Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America

by Damien Lincoln Ober

  There’s the long grinding pause of the doctor, pulling himself together from scattered bits. “The curse?”

  Ellery smiles. “I remember when a Founder was dying every day it seemed. Not enough of us left for that now.” He looks at his body, and he has to admit, it does look dead. “I signed the Declaration, you know. The Declaration of Independence. I stood right there, right behind the secretary and watched each man’s face. Each face as he signed his name.”

  “You’ve told me this story.”

  “We really did think the Brits would end up capturing at least a few of us. That they’d string us up and we’d be martyrs for the cause. Revolution started here, you know. In Newport. In 1769, when we hacked into the logs of HMS Liberty, let those worms loose in the British mainframes. Things scrambled the links to all their shipping protocols.” Ellery laughs. “Should have seen those captains with their big cockades, pacing their decks, all of a sudden had no idea which side of the Cloud was up.” He watches on the street below, a little pack of merchants walking into a tavern, oblivious of everything. “The Death showed up, you know, not long after. I always did wonder.”

  “Wonder what, Ellery?”

  But Ellery has moved on. He taps the window glass. “If I’m dead and still alive, does that mean that I can’t die? Or that I’m really not here? How long have I got, Doc? Give it to me straight, I can take it.”

  The doctor crests his edges through 3net just a sec. “I suspect any moment. The fact that you’re not turning cold right now, Ellery, is not short of a miracle.”

  “Well, I guess I’m going to sit here and watch the port like always, then, and see what happens.”

  “You want me to stay?”

  Ellery looks at the doctor, but the door is already closed. He slipped out so gently that Ellery didn’t even hear the knob click, or maybe he sunk into that device, portaled himself just as easy as sending an old tickle. Ellery turns his focus back on the tiny town square, a half‐block set in from the water and the ocean it lets into. Just going to watch this port, he thinks. Just going to sit here and watch this port.

  William Floyd :: August 4th 1821

  Great‐grandpa.” “Great‐grandpa.”

  “Great‐grandpa, look at my smartlife.” Floyd looks down at the little twins, each with a forward projection floating in front of their face. Links aren’t links anymore, but little looping snippets of realtime, all portaling off into the vast layered stretches of 3net. “Life don’t look so smart to me.”

  “Smartlife, Grandpa,” his granddaughter tells him. “It’s kinda like an old smartphone, except—” but the old man is winking at her and so she blushes and turns away. Still a little of that little girl in her. “Put your smartlifes back in your lenses,” she tells her kids. They flick their irises and the projections vanish.

  “Don’t need a smartlife or a set of dentures,” Floyd is telling his granddaughter. “Don’t need a cane or a feeder. I own a smartlens.” And he taps his eye. “Know how to use it, too.” Floyd reaches down to heft one of the seven‐year‐olds into a chair along the long table.

  “Careful, Dad. Take it easy.”

  “I don’t need to take it easy.” But he does, then, need to sit down and take a rest. He watches the kid jump out of the chair and go scurrying off. Then what was the point of lifting him into it? Floyd looks over at his son, the only other person seated. It’s a flashback to how the family table looked right after the second outbreak. All the other Floyd fathers and grandfathers and mothers and grandmothers, wives and sisters and brothers, too. All killed by The Death. It was just William Floyd and his son and the little granddaughter, still in her crib then, and they had no idea if there would be a country for her to grow up in.

  Now that son is sixty‐two years old, that little girl has a husband and twins of her own, and the Floyd family table is becoming its old self again. It recalls to Floyd the Saturday dinners of his youth, with long strings of healthy Floyds and their gracious old‐money wives.

  His granddaughter’s husband comes over and sits. “You seen these new clubs, Granddad‐in‐Law?”

  Floyd turns to the guy.

  “In order to find out where the meetings are, you have to actually go down to the corner of 112th and Broadway and pick up a piece of paper from a box they put out every morning. And then you actually have to go to the place where the meeting is, too. It’s hilarious. The meeting’s not on 3net.”

  Floyd’s son tells him, “New numbers this afternoon, Dad. Show that the panic is officially over. We are in recovery”

  “It’s goodbye panic and back to the Era of Feeling Good.”

  Floyd’s granddaughter and the twins take their seats around the table as the help emerges from the kitchen to put down hot plates of food. Floyd looks from one twin to the other. They’re the same but for hair length. “World’s filling up, again,” he says. “Funny, we used to worry so much about population.”

  “You used to worry about population, Granddad? Do I remember that? What, like that there were too few people?”

  Floyd’s grandson‐in‐law says, “I remember when I was a kid, my dad checking it on Newnet. And then saying how Thomas Jefferson was a slave‐driving Socialist pig,” and he laughs, with his mouth wide open.

  “We’re slaying them now, though, Dad, with all this immigration. People everywhere want to get a piece of what we’ve got here. To think, population numbers used to decide elections.”

  “Is that true, Great‐grandpa?”

  Floyd shrugs. “There was The Death. Not that hard to understand.”

  “The Death,” his granddaughter repeats.

  Floyd watches the twins. At the table but not even looking at their food. Must be into those smartlenses. Was easier when you could slap an actual device out of someone’s hand. Now what, poke an eye out every time someone’s drifting off to 3net? Might knock them the rest of the way in. He tells his granddaughter, “Shouldn’t let these kids spend so much time in 3net.”

  “You all spent plenty of time in the Dream.”

  “You know perfectly well we didn’t have Franklin’s Dream when I was a kid. We had the old Internet and that was plenty.”

  “They’re just slipping into other people’s lives, Grandpa‐in‐Law. No harm in that.”

  “It’s good for them, Grandpa, to use their smartlens to experience a bit of how other people live.”

  “There is no smartlens anymore, Mom. It’s smartlife.”

  “Then what are you accessing 3net with, William?”

  The kid looks equally disgusted with his mom’s advanced age as he is with his grandfather’s and his great‐grandfather’s, too. “3net is your smartlife.”

  Floyd has looked horrified through all this. “Slip into other people’s lives?”

  “Anyone with a smartlife, Dad.”

  “Or a smartlens,” his great‐grandson tells him. “But then you can only see it.”

  “Someone on 3net could be linked into my smartlens right now?”

  “You never set up your privacy settings, Dad?”

  “Privacy settings?”

  One of the kids gets up and slaves William Floyd’s smartlens. “There you go, Great‐grandpa. Now you have to grant access if anyone wants to experience your life.”

  Floyd rolls his eyes, “And it’s Jefferson who’s the Socialist pig.”

  William Floyd’s great‐grandson says, “I’m experiencing someone starting up a startup.”

  “I want to go inside 3net and come out in the West.”

  “What?”

  “How far west, Willy?”

  “As far as there is.”

  “Wait,” William Floyd is demanding, “you can do that now?”

  “No Grandpa, he’s only kidding.”

  “No one’s allowed to tell me I’m too young to start a startup.”

  Floyd sits as far back in his chair as possible. “Never thought I’d hear myself say this, but the way kids talk today.”

  Flo
yd’s granddaughter is scooping more mashed potatoes onto her children’s plates even though they haven’t touched the first scoop. Her husband watches, says, “Now that the panic is over, maybe our generation can finally get down to the business of making this country.”

  A bit aghast, Floyd says, “Business is done. We took care of it.”

  There’s some light chuckling from various spots around the table. “A lot harder to build something new, Granddad, than to knock down something old.”

  Floyd spits some unswallowed food into his napkin. “Knock down something old? Is that what you think we did?” Hard, sharp sounds of an old man clearing his throat. “You should have seen this place during the Revolution. Americans with their stomachs all dug out and their eyes, too, from carrion birds. Dead Americans putrefying along the roadsides, in piles at the edge of every town.”

  “They weren’t Americans then, Grandpa.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “It does make a difference, Dad. She’s right.”

  But Floyd can’t figure out how. How that could be right, or how his son could think so, too.

  “No more panics,” his granddaughter says. “No more dissolves. No more crashes. We’ve finished with all the apocalyptic talk. We’ve got a new America now. Real independence. Not weighed down by all those old problems.”

  “Wasn’t just talk,” Floyd says. “The world really was ending. Look at them in the streets. People hungry for a little of the old Dream, if you ask me.”

  “What’s the Dream, Great‐grandpa?”

  “This panic’s going to show people,” Floyd says. “How much money can be made on an economy they’ve invented just by voting for it. Soon they’ll be imagining something that’s going to make 3net look like an old email editor. And then they’ll be voting for that, too. It’ll be like the Cloud all over. Bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And when that Dream collapses, watch out. The gravity of it’s going to suck the whole world in.” He has a sip of wine, swallows some food he didn’t realize was still in his mouth. “And no amount of Andrew Jacksons or George Washingtons or Thomas Jeffersons are going to be able to stop it.”

  “But Grandpa. Multiple American realities are possible. Simultaneously, too. Not only possible but beneficial.”

  “That’s the real point of 3net, Granddad‐in‐Law.”

  Floyd shakes his head. “Everyone keeps telling me what the real point of 3net is, and every time they say it, it always sounds different.”

  “Don’t know how you old bucks keep talking about different when everyone’s on 3net and so how different can we be?”

  “All I’ll say,” William Floyd says, “is that when the pot boils, the scum rises to the top. You guys already crashed 3net once. But instead of maybe slowing things down, instead of maybe changing your behavior, you just insist there are safer ways to keep on ramping it up. Now there’s your curse.”

  But no one is paying attention to him anymore. Eyes all down into their plates, or off in their smartlenses, tunneled into some other dinner table with some other family where the old man of the house is gone and so no one has to be bothered by the crappy old revolutionary generation. “Well,” he says, “someone better start worrying about the curse. You’ve only got five years left.”

  “Is Great‐grandpa having one of his spells?”

  Floyd turns to his great‐grandson. He wants to ask the kid who told him that. That he has spells. He wants to ask the room, Do I have spells and no one tells me about them? But he can’t make words. He tries to figure out if he’s choking. He hears voices, faintly, looks up to see the same family faces he recognizes but now bleary, sucking their colors off from the lines of their bodies. He tries to say one last thing, but it’s no use. Some kind of last words, he thinks, ranting about the curse.

  Part 5 :: 50 years later… The Lighthouse in the Sky

  Thomas Jefferson :: July 4th 1826

  There was a mountaintop in this spot once. But then a human came along and knocked it right off. Built a home that folds its octagons symmetrically aside, then raises its last in a high dome to bask all eight sides in views of the valley. Spreads its wings and dips them underground to never be seen. Octagons and octagons, lined out in every dimension, the floor plan hinting spatial riddles all throughout its topography.

  Hung from the mansion’s northeast pillars, a drooping footpath ensnares the lawn, its edges laced with flowers last spored half a world away. Rows of experimental vegetables slice sideways into the hillside, like the veranda of some ancient temple. Each carrot and snow pea, each marigold—like the octagons and the doorways, the widths of the footpaths and stairwells, the alloy content of the transistors being pressed out by the slaves along the row—all facets of an ecosystem plotted out in databases that cross‐link through decades of meticulously kept spreadsheets.

  In the mansion’s rear corner study, light pools through windows and glass double doors, capturing what seem to be multiple versions of a risen sun. Set out from this octagon’s center, at an angle one degree short of two o’clock, Thomas Jefferson sits back thinly in a chair that popped into his brain one morning while riding the plantation. Humming softly and still but for his dancing eyes, the third President is typing up one final Brainpage status update: th@ all r cre8d =; th@ they r endowd by their cre8or with certn inalienable rights; th@ among these r life, librty and the purst of happines.

  He reads it over a few times to himself—as if the phrase were not already a constant echo through his mind. “There it is, Sally. The most important 140 characters in the history of man. The DNA of our Revolution. The core tweet of the American character.” Jefferson goes back to humming. Bach toccatas in the same octave the house groans while settling. Today is the first day Jefferson has been out of bed in almost a month. Teetering on the edge of death for weeks as that twin stalked the place, telling the doctor how important it is that the ex‐President survive until the Fourth of July.

  Sally keeps busy, tidying the cluttered shelves that stack strange objects toward the high trim. “How you all going to still have the Cloud I’ll never understand.”

  Jefferson has slipped into 3net. His avatar lounges in a digital model of this same octagonal room. The digital room sits in a digital model of this same building. Not hampered by the restraints of temporal geometry, the floor pattern can be broken from the wall and folded into a perfectly truncated cuboctahedron. Back and forth between this and the other Monticello so often over the years, Jefferson has forgotten which came first, the visualization or the actual building.

  “All these Thomas Jeffersons,” he mumbles. “Mustn’t leave any behind, Sally. Some Calvinist hacker gets inside and uses me to tyrannize the minds of good Virginians.”

  The old sage has spent his last few months programming the architecture of what’s about to happen, this joint finale. And grand it shall be. A simultaneous end for all the online Jeffersons. All around him, portals poke and web through the farthest quantum tunnels of 3net. Others reach back farther, into the ghosted caches he’s meticulously archived, the echoes he’s preserved of older internets man has left behind. Each portal ends at one of his Jeffersons. Looking in, he can see what domestic and intellectual world each has made in its own curling universe of code. All the drones he’s reformatted and reprogrammed, the haunts he’s brought back to life, given purpose to again, the group avatars from the Dream, step back profiles he’s replicated from other masked accounts. “I wonder, Sally. What it will seem like for them. Like death? Or perhaps a liberation, their bits freed to not be collections of my protocols any longer.”

  “Death for a computer program?” Sally shakes her head. “How is it, Tom, you go so simple from having no god to believing some strange things, and like you were a crazy person, too?”

  “Doesn’t have to be a god to be worth believing like crazy in, Sally.” He raises his hands. Lets them hover above all those Jeffer‐sons, like bringing some vast orchestra to noise. Each of their fa
ces, at that moment, turns up to see his palms. With mirrored, arcing swoops, he slices the air and every one of them goes to sleep. Pixel by pixel, they fade to just the outlines of their shapes. Then nothing.

  Of course, this mass death is just an aesthetically pleasing manifestation of these accounts all being terminated permanently. Wiped from the Cloud for good. Jefferson thought their ends deserved a little beauty, a touch of dramatic flare. Not that he would ever need to again, but if he were to recode this same protocol, he could brainstorm a few places for improvement. Oh, well…

  When he stands now, Jefferson really does stand. Not in 3net but in that corner study, in that mansion on that mountaintop he flattened. He checks off a task from a list he has open in his smartlife. “I am officially out of the Cloud.” The humming begins again. Whenever Jefferson is not talking, he’s humming. When he’s not humming, it’s because he’s talking. As soon as the words are fully out of him, the toccatas start back up, right where they were paused.

  He offers Sally a smile as he slides past, into the adjoining room, to the bolted stacks of harddrives. From floor to ceiling, they line the walls, set two‐deep and packed with data that arcs back to the days when the Cloud was actually connected. Inside these harddrives, all his collected caches of the old Internet, Newnet, the Dream, every generation and incarnation of Brainpage. All of it saved right here for later historians to sift through, discover whatever continuities they need to enlighten their age. This is the greatest collection of information the world has ever known. If 3net were to crash for good, if all human knowledge were lost, here is where man would begin to rebuild.