Peripheral Visions: Fallback

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Fallback

Six more strongholds had failed. That left only 48: Four dozen known outposts of surviving humanity scattered across the globe. Jared wondered when and whether migrants from the closest of the failed communities would arrive, seeking shelter... and, he reflected with anger, triggering another wave of resentment among the stronghold's less welcoming residents.

It was just such resentment – racial, economic, religious – that had led to the disastrous dictatorships of the 2030s and '40s, reckless, iron-fisted autocracies that pummeled dissidents and the world's climate alike. Determined advocates fought on despite draconian measures and public executions, calling for a return to democracy, but that was never going to happen. By the time national governments began collapsing in the 2060s, the point of no return had long since been passed. There might be a time when the Earth would be cool and green and hospitable to life again, but not for hundreds of thousands... more likely, millions... of years.

And intelligent life? That, Jared thought, looking out the small lookout window from high in the North Security Tower, would take far longer. The rise of intelligence in the form of humanity had taken almost 70 million years after the destruction of the dinosaurs. The ecological disaster of the Anthropocene was even worse than the asteroid strike that had wiped out those ancient forms of life. Humanity had systematically eradicated life forms across every continent, and deep into the seas, as well as destroying all the world's natural habitats. Of all the forms of life that had once existed in the Earth's biosphere, only a tiny fraction survived: Extremophiles in the desert, or clinging to life along volcanic vents along the ocean floor. Blind creatures skittering through pitch-black caverns hundreds of meters underground. Microbes in the cracks of the planet's rocky crust. Fungi and primitive plants resisting the crashing surf of the world's now-toxic seas.

What a mess, Jared thought. What a nightmare. What an inexcusable crime. The Earth could still heal itself, but it would take an unimaginably long time... and it would require the utter extinction of the selfish, voracious race that had inflicted so much harm on what once had been a beautiful and life-sustaining garden.

The thought tickled something deep in Jared's mind. A memory – a story. Something about mythical first humans, created by a divine being, expelled from a garden because of their intransigence and arrogance. It was ironic, Jared thought, that if such a place had ever existed in reality, and if the first humans had really been thrown out of it, their punishment had only led to them bringing their destructive ways to the rest of the planet. Whatever intelligent designer had made that blunder had shown itself as limited in foresight and wit as humanity itself.

Global civilization had crashed three hundred sixty years ago. Stronghold Iglutuiruk had been established in the early 2040s by dissidents as a seed bank, in defiance of the laws of the time, which had forbidden agriculture or preservation of agricultural specimens not engineered by the biocorps. The people who had built the seed bank in Canada's far Northern lands had been put to death, but the buildings and infrastructure had survived. In 2064, after the governments of both the United States and Canada had fallen, people who knew about the seed bank had made their way to the small cluster of buildings; refugees had stumbled upon the newly established outpost in small, straggling groups. Raiders and invaders had made their way to the stronghold, too – people looking to steal, to burn, to rape... people who had been inculcated into a culture of violent egotism in which might made right, and other human beings were nothing more than prey.

The people in the stronghold had killed every single one of the raiders, every single one of the invaders, but to those who came in fellowship they held out an unwavering hand of friendship. Stronghold Iglutuiruk had become known as a place welcoming to those who believed in science and fact, and that had made the stronghold a target for the last remaining religious zealots. More attacks followed. More victories followed, too, as Stronghold Iglutuiruk held fast and fought with a blend of precision and fury, fueled by a rage against the stupid animal violence that had brought the world to ruin.

Warrior kings, some of the stronghold's early leaders had declared its inhabitants. Warrior philosophers, subsequent leaders had declared, rejecting monarchies and reestablishing a semblance of democracy.

Just a semblance, though. There was no single ruler, though Councilmember Barris had been trying to years to garner enough support to change the stronghold's system of government and have himself named Prime Leader. In early years his rhetoric – outrageous promises coupled with outlandish accusations – had nearly cost him his council seat, but he had held on. As time passed, more and more of the stronghold's residents had begun embracing his ideas for a new warrior ethic, one that set aside science, philosophy, and even compassion. Barris had called for the elimination, upon birth, of anyone exhibiting physical defects. He'd also called for anyone suffering developmental impairments, crippling disease or accidents, or the ravages of age to be executed for the "crime" of being burdensome to the community at large.

Of course, Barris never applied the same logic to his openly stated wish that he and his supporters be apportioned more of the stronghold's resources than residents were typically provided. By his reasoning, human society naturally divided up into a few distinct classes: Workers, who should expect to put in hard labor for minimal reward; leaders, who served as stewards of general welfare, including communal morality, who were more mentally and spiritually advanced and so naturally deserved more food, water, living space, and other resources; and criminals, who rejected these obvious natural laws, along with nature's division of humanity into men and women who should only – Barris argued – be allowed to cohabit or enter marital concord with one another. Barris' schemes would have led to greater morality rates, but, he argued, there would be a corresponding increase in the birth rate if his ideas were put into force, including fertility requirements for couples that would be determined by council assignment.

Stronghold Iglutuiruk wasn't a place of fools, and those ideas gained only scorn for two decades. But in the last six years a shift had started happening: A shift that was accelerated every time more strongholds failed and migrants made their way to Iglutuiruk. Indeed, Barris had recently resorted to not even waiting for migrants to appear at the gates of the stronghold; he was already proclaiming that the migrants were a threat even if they never arrived to Iglutuiruk, deep in the Northern mountains as it was, because they sapped the strength of all humanity. "They could have stayed where they were," Barris told his followers. "They could have fought, rebuilt, and overcome. But they're constitutionally weak and fearful, immoral and lazy. They spread their weakness to other strongholds and those strongholds, too, will fail. Do we want them here?"

Barris had a way of inventing threats and dangers, and then infecting people's minds with his phantasms.

And it had worked. Barris now commanded the loyalty of almost a third of the stronghold's residents – even people who, a few short years ago, had seen him for what he was: A selfish schemer who ate without growing food, drank without harvesting ice, and called for punishment against upstanding citizens who, in his view, were neither hard-working, nor pious, nor "fertile" enough.

All of which meant that Jared had to court Barris even more than he had to court the rest of the council's twelve members, each of whom had fewer supporters individually than Barris did even if in total their supporters constituted a majority of the stronghold's population.

Barris had too much pull, and too little expertise or accomplishment. Jared hated having to deal with him. And yet, when Jared explained the plan to him, Barris supported it eagerly.

Jared wondered what Barris thought he personally would get from it. He was afraid he was going to find out the answer to that question someday.

***

"The Portcullis is my greatest invention yet," Barris told the stronghold residents.

He was speaking from the council floor, strutting and shamelessly taking credit for Jared's hard work in gathering support, to say nothing of the scientific brilliance and fifteen years of ceaseless labor and innovation by Marjorie and her technical team.

"God," Marjorie muttered under her breath. She was standing behind Jared's chair. Jared was seated at the long, curving Council Table. Barris, ever the showman, was pacing in front of the table, putting himself between the Council and the audience. The hearing chamber was meant to hold 800 people – a fraction of the stronghold's total population of 24,000 – but until today it had always served its purpose. Today was different, though. Today the chamber was stuffed with hundreds more, and the people spilled out of the chamber into the narrow corridors beyond.

Jared wondered why more people didn't stay in their apartments or workstations and listen to Barris' speech from there. He had a sick feeling that it was because it was Barris' speech – Barris, the man who made empty promises, and yet those promises were so huge and appealing that even smart people who knew better ... medical personnel, engineers, agricultural workers, people who understood the cycle of resource production and deployment ... screamed Barris' name and avidly clung to the fantasies he described, the glorious visions as well as the dark fabrications he came up with.

"Let me explain my great plan to you," Barris said. "It's a complicated plan, but you're smart people. Smart enough to put your trust in me!"

The chamber filled with laughter, cheers, applause.

"He's a real Kirsch," Marjorie muttered. "It's not at all a hard plan to understand."

Jared smiled. But he wasn't the only one who heard her remark. Beside him, Councilmember Grace shifted and blew air through her nose in a way that signaled her displeasure.

Barris was still speaking.

"We begin with Phase One," he said, his voice amplified thanks to the chamber's system of directed sonics. "We use the Portcullis to send people from our time back to the past. Our people will live among the Anasazi... our evil ancestors, for those of you who know the meaning of the word. It's from Navajo, a language that played a part in the historic conflict of World War II and helped defeat the socialists."

Barris was distorting history, Jared knew, but he also knew that the people who had no understanding of such historical facts wouldn't care, and neither would Barris' supporters who actually knew better.

"It's the same language that gave our great stronghold its name," Barris said – another lie, since Iglutuiruk was an Inuit word, not Navajo. The two peoples were doubtless related, their common ancestors having migrated to North America more than eighty thousand years ago, but thousands of miles and thousands of years separated their cultures and their languages.

Such factual niceties meant nothing to people so hungry for easy answers that they had started making a habit our of disregarding truth in favor of simple stories.

"And you know, don't you, that the name of our stronghold means 'Hope,' " Barris added, to more cheers and applause. "This portcullis is the hope we're named for!"

"Idiot," Marjorie muttered behind Jared. "Iglutuiruk means 'endures,' not 'hope.' "

Councilmember Grace shifted again, then twisted in her chair to glare at Marjorie.

Jared had never know Marjorie to back down from anyone or anything, and she didn't shy away now. She met Grace's glare and whispered, "I know another Inuit word, and it describes this clown: 'Attaksrangitchuk.' "

"Sh!" Grace hissed at Marjorie.

Jared laughed softly. Marjorie had just called Barris the sort of person who was so shameless he would take the belongings of others without permission or hesitation. It was apt, seeing how he was stealing credit for work he didn't understand and ideas he didn't comprehend.

"Our ancestors won't know what hit them," Barris said. "Our people will live among them for a few years, getting to understand their culture and their language, and setting up the institutes we'll need in order to do our work. Then some of them will come back here, to our time, for debriefing, and then they'll be redeployed to specific days in the past. Some days will be in the year 1970; some will be in 2050. There will be days in between, a lot of days, but I tell you, they will be glorious days! They will be days that belong to us!"

Jared wondered why people kept cheering and clapping at everything Barris said. He was making less and less sense as he continued, doing a terrible job of explaining the plan. The actual strategy was to establish financial and real estate holdings, create institutes, and then make partnerships with key political figures who might or might not believe that people from the future were visiting the past. They didn't need to believe it; they just had to play along for whatever sum of money it took to buy their cooperation as the embedded stronghold citizens moved to the next stage of the plan.

Barris was explaining that now, in his muddled way.

"Phase Two will take place on all those scattered days," he said. "Our people will interview carefully chosen individuals from the past. They'll ask questions about their attitudes and motives, find out what they know and why they did the things they did to the planet – and to us. Now, we can't bring them forward in time... we would if we could! We'd bring them here and put them on trial!"

The noise of the cheers and applause, confined to the hearing room, quickly reached a deafening level. Jared winced and covered his ears. Glancing over at Councilmember Grace, he saw that she was grinning widely.

Wonderful, Jared thought. Even councilmembers are falling under his spell.

"But then," Barris said. "But then," he repeated, as the cheers continued. "But then," he said again, as the noise finally subsided. "But then we'll start the real work!"

Jared sighed and closed his eyes. Tuning Barris out, he went over the plan in his own mind, only half-listening to Barris making an atrocious mess out of what were, essentially, clear-cut plans with every chance of being highly effective.

The stronghold citizens would go as far back as 1970 – the earliest time, according to the fragmentary surviving records, that human beings understood that their activities were having an impact on the planet's climate and their pollution was endangering the long-term viability of the environment. Only a few people would go back that far, partly because sending people back in time so many years was hugely energy-intensive and that was as far back as they were probably going to be able to send anyone. More strongholders would be sent to 1982, 1986, 1990, 1992, and other key years. The bulk of the strongholders would be deployed between 1992 and 2024, and a few more to points in time up to 2050 – the last moment, historians believed, that civilization might have been saved.

The interviews would be designed to explore the attitudes and beliefs – and also, the motivations and justifications – of people living in those times who refused to take action, deciding instead to ignore reality and cling to comforting fictions. What form would those fictions take? Religious delusions? Moral or economic convictions? Jared found this the most interesting part of the project. Regardless, the strongholders would adhere to a strict policy of revealing nothing about the future, in order to prevent changing events and transforming the world they would be leaving from to visit the past. Nor would they debate, shame, or otherwise challenge the convictions and mental processes that their interview subjects described; that could lead to history-altering action against the strongholders. There had to be a future – the same future – for them to come back to in order for the next part of the plan to be possible.

Jared realized the Barris was now talking about that third phase.

"That's when negotiations begin," Barris was saying. "Once we understand how they think, we will open channels of communication to the past and really engage with the governments of the time."

"Easy enough," Marjorie muttered. "since the strongmen and authoritarians of the mid-21st century had the very same mentality as you, Barris, you asshole."

Grace whipped around to shoot Marjorie another glare, but Marjorie paid her no mind.

"Then we can use their own ways of thinking to convince them to take the measures they need to take in order to save the planet," Barris said. "That's when the miracle will happen. You'll be standing here, all of you, in this room with me, and the world will change around us. The desert outside these walls will become a green paradise. The hazy sky will clear, and it will be the brightest, most beautiful blue you ever saw! The oceans will be full of fish, the mountains will be blanketed with forests, and the world will be ours, the world we deserved and should always have had."

The cheers and applause were twice as deafening this time. Jared covered his ears once more, noticing that Grace, beside him, had leapt to her feet and was clapping and screaming along with the rest of the crowd.

Jared wondered if Barris was telling the lie that the world would "transform around them" because he liked being the candy man who delivered fairy tales spun from sugar, or whether he really believed it.

If the plan worked, the world would indeed transform... but it would happen, from their perspective, instantaneously, and most of them... if not all of them... wouldn't be there to see it. The patterns of cause and effect – fraught with upheaval, persecution, plague and famine, wars and migration – that had brought their ancestors to Stronghold Iglutuiruk would ideally never take place. That meant their ancestors from the 21st century would probably meet different life partners, in different places, under different circumstances. Some of the same ancestral couples would probably meet and have children, but there was no guarantee they would have the same children... and the fact that those children would grow up in a very different world would almost certainly mean than few or none of them would marry the same people as was historically true for the strongholders.

Barris and his noisy, easily-deluded followers would vanish. So would Marjorie and her researchers. So, in all probability, would Jared himself.

But if they succeeded, the world would be a better place... a far better place... for an entirely different cohort of human beings.

***

The plan was always for Jared to be one of the strongholders sent to the past for the interviews.

All of the interviewers were assigned to talk with their own direct ancestors. This was to provide a natural link between the strongholders and the people of the past, who would probably be suspicious. But studies carried out by Marjorie's' researchers indicated that people bound by familial genetics responded more positively to one another than they did to non-relatives. No one knew if the reason for it had to do with looks, voice, pheromones, or something totally different from any of those things, and no one had time to study the phenomenon further. All they needed to know was that it was real, and then to use it to their advantage.

So it was that Jared found himself interviewing two of his male antecedents. The earliest was Gerald Dover in 1987. Gerald worked for petroleum concerns... or, as they called them in Gerald's time, oil companies. Jared had to be careful about what he asked and how he asked it; Marjorie had assigned him a clever coordinator, a guy named Samuel, to prepare the general list of questions. Samuel was meticulous about every word and even the sentence structures of the questions he prepared. Samuel and Jared both know that the oil companies of the 20th and 21st centuries had poured enormous resources into suppressing factual information about the impact the use fossil fuels had on the climate; they had also devised elaborate, expensive, and wide-ranging disinformation campaigns, intended to provide willing skeptics with an alternative narrative, a fairy tale designed to rebut and cast doubt upon science while serving as comfortable framework for a system of thought that not only excused reckless energy policies but encouraged them.

Their course of interviews was scheduled to take place every week for one year – the standard approach. As the year progressed and Gerald grew more comfortable with Jared, he opened up more and started letting his carefully-rehearsed official story fall by the wayside. Growing confident that Jared could and would say nothing to anyone in 1987 and 1988 in order to preserve history, Gerald started letting his bravado do the talking.

Jared had a hard time remaining emotionally neutral during his interactions with Gerald. There were moments when he felt his façade of calm was about to split down the middle and his growing rage would show through, especially when Gerald was in a boastful mood and detailed a long, long list of the industry's misdeeds. At their final meeting, though, Gerald showed a different face to Jared: "Are the greens and the commies right?" he asked. "All those hippies, do they actually have a point?"

Jared shrugged. "You know I can't tell you anything about the future," he said.

"Yeah, but... do we kill the planet, just like they're accusing us of doing? I mean..." Gerald gulped, and his face was pale. "I mean, are we guilty? Have I ... do I destroy the world? Your world? Do you, do my descendants, suffer because of me?"

"I'm sorry, Gerald," Jared replied. "I'm not here to reveal anything about myself or the world as it will be. I'm just a researcher gathering information on historical attitudes from primary sources."

"Right." Gerald fell silent. Then he said: "I have nightmares. I wake up in the middle of the night. I sometimes have... have hallucinations, or maybe presentiments. I look out the window and I see..." Gerald shuddered. "A wasteland. A hot, lifeless expanse. Nothing below but bare ground, white, sterile. Nothing above but a black, cloudless sky. Or maybe the black is a sky of clouds. I don't know. It's horrible, a horrible vision..."

Gerald trailed off. Jared sat across the table form him, patient.

After a minute, Gerald looked up, his face a mask of anger. "Fuck you," he said, getting up and striding to the door. Before leaving he turned back one more time: "I hope the world you live in burns. I hope you burn." Gerald slammed the door behind him.

The other ancestor Jared met with was Alan Snaire. They began meeting in 2025, just after the inauguration of the newly-elected president... who wasn't so very new, actually; he'd evidently held the office before. Jared was unsure about how that was the case, and the historical records from the time were so incomplete and so distorted that no one could make much sense of them.

But determining the overall history of the time was someone else's field of expertise. Jared focused on his ancestor, who was much quicker to open up to him than Gerald had been, and who didn't seem to care whether Jared really was who he said he was or not.

"Look, either you're from a terrible future and you're so desperate that you've made unbelievable scientific advancements, in which case Newt was right and the correct course of history is to let the law of the jungle prevail," Alan told him. "Or else you're from a wonderful future, a 'Star Trek' future, and you want to understand us primitives and how we think."

Gerald would have paused to closely at Jared and try to catch him reacting to such comments, but Alan didn't bother. He simply waved a hand.

"I don't give a shit," he said. "All I want is my slice."

"Your slice?" Jared asked.

"Yeah, of the pie," Alan said.

"I know you're using a figure of speech, but the language is a little different in my time," Jared said. "Do you mean the mathematical concept?"

"What? Oh – " Alan laughed. "You mean pi. As in 'The Life Of.' Great movie. Or as in..." To Jared's surprise, Alan started to sing: "3.1415926535..." He winked at Jared. "I guess you don't have music in the future."

Jared was about to respond that they did, of course, have music, but then he stopped himself: He shouldn't reveal anything about the world to come.

Not that Alan cared to hear it one way or the other. "No," he said, "I mean pie. Like, blueberry. Apple. Cherry."

"Oh, of course," Jared said. He had lived for three years in St. Louis before starting the interviews, and he'd eaten pie. It was usually far too sweet for his liking.

"But either you don't have pie in the future, or else you call it something else. 'Ambrosia.' 'Whackadoodle.' " Alan winked again. "Am I close?"

Before Jared could say anything, Alan was talking again. "The way I get my piece of the pie, and ice cream too, is that I work for think tanks and, sometimes, political campaigns," he said. "It's easy. I mean, I don't know how you do things in the future, but when you live in a democracy all you have to do is jam up the works and people get pissed off. Thing is, they never seem to take it out on the people doing the jamming up. It's unbelievable how easy it is to get them to attack the Democrats! And what really works is to tell them that the Democrats are molesting children. You wouldn't believe how eager people are to turn on their own kids. Gay kids, I mean, or trans kids. People are all, 'I want to be supportive of my lesbian daughter' or whatever, but the minute you tell them that it's a choice, that library books are turning their kids gay or teachers are indoctrinating them... your head would spin to see how fast they jump on that. Because, I mean, come on. Nobody wants a faggot son. Or a son who's a boy between the legs but says he's a girl between the ears. You know? It won us the last midterms and it won us this last presidential election. Now, the tricky part is what to do when the state lawmakers start turning up the heat even more. Know what I mean? And it's already happening. In Alabama there's this guy who already introduced a bill that would call for Old Testament penalties for any child exhibiting gay or trans tendencies. The militias are all for it, and so of course the bill is gonna pass, because we gotta keep the militias on our side. Who else is gonna impose order, real order, on these whiny bitches? Ever read 'Democracy in America?' Well, there's a chapter in there about how in a democracy pretty soon all you end up with are a bunch of self-obsessed whining little snowflakes, and that's pretty much our base. But you have to set things up right, otherwise today's base is tomorrow's pain the ass. A couple more years and there won't be any room for dissent, but right now we still need to thread the needle. That's gonna be kinda hard the first time some sixth grader in Tennessee or Florida or wherever gets stoned to death on a public street because he and his buddies had a circle jerk."

As the year 2025 progressed, Alan's ramblings only got more energetic, and more graphic. That first meeting, though, remained lodged in Jared's mind in a way he couldn't shake. They made it to late July before the sheer weight of Alan's verbosity, and the sheer lightness with which he described the atrocities he helped usher in, brought Jared to a breaking point.

On that day, Alan was talking more about himself than usual. "The only reason I do this, you know, is for the stipend. Three thousand a week for an hour of my time? Why the hell not? And yeah, I know some of the people in congress you guys pay off, and I know you pay them a hell of a lot more than me. Don't think I'm not gonna renegotiate this deal. But thing is, it's also pretty fun, you know what I mean? I tell the lawmakers I lobby... did I tell you I'm a lobbyist now?... well, I tell them about you, and I tell them that you've told me how nice the future is. All that garbage about the next mass extinction, that's all bullshit."

Jared had to bite down hard on his tongue to refrain from screaming. He'd never told Alan anything about the future. The man was leveraging his status as an interviewee for political bargains. He was lying. He as actually, Jared realized, endangering the future.

"Oh, son!" Alan laughed, seeing the look Jared couldn't keep off his face. "You know I'm a liar, right? I mean, I can tell the truth about lying, that's how much I lie and how little I care about it. Yeah, I feed them a fuckin' line, but they don't believe it. They know you guys won't open up about it... and they don't even really believe you, anyway. I mean... I don't believe you. People from the future? Pull the other one." Alan winked. "But you pay me, right? And you're sworn to secrecy. I mean, did everyone ask you guys to sign NDAs or was that just me?"

Jared stared at Alan, unwilling to say anything lest he lose control and say too much.

"Won't even tell me that, huh? You're good. But I see how pissed off you are. Maybe this will make you feel better: I know I just said I don't believe you're actually a time traveler, but that's only half true. I've started to believe you, at least a little. Because if you're not really from the future, then why are you doing all of this? Your foundations... you have, like, six of them around the world, right? And thirty-some buildings here in the States alone? And you pay all that money to... what, hundreds? Thousands? Of people you interview? Ain't no university got that kind of money, especially not since we redirected public education funds exclusively to religious schools. And religious schools wouldn't spent on this kind of stuff. Am I right? It doesn't make sense, economically. No billionaire, even libtard eccentrics, are gonna spend what you guys are spending and ask the questions that you ask. So I figure that you've gotta be real, right? And anyway, where do you get al this money? I mean, you've gotta have much more sophisticated economic stuff going on by the time that time travel is possible in, like, what, a thousand years. Plus, our economy is pretty much digital now, so you guys can just basically print money here. It's all ones and zeroes. It's numbers so fuckin' huge they don't mean anything anymore."

Jared kept his face still, though he was impressed with how well Alan has summarized the reality of the situation.

"So you're from the future. And it's a pretty good future. A few of us... I mean, we do talk to each other, we have internet forums and stuff, where we talk about these interviews."

"Who does?" Jared asked.

"Us. The people you interview. We seek each other out. Though I'm pretty sure a few of the people in the forum I belong to are ringers... either nut jobs and conspiracy theorists or else Homeland Security types looking to see what crumbs of intel you guys have spilled, just in case you're the real deal. But for me, it all comes back to this: The future's secure. God's not gonna let the world end. The proof is that you're here talking to me right now. Everything's fine, and it doesn't matter what we do in the here and now, because it's a steady state universe. Am I right? God just sets it all back to zero when he needs to. Forget all that crap about the ozone layer. What you really need from us, in the here and now, is for us to protect you from the damn liberals. And that's why you should be grateful... and, fun as this is, I need that gratitude to turn into more dollar signs on my weekly stipend."

"What?"

"I said you should be grateful, son," Alan told him.

Watching Alan stand there looking at him with an air of smug entitlement – the phrase "looking down his nose" came to Jared, a phrase he'd learned from historical documents and heard again while he watched Faux News during his time living in the past in preparation for this work – suddenly struck Jared as intolerably, unbearably wrong. A long-suppressed rage welled up in him. Alan became the symbol and embodiment of all the dishonesty, selfishness, and brutal disregard that generations of people like him had indulged in while bringing the Earth to ruin.

A red haze seemed to wash out the world, and Jared only distantly heard his own voice screaming about liars and killers and thieves – the theft of the future, politicians lying about "the sanctity of life" even as their careers were underwritten by the same people who were systematically murdering all life on the planet.

"Thank you for protecting me from transgender children," Jared heard himself screaming as his hands wrestled with something, "but couldn't you have done something to protect me from you?"

Jared heard a strange noise – the sound of Alan choking. The red haze cleared away. Jared saw his hands, which had felt remote and disconnected, had closed of their own accord on Alan's throat.

Jared let loose of Alan and stepped back, appalled at his loss of control.

Alan staggered, his hand on his throat, and coughed. "Jesus," he said, looking at Jared. "Got to you, didn't I? The future must not be as great as I – "

Jared's hands were his own again, and now he pulled a flask from his pocket and aimed it at Alan.

"What's that?" Alan asked. "Booze? Peace offering for fucking choking me?"

"A fallback," Jared said, depressing the trigger.

Alan held his breath while the tiny flask sprayed a mist at Alan, who blinked and shook his head, and then looked at Jared with annoyance. "Now you, like, mist me? Like a plant? You..." Alan's voice trailed off. His eyelids drooped. "I gotta sit down," he said.

Still holding his breath, Jared guided his ancestor to the table and helped him sit down.

Alan started to say something but then fell silent. Jared counted down, then tentatively took a breath. The air was fine; the short-term memory inhibitor had oxidized.

But it had also done its work. Alan was shaking his head and mumbling. "Think I'm getting sick," he said. "Sore throat. I'm so lightheaded all of a sudden..." He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. "You didn't bring some bug back from the future and get me sick, did you? COVID-42 or something?"

Jared forced a laugh. "Of course not," he said.

"Oh." Alan looked up at him, his gaze dulled but still attentive. "So you're gonna tell me something about the future after all?"

"Just this once," Jared said. "You get this one freebie."

Alan smiled vaguely. "Thanks," he said.

A moment later he remembered neither the question nor Jared's response.

***

Samuel agreed that it was better to terminate Alan's interview sessions prematurely, trust in the memory inhibitor, and hope for the best. Jared returned to his own time, worried that he might have altered something important.

But if he had, would he know it?

Theory said he might. Being in the past while triggering a change to the future would alter the future, but not the time traveler's memory. It had to do with alternate universes – or, another theory argued, a configuration of a unique space-time that was constantly shifting and changing anyway.

Jared seemed to have gotten lucky: The future seemed the same to him.

Still, a week after his return, when it was time for a periodic review and all the strongholders returned to the present, he felt an uneasy jolt in the pit of his stomach when Ada, the project coordinator, called everyone's attention to something complicated-looking on a temporal attenuation graph.

"You know we have you take black boxes with you the past and then bring them back again," she said. "These black boxes measure... well, all kinds of things. They help us compare and recomposite time-space causality matrices."

"Whatever the hell that is," one of the interviewers called.

There was a murmur of nervous laughter.

"Basically, it's the topography of... oh, hell, never mind. What I'm trying to say is that something changed. Looking at the data from all you all's black box readings, plus the time-space topography records we sent back with you... when we compare the data sets, it looks like something happened between you going back this last time and you all coming back."

"Like what?" Marjorie asked, stepping forward to examine the graph more closely.

Ada surrendered the graph and took a step away as Marjorie scrutinized it.

"It's impossible to say what, or where, or when, but something is different. It's got to be significant if it's showing up, but it hasn't affected the future too drastically... I mean, we're still here. But then again, that's just us. You know, right, that time travel also involves the existence of alternate universes? Which is another reason we give you the black boxes. They help guide you back here, to your home universe. Otherwise, you could get lost and end up on some other version of reality."

"Because we change things," someone said aloud,

"Or, just because." Ada said. "And it's a 'just because' that we think happened. What I'm trying to say is, we get readings on a number of those alternate universes. Theoretically, we exist in all of them: They're pretty nearby in the temporal topography, so they're very, very nearly identical to this reality here and now. We can see their effects in the matrices, and we can even image them to some degree. But looking at the new data... compared to the archival data on your black boxes, it looks like half those alternate universes are gone now."

"Gone?" a few people said, their voices overlapping.

"What could cause that?" Marjorie asked.

"I don't know," Ada said. "Most likely reason for it is random chance."

"What?"

"Really?"

Ada held up a hand. "Yes. Really. Another name for it is quantum fluctuations. Whole universes emerge and then disappear because of these fluctuations. It could happen to us. It might already have happened."

"Except we'd be gone if it did," someone said.

"Yes and no – the same quantum processes could bring us back after wiping us out. That's how deeply weird and random this sort of randomness truly is."

"Shit," someone said.

Marjorie was shaking her head. "I don't think so," she said. "I think... I think I did it."

Jared, who had been about to volunteer a similar confession, looked at Marjorie in astonishment.

"What makes you say that?" Ada asked.

"It's my ancestor, Glenn Jenkins," Marjorie said. "I didn't tell him anything, but... as it turns out, I didn't have to."

"He guessed?" Jared said, thinking about the things his own ancestors had told him – the assumptions they made – the forums they had joined, where they could spin whole universes of imagined meanings and interpretations out of the silence that the strongholders had offered in place of answers.

"He tried to," Marjorie said. "He projected, invented. He had a podcast."

There were groans from around the room. Everyone here had lived in the past; everyone here knew what a podcast was.

"He was a loudmouth and a showoff. He was an egoist," Marjorie added. "He changed history. Somehow, I caused this to happen."

"You can't take responsibility for his choices and his actions," Ada told her.

"But I enabled it. I..."

"We all enabled it," Jared said. "My ancestors said things, too, that suggested they were inventing things about the future, based on... nothing, actually. Because we didn't give them anything."

"So we changed the future because we were so careful not to change the future," someone reflected.

"No, we changed the future by injecting ourselves into the past, where we didn't belong," someone else said in a voice that sounded sick.

"What do we do now? Go back a few years and prevent ourselves from going back at all?"

"No," Ada said.

"No," Margorie seconded, firmly, taking back her place as the director of the project's logistics. "We do nothing of the sort. We stop cold, here and now. Whatever we changed is part of history now... maybe already was before we even went back..."

"A 'predestination paradox?' Impossible," a male strongholder said. "And the change in the temporal matrix graph proves that's not the case."

"Even so. What's done is done. Trying to undo it will only change things more. No, we stop there," Marjorie said.

"Do we?" another voice asked.

Barris had entered the room. He smiled at the assembled time travelers.

Everyone fell silent, distrustful of Barris.

Then Barris asked: "Isn't this a decision for the Council?"

***

"So, Director, what do we do?" someone asked Marjorie, who was standing in the space between the Council table and the audience.

The hearing room echoed with hundreds of mutters that more or less repeated the question.

Marjorie, who had just explained the situation, looked to Jared, who rose from his seat and gestured at the thick sheaf of bound paper on the desk in front of him.

"What is that relic?" Councilperson Grace asked contemptuously. "Something you brought back from – "

A wave of laughter from the audience cut her off, and Grace looked down, blushing. She had evidently forgotten the First Principle of time travel: While it was possible to go backwards in time, it was never possible to go forward – except for time travelers returning from the past, invariably arriving at the very moment they had left.

That was true of objects as well as people.

"This book is my hack-proof, power-failure and surge-resistant way of preserving vital documents," Jared said. "This book contains the operating details for the project."

"Including what to do in the present circumstances?"

"This was not unforeseen," Jared said. "We had a number of failsafes and fallbacks from the start. My use of the short-term memory inhibitor on my own ancestor was one instance of needing just such a failsafe. We foresaw that erasing a memory of us saying or doing something revealing might be needed. We were right. Similarly, we foresaw that something like this might happen, and we prepared a strategy for how to deal with it."

"And what is that?" councilmember Derec asked, sparing Grace a glance that seemed to suggest she remain quiet for the time being.

"We do as we always intended," Jared said. "We don't go back in time physically any longer, but we do use temporal communication to try to convince key people... not our own ancestors, necessarily, but the policymakers of past eras... to change course. If that doesn't work, we put pressure on them by removing crucial components from factories, or transportation systems, or focusing on other critical infrastructure."

"And how do we do that?"

"Sending people back in time is basically transferring matter and energy from now to then. If we can do that, then in principle we can aim a maser or a laser or a neutron beam from the present to key targets in the past, and disintegrate them."

"Bring down bridges?" Council Prevo asked.

"Crash their aeroplanes?" asked Councilperson Teima.

"Those are great ideas," Jared said. "Or we can bring down buildings. Or rather than sending focused energy back, we can send disruptive software into their computer mainframes."

"Malware?" someone asked.

"Yes. We can target their financial software. Their entire economy is computerized. We can introduce disruptive software to their system of credits and debits that will cause more widespread havoc than crashing any number of aeroplanes."

Councilmember Barris spoke up. "I like it," he said. "It's time we showed them we mean business!"

***

"So," Barris said, leaning back, his hands folded over his big round belly. "You wanted a conference with me, one on one. Here we are. What is it?"

Jared was slow to respond, fascinated by Barris' paunch. It was a common sight in the past, but in the here and now it was virtually unknown. That bulging belly was, for many strongholders, a sign of Barris' corruption. He'd gotten fat in the past few years, and even some of his most ardent supporters were questioning it – not just the why and how, but the justice of it.

"I have a favor to ask you," Jared said, bringing himself back to the task at hand.

"In exchange for what?" Barris smiled.

"Well." Jared nodded at the belly under Barris' folded hands. "If I'm not mistaken your solid core of support has grown rather... soft... these past few years."

A frown darkened Barris' face. Jared wasn't intimidated; he knew that Barris had lost too much support to pose a threat to him. He thought of Marjorie and how she was never intimidated by Barris even when he'd been at the peak of his power. Jared envied her strength and her certitude.

"What I need," Jared said, "is to send my son to the past."

"Your baby boy? Newborn... Hal, is it?"

Jared didn't confirm the child's name. "We both know the frustrations and political divides in the stronghold are going to lead to strife and violence... probably to civil war. The very same thing that destroyed some of the other strongholds over the years."

"Yes." Barris frowned. "That's unfortunate. But it seems to be human nature."

Not when people like you don't prod it along, Jared thought.

"I don't want him growing up here. Living back then... it was a tense time, and a time dominated by brutish stupidity. But it was a rich time, a plentiful time... in many ways a better time."

"Not to mention," Barris smiled, "our own times are as brutish and stupid as those times were. That's what you're actually saying when you worry about civil war, isn't it?"

"You still have contacts... loyal followers... in the garda and among the engineers," Jared said.

"Of course I do. I haven't grown that soft." Barris' smile took on a sinister edge.

"I need their help to access the Portcullis before it's dismantled," Jared said.

"And also to recharge the Vorenberg manifolds," Barris said. "It takes an awful lot of power to send people back through time. It blacks out half the stronghold. And another time travel excursion would take some planning... or, at the very least, some forgiveness after the fact. Which means you need cover, operationally as well as politically. Which you know I can give you." Barris tipped his head approvingly. "I know you don't like me. You think I'm no better than the strongmen of ages past. Well, I do agree with them about the need to exercise control – strict control – over the bewildered herd of humanity. It's for their own good. But I'm not as stupid as... I don't know... the guy who won the American presidency in 2024, perhaps. The guy who didn't even try to maintain a façade of democracy, or liberty. The guy who managed to get himself arrested and executed."

"Yes, well," Jared said, distaste for the subject evident in his voice.

"The question remains, though: You need something from me. But what do you have to offer me?"

Jared smiled. "Not all of my contingency plans are in that book. I have a few more up my sleeve, as the old saying goes. And you're probably going to find some of them... maybe a lot of them... dovetail nicely with your political ambitions."

"My, my. A wolf among the sheep, eh?"

An expression no one needed to have lived in the past to understand, despite both wolves and sheep being long since extinct.

"If our plans to reason with the people of the past fail, then all we'll have left is a quest for justice," Jared said. "I've outlined the logistical and technical requirements for what I call the Extradition Project: We bring individuals, cities, maybe even the whole planet from the past to the present, and put those assholes on trial for what they've done to us."

"I thought that was impossible," Barris said. "The First Principle of time travel."

"Yes. But we don't use time travel – not in the sense of what the Portcullis does," Jared said. "Instead of drawing someone through time, which is impossible, I thought about how to... isolate them. Let time flow around them, let them be frozen and intact in a static vacuole until the flow of natural time brings them here."

"Like baby Moses," Barris said, awe in his voice.

"Who?"

"Someone I became familiar with doing my own historical research," Barris said. "But the point you're making is you have a way to bring people from the past to the present time, without violating the First Principle."

"Completely in accord with the First Principle," Jared said, not bothering to correct Barris and point out that nothing could ever violate an inviolable natural law.

Barris mulled over the idea, then turned his smile onto Jared. "I agree," he said. "Let's save your baby boy. Let's do it tonight."

"Yes," Jared said, immense relief flooding through him.

"And then let's make our plans for the past... and the future."

It was an easier bargain to strike than Jared had thought it would be.

He wondered whether... and he feared that he would... one day find out what more Barris had in mind, and what more it would cost him.

Next week we close our eyes and hum along to the songs of a dystopian future. It's a truism that while those who win the battles write the history books, those who write the lyrics will have their say, even if they are singing "The Songs of Solemn Men."