stayed the same. But after that? This might be the only version of events that’s ever happened. Or it might be the fifth version, or the seventy-fifth.

  “People from the military have been inside that thing. If I went back in time, I wouldn’t necessarily be thinking geopolitically, but maybe they would. That has to be half the reason why they’re funding us in the first place. Maybe there were earlier versions of history where Republicans didn’t vote to pulp all those Andrew Jackson twenties and replace them with bills that had portraits of Reagan. Maybe in the first version of post–Point Zero history, insurgents in North and South Dakota didn’t attempt to secede; maybe we weren’t fighting enemies both here and in the Middle East. Or maybe there was a full-on civil war going on in the United States and the current state of affairs is an improvement. We don’t know. We can’t know. And we can’t know the extent to which any of us, sitting here at this table, is responsible.”

  Rebecca said, “But you wanted to tell me this—”

  “Because even if we have no hard evidence for this, we thought it was the right thing to do,” Alicia said. “We wanted you to be informed.”

  “I kind of feel like this is something I wish I didn’t know.”

  “Me, too,” said Alicia, her voice just above a whisper.

  She removed the tiny electronic device from her pocket again and toggled the switch. The blue light at its tip went dark.

  She lifted a hand and beckoned to the waitress for the check.

  32

  CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

  These days it was hard to even have a conversation without the President butting in. Things had gotten really bad in the Dakotas: a member of one or another secessionist faction had actually assassinated North Dakota’s lieutenant governor, which made it a lot harder to pretend that these guys were just a bunch of wackos that could be dismissed as crackpots or handled with drones. The President was stopping short of calling this a civil war—the word “insurgency” still applied—but he was in the process of drumming up support for an inevitable “increased military presence,” which meant that more people were going to die. The problem was that a fair percentage of the American public actually appeared to be in favor of Dakotan secession: why not use the landlocked territory as a dumping ground for survivalists, tinfoil-hat wearers, bigots, and fringe-libertarians, while the rest of the country got on with its own business? Live-and-let-live native Dakotans might not approve of that, but they could be relocated—it wouldn’t be the first time—and if you wanted to make an omelet you had to break some eggs. Let bad people do the best they could in the Badlands.

  But the federal government wasn’t having that: it couldn’t afford to lose that kind of face. So for the past couple of weeks the President had been showing up everywhere, on a major PR offensive. On Sunday night Rebecca had gotten pretty drunk—that stuff Alicia and Carson had laid on her had been pretty heavy, and she still didn’t know how to deal with what she had found out from Philip’s notes—and she turned on her webcam and rang up her dad, who by coincidence had also been drinking: he’d just officiated at the funeral of a member of his congregation who’d died at thirty-two from a cancer that had been spotted too late and spread too quickly, and after something like that he liked to tuck into a bottle of whiskey to let himself be human again, to let himself have his own troubled feelings instead of serenely soothing the feelings of others. So they sat in front of their screens with matching glasses at their sides—Dad with his bourbon, daughter with straight-up citrus-infused vodka she’d poured from a bottle she kept in the freezer. Despite the electronic intermediation and the ever-changing ads that floated beside her father’s image, Rebecca found this strangely companionable—she felt her father’s pride in raising a daughter that he could drink with.

  “Dad,” she said. “Question.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Do we have a duty to do good?”

  “Honey, darling, Jesus—when you said question I wasn’t expecting it
to be about, you know, deontology. More, like, how the Phillies look this year in the playoffs.”

  “Okay. Another question instead. Same but different. Say you had a time machine.”

  “Are you high right now?”

  “Dad! No! Listen! Suppose you had a time machine and you could go back in time to kill Hitler, like back when he was just interested in painting, before all that Third Reich stuff happened. You could, but would you have to? Or would it be okay to just never use the time machine at all? Just leave the thing in mothballs and let the past stay in the past?”

  “Okay.” Woody squinted at the camera and rubbed his eyes. “Come at it this way. Kant’s categorical imperative, right? Always act in a way you wish everyone else would act. More or less. To know if something ought to be done, you ask yourself whether it would be cool if there were a universal rule about it or not. So if you’re thinking of killing someone, would you be okay with a universal law that says it’s okay for people to kill other people, just whenever? If the answer’s no, and I’m going to guess that it is because if not we need to have a talk, then you have to leave Hitler be.

  “You know who really digs Kant’s categorical imperative, by the way? Nerds and cowards. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to make decisions about right and wrong for yourself, on a case-by-case basis. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a good book, and you could just follow the directions in it to the letter and be assured you’d never step on anyone’s toes, never piss anyone off, never do anything wrong. But life isn’t, you know, neat like that. Common sense: if a guy has a time machine and he doesn’t at least take a couple of seconds to think about killing Hitler, that makes him kind of an asshole, doesn’t it?”

  “Can we have a universal rule that says it’s okay to kill people named Hitler? And write off poor Steve and Susie Hitler as the cost of doing business?”

  “Nice try. But cheating. If you’ve got to qualify it like that, it’s not a universal rule. So you’ve got your Kantians. Call them the deontologists. Now on the other hand you’ve got your consequentialists. They don’t care about the goodness of the action, so much as the goodness of the result it gets. So it’s not so much about the killing of one man as it is about the millions of lives that murder would save. But the problem with that outlook is, again, the world isn’t that neat. If there’s a silver lining to World War II, it’s that people decided when it was over that they’d do their best to ensure that was the upper limit to the horror that humans could inflict on each other. What if killing Hitler just puts us in a world where the U.S. and Russia fire off all their missiles at each other in the eighties? Is that on you? Or do you get to throw up your hands and say you acted the best you could given the information you had and what you believed the consequences would be, so you’re blameless? Honestly, it’s a hell of a—”

  Not again: Dad’s face was suddenly replaced by an image of the presidential seal, followed by the man himself, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office with an appropriately stern look on his face. “Hello, Rebecca. And: Woodrow,” the President said. “It sounds like you two are having a little talk about: the nature of good and evil. And a lot of Americans are having that same conversation right now, in their living rooms and at their workplaces and in their churches. I want to show you something that will inform this conversation. I want you to see the true face of evil. I’m sorry for this.”

  On a blasted prairie dotted with tendrils of smoke drifting upward, three pikes were driven into the earth; each had a severed head atop it, gray and misshapen, wreathed in flies that drifted in slow, lazy orbits. “The lieutenant governor of North Dakota, his wife, and his eleven-year-old daughter,” said the President in voiceover. “David and Virginia Lowell had been married for seventeen happy years. Virginia’s chicken tetrazzini was famous throughout the city of Bismarck. Their daughter was in sixth grade, and was learning to play the viola.”

  The President’s voice deepened. “This image speaks for itself. Such outright lunacy cannot be tolerated in this nation. A predecessor of mine who loved the Dakota Territory once said, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ I have spoken softly, and I have spoken loudly, and now it is time for the stick. I say this as your commander-in-chief.” It occurred to Rebecca that she had never heard a president say the words “commander-in-chief” without sounding either sheepish or full of false bravado, as if he’d been installed in the position by accident.

  “Both your bills will be credited for this seventy-eight-second interruption,” the President said. “Good night, and in these troubled times, may God continue to bless America.”

  A day later, Rebecca lay fully reclined in the driver’s seat of her car as it ferried her out of New York City after a Monday at the office. She’d kicked off her heels and kept her arms folded across her chest like an Egyptian queen snug in her sarcophagus, watching the streetlights whip by above as she stared up at them through the car’s window.

  She closed her eyes, and as had been her habit over these past couple of days, she began to imagine possible past histories and what she might have done to change them into the new one in which she lived, either inadvertently, or out of a misguided attempt to play God and make the world a better place, or, worse, with malice aforethought. Any time she spent in the past would have been clipped out of history, as neatly as if it had never happened, because it hadn’t happened.

  She hadn’t gone back in time. The idea was silly.

  Or had she? Had she knocked on the door of her home to see a younger version of herself answer; had there been a mutual shock of recognition (as the younger Rebecca realized that, yes, her husband’s work was due to be a success, that he was not wasting his time chasing rainbows and tilting at windmills); had she slipped her arm into that of her past self (feeling a slight electric tingle as skin touched skin and a taste in her mouth as if she’d touched a nine-volt battery to her tongue) and said, We need to talk? Had she sat in a coffee shop, conversing with a woman who everyone assumed was related to her in some way—Oh my god you two are so cute, you’re mother and daughter but you look like sisters? Had she made some kind of idle remark overheard by a man on his way to spend two weeks’ vacation in North Dakota; had that comment convinced that man to settle there permanently instead, and to contact those who had political sympathies similar to his own? Had that unknown man then begun the slow process of taking over the state by placing his allies in the local governments if he could? Had that strategy failed, leaving brute force as a regrettable last resort?

  If she had gone back into the past, armed with the knowledge of an earlier version of history, wouldn’t she have done what she could to save her husband’s life? It would have been such an easy fix—she would barely have had to lift a finger. She could have told the younger version of herself to keep Sean home from school that day—she wouldn’t have even had to explain why, when a single dark look would have sufficed. Or she could have told her earlier self to pick Sean up from school herself instead of getting Philip to do it (and now she was doing what Carson had warned her not to do: she was ignoring the way that chance disguised itself as fate when viewed in hindsight). She remembered having had a few drinks that day, and thinking that she wasn’t good to drive. She remembered that for some reason she didn’t trust the self-driving car—it still seemed like newfangled technology back then. But now, in years of using autonomous vehicles, she’d never come close to being in an accident. Even with a buzz, maybe she should have taken the trip anyway—the computer might have been able to handle a situation that Philip could not have. Wouldn’t she have chosen to tell the past version of herself this crucial information?

  How could she not have saved him? Even if she had not been prepared to go backward in time when entering the causality violation device—who would be?—how could she have utterly failed to do enough, when there was so little that needed to be done, and the action that needed to be taken was so easy to see?

  33

  PRESIDENTIAL A
UDIENCE

  When Rebecca left the office that night, Felix waved to her, said, “See you tomorrow,” and went back to gazing at his monitor. He was working late. As a matter of fact, he’d been putting in late hours for the past month, on a project that he wasn’t allowed to say much about, including the fact that he was working on it. He’d needed to get real live government security clearance for it, which was pretty awesome, and elevated him a notch in the circle of his white-hat hacker friends.

  He was also being quite well compensated for the work, in ways both tangible and intangible. For the past three weeks, Lovability, or, more accurately, its parent company, had put him up at a pretty swank hotel near Lincoln Center, and told him they’d cover room service in addition to his regular bill. That was an especially generous offer, considering that there was a club on the hotel’s roof. Two or three nights a week he’d call up some friends—an assistant professor in computer science at Columbia; a couple of grad students at FIT; this guy who played marimba in a band doing a residency in Midtown, who Felix was casually trying to prise away from a boyfriend in Chicago. They’d go up to the roof, settle down in a booth, and Felix would order up bottle service. The kohl-eyed girl whose black bra strap artfully peeked from beneath her too-tight tank top always appeared just as the tune playing on the club’s speakers was about to hit its first big bass drop. There’d be that anticipatory ramping up of tempo, and then the server would set down the bottle of vodka in the center of the table with a sparkler fizzing away in its neck, and then you’d suddenly feel that subwoofer’s boom rattle your chest cavity, followed by an autotuned chorus that told you what a good time you were having.