Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America

by Damien Lincoln Ober

  “So you lose some memories?”

  “You protect Franklin’s Dream from a Luddite legislature.”

  “From some cloistered, overreaching Federalist judiciary.”

  Hopkinson wants to know, “How much am I going to forget?”

  The twins perk up. “Only everything you’ve ever learned about coding and programming.”

  “So, I’ll never be able to program again?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Not even an app?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “But I could learn it again?”

  Twin heads are shaking “no” in different viewers. “What good is wiping your brain if you can learn it all again?”

  “You’ll lose the aptitude.”

  “The aptitude for the skill set.”

  “It’ll be like waking up and the Revolution is done and the Constitution in place, Franklin’s Dream uploaded and gone live, and you can just sit back and enjoy it like every other American.”

  Hopkinson takes a deep breath.

  “There’s still music,” the other twin says.

  “Poetry.”

  “Chess.”

  “These are the real things, Mr. Hopkinson.”

  “Liberty is just a platform for enjoying them.”

  Hopkinson looks away from the screen now, at his old scientific instruments, all lined up on the shelf, all covered in dust. He hasn’t used them since he was part of the committee to investigate The Death. It’s supposed to be a glimpse into a set of higher laws, science is, a way to see past the touch of man, past all his barbaric efforts, his temporary laws of conquest and suppression. Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America is my greatest song, Hopkin‐son thinks, my best poem.

  “Go ahead,” he tells the twins.

  “Okay,” and they each leave the frame of their viewer. A voice comes now and it’s impossible to tell which one is saying it. “Set one of the viewers to fullscreen, Mr. Hopkinson.”

  Hopkinson rests his fingers on the keys. One last beat of hesitation but no second thoughts. Franklin’s Dream, he thinks. Thumb and pointer. Control F.

  Roger Sherman :: July 23rd 1793

  And so Congress has sent the eminent Doctors Benjamin Rush and Josiah Bartlett to see the great compromiser off from this world. They’re also supposed to check on the status of the work Sherm’s been entrustend so Congress has sent the eminentd with these last two and a half years. Upon the disappearance of Lyman Hall, Congress appointed one of its old guard to lead an ongoing investigation into this supposed Curse on America.

  Today, though, old Sherm’s not really doing any investigating. He’s been in bed almost the whole last week. Smartpad’s there on the side table, got his bluefingers on, but outside a little allchat, he doesn’t do too much with Newnet. Tinkers with his Brainpage a bit. Watches feeds come rolling in from Franklin’s Dream. Sends out some old‐fashioned emails to some of his oldest pals, the ones still left anyway. First The Death and then the War and now just plain old time has been doing a pretty good number on them. Three of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, right here in this room, a full ten percent of the ones left alive.

  Rush sits in a chair at a desk by the window while Doc Bartlett and Sherm talk politics, just like the old days. “Washington’s been reelected,” Sherm says. “But what about the next election?”

  Bartlett nods, “The Old Man can’t run forever.”

  Sherm is doing some math in his head. Like all thoughts, this one is bound to circle down around the drain and eventually end up being about the curse. “1826, he says. “Washington will be ninety‐four.”

  “Well, if anyone can live that long, it’s old Off‐the‐Grid.”

  “Off‐the‐Grid,” Rush rolls his eyes. He adds a dollop of Sherm’s blood to a slide, places the slide under the eyepiece of a portable microscope. “I don’t need the Internet either, but do I make some big deal out of it?” Poor Rush, still obsessed with that theory of his, that the Revolution could have been won in 1775 and all the bloodiest chapters avoided. “If only we’d removed Washington when we had the chance,” Rush says, good eye deep into the eyepiece of the microscope. “But then so what, I suppose. How would that make this moment right now any different? Would it have stopped The Death? No, probably not.” Rush comes up from the microscope. “Typhoid,” he declares.

  “Typhoid?”

  “You must have consumed some feces.”

  “You’re telling me I’m dying because I ate shit?”

  “Human, most likely.”

  Sherm lolls his head into the embrace of the pillows.

  Rush asks him, “Do you know how it might have happened?”

  “If I knew how it was I ate some human shit, Dr. Rush, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Maybe it was during the Constitutional Convention?”

  Sherm laughs. Doc Bartlett, too.

  Rush has come over to stand beside the bed. “We could bleed.”

  “Will it cure me?” Bartlett is shaking his head.

  “Well,” Rush says. “I’m not so sure anymore about bleeding, to tell the God’s‐honest truth.”

  Sherm turns his focus on the ceiling, his brain tumbling down into that track it’s been locked in these last thirty months. “The Fourth of July, 1826. The day the curse supposedly ends America.” He looks to Doc Bartlett. “Soon the curse will be your assignment.”

  Bartlett gets up, begins to stoke the fire. Looks like a man with more important things to worry about.

  “Washington,” Sherm ruminates on it, “serves until he’s ninety‐four. When he dies the country dies, too? Maybe.” Sherm’s search for the curse has long teetered from the physical to the metaphysical to the philosophical. “Washington is America, to just about everyone. But what happens when a President’s America for only 50.01 percent? Maybe that’s something the country can’t survive, life without Off‐the‐Grid.”

  Rush rolls his eyes. “Waste of good brainpower,” he says. “Focusing the energies of men like you on superstitious tales and outdated antiquities. It’s going to be the 1800s soon.”

  “Sometimes I think they gave me the assignment because they don’t believe anything will happen. Just want old Sherm to still feel part of the ongoing experiment. Meanwhile, today’s leaders hash out the real issues with no annoying distractions like a curse and a doddering old cobbler.”

  Dr. Rush leaves that afternoon, back on the long haul to Philadelphia. And so it’s just old Sherm and Doc Bartlett who move out onto the porch and lean back in deck chairs with the night sky above them. “It was two and a half years ago,” Sherm is saying. “They led me into that conference room with all the web cams unplugged. Never would have thought they could keep it secret for so long, not these days, with Newnet and Franklin’s Dream. Asked me to figure out what it was that was going to destroy America.” Sherm tilts his head to fit more of the sky into his field of vision. “Here’s where I came first.” His hand makes the shape of a hand against the starry night. “Maybe a meteor, or a comet. Listened to the ground, too. Studied geological scans and seismographs. Long loop weather patterns. Anything pointing toward some confluence on the Fourth of July, 1826. But I’d always end up back here, gazing at the stars. Thought maybe if I stared long enough, I’d get some glimpse of that future, however faint or mysterious.”

  “Any progress?”

  Sherm shakes his head. “Just like everybody else who knows about the curse: I’ve got no idea what the curse is. Witches, Indians, the Off‐Worlders, Franklin’s Dream, the Constitution or even the Declaration itself.” He stops for a moment to let the possibilities separate into different likelihoods. “Maybe we’re responsible, the Signers. Maybe the curse is the country itself, fifty years is the longest gravity can keep it from spinning apart.”

  “So you believe it’s true? That there is a curse?”

  “American tradition, I guess, to see every event not for what it really is, but in a worst‐case‐possible, furthe
st‐played‐out nightmare version. According to some, Franklin’s Dream was supposed to end the country the second it left Beta. That was two years ago, and here we are.” He sighs. “Guess you have to believe there’s a curse in order to do a competent job looking for it.”

  Bartlett wiggles. It’s a way of settling into his chair a little deeper. “We could tell them we’ve looked high and low and found no curse.”

  “Can’t prove a negative,” Sherm shakes his head. “Curse or no curse, if they believe it’s coming, it means it probably will.” Above, stars reveal nothing in the patterns they make against the void of dark space. “I suppose the question they really want answered is not so much how, but will. Will the country last more than fifty years?”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Despite what’s being said on Franklin’s Dream, we’ve done this thing right, Doc. As right as can be expected. It’s all in God’s hands now.”

  They look up again, at the Connecticut sky, at its pocked blackness. “A planet revolving around one of those stars,” Sherm says, “has no conception of the constellation its sun helps make.”

  “And we don’t either, I suppose you’re saying.”

  Sherm shakes his head. “Our sun’s probably not bright enough to be part of any constellation. At least not visible from very far away.” He traces a pointer finger through the thick milky belt of stars and gasses and asteroids, all lost in each other’s glow. “We just contribute to the sheen.”

  Bartlett is still there the next morning when Roger Sherman passes on. Old Sherm the cobbler, present and accounted for through every phase of it: Continental Association, the Declaration, the Articles, Constitution, Bill of Rights. Helped Franklin and McIntosh prep the Off‐Worlder treaty negotiations, developed the compromise that set states’ rights free to argue their way through all the coming histories of the nation. Sherm’s going to miss the rest of the documents, the resolutions, treaties and doctrines, the little adjustments that are sure to come and come again, fine‐tuning America off into eternity. Unless, of course, the curse gets it first.

  John Hancock :: October 8th 1793

  The top floor of Hancock Tower rotates so that anyone in Boston and surrounding townships can look up and see which way the governor faces at any given moment. Really, it’s the top two floors combined into one. Twenty‐foot ceilings, flat marble walls and light that comes spilling in. Always looks so futuristic no matter what future comes along. This is the tallest building in the New World, inherited when his uncle died and all of a sudden, John Hancock was the head of America’s most lucrative shipping empire. That was 1764. He was twenty‐seven years old and the richest private citizen in all His Majesty’s colonies.

  Today, as with most days since the erection of America’s tallest beacon of trade, the observation windows face east, toward the mouth of the Charles, the Boston Harbor, the fleet of ships right then sailing in parts and pieces, in and out, to and from the distant harbors of distant lands. John Hancock has faced this direction most of his adult life. When illness forced him to bed, he had the bed moved to the large windows in the main room, ordered the top floor rotated to face east. John Hancock wants to go out at the front of the continent which fronts the hemisphere that will one day front the globe.

  Right now, Hancock’s focus is lower, on the tiny men on the street below and their tiny horses and carriages all blending down to one teeming mass of humanity, seems like the tower rises right out of it. Made a lot of money together, John Hancock thinks, the people and I. He takes his eyes from the window, rolls up his sleeve to look at that old Sons of Liberty tattoo. Could have been me, he thinks. Could have been me put in charge of the Continental Army. Would have become President, too, first President of the United States. But no, had to have a Virginian involved and so it was George Washington. Look at him now, building a damned capital with his name on it. And here I am, surrounded by programmers, trying to cheat death.

  It was a few months ago that rumors starting hitting the cha‐trooms, users reporting that Francis Hopkinson had been spotted on Newnet, two full years after he was found dead in front of his terminal, the day Franklin’s Dream went live. Not supposed to be any haunts in Newnet, that’s one of the points of the programming. But there’s Hopkinson’s Brainpage, more active than ever. He’s been seen wandering the meetups. too, mixed in the crowd at virtual town halls. Even if there were haunts in Newnet, these actions are too complicated to be any haunt. Either Hopkinson coded his avatar so well that the best programmers can’t tell the difference, or he really is still alive inside Franklin’s Dream.

  When John Hancock heard this, he was already sick, already knew he was not getting better. Using his vast resources, Hancock brought in the best programmers money could buy. For weeks, around the clock, they’ve been coding John Hancock’s Franklin’s Dream avatar to levels of detail no human has yet attempted. All the spoils of Hancock’s vast “shipping” fleet are being funneled and filtered into these programmers’ pockets. If Francis Hopkinson can do it, maybe there’s life past the edges of the physical world for John Hancock, too.

  Wouldn’t mind one last look at the tower from the outside, he thinks. And not in feeds or digital captures, but the actual sky reflecting that slightly brighter version of itself in the polished surface. Makes it look so grand and impossible, hovering just above invisible. He turns to look at the programmers and their rows of desks, filling up every spare inch of the main room, little aisles for them to weave between computer mainframes and that’s about it. You can feel the information crowding the air. Just then, one of them is settling into a chair beside the bed. Together they work through a screen’s worth of questions to which John Hancock rattles off answers that are supposed to be right off the top of his head. It’s a constant battle, thinking about the answers as little as they tell him is necessary. “Need to get you in here as you really are,” they’ve told him. “Not as you think you’d like to be. Can’t look back on the present. And you can’t exist, not really, if you’re only the past version of yourself.”

  An aide enters and says, “Governor.” And he comes to the bedside so Massachusetts’s chief executive can put his signature on today’s stack of government flexdocs. One last time, his old John Hancock, right there in the middle, each crested H more bold than the last, the last one the perfect one, a perfect exit for his written name.

  Questions and signings done, the room settles into that constant clicking, the neverending typing of the programmers, the low hum of all those computers. They all know, from the Governor on down, that soon the body will give out. Mostly their programming work is done; it’s just the finishing touches left now.

  On the screen mounted beside his bed, Hancock can see the actual code of his online self. Aside from answering questions now and then, he really hasn’t had much involvement in the process. And so whenever the programmers aren’t looking, he works on tweaking a separate copy of the avatar. In this secret version of himself, Hancock has factored in the thoughts that pop up after the initial reactions. This second avatar is not necessarily how John Hancock answered the questions, but how John Hancock would like to have answered them, given a moment of thought, a chance to consider their part in the whole. Working in parallel, Hancock has constructed the version of himself that was put in charge of the Continental Army, that did become President. And his tower is not in Boston but in Hancock, overlooking this same river as it spills from the mouth of the nation’s capital, out into the ocean, way far away.

  Hancock experiences the sensation of being sucked toward the sea and he knows, suddenly and surely, that the end has begun. He’d always wondered if he would feel it coming, if he just settled in and listened to all there is to hear. Or would it sneak up and the world just cease? His legs go cold, then his fingertips. He’s not sure how much longer he’ll have the use of them. And so now he must decide which version to set loose in the Dream: the actual or the imagined John Hancock?

  Pressing the butt
on that decides it is his last physical act. He watches the upload bar zoom rightward and vanish, then lies back and sets his eyes further off, through the window, to the mouth of the harbor in the distance and the coast to its north, breaking over and over itself, on and on. Somewhere becoming the North Shore. New Hampshire. Maine. To the nation’s very edge. One last glimpse of the real America before he crosses over.

  Richard Henry Lee :: June 19th 1794

  Sun setting over the western hills of Virginia and the brothers Lee have gathered on the porch of Chantilly Plantation to see Richard Henry off from the world. Arthur died at the end of the second outbreak. Philip and Thomas Ludwell and Philip Ludwell were all gone before that. John and James and plain old Richard never made it much past birth. So it’s just the three of them, Richard Henry and William and Francis Lightfoot, a pitcher of sugared lemonade and three pipes full of fine Virginia tobacco. Alice is there, too, somewhere. And there was another sister, dead now a while, whose name was Hanna.

  “To France,” Richard Henry says. “Lopping off the head of the man who lopped off the head of the King. Now that’s what I call liberation of the mind.” His voice has grown thin these days as his life winds itself down. As have his arms and legs and torso and neck, too. It’s a skeleton of the man who presented the first resolution to separate the colonies from the vast British Empire. Now he raises his sugared lemonade to look through it, at the sun burning a swell of fire rightward across distant treetops. His other hand is tucked along the side of his leg, always in that black silk pouch with its string knotted tight. Lost the use of it when he was a boy, the first dead part of him. And so into the bag it went; aside from regular cleanings, it’s never returned, sits in there useless and frail and untouched by the sun. “What started in Old Virginia has gone viral,” he says. “All the way to Europe. The Declaration is catching like The Death. And it didn’t need any Internet or a Newnet or a Franklin’s Dream. Didn’t need any coding or programming. All went down inside the human brain.” A long sip of his lemonade. “You know,” he says. “The Revolution started right here, when I first told Daddy to go piss off and he slapped me and I told him to piss off again and he said, ‘That’s my boy!’”