Alt.History 101 (Alt.Chronicles)

by Ken Liu

  “This charge is called buddha,” he told me.

  We met at my apartment. He brought a friend along, I didn’t know why. He also had a tiny case small enough to fit in his pocket. The equipment looked like an acupuncture needle.

  “It’s going to take a couple days to feel the effects, all right?” he said. “Then buddha will take care of you.”

  “Why do they call it ‘buddha’?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I didn’t know why it was illegal. The charged biomites just manipulated brain chemistry. The people who resisted biomites were taking Xanax or Lexapro, so what was the difference? If you got charged, you didn’t have to gamble with poor brain chemistry that resulted from genetics. I hoped that maybe this would make things right.

  “Like fixing a car,” the trainer said, stabbing the needle.

  In retrospect, having a maniac jab me in the neck was idiotic. But I was that desperate. I was punching out batters with 110-mph heaters, but happiness was nonexistent. Did I want to be happy? Was that it? Maybe not happy, but something.

  It took more like a week to hit me. At first, I thought I’d been duped, that maybe the little prick stuck me with a fancy needle and put my money in his pocket. But it was after an extra-innings win, a game in which I threw eleven scoreless innings on one hundred and forty pitches, that the buddha landed. I was in the clubhouse, just out of the shower and waiting for depression to arrive. At that point, it kept a better schedule than a bus station. I could feel the slide beginning, the slow coast down the emotional slope, when an invisible hand cradled me in loving-kindness and lifted me up.

  Years later, a friend described the first time the charge hit him as floating on a big cloud of titties. I couldn’t argue.

  Life was really good. I loved every morning, every day and every night. I couldn’t wait to wake up for another day. This was what life should be; it should be about loving everything no matter what. I would walk through Central Park and talk to strangers for hours, sign autographs until security sent me home, help people carry things across the street. The city wasn’t a dark menacing metropolis. It had been transformed into heaven. Nothing out there had changed, yet nothing was the same. All I had to change was the filters through which I looked.

  There were parties. There were clubs. No booze or old-school drugs because I didn’t need them, but there were all-nighters with baseball groupies and friends of friends. There were pictures in the newspapers with my perma-smiling face and big goofy wave because life was so goddamn beautiful.

  My ERA doubled. By September, it hovered above 3.50. I had never been above 2.00, not in my life. I was trending toward 4.00 and didn’t give a damn. Once, when I was in high school, I broke all the glass on my car—the windshield, the sideview mirrors, the rearview mirror, the headlights and taillights and even the dashboard—because I blew a game in the last inning. Now I lost and went to a party.

  And sex. There was sex. Lots of it.

  I was twenty-five and had never been laid. Hell, I never kissed a girl or held a hand or even thought about it. Now it was every night. Sometimes three times in a night and not always the same girl. That was until Jace.

  I felt her before I saw her, the back of my head tingled and the little hairs in my nostrils stiffened. When she parted the crowd—she had a way of doing that—my throat went numb; words dissolved into lumping things that stuck together. She was ripped from a Photoshopped billboard. The skin glowed, the eyes pierced, the hips swayed like a body of water. She was an iSkin addict, but I’d learn that much later. And much too late.

  We made love for two hours that night. I timed it because I was doing things like that.

  Six months later, we were married. It was extravagant, to say the least. Multiple cakes, high-powered bands, a celebrity guest list. Most of them were her friends because I still didn’t know anyone. I could hang out with a group for days and not remember them the next week. Because it didn’t matter.

  Granddad came to the wedding with wife number three. I had stopped taking his calls, didn’t even listen to his messages. By the last week of the season, someone pointed out that his box seat was empty. I didn’t notice. He didn’t approve of Jace, but his wife was the same age and just as addicted to iSkin.

  “Pheromones,” he said. “She got you with pheromones.”

  I half-listened to him explain why I was so in love. It was pheromone targeting. Human pheromones, the chemical messengers that elicited specific reactions and feelings, were complex and often different for each person. Jace had pheromones injected into her sweat glands that specifically targeted my senses, designed to trigger a love hormone dump when she was around. I thought about the way my head tingled, how my throat seized. And that was before I saw her.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  Granddad jerked his head at wife number three. She worked for a biomite specialist and said that Jace had come into the office weeks before I met her. All it took was a dab of my saliva or a blood sample. She had both. I didn’t know how she got them, but I was forgetting a lot those days.

  “This is all confidential,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

  Granddad just wanted to shit on my wedding. My life isn’t going the way he planned it, I thought. My life.

  When spring training started the following March, I was still a blissful idiot with a rag arm not worth a slice of what the Mets were paying. But I kept on smiling and the party continued, even when the headlines read The Seams Have Unraveled.

  By July, me and my 4.33 ERA were sentenced to middle relief. By then, the trainer was coming to my house every week. I was dreaming of Granddad at night, remembering Dr. Cherry Smoke and my sudden obsession with red seams. Who am I? I would wake up wondering. What am I?

  The emptiness was returning.

  The lovely charged effects were draining off before the trainer could hit me up again. A year of injects and a million dollars later and the buddha couldn’t fend off the emptiness for more than a few days. The trainer gladly stabbed me with another dose even while explaining brain chemistry and neuroplasticity. He was either brilliant or memorized a Wikipedia passage. Either way, I didn’t care.

  “You might lay off a bit,” he advised. “Let nature catch up.”

  I wanted to put my fist into the back of his throat.

  Wish I could say the accident ruined all of that, that it would’ve been a fairy-tale ending with a picket fence had I not brought it all to a halt. Somewhere beneath all the dopamine and oxytocin, though, I could hear the fat lady.

  I was a Behind the Music episode.

  The motorcycle violated my contract, scared the shit out of my wife, and pissed off Granddad. But I needed something because I wasn’t me. I was an actor hitting my marks, saying someone else’s lines. I was damn good at it, but somewhere deep inside I fucking hated it. And Jace knew it.

  That was why she planned to have a baby.

  I found out through Granddad’s wife. She was still working for the biomite specialist and still giving up the gossip on my wife, even though she could lose her job. I knew every time she had a boob adjustment, a brain enhancement, or tummy trim. Even when she ordered a new pheromone, one that didn’t match my profile. She was targeting someone on the side and I didn’t do a damn thing.

  The baby, though… that was too much.

  Jace had an ovarian injection, one that would turn them on. She did it without telling me. Maybe she could see I was fading, I was losing interest. Maybe she really did love me, I sometimes wondered. But we couldn’t bring a baby into this scrap heap we called a marriage. I’d like to say Jace was a distortion of her true self, a reflection so warped that she wouldn’t recognize herself. But so was I.

  I just couldn’t do that to a baby.

  I climbed on a brand new KTM 1290 Super Duke R that morning and woke up eight weeks later. The news reports were blunt and viral images of the carnage filled the Internet—scattered teeth and my million-dollar arm bending the wron
g way. Besides a new arm, they printed a new jaw, three new organs, a new lung and a new leg from the knee down.

  I was told that Jace left me and the Mets voided my contract. Only one of those things saddened me. Even worse, the doctor told me the extent of the damage done by the buddha.

  “Charred.” That was what he called it. “Your biomites are in a charred state.”

  My chemistry was overworked, the neurons going on strike. Charred was not the label an athlete wanted. It wasn’t what anyone wanted. Rehab, I was told, was my only chance to make things right. I figured it was my final stop because if it didn’t work and baseball was done, I was checking out. No point in living anymore. I didn’t want to be around to see the ESPN biopic of an athlete that had it all only to end with a fade-out of me sitting in a dark apartment.

  For the first time in my life, I was scared.

  Granddad was there. After all that, he came in and hugged me. I started crying right there in the hospital.

  He found me a rehab center that specialized in biomite addiction. In the old days, someone could throw away the booze or flush the coke, but what did you do when your own body was getting you high? I could just stop taking the charge, but there were others out there that had transformed their brains into opiate factories that just flat-ass collapsed. They had become the bottle of booze. I was lucky, someone told me. The buddha was a kinder, gentler charge. It gave me a chance to recover.

  As much as I wanted to get better, I hated that fucking place. I don’t remember much, but at one point I was put in a straitjacket. Much later, I cried for my dad. Someone said that was good.

  There were also clay injections, the extraction and replication of my own organic cells and reinsertion into my body to cleanse it of toxic biomites. For all the good biomites had done in the world, for every case of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and autism it cured, there were ten biomite addicts chasing the buddha. Experts were saying that biomites would soon go beyond the body, that phones would be integrated into the brain, there would be thought transmissions like texts and audio implants and imbedded video in the visual cortex. The world would be more connected than ever.

  “It’s too much, too fast,” a counselor said. “The human race isn’t ready for that.”

  Granny would’ve loved that place.

  There was even some brainsculpting treatment to return my habit of thought back to normal. How they knew what normal looked like was beyond me. I didn’t. The technician that put me in the brainsculpter, this MRI-looking machine, said my body would know normal. That seemed a little shortsighted since my body craved the buddha. Besides, what did my normal look like? Was it before Granddad brainsculpted me into a Hall of Fame pitcher? (Hall of Fame was a little in doubt, at that point.) Would I give a shit about baseball when the technician pulled me out of the noisy tube, or would I come out loving fingerpaints and gardening?

  “You can’t change your true nature,” the counselor told me.

  Isn’t that what Granddad did?

  A year in rehab and I was clean and normal. I was thirty-five and, as it turned out, still loved baseball. I stopped asking myself if that was my normal or if that was Granddad’s doing. It didn’t matter. Everyone always thought that once diseases were cured and the problems solved, life would be just a long road of green lights.

  I couldn’t sit at home watching baseball if I wanted to stay clean, so I started advocating for biomite reform. Abuse wasn’t limited to the addict. It was everywhere. A girl was disqualified from the National Spelling Bee when it was discovered she had been brainsculpted with an unsanctioned strain of biomites that boosted her intelligence equal to Deep Blue. They asked her to spell pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. She did.

  A teenager had been dropped off at an emergency room when her head swelled to the size of a pumpkin after they applied a knock-off strain of iSkin meant to facesculpt their features. She looked more like a Bratz.

  A Little Leaguer was found to be 99% biomites after his parents arranged for a complete transfusion. That became a landmark debate on whether he was still human or a synthetic being.

  I was asked to coach a minor league team. I declined and, despite the advice of everyone to give up the dream, including the agent I made wealthy, I made another run at the majors. The new arm from the motorcycle accident was lively and, once my mind was right, every bit as good. It was the strain of biomites used to rebuild it that made it spectacular. Granddad never said so, but he had a little something to do with that.

  A year after I returned, Major League Baseball established biomite augmentation limits and brainsculpting directives to protect the integrity of the game. That would have prevented me and my new arm from ever playing again.

  It also explained how a fifty-five-year-old was pitching the World Series.

  There would always be an asterisk by my name. History wouldn’t remember me asking for the seams or all those strikeouts. I would forever be the poster child of brainsculpting. Was it fair that I was made that way? Was that really human?

  Biomites got me back in the game, put me in Wrigley with the bases loaded and a chance to reverse the curse. I was fifty-five years old with the seams in my hand. I didn’t know what I would be the next day or the day after that.

  But I was made for this.

  A Word from Tony Bertauski

  History was never my bag.

  Columbus discovered America in a year that rhymes with blue and ends with two, that’s all I know. So when Sam asked me to submit a story for The Future Chronicles’ new anthology Alt.History 101, I, of course, immediately said yes.

  Running the gamut of a writer’s insecurity, I spent the following day wondering how much better everyone else’s stories would be. The next day was spent crapping on ideas. The third day I asked my daughter for help. Her ideas were better than mine, but they all felt like writing term papers for senior English. I was ready to throw in the towel (Sam, I’m just waaaay too busy, got to say no) when I landed the keeper.

  I love writing science fiction and dystopia. For me, it’s the thrill of exploring uncharted imagination, throwing out what’s possible in the real world—sometimes reinventing the laws of physics—just to see what happens. Most of my writing explores themes of consciousness and identity, emotions and thoughts, suffering and joy… the human experience.

  I’m as deluded as the next person because I believe if this (aka. Problem) wasn’t happening right now, my life would be awesome. This is the thread that started my Halfskin series, a story arc built around the premise that stem cell technology has been perfected and, as a result, we have complete control of our bodies. No more personality disorders, no more disease or genetic malfunctions. We can design our bodies, print new organs and limbs, alter our way of being. And everything becomes perfect. No more suffering, hurray!

  My contribution to Alt.History 101 picks up this thread when an unfortunate event turns Steve Wozniak toward medical technology instead of computers and follows it through the life of a professional baseball player. It explores how problems shapeshift but don’t disappear when a well-meaning granddad just wants the best for his family.

  http://www.amazon.com/Tony-Bertauski/e/B001H6KJPW/

  Rengoku

  by Sam Best

  Author’s note: All dialogue in brackets has been translated from Japanese.

  JAPAN, HONSHU, 1945

  THOSE WHO KNOW WAR know it before all else, forever. The stone of their souls has been irrevocably chiseled by masons of violence, and whatever memories they forge thence slip into these chasms, finding in the depths only darker shadows.

  The three soldiers who had been left for dead in the forest of Shirakami-Sanchi knew war. They had lived it for the two long years of their botched assignment in northern Japan.

  Two of them, an American from Virginia and a Japanese raised in Kyoto, waited patiently in the underbrush three klicks east of their base camp, where their commanding officer slept.

  The forest w
as sparse here; the beech trees clumped together in distant stands if they weren’t standing alone in the wood like grim sentinels. The taller trees with sprawling crowns gave almost no ground cover, so the two men had half-buried themselves in the moist dirt and covered their bodies with a thick layer of decaying plant matter.

  They lay unmoving, their eyes fixed on a small patch of ground a half-klick away atop a small bump of hill. Within that patch was a narrow trough, just large enough for a man. Within lay a Japanese runner in civilian clothing. The only mark of distinction about his person was a stack of paper bound in plastic and steel wire that bore the unmistakable stamp of the Empire.

  The man slept in the hastily-dug trough with his fingers laced over his chest. His clothes were filthy – to make it this far into the wood from the south meant no rest for at least twelve hours from the border. The southern forest was not as forgiving as the north. For a runner to even attempt the journey at all given the infamous reputation of the shadow team that stalked the wood meant that his information was of grave importance indeed.

  The American and Japanese soldiers hidden beneath decaying leaves waited as the runner stirred in his sleep, then quieted.

  [“East wind one knot,”] the camouflaged Japanese soldier whispered, peering through binoculars. The target was too close to warrant his long-range spotting scope, which he carried tucked into a custom-lined inner jacket pocket next to a brief letter to his son and a wrinkled photograph of his deceased wife. Her name was Suzume, and the photograph was never far from his heart.

  He was Private First Class Kenishiro Tatsuya, and he had joined the Marine Corps shortly after the outbreak of the second great world war. A citizen of both America and Japan, Kenishiro had been tortured by his peers throughout his training and had even been hospitalized for a month near the end after refusing to drop out. He had been granted the remote assignment in the forest of Shirakami-Sanchi after demonstrating to all interested parties that he had no intentions of quitting.