King of the Worlds

by M. Thomas Gammarino

  “Like what, for example?”

  “Well, that depends on you. Isn’t there any cause that’s particularly important to you? Some social problem, say, that really gets your goat?”

  Dylan thought for a moment. Nothing came to mind. He shared the usual armchair sympathies toward victims of genocide, disease, natural disasters and the like, but with the possible exception of crestfallen actor-exiles—of whom he was aware of just one—he didn’t have a pet cause per se.

  “What do you say we make that your homework for the week?” Fudge suggested. “Do your research and find a cause you can really get behind. Who, in short, would you like to help? It could be one person or a whole community. The important thing is that you believe in it wholeheartedly.”

  “I can do that,” Dylan said, and while his conscious mind kept griping to Fudge about his existential situation for the rest of the hour, his unconscious went to work on the assignment.

  It didn’t take long. He had a cause all right. A case, rather. It had been quietly gnawing at him for weeks. People don’t just disappear from Omni. Something had happened to Mei-Ling Chen, and he was going to get to the bottom of it. The poor girl had written to him with her scarred wrists twenty years ago to tell him he’d saved her life. Whatever he might have liked to believe, he didn’t deserve that kind of praise—all he’d done was his vainglorious job—but maybe he could earn it retroactively. Maybe, if he went about this skillfully enough, he could really save her life, or at the very least—and what seemed much more likely—avenge her untimely death.

  • • •

  Dylan didn’t wait for Fudge’s approval before getting started on his detective work. Between classes the next day, he wandered over to the science building in search of Meghan Hynson, who taught both physics and forensic science. Dylan and Meghan were by no means close, but she was on the curriculum committee and they’d had lunch a few times to talk about the Science Fiction course he was thinking of proposing. She’d suggested he call the class “Retrofuturist Fiction” since so many of the speculations students would be reading about had long since been eclipsed by reality. She had a point: much of science fiction, once so bound up with the future, now had a very definite passé quality to it. It was uncanny sometimes to see what old-school SF writers had prophesied: the flying cars and rolling roads; the jetpacks and hoverboards; the vidphones and holographs and nanobots—by now, humans had a sense of blasé entitlement to every one of these technologies, and those who still read fiction at all went to historical fiction for their cognitive estrangement. Still, “Retrofuturist Fiction” sounded snobby, particularly to his American ear as pronounced with Meghan’s native-Londoner accent. If “Science Fiction” had been good enough for the Golden Age, then it was good enough for Dylan’s class.

  He found Meg in her classroom, setting up a lab.

  “Hi, Meg,” he said.

  She looked up from her graduated cylinders and teat pipettes.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “I have a somewhat unusual request.”

  “‘Find the strangest thing and then explore it.’”

  “Is that a quote?”

  “’Tis. John Wheeler.”

  “Who’s John Wheeler?”

  “The astrophysicist who discovered black holes.”

  “Oh.”

  Meg did this sometimes. With her cyclist’s body and pleated golden locks, she was a not-unattractive thirty-something woman, but her social skills bordered on the autistic.

  “What’s up?”

  “Okay, here’s the thing: I have in my possession this letter”—he took it out of his backpack—”and for reasons I don’t exactly feel like going into, I’d like to get in touch with the girl who penned it some twenty years ago on Earth.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “But unfortunately I must have tossed the envelope, so I’ve got no return address or postmark, and what’s really stymieing is that Omni would seem to have no record of her existence whatsoever.”

  Meg perked up at that. “I’m sorry, did you say no record?”

  “None to speak of.”

  “But Omni is greater than the sum of all human knowledge…”

  “I know. It’s incredibly fishy. That’s why I’m here.”

  “And it’s autopoietic. No one controls it…”

  “I know. And I don’t want to speculate yet as to why it’s missing exactly, but I’m hoping you might be able to run some kind of chemical analysis on the ink, and then maybe that would help us find the factory that made the pen, and from there we could see what stores were selling those pens, and then little by little we could zero in the store where she bought it and maybe they’ll have a record of the transaction or some security video or something that might lead us back to the author? I realize it’s a long shot, but I’ve got to start somewhere.”

  “We could certainly try that,” Meghan said.

  Dylan phewed.

  “But might I suggest that we first take advantage of the school’s subscription to Omni’s handwriting analyzer and see if that turns up any matches?”

  “You’re a genius,” Dylan said. Now why hadn’t he thought of that?

  “I’m just a scientist, Dylan. You humanities types are generally pretty hopeless when it comes to actually getting stuff done.”

  He smiled.

  She winked an awkward beat too long. “So just call up the program, enter the school’s ID, and scan away.”

  “Thanks, Meg.”

  “Let me know what you figure out. I’ve heard about various attempts at censorship, but I’ve never heard of Omni actually missing information before.”

  “There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to despise clichés?”

  “Touché.”

  “And read up on brane cosmology sometime. You betray a very naïve, anthropocentric understanding of time.”

  She was getting feisty. He thanked her once more and went back to his office, feeling at once hopeful and incredibly stupid.

  He called up his omni’s handwriting analyzer and scanned the letter’s penmanship. Within a few seconds it had pulled up two—and only two—like specimens. Few people ever had occasion to write longhand anymore, but the scriptorium went back several decades; surely most people’s handwriting would bring up more than two matches. He scanned some of his own penmanship from a memo on his desk, just to see, and the analyzer brought up some 2,142 results: tests he’d taken in school, autographed ephemera, insurance policies, tax returns, receipts, even some romantic graffiti he’d Sharpied onto a bridge in the state park in high school (“DG ♥s EW”). Granted, Mei-Ling Chen was likely a few years younger than he was, and presumably a lot of her writing had been in Chinese—which, for all he knew, might be a separate program as far as his omni was concerned—but for her Roman script to exist in only two places in the scriptorium still seemed odd, especially given that both instances were signatures, just a year or so apart, on discharge forms from Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, California, Earth, Solar System, Orion-Cygnus Arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Laniakea Supercluster. Odder still: neither of those signatures read “Mei-Ling Chen.” Instead, they read “Jade Astrophil,” whoever that was.

  So either his omni’s analyzer had goofed, which seemed highly improbable, or he had a very useful new clue.

  He followed the trail and asked Omni, “Who is Jade Astrophil?” anticipating clarity, insight, resolution. What he got instead was this:

  “Jade Astrophil” returns 0 results.

  What? Omni flat-out contradicting itself? Impossible. He knew for a fact there were at least two instances of Jade Astrophil’s signature in the scriptorium. How in hell could he know something Omni didn’t know? He told it explicitly to retrieve those two signatures from Good Sa
maritan Hospital, but again it told him:

  “Jade Astrophil” returns 0 results.

  He tore the buds out of his ears and slammed them down on his desk.28 From the office across the hall, Ian the Latin teacher asked if he was okay. Dylan lied and said he was fine. He wasn’t fine. What the hell did it mean, zero results? How was this possible? Supposedly Omni answered to no power higher than itself. Its moral incorruptibility was advertised as one of its chief virtues. But then how to explain this blatant act of censorship? He was hard-pressed to believe it was another glitch. If finding a single glitch in Omni was hugely improbable, then finding two in the same day must be effectively impossible.

  28_____________

  He couldn’t have broken them if he’d tried. For years now, Omni itself—not the local, lowercase contacts, but the vast churning cloud of information—had looked to the devices’ constantly evolving designs. Humans could no more reverse-engineer omni hardware than they could the comparatively simple human brain. Whether this implied that Omni had achieved some measure of consciousness or not remained a question for the philosophers.

  Like some twentieth-century human, then, he was left to the feeble computing power of his own brain. Who did old-fashioned logic suggest this Jade Astrophil might be? If the handwriting analyzer could be depended on, then Jade Astrophil and Mei-Ling Chen were one and the same person. Therefore, either Mei-Ling Chen had in fact been Jade Astrophil all along and for some reason she’d felt compelled to create a pseudonym uniquely for her correspondence with him; or, Jade Astrophil was the pseudonym, which seemed more likely, given that the name sounded made-up, stagey, not authentically Taiwanese at all. In any case, both discharge forms were from within the last couple of years, which meant there was a good chance she was still alive.

  With some healthy skepticism now, he popped the buds back in and sought definitions from Omni:

  Jade¹ (noun) a hard, typically green stone used for ornaments and implements and consisting of the minerals jadeite or nephrite; an ornament made of this; a light bluish-green.

  Jade² (noun archaic) 1. a bad-tempered or disreputable woman. 2. an inferior or worn-out horse.

  Astrophil (noun literary) Likely composed in the 1580s, Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella” is an English sonnet sequence containing 108 sonnets and 11 songs. The name derives from the two Greek words, ‘aster’ (star) and ‘phil’ (lover), and the Latin word ‘stella’ meaning star. Thus Astrophil is the star lover, and Stella is her star.

  Holy Higgs! Now here was something. Could it possibly be a coincidence that this girl who had so doted on him as a star had changed her name to “star lover”? And might that explain what she was doing in LA? Had she sought him there, not knowing that he had de-worlded for New Taiwan?

  If there’d been anything whimsical about his search for Mei-Ling Chen up to this point, the recalcitrance of the facts now charged it with meaning, made it a point of personal pride. His heart raced, adrenaline flooded his veins. Oh, he had a cause all right. Something sinister was going on out there in the Omniverse, and Dylan was going to find out what it was, even if it killed him.

  But first he had one more class to teach.

  • • •

  “What does the phrase ‘American Dream’ signify to all of you?”

  “Why do we have to study this?”

  “Did I see your hand up, Cade?”

  Cade rolled his eyes and put up a hand.

  “Cade!” Dylan said.

  “Why do we have to study this?”

  “Well, Cade, this is an American literature class, and the American Dream, you won’t be surprised to learn, was sort of a central theme in American literature. You’d do well to know about it.”

  “Okay, but most of us have never even been to Earth, let alone America. Why should we have to study so much Earth history when we hardly learn anything about our own planet’s?”

  “Ah, now there’s your real question, and it’s a good one. Suffice it to say that this is called the American School of New Taiwan for a reason. Many of your parents are or were American, nearly all of them are Earth-human, and they want you to understand your roots.”

  “But our roots are here,” said Cade. “We were born here.”

  “I guess that depends how we define ‘roots,’ but fair enough. In any event, you’ll have New Taiwanese history next year as seniors. And you’re all studying the language already, are you not?”

  Cade nodded, but it was clear he wasn’t sold on the point, and truth be told Dylan rather appreciated the kid’s allergy to received ideas. Would that more students were like that.

  “I’ll admit you have a point, Cade. I don’t think you’ve exactly articulated what that point is, but there’s one buried in there somewhere, and maybe it’s to do with the question of how we talk about the ‘American Dream’ as if it were somehow exceptional. Was there really anything so American about the American Dream? Or should we just call it the old Terran dream? Or the old human dream? Maybe even the hominid dream? Because, in a way, I think you’re right: what’s the use of studying the so-called ‘dream’ of some people light years away if we can’t relate to it somehow, if it doesn’t shed some light on our own dreams? And so, back to my original question: what does the phrase ‘American Dream’ mean to you?”

  “Money,” ventured shy, curly-headed Sherman. “Isn’t that what America is all about?”

  “Good,” Dylan said. “That was definitely a part of it.”

  “Landing on the moon,” put in Jake.

  “Just that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” Dylan said. “So maybe something about technology then?”

  “I guess.” It was clear Jake had put in his two zarkaks for the semester.

  “Bear in mind the Soviets had similar ambitions in those years, and they were thought to be about as un-American as it was possible to be.”29

  29_____________

  In Earthling terms, the New Taiwanese economy would be classified as a Social Democracy on the Nordic model, a.k.a. “The Swedish Middle Way,” i.e. a mixed economy with high taxes and a generous universal welfare state. Sure enough, every metric for well-being on New Taiwan put the old liberal-democratic US to shame, thereby perversely limiting Dylan’s students’ powers of empathy with regard to the demise of this so-called American Dream.

  “What about the whole white picket fence thing?” asked Anna.

  “Okay,” Dylan said. “What about that? Elaborate.”

  “Mrs. Crumb told us how when she was a kid growing up in Detroit, that was the, like, ideal. A big house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a garden and some kids and maybe a dog. Football on Saturday, church Sunday morning and then a long drive in the family car. Apple pie. Television. All that.”

  “Excellent. Now let’s go back to that fence for a second. Tony, what does a fence do?”

  “Like, stands there?” Tony said.

  “Okay, but what purpose does it serve?”

  He thought it over. “Keeps people out.”

  “Precisely. It marks off one’s property, doesn’t it? One’s private property. Anybody can be on the other side of the fence, but cross that line and you could get in serious trouble, which, in a way, brings us back to Sherman’s answer, because what does it take to have property?”

  “Money,” Sherman said.

  “Right. And who in America had that?” Dylan asked.

  “People who work hard,” Sherman said.

  “Well, that was certainly the Kool-Aid Americans drank anyway. Free enterprise. Anyone could become anything. It was a revolutionary idea really. Back in Europe there was just no such notion. The rich were the aristocracy. Kings and queens and their friends. Very little mobility. You were either born rich or you were destined to a life of hard work, poverty and rags. So it was b
y and large these latter who came to form the United States. A bunch of losers, basically, because the old winners were secure at home with no reason to uproot themselves. But the losers—the losers had everything to gain, and they were hungry. There was always that jackpot mentality from the very beginning, people trying to strike it rich in the New World, the natives be damned. That’s what got Columbus over there in the first place, albeit accidentally.30 So the American Dream, as I see it—and I’m sort of improvising here, but that goes to my point—the American Dream was at heart about being able to invent oneself from scratch, to slough off your lowly origins and become whatever you wanted. The self-made man, as it were. America’s Achilles heel, though, was that it always rewarded the quick over the patient, the immature over the wise, arrogance and excess over sanity and moderation. Hubris, the Greeks called it. They knew. Some of them anyway. The tallest towers fall. The unsinkable ship sinks.”

  30_____________

  For the record, the Terran population of the Americas before Columbus sailed the ocean blue may well have exceeded fifteenth-century Europe’s 70 million. Columbus himself did not believe he had discovered uncharted lands so much as the “Earthly Paradise”—or Garden of Eden—at the “End of the Orient.” It was left for Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, in a 1503 letter to his friend Lorenzo di Piero Francesco de’ Medici, to identify this land as the “New World” (“Mundus Novus”), which was why the country Dylan grew up in was called “The United States of America” and not “The United States of Columbia,” though Columbus, despite being a prolific slave trader, rapist, and all around genocidal maniac, was memorialized in the names of that country’s capital city, two state capitals, a World’s Fair, a river, a traffic circle, and a federal holiday, not to mention a South American nation and an Asteroid (327). It was some comfort perhaps, some evidence of human progress, that there was as yet no exoplanet named after him.