The Time War Ch. 24

The Time War

By Gary LM Martin

Chapter 24: The Positronic President

The Luddites:

The quad was rapidly becoming a duo again.

Originally, the couple consisting of Tom Stoyer and Donna had joined forces with the duo of Maggie and Bradley. Officially speaking, anyway.

Unofficially, Tom was spending more and more time with Maggie, and it had reached a point where he no longer slept with Donna. And now Tom had taken it to the next level. Bradley only found out about it three days later, when Brad tried to initiate sex with his wife. He was kissing her and touching her and she responded, with no great joy, it seemed, but she did respond. However, when Brad moved to lift her shirt, she pulled on his hands.

"What?" he said, and his tone was already hurt.

"I... I can't," said Maggie, turning away from him in bed.

"Why not?"

"Tom ordered me not to."

"What?"

"Tom told me... I can't make love to you anymore." Maggie swallowed hard. "In fact, tomorrow, I'm moving in with him."

Bradley was speechless. Maggie was his wife. "Maggie... don't you love me?"

Maggie looked at him, at the man she had married six years ago. He was still the man she loved. But she had greater responsibilities now, more weighty obligations. "I do," said Maggie softly, caressing his cheek. "But I have a greater purpose now."

And in that moment, Bradley realized that Tom Stoyer had just stolen his wife.

********

Bradley tried to seek consolation with Donna. After all, she was a fellow member of their quad. The next day he cornered her in the kitchen while she was washing dishes and wrapped his arms around her from behind. He started squeezing her breasts, and suddenly life was good again.

"Bradley, stop," said Donna.

Bradley squeezed harder. Her breasts were nice and juicy, almost as much as-

"I said stop!" said Donna, pulling away from him.

"What's wrong?" said Bradley. "Aren't we all in a quad together?"

"Not any more," said Donna. She bit her lip. "It's just Tom and Maggie now."

Bradley suddenly realized the idea of a quad, four people in loving relation to each other which had seemed so progressive to him just six months ago, was a sham, simply a vehicle to steal his wife away from him. And now he had lost Maggie, and he didn't have Donna, and all he had was... nothing.

********

"My dear, dear friends," said Tom Stoyer at breakfast the following day. "We are ready to take action once again."

His followers cheered him, even as Bradley, and Donna, both looked glum.

"A key turning point in history was the election of the year 2000, nearly 450 years ago," said Stoyer. "The candidate who won, an actor named Charlton Heston, was in bed with the industrialists and the fossil fuel industry. He speeded up the era of Temperature Change which even now is destroying our planet. Every day the temperature fluctuates between twenty to thirty degrees, all in a single day! We know the sad truth, that this is caused by technology and factories and air cars, but the stubborn capitalists resist our efforts to tax and regulate our way to a healthier planet. There was a candidate running for president in the year 2000 who realized this. His name was Al Gore. If Al Gore had won, he would have deindustrialized our nation, ridding us of polluting power plants and technology. If he had won, we wouldn't have to live through a day when the temperature was 50 degrees, then 60 degrees and 70 degrees, all in the same day. And so we are going to help Al Gore win that election."

"But Tom," said Bradley. "In the year 2000, nuclear fusion hadn't yet been perfected. How will people get electricity without power plants?"

"Not to worry, my technically minded friend," said Tom. "There are many alternatives. Windmills! Solar power! Large scale gerbil farms!"

"Gerbil farms?"

"Farms where millions of gerbils run on treadmills," said Tom. "Also, there has been great strides harnessing the power of ants who build anthills. Do you know that there are literally billions of ants in the ground beneath us? Imagine if we could harness merely a fraction of the power they use to move!"

********

It wasn't long before the Continuity Service noticed the change.

"It's all... gone," said Sarah, staring at her holomonitors.

"What do you mean, it's all gone?" Colonel Strayker asked, wearing a severe looking brown suit with tall collars.

"Factories. Air cars. Power plants...." Sarah stared at the holomonitors. "This is a real time feed from our present, not the past. But from the state of affairs, this looks very much like the 18th century. Look at those primitive homes! Look at those horse drawn carriages! People are moving equipment around on carts and donkeys."

"What kind of change could cause that?" Strayker asked.

"I don't know, sir," said Sarah.

"Well, find out," said Strayker.

As Sarah worked, Calle reflected that it was a good thing that their underground base still had power.

"That's why we have the Temporal Suppressor," said Major Reynolds. "If the temporal suppressor wasn't protecting this building, the Time Shaft and our backup generator, we'd be standing in the dark."

"If we'd even be here," said Erica Green. "More likely than not we simply wouldn't exist. And if we stepped outside the base without getting a good anti-time dusting? We'd be gone as well."

"Has that ever happened to anyone?" Calle asked.

Erica shivered and turned away.

********

They went back to the year 2000 to try and figure out why Al Gore won the election. Sarah could find no obvious single cause she could attribute to the change in election results; at some point, Gore simply rose higher in the polls than Charlton Heston, but there was no reported reason for it.

John Calle was posing as a journalist. He stood in the front row during an Al Gore campaign event. He listened to Gore speak. What Gore was saying was ridiculous--portraying factories and power plants as evil things which were destroying the environment by generating carbon dioxide. Even back in the 20th century, it was well known that 97% of carbon dioxide was produced by natural sources--the land, the water, and animals--and only 3% produced by cars and factories. Human activity simply had no effect on the environment, at least not in this way. But Gore pretended as if facts didn't exist, and painted a world of violent temperature change, one which would destroy mankind unless it rapidly deindustrialized.

Calle frowned. He had read that Gore was a wooden public speaker, but in fact found him to be quite the opposite. Gore spoke with passion and genuineness and conviction. Calle didn't agree with what Gore said, but the way he said it was very compelling. When Gore finished giving his speech the audience gave him a rousing applause. Something here had changed.

After the speech, Calle was poking around backstage when a gorgeous blonde woman touched his hand. "Are you a reporter?"

"John Callenberger, with The Cleveland Star," said Calle.

"Oh, you must be new," said the woman. "My name is Maggie Galleher, I'm Vice President Gore's press secretary. Why don't we talk if you have a few moments?"

Calle did. Maggie led him to a small office and closed the door behind them. She sat down behind a desk and smiled at him. "So... you're the mysterious John Calle."

Calle started to reach for the compression pistol hidden in his jacket. But Maggie was quicker, raising the snout of a weapon of her own.

"Uh uh uh," she said, and smiled as Calle slowly dropped his hand. "That's better. Donna said you were cute, but didn't say how cute."

Calle blushed involuntarily.

"You've come back to try and change things, haven't you?"

"You're the one who changed things," said Calle.

"It's all a matter of perspective," said Maggie, playing with her blonde curls with her free hand.

"What did you do here?" Calle asked. "Gore seems... different."

"We got him an acting coach," said Maggie.

"I don't believe you."

"Well that doesn't really matter, does it?" said Maggie smiling.

"Do you really want to the world to be without electricity and factories and cars?"

"It will be a perfect world," said Maggie, her eyes shining. "We will be at peace with Mother Earth."

"You will live like we did in the stone ages, without food or medicine or the basic necessities of life," said Calle.

"We will struggle to get closer to the Earth, and in that struggle, become closer to our true selves," said Maggie.

Calle could see that she was quite, quite mad.

"Unfortunately, you won't be around to see it," said Maggie, raising her pistol slightly.

Was she about to shoot him?

"Wait! I thought you said I was cute!"

"You are cute, John Calle," said Maggie. "But I have standing orders to execute one John Calle. I'm sorry, dear."

And as Calle sat there, she aimed the compression pistol squarely at his chest. At its highest setting, it could burn a hole right through him. That's how the others would find him. And they wouldn't be able to go back in time to save him, because that would require looping him, and looping was expressly forbidden, because it could cause ruptures in the timeline.

Calle watched in horror as Maggie steadied her aim.

Marion.

And then there was a knock at the door, and someone else came in.

"John!" said a familiar voice, who suddenly came into view.

"Donna?" said Calle hopefully.

Donna looked from Calle to Maggie. "Maggie, what are you doing?"

"I was about to carry out our standing order," said Maggie.

"Maggie," said Donna. "There are orders and there are orders."

"I wasn't aware of the distinction," Maggie said, her finger still tight on the trigger.

"Maggie, this is John," said Donna, wrapping her hands around Calle's chest from behind. "How are you, John?"

"I'm fine, Donna, how've you been?" Calle asked, trying to ignore the gun pointed at his chest.

"I can't complain," said Donna. "It seems like ages since I've seen you last."

"Actually, it's only been 18 years," said Calle.

"That's right! The time we had lunch in 1982 during the Common Decency Act debate," said Donna. "It seems like a longer time than that, though."

"Such is the nature of time travel," said Calle.

"Yeah," said Donna, smiling. "Maggie, lower your gun."

"Donna!" Maggie protested. "We can't just let him go."

"Yeah we can," said Donna. "There's nothing John can do to reverse what we've done. There's no need to kill him. Let him go."

"And what will we tell Tom?"

Tom.

"We tell him nothing. We tell him our mission was accomplished." She turned to Calle. "Run along dear. Go home to your time police and pout."

Calle, warily watching Maggie still pointing the gun at him, got up and made his way to the door. "Thank you."

"You're welcome, dimples," she said, as Calle left.

********

"They got him a speech coach?" said Colonel Strayker.

"I believe she said an acting coach, but she might have meant a speech coach," said Calle.

"And you didn't bring this agent in for further interrogation." Those hard blue eyes stared at him, made only more severe by Strayker's bright blonde hair combed over his forehead. He was wearing a severe looking violet suit with high collars.

"She had a pistol pointed at me the entire time," said Calle.

"Then how did you escape?"

"I kicked her gun away. She turned, and ran-"

Strayker cut him off with a hand gesture, either no longer interested, or not entirely believing him. "The fact remains that Gore seems to have won the election by improving his speaking style. How do we counter that?"

There was silence around the table for a long moment.

Then Sarah said, "I have studied the changes in Gore's speaking style. In our protected database, we have historical recordings of how Al Gore used to speak, before the timeline was changed."

She pressed a button on the Pad, and a holoimage of Al Gore appeared above the conference room table. "I-am-a-Southerner,-and-a-moderate. A-moderate-,and-a-Southerner-"

Everyone made a face. Gore sounded incredibly rehearsed, as if he were reading a script.

"And here is how he sounds now," said Sarah, pressing another button on her Pad.

"My friends, the time has come to rid this nation of the scourge of Temperature Change! We must be free of it, if not for us, then for our children, and our children's children, and our children's children's children."

"Completely different," Erica Green remarked.

"Not just different," said Sarah. "In the first clip, from the unaltered timeline, he sounded almost robotic. Almost unnatural. In the new clip, he sounds almost completely natural."

"So?" said Strayker.

"Note I said 'almost'. If you listen carefully, you'll notice that the new version of Al Gore always pauses exactly a half second after every comma, always a half second after every period. Listen again." She played it again, but they all looked puzzled. They had no way of knowing exactly how long a half second was. But Sarah Chambers did. She was a Passive Observer.

"What are you saying?" said Strayker.

"No human being could pause so exactly, so precisely, after every comma and period," said Sarah. "Therefore, Al Gore is not a human being."

Calle's eyes narrowed. "Are you saying... they replaced a robotic sounding human being with a human being sounding robot?"

"Precisely," said Sarah, giving a rare grin.

Strayker puffed his nuclear cigarette furiously and leaned back in his chair. "Is it possible?"

"Why not?" said Sarah. "We have the technology to do it now. So could the Luddites."

"Then how do we counter it?" Strayker asked.

"I have some ideas on that as well," said Sarah.

********

Vice President Gore was giving a speech at the Des Moines Chicken Club. The Secret Service routinely checked out the Vice President's podium, as they usually did, but they failed to detect the electromagnetic pulse generator which had been built inside of it.

When Vice President Gore came up to start his speech, he didn't get any farther than, "My friends-" before falling to the ground and collapsing.

********

The Vice President's advance team released a statement that the Vice President had fainted because of the extreme heat (it was 65 degrees that morning in Iowa) but that he was fine now and would return to give his speech later in the afternoon.

And he did. But when he gave his speech, everyone could tell that once again, it was the old Al Gore, speaking in the very tortured, wooden rehearsed sounding way. "It-is-so-good-to-see-you-all-today," said Gore.

"That's much better," said Major Reynolds, with a smile. "To have politicians speaking like robots, rather than robots speaking like politicians. That's the way things were meant to be, don't you think?"

Calle smiled back. For once he had been able to wholeheartedly participate in a mission without having moral qualms. He felt like he had participated in a job well done.

Reynolds activated the gateway, and they stepped through, one by one. Reynolds went first, followed by Daniel Acton, followed by John Calle, with Lieutenant Miguel Ramirez bringing up the rear.

Ramirez was a relatively new recruit to the Continuity Service. Calle had met him in the cafeteria a few days ago, and found him to be a friendly, good natured fellow.

As they marched up the Corridor, Calle tried to ignore the whispers. They seemed to be coming from the swirling mists. He couldn't make out what they were saying. Instead, he followed the light, the bright light which would lead them back to the control room.

Behind Lieutenant Ramirez, a human shaped creature made of solid yellow light stepped onto the path, without making a sound. It shadowed Ramirez for a few steps, even walking the way Ramirez did, reducing in size so that its yellow outline was the exact same proportions as Ramirez's body. And then the glowing yellow creature moved forward and inhabited Ramirez's body, and vanished inside of him.

Ramirez gave a choked scream. Everyone turned and looked at him. "Ramirez, are you all right?" said Calle. It felt funny talking inside the Binochi Corridor. It was hard to hear over the sounds of the swirling mists. Calle's voice sounded like a faint echo to his own ears.

Ramirez shuddered rapidly, and then he looked down for a moment. Everyone watched as he slowly looked up. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"How do you feel?" Major Reynolds asked, his hand just happening to rest on his compression pistol.

Ramirez noticed Reynolds, Daniel, and John Calle staring at him. "I'm fine. I'm all right."

Reynolds considered for a moment. Could it be a warning sign of temporal psychosis? It would be best to have Ramirez checked out by Doctor Vladek, just in case. "Let's move on, then," he said, looking Calle in the eyes and nodding slightly.

Calle nodded back. As they continued towards the bright light of the control room, Calle kept looking behind him, making sure Ramirez was there. He was, meekly following them back. The only thing that looked odd was his face; his eyebrows were continually raised, as if he were surprised by something.

It was with some relief when they entered the control room without incident. Reynolds heaved a sigh of relief. "Good work, men." He turned to Sarah. "How are the year 2000 elections looking now?"

"Charlton Heston won the first of two terms," said Sarah.

"As it should be," said Reynolds approvingly. "Ramirez, I want you to get checked out by the Doc."

"I feel fine," said Ramirez.

"That's an order," said Reynolds.

"All right, sir," said Ramirez, giving a goofy grin.

Reynolds, Daniel, and Calle left the control room. Calle noticed without noticing that Ramirez lingered behind.

"Lunch?" Daniel asked casually.

"Sure," said Calle.

Those glowing orange eyes.

Suddenly, he had a sense of urgency. An important need to return to the control room. Turning around, he ran in the opposite direction. Back to the control room. Daniel followed.

"-you can't do that," Sarah was telling Ramirez, just as they reentered the control room.

Ramirez was rapidly working on the controls for the Time Shaft. The Time Shaft started to roar more strongly with power. Calle could see the blue pulses shooting up the vertical shaft much more rapidly, like a penis about to ejaculate.

"Stop!" Sarah cried, grabbing his arm. Ramirez, without even looking up from what he was doing, threw Sarah across the room with one arm. She went skidding across the floor.

Lieutenant Adam Schiff, the duty officer of the moment, ran to Ramirez and grabbed him in a tight hug. Ramirez effortlessly removed Schiff's arms and grabbed his head and twisted. With a cracking sound, Schiff's head came off, and went flying across the room.

Daniel Acton and John Calle tackled Ramirez together, but Ramirez didn't even budge. He tossed Acton in one direction and Calle in another.

At that moment Calle heard a klaxon sound and looked up to see that Sarah had pressed the alarm.

Ramirez turned his head and looked at Sarah.

Calle, sitting up from the ground where he had been tossed, drew his compression pistol and fired at Ramirez. His shot hit him square in the back.

Ramirez turned back to the controls. In moments the Time Shaft started to send off vibrations that shook the entire room. The roar of the Shaft now sounded like thunder. It was set to overload.

Colonel Strayker and two Continuity Service officers entered the control room. The officers had compression rifles, but Colonel Strayker had a blaster rifle. They immediately opened fire on Ramirez.

Ramirez started to jerk as if he had been stung by insects. But he still kept working the controls.