Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America

by Damien Lincoln Ober

  “Yeah,” Bartlett says. “I was wondering how I was going to find it.”

  “I don’t like this any better than you, white man.”

  “I like it just fine.”

  But the Indian continues as if Bartlett hadn’t spoken. “This is my fate, same as it is yours. Come,” and he pulls off tangentially, into the pines. “I’ll show you to the Fissure.”

  Bartlett tries to spark up some small talk as they ride along, side by side, but the Indian’s not interested, not at all. Thirty years’ worth of constant warfare with people who look just like Bartlett— can’t say he blames the guy for a little indifferent silence.

  As they clear the pines and begin through a rolling field of mossed‐over glacier stones, a loud crack echoes a few times off the hills. Bartlett looks over to see the Indian slouched in his saddle, blood bright on his hands, already darkening the leg of his pants. The Indian manages to lift his arm, pointing over the lip of the closest hill. “There,” and he slops to a pile in the moss.

  A few more shots crack out, berwanging off the glacial hills. Bartlett’s at a full gallop until the horse refuses to climb any more. He jumps down and takes the bag off the saddle, begins a fevered scurry up the sharp and steepening rocks. Only now does he look back. The Indian there, dead in a little bowl of rocks, his horse poking at some shrubs nearby. But nothing else. The shots have ceased. Bartlett might not know where they came from, but he’s got a pretty good idea from whom.

  Over the lip of the hill he meets a line of scraggly trees, about five or six deep. He can smell it now. Sulfur. The heat is intense. The closest trees are wilted and brown on the side facing the crevasse. Bartlett inches toward the Fissure and looks down. Below, a red gash slices lengthwise through the Earth. Steam swells lap the lowest sky, a peek into the inner workings of this planet.

  Bartlett feels the front of his coat go warm and wet. He hears the shot a fraction of a second later, looks to see General McIntosh leaning from the line of wilted trees, thirty yards farther down the spine of the Fissure. Bartlett doesn’t give him a chance. He turns and, clutching the crystal to his body, dives into the lava. With a soft hiss, he bursts into flames and melts, Doc Bartlett and the crystal, dissolved into the molten earth.

  Samuel Huntington :: January 5th 1796

  Sam is talking politics in a private allchat with the John Hancock avatar. Ran across each other a year or so back, and at first it was hard to tell the difference; where does the old John end and the software edition begin? But lately the programming has picked up a tick or something, a fuzzy sheen. Hancock sits there wavering, skipping, shaking loose and then reforming.

  “Pretty soon,” Hancock says, “electors in the several states will begin their individual processes. For the first time, we’ll have a President of the United States who is not named George Washington.”

  “We’ve got it,” Sam tells him. “Going to be close, but the latest state‐by‐state predictives tell us Adams will win.”

  “State‐by‐state?”

  “They come in spreadsheet and pie form, bar graphs, maps of every possible organizational proportion.”

  “And the maps and graphs and pie charts are linked to analysis claiming and counter‐claiming the veracity of the data. I’ve seen it.” Hancock shakes his head. “Election started off about who’s got the better plan to get the population numbers rising again. Now it’s this battle for reality. Dream insists Jefferson is going to win and the real insists Adams.”

  Sam’s been trolling Franklin’s Dream pretty much nonstop since the Old Man announced his retirement. His Brainpage portal is reborn each minute with feeds from several interlocking Federalist recycles. Dozens of long anti‐Jefferson threads ping each time a new thread untangles itself from some other thread. Pinging pings out in this nonstop pulse code being relayed. Feeds topple to crowd feeds off his wall: recorded speeches, live speeches, live and recorded screams, screams remixed and remixed speeches, too, that now mean the opposite of what they meant when first spoken.

  “Franklin’s Dream,” Sam says. “Out here in the real, it’s the new big tickle. America runs on the Dream. There are lots of people saying they’d like to live inside, John. You could probably make a good buck selling that, bringing them over like you did yourself. Be the richest man in the Dream, just like you were in the real.”

  Hancock holds up a hand. They watch it twitch and reset. “You don’t want to be in here, Sam.” John Hancock’s head is shaking. It’s also jumpy, fizzing out and reforming whenever he moves. Reminds Sam of the old days, running software off laptops and old tower models that didn’t have enough memory, the world freezing, then leaping to catch itself back up. “Not sure how it all works,” John Hancock says. “But I’m dying in here.”

  “Dying?”

  “Whether it’s some virus the code’s got or the stasis of the data‐set it refers to. Way down deep, I’m only a complicated still photo, degrading over time.”

  “Well, I’m dying in the real if it’s any consolation. Guess you’ve already been through that.”

  Hancock tries to recall. “It was more like I fell asleep. And then I woke up here and there I was, on the other side, dying. Watched that old body of mine slip away. Our eyes met.” Hancock shakes his head. “I still wonder what it felt like for him, the me out there, if it felt like anything at all.” Now he looks down at his avatar, glossed hazy with static. “Every time I perform a task, it knocks a few digits out of the code. I’m a whole base system off by now, my entire algorithm.”

  Sam is nodding along. “Yeah, pretty much the same thing for me, out there in the real. I got this cold spot in my throat that makes me cough if I take too big a breath. The cough makes my stomach hurt, which makes me wince and get short of breath, which makes me suck in more air past that cold spot, which makes me cough again.”

  Sam wonders if he would lose something of his real self if his avatar caught some refresh virus. Or does some version of The Death affect only code? “What about Francis Hopkinson? Can you help me find him?”

  Hancock’s avatar is shaking its head. “Haven’t seen him in a year at least.”

  “Could he have disintegrated too? Like you say, with nothing out there to keep his programming fresh.”

  “No, Hopkinson can’t be dead. He’s…”

  “He’s what?

  Hancock shrugs. “What he knows about the code, what he knows about programming it. Imagine a man back in the real who could bend reality with his mind.”

  Sam works this over a minute. Sitting there, perfectly still. Really, back in the real, the real Sam is having a coughing fit, brings him pretty close to that great border between lands.

  Hancock measures this. “You think if Hopkinson comes out, man who coded the Dream endorses John Adams. You think that’ll swing the election.”

  “Before he was a god in the Dream, Hopkinson was a Federalist in the real. We would never have gotten the Constitution through without him.” Sam lets a memory drop down over the inside of his face. “We were pals, you know, back during that Second Congress. Ate together almost every night after those hours of droning debate.”

  “Programmers are creating fan avatars,” Hancock says. “Tribute avatars. All but autonomous. Group avatars are getting so big that individual opinions inside don’t affect the overall code. How can they represent the people in the group then?” He pauses a moment. “Talking about making Franklin’s Dream a branch of the government… Forget about Francis Hopkinson. Take that message to the people. Might get them thinking twice about the Dream. And then John Adams might just have a shot.”

  “Might have a shot? He’s got better than might. Better than a shot.”

  John Hancock smiles at the little rays of Federalist hope. “Despite what your selected datasets allow you to believe, all the simulations show Jefferson winning a squeaker. The more simulations that get run, the more the results verify other results. Washington is the only one, Sam, who could pull off supporting a large
r government in a nation full of rebels and pirates and slave masters.” Hancock ponders it a moment. “How would you even do it? Franklin’s Dream a branch of the government? Replace the Senate? The House? Add another chamber? Would it be lower or higher or in‐between?”

  Sam’s avatar sits there frozen.

  Hancock doesn’t seem to notice, holds up his wavering hand. “There’s no programming for dying, but neither is there any code to prevent it. It’s a part of you. It’s in the math. Eventually you fall apart and stop functioning. Be it country, body or code.” John Hancock’s shaking that shaking, pixilated head of his. “Maybe Hopkin‐son wrote the perfect code. Invulnerable to time and the cycles of time. What do you think, Sam?”

  But Sam is dead back in the real. There was a time when his avatar would have sat in that private chat until it either decayed back to primary data bits or was stumbled upon by an escaped drone or a worm. But now there’s code to prevent that. This is Newnet. Sam Huntington’s avatar stands from the table, walks to the corner and lies down, speaking the words Sam had programmed in when he first set up its death sequence, mandated for each user before he’s allowed to log on to Newnet for the first time: “Sam‐a‐lam‐ma‐ding‐dong‐sally.” And then he vanishes, Sam Huntington condensed back to meat only.

  Francis Lightfoot Lee :: January 11th 1797

  Francis Lightfoot’s voice has reduced itself to the setting just above vibrate. “John Adams has won,” he whispers, “despite everything the Dream thought was going to happen.” It’s been a few weeks of him slowly fading as he sits on the porch in the afternoon sun. Alice tried to rig up some voice‐rec software, linked it back to Francis Lightfoot’s Brainpage, opened a brand‐new all‐chat account for him, but he just kept looking at them empty chairs, talking at them empty chairs. Alice can’t tell it from the days when there were four, five or seven, all gathered together on Chantilly Plantation to watch one of their brothers die.

  “Doesn’t seem to matter to the Republicans,” Francis Light‐foot is saying. “They’re saying Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America is its own America now. A whole separate country that Thomas Jefferson is going to be President of, election be damned. And this separate America is somehow going to exist at the exact same time, in the exact same place?”

  “Sure it is,” Alice says.

  Francis Lightfoot looks outward, either at where none of his brothers are sitting any longer or past that point in space, toward some further layer of Virginia. “But what happens when someone in Franklin’s Dream decides they want their own America too?” He shakes his head sadly. “A shame Richard Henry isn’t here, with his useless hand in that silk bag, to encourage such splitting until every man has his own private America, separated and individual from the rest.”

  “Yes,” Alice says. “Every white man can have two then, two Americas, one in the Dream and one in the real.”

  A sigh. “Franklin’s Dream, spreading through Newnet just like The Death.”

  When William died a few years back, they got together for what was going to be the last‐ever conversation between the living brothers of America’s greatest family. But all Francis Lightfoot and William did was argue, argue, argue, the whole damn time.

  “I remember when a fan page was something to decide which Signer of the Declaration of Independence had the biggest rump. You created fifty‐six pages with a picture of each one’s hindquarters and whichever had the most likes at the end of the day was the winner. Now this is how they’re creating new Americas?”

  Alice had thought maybe a few days. That’s been the pattern with all her brothers. They start to decline, call the family in, it’s a few days and then off to whatever other world or America waits for the Lees who’ve passed. But Francis Lightfoot is hanging on. Hanging on like it’s not only him fighting off death but all the Brothers Lee, tag‐team wrestling to keep the world from losing the very last of them.

  “Dream isn’t the beginning of something,” Francis Lightfoot says, “just the way it’ll always be from this point forward. Republicans revolting against Federalists who just finished revolting against the crown. Just like Havana, slaves revolting against their masters who are revolting against their masters who are cutting their king’s head off right there in the street. And some day some guy in a small town somewhere, or a freed slave on a free island, or a patron of a church, or a Republican inside the Dream will revolt against whatever power’s right then most directly above him, and on and on and on forever.”

  Francis Lightfoot’s not sure if that’s wonderful or horrible. He knows it’s one or the other, but it can’t be both. Can’t be somewhere between. “Wonder what happened to all those profiles of all those rumps,” he says. “Still back there in the old Internet probably, the rumps of the Singers of the Declaration of Independence. Nothing to do but struggle through one neverending existential crisis: Why were we created, and what is our purpose? Really, they’re all just butts. And virtual ones at that.”

  “Franklin had the biggest rump,” Alice mutters. Doesn’t even glance up from her sewing. “And it looks like he always will.”

  “I was there for the beginning,” her brother says. “Maybe I’ve been allowed to live just long enough to see the end. Well, the beginning of the end, at least. That would be some sweet symmetry.” He thinks it over a second. “Or maybe this is how it always seems—that it’s just about to fly apart. Gives people a reason to be fighting all the time to save it. Maybe the curse comes when we forget to give a shit.”

  He waits, but there isn’t a Lee brother left to agree, or disagree, or redirect or augment his point. And so it just dangles out there. Francis Lightfoot’s eyes go still. The air in front of his face isn’t getting thick again with his breath. All that’s left is Alice, sitting alone on the porch of Chantilly Plantation.

  Carter Braxton :: October 10th 1797

  It was his last slave left who found him one mid‐morning staring at the screen of an old smartpad. At first, the boy decided to leave his master be. That his master was probably doing whatever it is masters do on Newnet, and it was best to just scoot on out. But the slave came back a half day later and Old Master Braxton was still doing it. And that ain’t healthy.

  The slave sent for the doctor, and the doctor came and bled Carter Braxton of settled humors. And then he bled him some more. He put all kinds of salts and potions and goo across Carter Braxton’s upper lip, this doctor did. But he just couldn’t get any kind of reaction. And so they called in a better doctor and settled in to wait.

  A few days pass and here comes a carriage rolling into town, as plain looking as the single horse that’s pulling it. Inside the carriage is Dr. Benjamin Rush, all the way down from Philadelphia. Finds the honorable George Wythe, a fellow Signer of the Declaration of Independence, sitting beside Carter Braxton, still face‐deep in that smartpad. Rush asks, “Has he been bled yet?”

  Wythe turns over one of Carter’s arms so Rush can see the crosshatching left from the last doctor. “Just wondering if he can hear us,” Wythe says. He snaps his fingers an inch from Carter’s eyes. “Could this whole thing be about the Dream, I wonder?”

  “How so?”

  Wythe shrugs, “You know, they found him like this, face in the Dream.”

  Later, Rush watches Wythe’s carriage rolling over the next hill away. His carriage is even more plain than mine, Rush thinks. There he goes. The last of them. The last sane Virginian.

  That evening, news wafts through the Cloud that if you have any designs on seeing old Carter Braxton again, now is the time. Next thing Rush knows, a string of hefty Virginia men start plopping by with all their pomp. The man who expended his fortune for Virginia and the Revolution is dying. And so get in the frame of a Dream feed if you can, a few cycles of your feet clopping up the steps to pay respect. Rush can’t tell if it’s just the Virginia tradition of high political drama or that American virtue they slime on about. All these massive political wigglers who’ve changed the course of t
he planet with their weight alone, in a torrent of slave‐drawn carriages. Madison, John Tyler and his little rat‐turn of a son. Ambassador Monroe, Governor Wood, the Society of Cincinnati’s newest face man, John Marshall, Bushrod Washington with a card from his uncle, the Old Man himself. Rush supposes that in this new atmosphere of party, everything, deaths especially, will now be co‐opted toward a message.

  Late in the day, the twins show up on Jefferson’s behalf. “Mr. Jefferson can’t make it,” one tells Rush.

  “Presiding over the Senate,” says the other.

  “And how is the Vice President?”

  They all turn to look down at Carter Braxton.

  “Maybe his time signature has slowed,” one of the twins offers.

  “Dr. Rush, Mr. Jefferson would like to get you all together again.”

  “Who? Me and Carter Braxton?”

  “No, the Signers.”

  “The Signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

  “The ones left, anyway.”

  Rush smiles. “One more tour, huh?” Seven months, he thinks. That’s how long Adams has been President. And already it begins. Another election is just three years and five months away. Getting the Signers back together’s not a bad way to start it. Don’t even have to really do it. Just talking about it’s going to be plenty. Remind every voter who it was that wrote the thing, who it was that coded the gene of liberty.

  John Randolph of Roanoke shows up next with his dogs and his stuffed crotch all but wagging out the front of his riding pants. Actually whips Carter across the shins with his crop and shouts into the old man’s ear. Can’t bully a thing out of him. “Probably swallowed a marble,” Randolph explains. “Got caught in some tube somewhere, keeps the emails from reaching the server.”

  And Benjamin Rush is like, what? Up to this point, he’s only seen this act in Dream feeds.