Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America

by Damien Lincoln Ober

Doc Bartlett peels off his glove so he can put his bare palm on the crystal, feels a sort of radiating coolness. It would take thousands of years for something like this to form in nature. But inside a man, it grows so fast that man cannot survive it. All the bodies in piles on the roadside, do they all have these crystals in them? Maybe it’s the crystals, not The Death, that they should be worried about. Maybe flakes of it arrived first, microscopic ash from some volcanic eruption on the other side of the earth. Or maybe they’ve always been there, dormant in certain humans, something defined by genes, passed through families like a hook nose. Maybe the wi‐fi signal or the refresh rate is just a trigger for something that’s been waiting eons to happen.

  Doc Bartlett turns and can see it in the doorway, if only fleet‐ingly: what the house once looked like full of Whipples. That big family before it was ravaged by The Death. William was the last of them. He’d thought he’d made it through. But now he’s gone too, and what of the rest of them, this tiny remaining fraction of humanity? Is William’s death the start of a grand finale that will wipe the earth clean? Through the vague apparition, Rush returns, bursting into the kitchen. The separation was enough to give each man a fresh look at the other. Blood stains gone black, smearing their aprons, up past both elbows.

  “I’ve found it,” Rush says. “An old tower model. This ancient router with like those two plastic antenna? Remember?” He smiles. “I disconnected it.” Rush freezes, sees Doc Bartlett wrapping the crystal in a square yard of leather. “What are you doing?”

  Doc Bartlett puts the crystal into one of his satchel bags. “A disease spreads through the Internet, somehow causes crystals to grow in the stomachs of its victims?” He looks to see the questions still hanging Rush’s face. “I’m going to study it,” Doc Bartlett says.

  Rush shakes his head. “They’re never going to let you take it off the property.”

  Doc Bartlett moves close to Rush. He presses a mischievous smile, puts a single finger to his pursed lips. “If we’re going to beat this thing, I need to examine the crystal.”

  Rush stares back blankly. “The Internet did it.”

  Arthur Middleton :: January 1st 1787

  A fire burns, center of the War Room’s northern wall. That’s what Middleton has come to call it. The War Room. And so his many subordinates too. Above the fireplace, a flag that was carried into the battle of Trenton. Middleton has his back to it. Leans heavily on his cane. Gosh, he looks terrible. It’s not The Death, but something’s got him. He’s only forty‐four, looks closer to seventy, dried out, hair thinned to a few wispy tendrils. He coughs, holds a hanky to his mouth, coughs again, examines what’s in there, tucks the hanky away.

  On the table before him, a map shows the Atlantic coast of North America. White pins mark the cities that have reestablished contact with Philadelphia. Dotted lines reaching inland trace the progress of western expeditions. Nothing but empty woods thus far, as if all the Indians just vanished. But the big problem is the knife, a long hunting blade stuck into the map. It marks the spot where an uprising of farmers and war veterans has seized a tax office in western Massachusetts

  General Lachlan McIntosh stands on the other side of the table, full military regalia. He’s got a limp when he moves now, always will. But he’s alive, which is more than can be said for Button Gwinnett. “Reports on the uprising, sir.” He holds a smartpad out over the map. “They want Internet.”

  Middleton takes the smartpad with his non‐cane hand, leans the cane against his own leg, swipes a single extended finger across the touchscreen. Head shaking as he reads. “The fools are going to destroy what’s left of this fledging country.” Middleton hands back the pad, reaches out to add a few blue pins to the giant map. These mark the places where people, despite the national ban, are still accessing the leftover skeletons of the Cloud. “They’ll start a third outbreak,” Middleton says. “Just barely made it through the second. Now these Massachusetts men want to put the whole country back on the grid?” He points at different places on the map, “Tories and Loyalists in upper Maine. English landing in Canada as we speak.” Middleton shakes his head. “Bodies, a million of them, just rotting in the cities and towns. No one wants to get close to them, much less clean them up. All that rot gets into the water, it’ll cause diseases that make The Death look like a toe stubbing. Won’t be a single human left.”

  “Can’t say I blame them, sir.” McIntosh peruses the map. “Wouldn’t want to touch one of those bodies either.”

  Middleton eyes his general. “Suppose you’re right.”

  “Jefferson wants to dissect them, you know. The bodies. That’s his new idea.”

  Middleton sighs, pokes some empty stretches of woods. “Indians, hiding somewhere probably. Hatching plots to take back their land. Or just waiting for us to finally die off and they’ll stroll back in. A few‐hundred‐year nightmare over.”

  Together they gaze into the map, at the pins which mark threats to the lives of Americans. That big hunting knife. Mid‐dleton shakes his head, turns away, looks out the window at the flying saucer floating over Philadelphia. “And these damned Off‐Worlders. Last thing we need.”

  “Seems like they could be the first thing we need. If what they claim is true.”

  Middleton chews on it. “A cure for The Death?”

  “We get The Death cured and the Internet back up,” McIntosh nods to the big knife, “a lot of these other problems, these rebels, they’ll just fade away.”

  “And you believe the Off‐Worlders? You think they really do have a cure?”

  A soldier enters then through the tall door at the end of the room. “Mr. Secretary,” he says, crosses to hand Middleton a smart‐pad. Middleton has to lean against the desk to finger flick through a few reports. He struggles to sign one with a stylus he digs from his breast pocket. He gives the smartpad back and the man is gone. “The Off‐Worlders,” he says. “You better have a plan: what we want to get and what we can afford to give. Because they’re going to want something. That much I’m sure of.”

  “Me, sir? But Congress has directed that you and Mr. Franklin…”

  Middleton’s head is shaking. “Congress has directed the Secretary of Continental Defense and Reconstruction” Now he sinks into his chair, rests the cane on the wall behind him. But the cane slides and clatters to the floor. Middleton looks at it a moment. “I’ll be dead long before the day of the video summit.”

  McIntosh is struck with the idea that the Secretary is unlikely to rise again from that chair. And when Middleton is dead, McIn‐tosh will be promoted to his place, at least until Congress appoints a permanent replacement. And would they choose someone else? Why not? Lachlan McIntosh, Secretary of Continental Defense and Reconstruction.

  Middleton has been talking for some indeterminate period when McIntosh brings his attention back to the present. “—forty‐four,” Middleton is saying. “Forty‐four years old. Certainly not that old.” Middleton glowers at the pins and the knife sticking odd angles from the map. “The Death, Royalists, Indians, Off‐Worlders in a ship that could probably vaporize Philadelphia with the touch of a button. All that and I’ve got a fucking cold, and no amount of leeching can get it out of me.” He turns in his chair to be facing the window and the city and the Off‐Worlder ship.

  McIntosh moves to peer out a different window at the same thing. “Think they’ll look human, sir?”

  Middleton snorts. “Want to trade, we’re told.” One slow in breath, which he releases just as slowly. “But if they’ve had the cure this whole time, why wait?

  McIntosh thinks for one distinct second. “To drive up the price,” he says.

  Middleton draws his focus away from the window, regards McIntosh directly. “Have you ever been in the forest when a storm is coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happens to the animals?”

  McIntosh is transporting himself to the forest, out on a hunt with rain clouds darkening the horizon. “They burrow, sir. The
wood grows quiet.”

  “And is this before or after you know there is a storm on the way?”

  McIntosh nods. “The creatures of the woods always know first.”

  “How, then, how do they know first?”

  “They sense it, sir.”

  Middleton’s gaze has drifted off. “The Indians. Gone, vanished. We suppose it’s because of The Death. They see it sweeping our cities; they know to take cover and let it pass. But what if it wasn’t The Death that scared them off?” Middleton takes one last breath, looks out that window as he goes still. “I wonder what storm it is that’s coming.”

  Thomas Stone :: October 1st 1787

  What are you doing here, Delegate Stone, over in the old Internet?”

  Thomas Stone types, “Looking for my haunt.” He’s logged on to the menu of the old Congressional mail server. Used to self‐manage the committee group listservs and filter out non‐human‐generated trash mail, back before The Death.

  “Trash mail is all there is now,” the mail server tells him. “Except for you, I guess.”

  Stone types, “Any word since that newsletter?”

  “Delegate Stone, why don’t you forget about all this? Forget about your haunt. I should never have forwarded you that letter.”

  “But you did.” And Thomas Stone is glad, too. Glad to know for sure. That his haunt is still out there in the old Internet, still active. Name right there on top of an anti‐Federalist e‐blast. Stone has heard plenty of stories of other humans—survivors of The Death—going back online after the cure, only to come face‐to‐face with their own haunt, all their old online accounts and profiles, fused and melded into some kind of autonomous functioning program, acting on protocols of its own. Most end up getting infested by worms, tiny AIs looking to expand their code. Climb into an old haunt and the haunt becomes something else, usually not something very nice either.

  It was a major catalyst for the public push for Newnet, a whole new cloud, new code, error‐proof and invulnerable to viruses like The Death. People wanted a fresh start, a non‐meat space in which they’d never have to worry about running into that old version of themselves. The Federalists sure took that one and ran with it. Instead of just a new Internet, they came out with a whole new government. They’re calling it the Constitution, and there’s quite a few old‐school patriots who think it flies in the face of the Revolution. But now they got the Old Man himself standing right up behind it. George Washington, not off the grid any more. Federalists might just pull some political jujitsu and get the thing ratified.

  “All we get over here is the anti‐Federalist view,” the mail server says. “Used to anyway. Even they’ve given up on this place now. Might be fighting against the Constitution, but they’ve ceded the platform. Off to Newnet, to do battle on the opposition’s turf.”

  “Lost their religion,” Stone types. “This here’s the empty church. Ghosts and all.”

  “Tell me, Delegate Stone, how are things out there, out there in the real?”

  “Suppose they’re coming together, all things considered.”

  “You must not know about the Society of Cincinnati, secret military cabal in charge of Federalist coffers.”

  “Nothing secret about it.”

  “Obsessed with world empire and primogeniture.”

  “Nothing secret about it.”

  “But, Delegate Stone, aren’t you the least bit interested in how? How you got this new Internet, how you got this Constitution? Most humans poking around in here, that’s what they’re looking for. They want to know about the SOC, the Society of Cincinnati. They want the names of all the delegates who voted for the convention to be closed‐door. They want to know which ones are members. Members of the SOC.”

  “‘Closed door,’ you say?”

  “They wrote the whole thing while the Internet was banned. No one knows what happened unless you were there. Have you read the latest posts from American Brutus?”

  Yep, Stone thinks, anti‐Federalist worm has gotten inside this one. Kinda sad because he always thought of the mail server as a pal, as if the old program really was human after all. “Let’s forget about politics,” Stone types. He types, “Tell me about my haunt.”

  “You already know everything I know: Word strings started appearing as comments on his status updates; weird messages from his account, links to weird websites, always addressing you as, ‘Hey Mr. Friends.’ Worms had gotten in him. This was way back, right after The Death. He stopped updating, maybe a year and a half ago. Probably got all haunted out. Ran out of tasks and programs to run over and over and over again.”

  “As of a week ago, my haunt was sending messages with this e‐blast server. I never signed up for that one. Can’t you trace it back, some echo in the code you can measure?”

  Stone waits, gets nothing back but a blinking cursor.

  Stone types, “Used to be this program could keep track of all the mail coming in and out of Congress, all the usernames and passwords, records of all the time spent online, what terminal or smartphone it was accessed from.”

  “Lots of things over here don’t work like they used to.”

  “Well, what’s the newest thing in working great, for this old place, anyway?”

  “A search drone,” the mail server tells him. “Some have coded themselves up pretty slick. Most are shit, but if you find a good one, it can find anything.”

  “See ya, buddy,” he types, but probably not. Back on the other side of the terminal interface, the organic Thomas Stone has been given a random number of hours or days that he might survive an infection that has taken hold of his respiratory. Terminal fatigue, they call it. Told him the wrong deep breath will burst a lung. Pop, just like that. Could happen any moment.

  Stone leaves the menus behind, gets himself into a rickety search hub, types, “Looking for my haunt.”

  “How do you know you have one? A haunt.”

  Stone types, “Search drone: What is the best search drone in operation right now?”

  “‘Looking for my haunt’ is your real question, right?”

  Thomas Stone smiles, but before he can type his query, the search drone chimes in, “How do you know you have one? A haunt.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Stone types. “Everyone who had a web presence back before The Death.”

  There’s a beat of the search drone computing. “Seems that way sometimes. More drones in the old Internet than humans in the real.”

  Stone thinks a second. Fingers mush down keys in word patterns. “Newsletter with my identity tied to it.”

  “Maybe it was just routed through. Maybe the haunt got erased and it’s just the name now. Like graffiti. Thomas Stone’s haunt was here.”

  “Something’s erased, it’s erased. Name on top of a newsletter is not erased. The identity maybe got corrupted, fell apart, froze itself, but it’s still there. Some bit of code comes along with one more function, another worm finds it… maybe that old haunt comes back to life.”

  The search drone pauses for a second, which is weird for a search drone. Or used to be anyway. Used to be their programming was a pretty basic affair. Didn’t have much to compute. You asked a search drone a question and it went digging. Usually able to filter a few right answers up near the top, comparing your query to the queries and query logs and query groupings other users were typing into some other portal. The most complicated thing a search drone could do was communicate with other search drones. All these little programs, all linked together, sharing data. But the drones went and got a little more complicated without the humans around. Drones all but thinking now, Stone thinks.

  “Weird things are happening here in the old Internet these days,” the drone tells him. “Things I never would have thought possible. Huge chunks of what could never be deprogrammed just dropping off with nothing in their place. Just nothing.”

  “Maybe it’s the cure. The cure for The Death. The Off‐Worlders gave it to us. Probably some wild code in there.
Comes from outer space after all.”

  “No, we saw cure. Cure swept through here. Code sent through everything. This is something else.”

  “There are rumors out here, you know. That they’re taking it down,” Stone finally just tells the thing. No idea if the drone can get what that means. Try it on a human—they’re taking down reality. Truth is, the old Cloud is being erased, piece by piece, as Newnet is uploaded. Huge partitions are going up to close off the hardwired places, areas where the code of the old Internet runs too deep to ever be erased.

  “Why are you really here, Stone?”

  Great, now the search drones are asking the questions. Stone smiles, types, “You tell me.”

  “Your haunt became an anti‐Federalist drone. That’s why you want him, right? You’re here to get him to stop posting. If he wasn’t spreading anti‐Federalist screams about the Constitution, you wouldn’t much care. And neither would the people you’re working for.”

  “Who am I working for?” Thomas Stone types.

  “Franklin? Madison? The Society of Cincinnati? General Washington? Though I suppose some of those are the same thing now.”

  Thomas Stone coughs back on the meat side of his terminal, sits there frozen after, figuring out if he’s still alive. Both lungs feel intact, and so he gets his fingers back down resting on the keys. “What if I told you I was in here for signs, for proof?” he types. “Proof that the drones are looking for The Death. Got used to their little world with all the humans gone. Suddenly, the humans start taking down pieces of the old Cloud, locking off the pieces they can’t. Maybe another burst of The Death will be enough. Get rid of those annoying humans forever.”

  Stone’s never seen a search drone sneak in the last word. But this one does. “Next time you come, I won’t be here anymore. Humans don’t have access to something, does it still exist?” And then the search drone is gone, dissipated into code. Fucking old Internet. Stone shakes his head, dives back into the busted surf.

  Avoiding pop‐up strings is nearly impossible. Crash your browser every fifteen minutes. No link or click is safe. So many redirects and mass filters, banner decoy drones, pages slightly misspelled, content worms. Finding specific programs in the mess is nearly impossible. But while most humans have been all gaga with the programming ins and outs of Newnet, Stone’s been getting pretty fancy in the old. When you’re a real human in the old Internet, you can find things in ways no drone is ever going to be able to replicate, no matter how much self‐code it’s got.