Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles) Read online

  Alt.History

  102

  WINDRIFT BOOKS

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  ALT.HISTORY 102

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the appropriate copyright holder listed below, unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal and international copyright law. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein.

  The stories in this book are fiction. Any resemblance to any person, place, or event—whether historical, current, parallel, or alternate—is entirely coincidental.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  Alt.History 102 copyright © 2016 Samuel Peralta and Windrift Books.

  Foreword copyright © 2016 Samuel Peralta. Used by permission of the author.

  “Part Lives” by Samuel Peralta, copyright © 2009 Samuel Peralta. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Most Beautiful Woman” by Jennifer Ellis, copyright © 2016 Jennifer Ellis. Used by permission of the author.

  “Requiem” by Will Swardstrom, copyright © 2016 Will Swardstrom. Used by permission of the author.

  “Diablo Del Mar” by Artie Cabrera, copyright © 2016 Artie Cabrera. Used by permission of the author.

  “Whack Job” by Rysa Walker copyright © 2016 Rysa Walker. Used by permission of the author.

  “Drought” by J.E. Mac, copyright © 2016 J.E. Mac. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Elissiad” by Asha Bardon, copyright © 2016 Lesley Smith. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Tesla Gate” by Drew Avera, copyright © 2016 Drew Avera. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Black Network” by Adam Venezia, copyright © 2016 Adam Venezia. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Visitation” by Hank Garner, copyright © 2016 Hank Garner. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Finest Mask” by J.J. Brown, copyright © 2016 J.J. Brown. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Blackbird Sings” by Therin Knite, copyright © 2016 Therin Knite. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Locked Web” by Alex Roddie, copyright © 2016 Alex Roddie. Used by permission of the author.

  All other text copyright © 2016 Samuel Peralta.

  Edited by Samuel Peralta and Nolie Wilson

  Cover design and art by Samuel Peralta and Adam Hall (www.aroundthepages.com)

  Alt.History 102 is part of the Alt.Chronicles series of The Future Chronicles, produced by Samuel Peralta (www.samuelperalta.com)

  978-0-9939832-9-0

  ALT.HISTORY

  102

  STORY SYNOPSES

  The Most Beautiful Woman (Jennifer Ellis)

  What if, in Hedy Lamarr’s zeal to assure an Allied victory in World War II and become recognized as an inventor, she accepted a mission to spy on Hitler, through any means necessary? With her frequency-hopping technology, she could hold the key to winning the war… for either side, but only if the men involved are willing to see past her beauty.

  Requiem (Will Swardstrom)

  What if a chance meeting as children meant more to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Marie Antoinette than the history books have led us to believe? The young maestro played for Marie when he was just six years old and she was seven, and professed his love for her that day. What if he never gave up on that love and when her life was on the line, decided to test that love against the backdrop of the chaos of the French Revolution. Told by his apprentice, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, Mozart’s attempt to save the French queen—and possibly himself—could change history forever.

  Diablo Del Mar (Artie Cabrera)

  What if Christopher Columbus hadn't been able to present the New World's riches to his Spanish benefactors, and had instead been recruited by a mysterious cult with an outlandish goal?

  Whack Job (Rysa Walker)

  What if a time traveling historian decided to make a real historical event fit the pop-culture version? Simon Rand is well-accustomed to altering history. In fact, the CHRONOS key around his neck has allowed him to alter the timeline to include an entirely new religion—one that his grandfather, Saul Rand, claims will result in a better future than generation after generation of haphazard mistakes and blunders. But it takes an accidental jump into an infamous 1890s murder scene to show Simon the lengths to which Saul is willing to go in his quest to "fix" history.

  Drought (J.E. Mac)

  Gold brought speculators to California. Oil brought them to Los Angeles. Water is why they stayed. At the turn of the century, Los Angeles found its continued growth threatened by lack of water. A shady deal which has come to be known as “The Rape of the Valley” diverted the Owens River to Los Angeles. It ceased development of a federally-funded irrigation project that would have brought prosperity to Owens Valley farmers, and instead made some that had been associated with the early development of Los Angeles very wealthy. But what if “The Rape of the Valley” had never occurred?

  The Elissiad (Asha Bardon)

  What if Hannibal and his elephants crossed the Alps and destroyed Rome, making Carthage into a new Eternal City? Now Carthage is home to two aliens stranded on Earth, who have adopted the personas of the native gods in order to repair their vessel—while uplifting humanity in the process. Welcome to the day Carthage learns the truth about their gods.

  The Tesla Gate (Drew Avera)

  It’s early in the twentieth century and Nikola Tesla is attempting to build a device to traverse time and space. And as he gets closer to opening the Tesla Gate, what he doesn’t realize is that he risks losing a part of himself, a second personality, that is more real than he imagined.

  The Black Network (Adam Venezia)

  In a world where modern computing power exists, but is tightly held by the elite—who use their control of information reinforce their status—how far will the common folk go to have access to technology, and ensure their own empowerment?

  The Visitation (Hank Garner)

  There have been theories that we on Earth have already been visited by inhabitants of other worlds. Part of the argument is that it is hard to imagine that, without outside intervention, the human race has advanced from simple cave dwellers to a species wielding the power to destroy ourselves. But do we really understand the degree to which these visitors may have shaped us?

  The Finest Mask (J.J. Brown)

  What if the Europeans who invaded North America three hundred years ago had been susceptible to infectious disease epidemics, but the people of the indigenous nations living there were resistant, superior in health? In this world, disease has decimated nearly all of Europe’s population, as well as the colonists who survived in North America. Gene hunter, scientist Sir William Potter travels from London to New York City searching the blood of the healthy for an elusive gene that he hopes could prevent the ravages of the future.

  The Blackbird Sings (Therin Knite)

  What if the Cold War had ended in a short but devastating hot war? In September 1983, the Soviets launched a brutal nuclear assault against the Pacific Coast, killing millions and setting off a war that changed the face of the world forever. With the Pacific Coast i
rradiated, and its infrastructure destroyed, the US collapsed in on itself, and from its ashes was born a new nation with a focus on protecting its people through the use of a different sort of advanced technology—cybernetics. Thirty years later…

  The Locked Web (Alex Roddie)

  What if the Cold War never ended, and control of the Internet was seized by ever more authoritarian governments to power their machines of war? Eric Critchley, housebound and lonely, attracts the attention of the secret police when he starts building a computer to help himself get online—a dangerous activity in the Britain of 2015.

  Contents

  Foreword (Samuel Peralta)

  The Most Beautiful Woman (Jennifer Ellis)

  Requiem (Will Swardstrom)

  Diablo Del Mar (Artie Cabrera)

  Whack Job (Rysa Walker)

  Drought (J.E. Mac)

  The Elissiad (Asha Bardon)

  The Tesla Gate (Drew Avera)

  The Black Network (Adam Venezia)

  The Visitation (Hank Garner)

  The Finest Mask (J.J. Brown)

  The Blackbird Sings (Therin Knite)

  The Locked Web (Alex Roddie)

  A Note to Readers

  Foreword

  by Samuel Peralta

  “Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you.”

  — Chuck Palahniuk

  Schrödinger's Cat is a paradox, devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, to illustrate what he saw as issues with what’s called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

  In this thought experiment, a cat is sealed in a chamber, along with a device that releases a poisonous gas triggered by a bit of a very slowly decaying radioactive material. After an hour, there is an equal probability of a radioactive decay or not, whether the poison gas is released or not, and consequently whether the cat is dead or not…

  Until you open the box. Then the so-called quantum wavefunction collapses into one and only one solution, and by making the observation of the state of the cat, you ascertain that the cat is dead or alive.

  But what if you don’t look? The Copenhagen interpretation is that the cat is a superposition of the “cat is alive” function and the “cat is dead” function, that, in some sense, the cat is both dead-and-alive.

  But there’s another way to look at things. The so-called Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics asserts that the wavefunction never collapses.

  It implies that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual "world". The cat is dead in one universe, and alive in the other, and both alternative histories exist in parallel universes.

  Literature and film has always been obsessed with parallel universes, and the map of alternative histories ranges from those with global significance, from Philip K. Dick’s landmark novel The Man in the High Castle, to the intensely personal world of Eric Bress’ and J. Mackye Gruber’s film The Butterfly Effect.

  Dick’s Hugo award-winning novel charts life in the sixties in America, which is under a totalitarian state in a world because the Axis Powers—Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—had, fifteen years earlier, won World War II.

  Bress’ and Gruber’s film follows a college student, who has the power to travel through time, and who tries to change the present for the better by altering his past—with unintended consequences for himself and his friends.

  It’s a vision that frames the question of inevitability, of destiny.

  * * *

  Past Lives

  1

  In my first life, I see myself

  second daughter to the late lieutenant and his wife,

  he a soldier fallen on the front lines of Dong Xoai,

  she a concert pianist, now teaching me along with

  the neighbors’ children after school. She straightens

  our postures, raps our knuckles with a ruler as we mangle

  Rachmaninoff. Sometimes, at night when she thinks I’m

  asleep, she plays for herself, their song.

  2

  In my second life, I see myself

  a teacher in the jungles of Mindanao, two months pregnant,

  my partner and I marching villagers through irregular verbs.

  Typhoons trespass across the borders of our peace, stirred

  by the shrapnel of insurgent monsoons. Gunfire.

  We dive for shelter, covering our heads and mouthing

  prayers in a foreign tongue. Sometimes our prayers are

  answered by a different god.

  3

  In my third life, I see myself

  at the bus stop, sniping with my son, third grade now

  at St. Luke’s Catholic School. He wants to bring

  with him this morning’s letter from his adoptive father;

  I tell him later. When I open it myself on our driveway,

  fine sand seeps out, swept into the envelope from the storms

  that ring his barracks, a thin stream marking time

  until the grains run out.

  4

  In my fourth life, I see myself

  cursing a vending machine at Dover AFB,

  its stark metal denying iced tea for my mother. And suddenly,

  inexplicably, my life, all my past lives, come clear to me,

  forever framed in that inexorable cycle of reincarnated grief.

  My mother takes my hand. An hour away, the transport

  from the airfield at Basra drones toward us, draped

  in mourning, bearing her grandson home.

  * * *

  That simple question—What if?—is what powers literary fiction based on alternate histories.

  What if Hedy Lamarr had been a spy for the Allied forces during World War II? What if Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had been in love with Marie Antoinette? What if Christopher Columbus had been recruited by a mysterious cult? What if the Internet had been tightly held only by an elite few? What if the Native American population had been resistant to European diseases? What if the Cold War had become a hot war?

  Physics, with its Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, tells us that these worlds may, indeed, exist. We may not be able to travel to them, no, but through the power of words and images we may be allowed a visit.

  __________

  Samuel Peralta is a physicist and storyteller. As well as his own work, he is the creator and driving force behind the speculative fiction anthology series The Future Chronicles.

  www.amazon.com/author/samuelperalta

  The Most Beautiful Woman

  by Jennifer Ellis

  What if, in Hedy Lamarr’s zeal to assure an Allied victory in World War II and become recognized as an inventor, she accepted a mission to spy on Hitler, through any means necessary? With her frequency-hopping technology, she could hold the key to winning the war… for either side, but only if the men involved are willing to see past her beauty.

  SEPTEMBER 28, 1942

  HEDY SCRUTINIZED HER FACE in the hotel mirror once again. She painstakingly reviewed her porcelain skin for any signs of wrinkles, of aging, for that turning point where her looks would no longer be the most compelling aspect of her being, the part of her that unfailingly brought men to their knees and made them do her bidding on all fronts mundane and meaningless.

  More jewels, Hedy? Gowns? Furs? Cars? Come live with me in my castle in the mountains. I will give you everything. You are the most beautiful woman in the world. You deserve the world. Hedy Lamarr, the woman with a face that could launch a thousand ships. Hedy Lamarr… She wondered if Hedwig Kiesler could launch a thousand ships.

  But she was no longer Hedwig Kiesler, Austrian of Jewish origins and the first woman in the world to take off her clothes on the screen. She was Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood starlet, almost American, and Catholic.

  Yes, they gave her everything she ever wanted. Except respect, freedom, and the opportunity to create things, real things.

  Someday she would no longe
r be the most beautiful woman in the world. Would that be a moment of relief, or defeat?

  But the hairline fractures of skin that would widen and become roadmaps of crevices, the gauntness and resignation of time, and the slow, distressing slide of vibrancy that would mark her middle years, remained in her future. She was only twenty-eight, and even she couldn’t dispute that the woman who stared back at her was extraordinarily lovely.

  Even so, there was something new in her eyes—a flash of hardness, of fury, that no matter how creative and brilliant she was, her beauty somehow trumped all of that and rendered her inconsequential, an object that could be moved around on stage to fulfill the vision and goals of men.

  The best way you can help the war effort is to sell war bonds, Hedy. That’s what the U.S. Navy said when she and George presented the Navy with their frequency-hopping invention, a revolutionary new technology for radio-controlled torpedoes that would prevent signals from being jammed or decoded. Then the military had classified their invention, refused her application to join the National Inventors Council, and dismissed Hedy to do her part for the war by playing her role as the most beautiful woman in the world.