Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America

by Damien Lincoln Ober

  “George Social Clymer” Clymer laughs. He takes a moment of stillness. “Never would have won the Revolution if we’d had the Internet holding us back. Makes me wonder sometimes if The Death and the curse are connected somehow. Maybe it was The Death that started America and so it’s fifty years from the appearance of The Death that the curse strikes.”

  “Oh, Grandpa, not the curse.”

  Clymer watches his son and grandson work a second. Maybe if they listened to the old folks a little bit, maybe they could get themselves out of this mess instead of further and further into it. He knows they think they’re winning, that victory is some kind of inevitability, ordained by their nation’s dedication to liberty. “When I was your age…” but Clymer stops. He was about to say, I was signing the Declaration of Independence. But then he realizes he was quite a bit older than his grandson is now. I was forty‐two. Gosh, Clymer thinks, I should sit down. He looks at the chair he’s already seated in.

  “You can come, if you like, George.”

  Clymer snaps up because the voice is not the voice of his son or grandson. Hovering there before him is Francis Hopkinson, his outline anyway. Formed of a thin sheen of pixels, Hopkinson flitters and flashes, a cheap hologram of the man Clymer once knew so well. Clymer realizes he’s standing now, and he turns and looks back and sees himself slumped over and still in that chair. Neither son nor grandson has noticed yet, they remain neck‐deep in the Dream, rebuilding the past to steer the future through a war. “What is this, Hopkinson?”

  Francis Hopkinson looks over his shoulder at a portal that shimmers and flits code. “Retake America, from the Dream side out.”

  “Retake it from whom?”

  But Hopkinson only smiles. “You ready for one more adventure, George?”

  Benjamin Rush :: May 19th 1813

  Just another day for Benjamin Rush. He’s had 24,000 of them or so over the years. But then Thomas M’Kean shows up and that changes everything. Not just another day anymore. Standing in the front hall of Rush’s house, the two old Signers shake hands. “Mr. M’Kean. Actually here in the real.”

  “Hello, Ben.”

  Rush invites M’Kean into his study, where he has several feeds coursing in, separate live streams of the House and Senate, debating funding for naval construction and federal control of state militias, respectively. A small inferno burns in the fireplace beneath the screens, crackling and oozing heat. Rush clears his throat, points at the feeds. “What do you see, Tom?”

  “John Randolph of Roanoke doing the John Randolph of Roanoke.”

  “No.” Rush zooms the House display to highlight a single pixelated figure, half‐there against the chamber’s back wall. “Thought with Newnet we were getting rid of haunts and drones and all the awful things that used to pervade the old Internet. But now Newnet has all those things and worse. And it’s more impossible to tell the difference between them and any real user.”

  M’Kean takes an offered seat. “We keep trying to eliminate the drones and the drones keep returning. Maybe they have nothing to do with man at all, were here before us and will be here after. The Dream’s just opened up a place where our worlds can cross over.”

  Rush plops into the den’s other chair. “The first hyperwar. We can watch it all from the comfort of our palms.”

  “A long way from wondering if Off‐the‐Grid is still alive. But you never did like the Old Man.”

  Rush smirks. “Like him fine now, compared with what these kids have to offer.” Rush takes a long look at his guest. M’Kean has picked up a tremor, his age finally beginning to show; it shakes him a little while he sits there, but he’s still as lean and angled and dangerous‐looking as ever.

  “I remember when the Dream was just a way to organize a press blitz.” M’Kean waves a hand at it.

  “Kids probably think it was like that from the dawn of man. Along came the old Internet and with it the Dream.” They both laugh. “Physical locations are a fad. Soon, Congressmen and Senators will just stay at home in their subsidized mansions. I’m not sure who’s the biggest threat: the English, the Off‐Worlders, the Federalists or the Republicans.”

  “Coming apart, pulling together. Depends on how long a lens you take to it.”

  Rush shakes his head.

  “It’s just their way,” M’Kean says. “These new Americans. We fought our fights pretty rough.”

  Rush holds fingers up like it’s a list he’s worked through a hundred times. “Standing army. Deficit spending. Permanent forts all over the country. Instead of fighting for independence, we’re trying to take over Canada. They’re even talking about 3net again. And that’s the Republicans!”

  M’Kean sits there a while, listening to Rush work himself through what sounds like his standard dinner party shtick. Boring as it is, it can be important, sometimes, to give people a chance to let their favorite noises hiss out.

  “Baltimore’s like a war zone,” Rush says. “The Paris of the West. Poor Light Horse Harry. Killed by a mob in the street. An American mob. Here, in America! Brits show up, they won’t know who to kill and who to welcome back to the Empire. I sure can’t tell. Got their own private navy there in Baltimore. Running up and down the coast taking potshots at anything that floats the jack. How long before the tide tips and they can make more money doing the same thing for the King?”

  “Yep, pretty wild.”

  “Andrew Jackson’s down there running crazy in Florida like there never were any rules. You seen this guy John Coffee he’s got? What laboratory was that monster grown in?” Rush shivers. “And we thought Jefferson’s twins were creepy.”

  “It’s good for the kids, this war. They need to work on making some heroes of their own. Not too many of us real ones around anymore.” M’Kean shows off that palsy in his hand. “Soon there won’t be any left. A perfect vacuum and some dickhead who’s never done anything will get sucked in, be the next George Washington.”

  “The Dream sure makes the war look okay,” Rush says. “But Admiral Cockburn and that attack dog, Lieutenant General George Ross, tearing up the entire Chesapeake Bay. They’ll make a wasteland of the whole seaboard if someone doesn’t stop them.”

  “You’re going to hate me for saying this, Rush. But it’d be nice to have George Washington around. Someone’s got to knock that prick Cockburn’s block off. Do it myself if I were young enough. Try something like that now, and I’d just make a fool of myself.”

  Rush watches what’s coming through on the feed, clearly thinking of something besides what’s coming through on the feed.

  M’Kean looks, too. “After all we’ve done, this is what we’re reduced to, watching and complaining. Complaining and watching. Come on, Ben. Let’s turn this thing off and just not worry about it.”

  Rush appreciates it, lets a breathy chuckle escape vague and unpointed. “I remember the day John Morton died. The day we uploaded the Articles.” Rush ponders, his brain off on one of its meanders. “I always wondered if maybe those Articles had something else in them. Something maybe they got from John Morton, all that blood and phlegm splattered all over his laptop.”

  “Calling what we did back then the Immortal Congress,” M’Kean says.

  Rush sighs. “We lose this war, Tom, it’s back to colonies, and everything we’ve done these last fifty years will be wiped out of the Cloud forever. Like it never happened.”

  “Why don’t we just enjoy the afternoon, then? Us old guys, maybe we shouldn’t be so worried about the war. How it might or might not come out.”

  Rush is measuring his words: “Because you think we won’t live to see the end of it? You know something I don’t? British on their way to Philly? Going to hang the two of us, finally, for signing the Declaration?”

  “It’s something in the Dream, Ben. Jefferson’s calling it Central Programming.”

  “Central Programming?”

  “Like scar tissue in the Cloud. Some of that coding that makes up the protocols of the Dream, of Newnet, sort
of calcified at some point. Developed a nerve center.”

  “Are you saying the Cloud has grown a brain?”

  M’Kean’s eyes widen. “That’s a scary way to put it, Ben, but yes, I suppose so.”

  The two sit thinking a few moments.

  “Well,” M’Kean continues, “we figured out how to tap into it. And one of the things we found… Central Programming, it can take your Brainpage, your Dream avatar, cross‐reference it with all the other echoes you make in the Cloud—”

  “It can determine the date of your death?”

  M’Kean nods.

  “And today’s mine?”

  “‘Fraid so.”

  “How?”

  M’Kean shrugs, lets silence be his answer.

  “I feel okay.”

  M’Kean smiles. “You never were that good a doctor.”

  Rush laughs. “Awful big of you, then, to come and spend my last day with me.”

  “No patriot of your caliber should have to die alone.”

  Rush retains that smile. “Where’s the cutoff line? What caliber of patriot do you need to be to be assured a visit by Thomas M’Kean the day Central Programming predicts you’re going to die?” They look into the Dream feed. Rush takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. He feels his body sinking away from the main courses of the world. “I watch this war now, it’s like watching someone else’s world.” He stands, goes to the desk in the corner. “Are you sure about this Central Programming thing?” And it’s the first time M’Kean has heard a bit of fear in the doctor’s voice. “I really do feel fine.”

  “Sorry, Ben.”

  But even before M’Kean says it, Rush is waving it off. Comes away from the desk with a letter, twice folded. “You know what this is, right?”

  M’Kean pats the breast of his coat. A few layers down, his own Jefferson letter. “Never leaves my side.”

  Rush is falling back into his chair. “I’ve wondered about these letters, Tom. What parts of something larger they all must be.”

  M’Kean lets the room slow down. “Knowing Jefferson, there’s probably some code embedded in the layout of the characters. Corresponds to an address you can enter in the Dream and it takes you to a secret chatroom where all the Signers have been uploaded as they die. A place where the great avatars go to hash out democratic philosophy on into eternity, ever toward greater and greater compromises that inch in half‐steps toward perfection but never quite get there.”

  “I don’t think Tom Jefferson’s the kind of guy who’s into private heavens. But yeah, I suppose they contain some riddle.” Rush lets his letter fall open. He reads silently a moment.

  “I could take yours,” M’Kean says. “Maybe collect the others.”

  “Don’t think that’s going to be possible.”

  “Why not?”

  But Rush just smiles, shakes his head a little. “I guess you’ll see in a little while. Maybe…” The doctor works himself to his feet. “Gosh,” he says.

  “You okay?”

  “Might be that I’m feeling something coming on.” And he lays a hand flat across his chest. “Always thought I would die with the country at peace.”

  “What is it?”

  Rush tries to take a step but can’t. Goes down on one knee and there he is, wobbling like that. Central Programming was right, he thinks. M’Kean is up, spry for a man almost eighty. He helps his old friend to the floor. Rush lays there flat on his back, looking upward. “Anything I can do, Doctor?”

  Rush grasps for M’Kean’s hand. “Tell me I’ve measured up, Tom, even if it’s a lie.”

  “You were right there the whole way, Ben. More than measured up. In some ways, you set the bar.”

  M’Kean watches Rush’s face melt into a smile. The actual moment of death is clear, a stillness that settles in with unmistakable finality. M’Kean sets the hand, inanimate, across its owner’s corpse, waits a moment out of respect, then looks to the table beside Rush’s chair. But the Jefferson letter is gone, vanished. M’Kean smells smoke. Is something burning?

  Robert Treat Paine :: May 11th 1814

  The Paine girls have been thrown into a low‐bubbling hysteria over videos that hit the Dream just a few hours before: a giant cephalopod thrashing small fishing towns up and down the coast of Nova Scotia. “Must have been that thing that sucked the blood out of those sailors,” one says. Because reports are coming in about the bloodless bodies being dug out of the towns this thing has destroyed. And “destroyed” is the right word. Only a few leaning joists left standing. Footage of the thing is always bouncing two second clips, and then whoever’s filming gets snatched up, too. Buildings falling into the blur of thrashing tentacles. Bodies flung left and right, all bloodless. Doesn’t seem to be a human able to escape all those tentacles. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands.

  The latest uploaded clip of the monster shows it swimming southward off the coast of Maine, then wasting a ship of the line with a few flicks of those tentacles. As the ship goes down, so does the monster, turns a big eye toward the shore and then dunks below the surface.

  All of the Paine daughters are there. All four of them. Not one died in childbirth or rearing. None taken by The Death. Not one killed in a war, this one or the Revolution. Not one has fallen to disease or violence. When Robert Treat Paine has a daughter, that daughter grows up big and strong. Same can’t be said for the boys. Of four, only one remains, serving on the USS Frolic, somewhere in the vast curves of the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Maybe he’ll return tomorrow. All the ships have been called in. The entire navy, so how long will that take?”

  “I think we should tell Father,” one whispers. “He has the right to know.”

  “Even if it kills him?”

  Throat‐clearing crackles from a bed in the corner of the room. “I may not be able to hear what you’re saying, but that doesn’t mean I don’t already know.” The girls look just in time to watch Robert Treat Paine take his last breath and go still. And so they call the doctor up from the downstairs parlor, where he’s been camped in the liquor cabinet since he first arrived a few days before. The doctor comes in, turns a dial on a small transmitter beside the bed and just like that Robert Treat Paine comes back from the dead. “I’ve been to the future,” he tells them. Which is the exact thing he tells them each time he’s revived.

  It was a few days back when the doctor injected some microscopic computer chips into Robert Treat Paine. The doctor told the Paine daughters that the computer chips were like little drones. He held up that dial for them all to see, turned it a few notches and back came their old dad. “It uses the parts of the Cloud that you’re existing in at any one moment to vibrate your cells. Works pretty much the same as a smartlens, only in reverse, Cloud adjusts you a little.” He smiles. “Smartlife.”

  Now every time the old man drifts off to the land beyond, the doctor will come from downstairs and turn the transmitter up a little higher. And Robert Treat Paine will flutter back from the grave and tell his daughters, “I’ve been to the future.”

  Deciding a hallucinating dad is better than no dad at all, one of his daughters settles in next to the bed. “Tell me about the future, Dad.”

  “The Fissure,” Robert Treat Paine says. “It happens. The country splits. Rhode Island is destroyed in the fighting. Broken right off into the Atlantic. New England and New York become part of England again. Tariffs are less, actually, than under the Virginians. But none of that matters because no one can go in the water. Not the oceans, not the streams, not even the ponds. Turn on your faucet and it might come out and get you.”

  “What’s going to get you?”

  “The Vampire Millipus!”

  The girls all look around. Who told him? But they’re all shaking their heads and trading glances, and then looking back at their dad.

  “It had babies,” he tells them.

  “Babies?”

  “Planted inside some soldiers it ate on its way up the Mississippi.”

  “N
o, Dad, it’s off the coast of Canada.”

  “Maybe now it is. Remember, this is the future I’m talking about.”

  They can’t help but smile.

  “The drones,” he says. “They came across. All of them. Not tens, but hundreds. Hundreds of millions. It wasn’t an invasion, they just filled the place right up. Filled up every city and country town and started making towns of their own. And if you think kids today are half in the Dream, these drones looked like what ghosts would look like if ghosts were real. Half there and translucent. You can see everything inside them with just a glance.”

  Robert Treat Paine takes a few long breaths. “The Cloud, the Dream, Newnet. None of it survived the war. All those drones came across and that was it. The Cloud couldn’t take it, fell in on itself. Looked like a tornado, dust spinning, winds that spit eastward right to the coast. The whole thing collapsed. The air was buzzing for a week. And that’s when the Off‐Worlders attacked.”

  His daughters share a few concerned looks.

  “Vaporized every army on earth. Not just here, but in Europe and Africa, too, Asia probably, but we didn’t have any way to know. No Newnet, no Cloud. People and drones alike, all watching the sky for what the Off‐Worlders were going to do next. Avoiding any body of water bigger than a frog pond. Who wants to live in a world like that, where a sip of water could plant a Millipus larva inside you? Where there’s no Cloud? Where the Dream is collapsed? And so humans started talking about a way to escape. And the only place they could think of was the old Internet.”

  “They went back through the Fissure?”

  “Mary!”

  “What? It’s interesting.”

  “No. The Millipus had destroyed it. Swam right up the Mississippi and destroyed the Fissure. Knocked it back into the earth. All that was left was a field with some prints of its suction cups.”

  “But how did it get past New Orleans?”

  “What’s in New Orleans to stop it? It just bashed the place with its tentacles. Reared up like a horse and just fucking bashed the place.”