Red, White, and the Blues

by Walker, Rysa

  “Those,” I say, tapping the pale-orange bubbles. “The others are darker, and a bit more yellowy. What are the clear bubbles?”

  “Our hitchhikers from the other timeline,” he says. “If I could figure out where they’re coming from, what specific reality, I might be able to block them, but we don’t have a lot of data points. So far, they’ve only latched on to Tyson and Madi, as far as I can tell. I hadn’t analyzed all of them yet, however, and now most of the colors that were on the display are gone.”

  I ask him why they’d be gone given that this house is under a CHRONOS field, and he begins explaining that this is a historical display of chronotron pulses writ large, not something he’s measuring inside the house. There’s something about Einstein-Rosen bridges and finding the negative energy of the exotic matter that keeps a wormhole stable, but by the time he reaches that bit, I’m not really listening. It’s partly because the science is over my head, but more that I’m distracted by a single red bubble at the bottom of the screen, like a bloodred moon. It’s gone before I can even point it out. Alex must have seen it, too, however, because he’s staring at that section of the screen.

  “Where did it go?” I ask. “You saw it, didn’t you? Right there. What color was it?”

  Alex frowns. “Red. But . . . it’s gone now. And that shouldn’t happen without another time shift. Which we would have felt, and we didn’t. Maybe it was just a reflection.” He nods toward the tall windows across the room. “There’s a helipad on the office building across the street.”

  I stare at the spot where the bubble was, willing it to come back, if only for a second, just to confirm that it wasn’t a reflection. But that sector of the display remains blank.

  “I’m . . . going to go get that coffee now.” I back away from the display, angry at the tears hovering just below the surface. Tyson motions for me to join them, but I ignore him and hurry toward the door.

  Unfortunately, the kitchen isn’t empty when I get downstairs. The woman I haven’t met yet, the geneticist, is there with her daughter, both of them on the floor in front of the patio door, looking out into the backyard. It’s a nice yard, with trees and a small shed beyond the brick patio. It was probably even prettier when the place was first built, but it’s more of a large courtyard now, hemmed in by tall buildings on all sides.

  A row of juice glasses is lined up on the countertop.

  “Don’t use those,” the woman says. “They’re being requisitioned as lab equipment. The mugs are in the cabinet next to the fridge. And the food unit is crap. It can handle pasta and makes a decent rice or oatmeal, but don’t try for anything fancy. Makes okay coffee, though.”

  “Thanks. Good thing I’m not hungry, I guess.” I fill a mug and take a deep breath before turning around. “I assume you’re Lorena?” When she nods, I say, “Katherine Shaw. How old is your little girl?”

  “Almost eleven months.”

  “She’s adorable.” Both the child and her mother didn’t exist in the previous timeline. Do they exist in this one? I don’t know, and it’s not really the sort of question you want to ask someone, especially on short acquaintance. I’m about to make a polite excuse and head back up to the library, when she asks if I enjoy my job.

  The question catches me off guard, partly because it doesn’t really make sense. I can’t imagine not enjoying my job, since I was quite literally made to enjoy it, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t enjoy his or her job. That’s the beauty of the whole chosen-gift system, at least in the cases where parents choose wisely. There may be other things you could imagine doing, which you think might be fun or interesting, but none of them would suit you better than the job you have. Although, as I think about it, Morgen Campbell might be one exception to that rule. I’m not sure what chosen gift his parents selected for him. It probably wasn’t related to a job. He inherited the Objectivist Club, along with numerous other properties, so they probably weren’t too concerned about him entering any sort of profession. But I’m quite certain he’d rather be a historian or maybe a professional time-chess player than run the OC.

  “I do enjoy my job,” I tell her. “I’m not sure how much you know about the system in my time—”

  “Oh, I know about the chosen-gift system. I read A Brief History of CHRONOS. Maybe I should phrase it as a hypothetical. Do you think you’d choose your job if you had to train for it the old-fashioned way? If there was a chance that you’d work really hard and still suck at it?”

  “I’m not really sure how to answer that. I think so. On the one occasion where I thought a mistake might result in me being forced to do something else . . .” I shake away the thought, both because it’s still scary to think about and because it reminds me again of Saul and that bloodred moon. “It was awful even contemplating it. I know that historians miss it once they stop doing fieldwork, although if they spent their time well, they’ve collected enough data to give them plenty to write about for the decade or so until they retire. So yes, I enjoy it. Although I’ll admit I prefer the days without time shifts that completely upend the historical record. Do you like being a geneticist?”

  She nods, staring down into her cup. “Very much. It’s horrible to admit it, but I went a little stir-crazy during the months when I was home after Yun Hee was born. I loved spending time with her, loved having that time as a family, but I missed my lab. Missed my research. Even so, I didn’t realize how much I defined myself by that job until it was gone. RJ . . . he’s moved from one job to the next. Doesn’t really matter to him. In fact, he’d be happy to stay home with Yun Hee if my salary was a bit higher. I’ve been at that lab for seven years, though, and I checked just now. The building doesn’t even exist anymore. I couldn’t bring myself to see what else has changed, because I know it’s going to be massive. All I had to do was look out this door—we’ve got skyscrapers on all sides now. Used to be smaller apartment buildings, mostly. There used to be a willow tree, but it’s gone. It’s a wonder any of the trees survived with so little sunlight. Between the buildings and the smog, very little seems to be getting through.”

  Dark day. Bloodred moon.

  I pull in a deep breath. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to fix it. And on that note, I should head back up. It was nice meeting you.”

  Lorena doesn’t respond. It’s possible she didn’t hear me or that she’s preoccupied with her own thoughts. But I suspect it’s also because meeting me, meeting any of us, hasn’t been at all nice for her.

  As I leave the kitchen, she says, “Could you ask RJ to come down? And tell the others that they might want to get food or whatever in the next few minutes. I’m going to play around with the replicator to see if I can get it to spit out some basic chemicals to work on that serum for Jack. I doubt I’ll have much success, but it gives me something to do.”

  When I get back to the library, RJ is talking with Alex. I pass along Lorena’s message and he heads downstairs. Tyson has taken over one of the computer terminals. Rich is on a couch near the window, scanning through the index of what I’m guessing is a history book that was under the CHRONOS field. A small stack of books is on the coffee table in front of him. I pick up the one on top, running my finger along the heavily creased spine. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, Volume 2 Since 1865. It’s old, and the cover is worn at the edges, but it’s solid. Sturdy. But in another way, it’s remarkably fragile. If not for the CHRONOS field in this house, the book wouldn’t exist anywhere in this reality. Or, at least, it wouldn’t exist in this form. There might be another version by the same author, maybe even with the same title, but the history inside would take a sharp turn in the early 1940s.

  “I wouldn’t bother with those,” Alex says, glancing at the books we’re holding. “It takes too long to search, and we have a much larger collection in digital format. Hold on a sec.” He enters a few commands, waits a moment, and then calls up the house’s virtual assistant. Richard and Tyson seem to find it amusing that Madi named the as
sistant Jarvis, apparently in reference to some comic book. Alex asks it to compare the list of speeches given by Charles Lindbergh between 1938 and 1942 in both the files on the household’s internal system and publicly available external information sources.

  About thirty seconds later, two lists of speeches appear side by side on the wall screen. Both timelines are in sync up until early February 1939. In our timeline, Lindbergh’s speaking schedule continued, albeit at a slower pace, until December 1941, when his isolationism was pushed aside due to the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the new timeline, Lindbergh begins giving more speeches, both in person and via radio. In mid-March, he embarks on a series of rallies with several other isolationists, which increase after he announces his run for the Senate and culminate in an event at Madison Square Garden on February 22 of the following year, which is a commemoration of Washington’s birthday and in memory of a woman and her two small children who were killed at the Pro-America Rally in 1939 by Jewish protestors. A gunman fires three times at the stage, hitting Lindbergh and Kuhn, yelling something about death to Nazis, then kills himself before the police can capture him. Lindbergh drops out of the Senate race a few days later, citing concerns for the welfare of his pregnant wife and two small children.

  “Whoa,” Tyson says. “The 1939 event is the Madison Square Garden rally I told you about earlier. The German-American Bund event. Glen and I were there, and no one was killed. Some guy went after Fritz Kuhn, the Bund’s leader, but he wasn’t even armed. Police grabbed him. The worst thing that happened was that the guy got roughed up and literally lost his pants in the struggle before they carted him off to jail. So, I think both of these are solid initial predictions for the other side’s first moves—they must have arranged for the death of the woman and kids, and then the attempted assassination of Lindbergh the next year at the memorial.”

  I glance back at the description for the rally where Lindbergh was shot. Most of the other speakers were men, but there are four women, two of whose names I recognize from my own research.

  “Elizabeth Dilling and Laura Ingalls. They were active in the mothers’ movement, protesting any US involvement in European wars. Opposed to offering any sort of aid. Ingalls was a pilot. Dilling was notorious for seeing communist and Jewish conspiracies behind absolutely everything. She was toxic.”

  “You’ve studied them?” Tyson asks.

  “Not in person. Their movement is on my research plan, but I was waiting a few years so that I’d be at least a tiny bit closer to their demographic, which is solidly middle-aged. But I did the usual background study while writing up my research agenda during the last year of classroom training. I’m almost certain the America First Committee isn’t supposed to be organized until the war actually begins in Europe . . . in the early autumn. The group started in September of 1940, I think. The isolationist movement itself was already rolling along full speed, but they wouldn’t have billed it as an America First rally.”

  We spend several minutes debating whether the America First Committee getting a head start is a big enough change that it might be one of the specific moves the other side made, or whether it is something that emerged organically. None of us really has a clue one way or the other at this point.

  “What about Coughlin?” Rich says. “They’re calling him brother now, rather than father, and that’s definitely a Cyrist cross he’s wearing.”

  Tyson seems skeptical. “Even though that’s a difference, do you think it’s large enough that it could actually have an impact? It seems more like something they might have changed inadvertently, as a result of another move, rather than a move itself.”

  I take a deep breath, trying to decide whether I should tell them about Saul’s use of the Cyrists in his games with Morgen and my role in designing the Cyrist cross. Even thinking about the symbol bothers me right now. I keep seeing that giant outline against the murky sky, and the way it changed over a matter of minutes. But is the design really all that original? Aside from the infinity sign, it’s just a synthesis of a bunch of other religious icons.

  “Plus,” Rich continues, “I can’t see how a radio preacher in Detroit—even a really influential one like Coughlin—converting from one religion to another could possibly play a role in keeping Japan from attacking Pearl Harbor. To be perfectly honest, I can’t see how any of the things we’ve found could do that.”

  “We may be overthinking this,” I tell them. “The initial predictions you enter at the start of The Game are little more than a crapshoot in a complex scenario. If we use Coughlin, for example, we’ll need a bit more detail in order to get any appreciable credit for the answer. Why he switched religions, who talked him into it, and how it helped flip the timeline, for example. You don’t need all of those, but just tossing out an event without any supporting data will cost us. Likewise, if we go with something broad, like America First launching six months or so early, we need to figure out where the change happened. When? How? And I’m not even sure that there are definitive answers to those questions. The initial predictions just give you a place to start, assuming that you get something correct.”

  “She’s right,” Richard says. “I mean, we should definitely make initial predictions, but we need to be aware that the odds of any one of them being completely right are really, really tiny. Lindbergh would be a safer guess. We know where and when he’s shot, and we know the method, and who did it. We can scrape enough information together to make an educated guess on why it helped tip the timeline. Might be enough to give us a few extra points in reserve.”

  “True,” Tyson says. “Getting back to Coughlin, though. Cyrists aren’t pacifists, are they? Leaving Japan out of it for now, how would that guy switching religions help keep the US out of the war?”

  “The mothers’ movement I mentioned worked closely with Coughlin,” I say. “And he’s still basically the same person, even if he’s changed his affiliation. The real question is when the change occurred, and how. We’re not going to get many points if we only lay out a single piece of the puzzle. But hopefully their style-point total will be low.”

  Tyson shakes his head. “Nope. Alisa said their style points are—and I quote—‘through the fucking stratosphere.’ She said they maxed out two categories with bonuses. And while she’s not exactly the world’s most reliable source, I didn’t get the sense that this was a lie.”

  I pull in a sharp breath. “Maxed out two? Damn. That’s almost unheard of. Morgen maxed out a single category a year or so back, mostly in a stroke of luck. Saul says he hasn’t stopped bragging about it since.”

  Alex says, “Could one of you explain this style-points thing to me? It sounds like you’re saying that even if our side wins, even if we manage to reverse the timeline shift, they might still win because they did it with style?”

  Tyson, Rich, and I exchange a look.

  “That pretty much sums it up,” Rich admits. “Although, it’s more that you earn extra points for not taking the easiest path. Getting actors from the timeline to help you is better than doing something yourself. Convincing them is better than paying them, although I suspect that’s going to be a bit hard to police in a real-life game. And there are other factors the system considers, like limiting the geographic area, the time frame, using average people on the street as opposed to major historical actors—all of those things add up. Which means once we figure out their specific changes, we have to think creatively about how we reverse them.”

  “Seems the playing field is tilted considerably in the other side’s favor,” Alex says.

  Tyson responds with a bitter laugh. “Not to hear them tell it. Alisa says we’ve been given home-field advantage.”

  “Seems only fair,” I say. “It’s our timeline, so we are literally playing on our home field. They have almost nothing at stake.”

  “True,” Tyson says. “As best I can tell, the only benefit is that the rules are derived mostly from our version of Temporal Dilemma. The only exception was the whole issue
of observers. They’re not a factor in computer simulations, but apparently Morgen wasn’t willing to give up the cash he earns from selling those slots.”

  “Fleece the gamers,” I say. “That’s how Morgen’s family amassed their wealth, and I suspect it’s his default move in any reality. Did Alisa happen to mention which categories they maxed out?”

  “Yeah,” Tyson says. “Chron and geo.”

  “And they’re using our rules on style points. Hmm. I don’t guess either of you has a copy of those in your backpack?”

  “Nope,” Rich says. “I have a custom bottle of sambuca that was supposed to be a gift for Angelo, a spare pair of glasses, and a CHRONOS diary that mostly contains information about the 1960s and connections to musical history from other eras.”

  Tyson shakes his head. “Alisa said there’s a copy on the drive, but we can’t access that. As soon as we plug in the drive, we have to be ready to start the game.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll have to rely on what we remember,” I say. Judging from their expressions, however, we’ll apparently be relying on what I remember. “Oh, come on. You guys played at least a few times, right?”

  Rich shrugs. “When I play, I’m just trying to flip the timeline and avoid looking like too much of an idiot. Style points are considerably beyond my level of expertise.”

  “I played as a kid,” Tyson says. “A couple of times at the OC since then. The only thing I remember about style points is the geographic category. To max out, you have to make all your moves in a single city. Most of the time that’s the nation’s capital, but in this case, judging from the vids we saw, I’d say New York seems more likely.”