Alt.History 101 (Alt.Chronicles)
Page 24
Do they want me to do the show naked? he asked himself. A quick search of the room and he found a new outfit in the closet. It was a new jumpsuit, as bright orange as his old one, if not more so. This one was pressed, with the Second Chance logo emblazoned across the back and again on the front left breast. It appeared to have some electronics stitched into it. “Microphone? GPS?” he asked the suit. He jumped when there was an answer.
“And a camera, among other things.” The voice was thin and tinny, and it was hard to tell if it was male or female. “Put the jumper on. We’ll let you get one more rest and another meal to get your strength up, then you’ll be on your own for a while.”
“What about the help? Can’t I get a car or something?” Lance asked.
“You want a car straight out of the gate? You’re dreaming. Here’s a tip for you, the more you endear yourself to the audience, the more the producers will want to keep you alive. Be boring and they’ll make sure the action comes to you.”
It hit him suddenly that something else was missing, too. “Hey, you can’t take that photo, I need it.” There was no reply.
The room started spinning. He’d lost her again. The horrible truth was he could not remember her face without the photo. It had been too long, and without the visual aid, all he could remember was the last time he saw her. He had skipped his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and gone to bar across town where he could be anonymous in a different way. He came home that night to a house in flames. He pushed past the firefighters when the smoke had slowed and found a charred human who used to be his wife. All the police cared to see was a drunk putting on a show.
THE LINE
Lance was much less enthusiastic about climbing into the van a second time. He could have run as soon as they were outside, but he knew he’d be less able to get help, and have his photo returned, if he made the producers’ jobs difficult. It was another long ride. He tried to sleep, but his eyes wouldn’t shut. The vehicle stopped after several hours and the door opened. He could see it was night and the only light was coming from street lamps. He stopped short when he surveyed his surroundings.
“No! You can’t do this to me.” He jumped to the safe side of the yellow line drawn on the pavement. He was back at his old home, his old prison.
“The viewers want to see your first moments after your death, Lance.” The voice in his suit said to him. “There’s a sack with a few survival supplies and a key for one night in a local motel in the middle of the field to the north. There might be a photo in it as well. Good luck.”
His eyes went wide and wild. “Wait, what?!?” Suddenly, the van doors shut behind him and the bright lights of cameras flooded all around. There were two cameramen on a jeep beside him, ready to capture his harried response as if he had just emerged from the prison for the first time.
Lance ran along the fence line away from the cameras. The jeep kept up with him, making him easily viewable to anyone wishing to do him harm. He was no longer just a target, he was a well-lit target. The end of the fence made him stop short.
“I’ve changed my mind, turn off the cameras!” he yelled at the cameras. The crew didn’t respond. I have to get away from this, he thought. He eyed the bag of supplies in the field to his north. It was a risk, but the safety of another night in a hotel and the comfort of his only possession was too much to ignore.
He ran across the road, making a beeline for the supplies. The cameras swung around to follow, but the jeep itself slowly backed away. He paused for a moment to consider why.
Pfft. Pfft.
Dust clouds mushroomed by his feet. He dove into a shallow ditch for cover. The noises stopped and the jeep pulled over to where he was trapped. The cameras and lights were trained on his location.
His eyes darted from his right, where the bullets had landed, to his left, where the cameras waited. Only now could he name the choice he made by enlisting with Second Chance: fame. It was a decision he could not take back. He’d have a spotlight following him until he was dead, and his only way to escape this situation was to perform. To keep performing the rest of his life. A good story could keep him alive for a while, but how long could he make himself seem compelling? Lying in a ditch, he could not even convince himself his life was worth saving.
Lance pulled into a fetal position, looked straight at the camera and whispered, “It wasn’t supposed to end like this.”
A Word from Thomas Robins
National Public Radio sometimes recites, verbatim, from U.S. Supreme Court transcripts. I find it fascinating. The highest court in the country has discussions that drift into philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history. They take laws that seem straight-forward and, through questions and comments, make me unsure where I stand on an issue. When I was asked to write an alternative history story, I knew I wanted to explore what would happen if a Supreme Court’s decision had gone a different way. In this case, the seeming disparity between the death penalty and the ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
I hope you are enjoying this anthology and I don’t want to detract from it by too much self-promotion. If you feel moved to know more about my writing, please check out my website at www.thomasrobins.com or join my mailing list.
Thomas Robins is the author of the novel Desperate to Escape, several works appearing in Kindle Worlds, and a smattering of short stories in anthologies. Thomas lives in the Kansas City area with his family, cats, and an unremarkable collection of science fiction memorabilia.
A Brief History
of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel
by Ken Liu
AT THE NOODLE SHOP, I wave the other waitress away, waiting for the American woman: skin pale and freckled as the Moon, swelling breasts that fill the bodice of her dress, long chestnut curls spilling past her shoulders, held back with a flowery bandanna. Her eyes, green like fresh tea leaves, radiate a bold and fearless smile that is rarely seen among Asians. And I like the wrinkles around them, fitting for a woman in her thirties.
“Hai.” She finally stops at my table, her lips pursed impatiently. “Hoka no okyakusan ga imasu yo. Nani wo chuumon shimasu ka?” Her Japanese is quite good, the pronunciation maybe even better than mine—though she is not using the honorific. It is still rare to see Americans here in the Japanese half of Midpoint City, but things are changing now, in the thirty-sixth year of the Shōwa Era (she, being an American, would think of it as 1961).
“A large bowl of tonkotsu ramen,” I say, mostly in English. Then I realize how loud and rude I sound. Old Diggers like me always forget that not everyone is practically deaf. “Please,” I add, a whisper.
Her eyes widen as she finally recognizes me. I’ve cut my hair and put on a clean shirt, and that’s not how I looked the past few times I’ve come here. I haven’t paid much attention to my appearance in a decade. There hasn’t been any need to. Almost all my time is spent alone and at home. But the sight of her has quickened my pulse in a way I haven’t felt in years, and I wanted to make an effort.
“Always the same thing,” she says, and smiles.
I like hearing her English. It sounds more like her natural voice, not so high-pitched.
“You don’t really like the noodles,” she says, when she brings me my ramen. It isn’t a question.
I laugh, but I don’t deny it. The ramen in this place is terrible. If the owner were any good he wouldn’t have left Japan to set up shop here at Midpoint City, where the tourists stopping for a break on their way through the Trans-Pacific Tunnel don’t know any better. But I keep on coming, just to see her.
“You are not Japanese.”
“No,” I say. “I’m Formosan. Please call me Charlie.” Back when I coordinated work with the American crew during the construction of Midpoint City, they called me Charlie because they couldn’t pronounce my Hokkien name correctly. And I liked the way it sounded so I kept using it.
“Okay, Charlie. I’m Betty.” She turns to leave.
“Wait,” I say. I do not know from where I get th
is sudden burst of courage. It is the boldest thing I’ve done in a long time. “Can I see you when you are free?”
She considers this, biting her lip. “Come back in two hours.”
* * *
From The Novice Traveler's Guide to the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, published by the TPT Transit Authority, 1963:
Welcome, traveler! This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the completion of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel. We are excited to see that this is your first time through the Tunnel.
The Trans-Pacific Tunnel follows a Great Circle path just below the seafloor to connect Asia to North America, with three surface terminus stations in Shanghai, Tokyo, and Seattle. The Tunnel takes the shortest path between the cities, arcing north to follow the Pacific Rim mountain ranges. Although this course increased the construction cost of the Tunnel due to the need for earthquake-proofing, it also allows the Tunnel to tap into geothermal vents and hot spots along the way, which generate the electrical power needed for the Tunnel and its support infrastructure, such as the air-compression stations, oxygen generators, and sub-seafloor maintenance posts.
The Tunnel is in principle a larger—gigantic—version of the pneumatic tubes or capsule lines familiar to all of us for delivering interoffice mail in modern buildings. Two parallel concrete-enclosed steel transportation tubes, one each for westbound and eastbound traffic, 60 feet in diameter, are installed in the Tunnel. The transportation tubes are divided into numerous shorter self-sealing sections, each with multiple air-compression stations. The cylindrical capsules, containing passengers and goods, are propelled through the tubes by a partial vacuum pulling in front and by compressed air pushing from behind. The capsules ride on a monorail for reduced friction. Current maximum speed is about a hundred-and-twenty miles per hour, and a trip from Shanghai to Seattle takes a little more than two full days. Plans are under way to eventually increase maximum speed to two hundred MPH.
The Tunnel's combination of capacity, speed, and safety makes it superior to zeppelins, aeroplanes, and surface shipping for almost all trans-Pacific transportation needs. It is immune to storms, icebergs, and typhoons, and very cheap to operate, as it is powered by the boundless heat of the Earth itself. Today, it is the chief means by which passengers and manufactured goods flow between Asia and America. More than 30% of global container shipping each year goes through the Tunnel.
We hope you enjoy your travel along the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, and wish you a safe journey to your final destination.
* * *
I was born in the second year of the Taishō Era (1913), in a small village in Shinchiku Prefecture, in Formosa. My family were simple peasants who never participated in any of the uprisings against Japan. The way my father saw it, whether the Manchus on the mainland or the Japanese were in charge didn’t much matter, since they all left us alone except when it came time for taxes. The lot of the Hoklo peasant was to toil and suffer in silence.
Politics was for those who had too much to eat. Besides, I always liked the Japanese workers from the lumber company, who would hand me candy during their lunch break. The Japanese colonist families we saw were polite, well-dressed, and very lettered. My father once said, “If I got to choose, in my next life I’d come back as a Japanese.”
During my boyhood, a new prime minister in Japan announced a change in policy: natives in the colonies should be turned into good subjects of the Emperor. The Japanese governor-general set up village schools that everyone had to attend. The more clever boys could even expect to attend high schools formerly reserved for the Japanese, and then go on to study in Japan, where they would have bright futures.
I was not a good student, however, and never learned Japanese very well. I was content to know how to read a few characters and go back to the fields, the same as my father and his father before him.
All this changed in the year I turned seventeen (the fifth year of the Shōwa Era, or 1930), when a Japanese man in a Western suit came to our village, promising riches for the families of young men who knew how to work hard and didn’t complain.
* * *
We stroll through Friendship Square, the heart of Midpoint City. A few pedestrians, both American and Japanese, stare and whisper as they see us walking together. But Betty does not care, and her carelessness is infectious.
Here, kilometers under the Pacific Ocean and the seafloor, it’s late afternoon by the City’s clock, and the arc lamps around us are turned up as bright as can be.
“I always feel like I’m at a night baseball game when I go through here,” Betty says. “When my husband was alive, we went to many baseball games together as a family.”
I nod. Betty usually keeps her reminiscences of her husband light. She mentioned once that he was a lawyer, and he had left their home in California to work in South Africa, where he died because some people didn’t like who he was defending. “They called him a race traitor,” she said. I didn’t press for details.
Now that her children are old enough to be on their own, she’s traveling the world for enlightenment and wisdom. Her capsule train to Japan had stopped at Midpoint Station for a standard one-hour break for passengers to get off and take some pictures, but she had wandered too far into the City and missed the train. She took it as a sign and stayed in the City, waiting to see what lessons the world had to teach her.
Only an American could lead such a life. Among Americans, there are many free spirits like hers.
We’ve been seeing each other for four weeks, usually on Betty’s days off. We take walks around Midpoint City, and we talk. I prefer that we converse in English, mostly because I do not have to think much about how formal and polite to be.
As we pass by the bronze plaque in the middle of the Square, I point out to her my Japanese-style name on the plaque: Takumi Hayashi. The Japanese teacher in my village school had helped me pick the first name, and I had liked the characters: “open up, sea.” The choice turned out to be prescient.
She is impressed. “That must have been something. You should tell me more about what it was like to work on the Tunnel.”
There are not many of us old Diggers left now. The years of hard labor spent breathing hot and humid dust that stung our lungs had done invisible damage to our insides and joints. At forty-eight, I’ve said goodbye to all of my friends as they succumbed to illnesses. I am the last keeper of what we had done together.
When we finally blasted through the thin rock wall dividing our side from the American side and completed the Tunnel in the thirteenth year of the Shōwa Era (1938), I had the honor of being one of the shift supervisors invited to attend the ceremony. I explain to Betty that the blast-through spot is in the main tunnel due north of where we are standing, just beyond Midpoint Station.
We arrive at my apartment building, on the edge of the section of the City where most Formosans live. I invite her to come up. She accepts.
My apartment is a single room eight mats in size, but there is a window. Back when I bought it, it was considered a very luxurious place for Midpoint City, where space was and is at a premium. I mortgaged most of my pension on it, since I had no desire ever to move. Most men made do with coffin-like one-mat rooms. But to her American eyes, it probably seems very cramped and shabby. Americans like things to be open and big.
I make her tea. It is very relaxing to talk to her. She does not care that I am not Japanese, and assumes nothing about me. She takes out a joint, as is the custom for Americans, and we share it.
Outside the window, the arc lights have been dimmed. It’s evening in Midpoint City. Betty does not get up and say that she has to leave. We stop talking. The air feels tense, but in a good way, expectant. I reach out for her hand, and she lets me. The touch is electric.
* * *
From Splendid America, AP ed., 1995:
In 1929, the fledging and weak Republic of China, in order to focus on the domestic Communist rebellion, appeased Japan by signing the Sino-Japanese Mutual Cooperation Treaty. The treaty forma
lly ceded all Chinese territories in Manchuria to Japan, which averted the prospect of all-out war between China and Japan and halted Soviet ambitions in Manchuria. This was the capstone on Japan’s 35-year drive for imperial expansion. Now, with Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria incorporated into the Empire and a collaborationist China within its orbit, Japan had access to vast reserves of natural resources, cheap labor, and a potential market of hundreds of millions for its manufactured goods.
Internationally, Japan announced that it would continue its rise as a Great Power henceforth by peaceful means. Western powers, however, led by Britain and the United States, were suspicious. They were especially alarmed by Japan’s colonial ideology of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” which seemed to be a Japanese version of the Monroe Doctrine, and suggested a desire to drive European and American influence from Asia.
Before the Western powers could decide on a plan to contain and encircle Japan’s “Peaceful Ascent,” however, the Great Depression struck. The brilliant Emperor Hirohito seized the opportunity and suggested to President Herbert Hoover his vision of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel as the solution to the worldwide economic crisis.
* * *
The work was hard, and dangerous. Every day, men were injured and sometimes killed. It was also very hot. In the finished sections, they installed machines to cool the air. But in the most forward parts of the Tunnel, where the actual digging happened, we were exposed to the heat of the Earth, and we worked in nothing but our undershorts, sweating nonstop. The work crews were segregated by race—there were Koreans, Formosans, Okinawans, Filipinos, Chinese (separated again by topolect)—but after a while we all looked the same, covered in sweat and dust and mud, only little white circles of skin showing around our eyes.