by Christopher Howard
It was one thing to go poking around for extinct plants in the Pleistocene, or pulling a piece of a nameless person out of time with a well-placed ping, but when Frederic bio-captured the Führer during a late thirties speech at the Reichstag I almost choked up my lunch. A complete capture like this...it only happened once.
"Coming through! Look at the histo. A full cap."
Frederic adjusted the composition.
I nodded. "You're sure it's him? Adolf Hitler? The dictator?"
By an absolutely pure troke of chance, Frederic had planted the capture focus on the podium and caught the entire physical map of the living being that stood there.
The map data surged back through the channel to the present, just before the channel collapsed. Nothing physical but the coord's signal went back, and very little in the way of physical returned--compressed data, as close to infinitely folded as you can get. The channel was a tight thread through time, a transmission wire. The map was a perfect data replica of the captive region, and the data--if it contained a human and you had the gear--could then be processed into an artificial being that could think, see, feel pain, speak, even learn.
In fact he was speaking when he appeared in the holo.
"...die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen..."
I gestured to the con. "Translate it!"
Frederic worked the app, piping the audio through the late thirties context Deutsche proc we'd set up just in case. He cut the dictator off in mid-sentence. The mouth of the created holoform moved, then stuttered. Then clamped shut, bitter, furious. Hitler was angry.
"C--Can you hear me?" said Frederic, nearly shouting, as if he had to make his voice heard decades into the past.
Hitler glared at him. "What have you...Why...Cannot..."
I took a step forward. I knew what the problem was and made some adjustments.
"You hear your voice being translated. You'll get used to it," I said firmly.
Hitler turned his eyes on me. His face was worn and emaciated, the result of a long, bitter travel to tyranny. His eyes were deep blue wells of venom, cold, unpredictable. He wore a gray uniform with a wide collar, an iron cross high on his chest, a holstered gun at his hip.
"What is this place?" asked Adolf Hitler.
I took a deep breath. "My father's workroom. In Los Angeles. In America."
His brows rammed together. "Who are you?"
"Zachary. This is Frederic. He's the one who actually cap'd you."
"But--"
"No, you're not real. You might feel real, but you're just a running process that's created an artificial you out of the captured data."
"But...I am speaking to...I am--" He looked around. Hitler wiped his forehead. "I am perspiring."
"The exact physical state of your body, every wrinkle, every hang-nail, the content of your stomach and the thought in your head has been copied from an instant in time and brought here. Another process assembles all of the data into a visually physical shape with simulated volition. You can speak and think and do just about anything you could have done--what is it? Seventy--eighty years ago."
"Years? What is the year?"
"Twenty-three. Two thousand twenty-three."
"What has happened to--"
"Germany's still here."
"And my...people?"
"If you mean your party, your Reich, your culture of hate...then you failed. You lost the war. You committed suicide four or five years after your today. In Nineteen Forty-Five."
"No!" he gasped. "No. Not like..."
My words opened a valve that drained his energy, his stature, his ability to move. An unreal gravity pulled him to the floor. Hitler dropped to his knees, covered his face, and sobbed.
Frederic shoved me aside and shut down the app. The Führer vanished.
I grabbed his arm, too late.
"Look what you've done to him. You've ruined him!"
Use a low voice, add some sarcasm. "Probably traumatized by his own future. He knows he's failed."
Frederic went on, not getting it. "He's never going to speak to us again. If he does, he won't be the _real_ Hitler."
"Right." Increase sarcasm. "The pure historic Hitler." I shook my head. "It's Adolf Hitler you're talking about! The guy's an animal. He killed millions of innocent people."
Frederic gave me a murderous look. "I could have sold him...and for _real_ money. Who knows, a hundred thousand? Or I could have made a nice project out of him. Imagine Mrs. Thaler's face when I bring the Führer to History 17!"
A burning defiance shot through me. "Not on my dad's equipment."
"Richard's then."
"Uncle Richard?"
"Hitler's mine. Make me a copy."
I glared at him while I keyed in the commands, and then tossed him the card.
He caught it with both hands, carefully, as if I was lobbing Ming vases.
"Take it," I snapped, keying in the purge.
"What's your problem?"
"Hitler? A full cap? What's my problem?"
"He's not real. No one with half a brain's going to think a bio-map of Adolf Hitler's going to affect anyone's politics or thinking or actions. What's he going to do? Usher in another Reich?"
"You don't see the connection between ideas and action? Normal people don't worry me. It's everybody else."
He started to shake his head. "Who'd vote for him? Pretty sure there's a ballot restriction on 3D's."
"Dictators and the dead. They've both been elected."
"People are going to follow a talking holoform? People are going to haul off undesirables to concentration camps because a 3D told them to?"
"They've done worse for less. And he has other uses. You don't see the danger in possessing a Hitler? Or it falling into the wrong hands?"
Frederic bounded up the stairs and down the hall. He swung the front door open. Over his shoulder he said, "Pay me well, I don't care how wrong their hands are."
He'd said it in a flash of anger, but I'd known Frederic since kindergarten. He had an entire slow-cooker manufacturing division tucked inside his head. He could let something stew for days or even weeks.
I didn't see him for three days. I avoided the places he liked to habit around school. I saw him three days after capturing Hitler, but I didn't see him in person. Not at first.
A short clip on a newsfeed showed him in front of his uncle's house giving a press interview. Live. He held up the card to which I'd copied a complete map of Adolf Hitler. The news said it was the greatest cap of all time, even better than that piece of Isocrates--roughly the upper half of him--who still yammered about pan-Hellenism in some British Museum. I grabbed my jacket and ran from the house.
Frederic's Uncle Richard lived a few kilometers away. When I arrived I had to push through the crowd, duck under the arrays of transmission cones for the mass of comm equipment seven media networks had set up in front of the house. I was twenty steps from Frederic when I heard the surprised gasps of the spectators behind me.
Reporters shouted questions. A man's confident laugh followed. Two uniformed security guards--hired by one of the reporters--moved toward me, one urging me back with an unfriendly gesture.
They stopped, eyes wide, both staring beyond me. I wheeled around to find the crowd parting where the concrete walkway led to the house.
They moved out of the way for the man with the brief case, Senator Keesling, Christian Keesling. Wealth oozed from him. Not good hard working money. Money that dirtied your hands.
He had gray hair, thick as a brush, cut like a cliff's convex face. Not much more than skin along the ears and neck, but curving out to a sharp ridge that ran around his head halfway between the ear-tops and the apex of his skull. Bald on top. He smiled a lot, the creases angling out from his nose folding into shadowy trenches. He showed big white teeth. Every wrinkle in his face deepened when he laughed. His eyes nearly closed, crows feet crinkling and lengthening into the feet of some lumbering Jurassic ancestor to crows.
Keesling's dark blue eyes, when he showed them, were penetrating, erratic, untrustworthy. The power of his presence spread over the crowd and affected them in only two ways, the bared teeth of cornered animals and the dazed stare of zealots watching their savior. Frederic backed away from the podium as the Senator neared.
Christian Keesling marched up the steps, crossed the lawn, cameras following every step. His bodyguards fanned out behind him, pushing media workers out of the way. One turned and waved me off. I stepped backward, hardly noticing the six-foot soldier in a suit. I watched the podium. Frederic stood a few steps back from the barricade of mics, watching the Senator move toward him.
I saw fear. Frederic was afraid, but he couldn't move, not with a man like the senator coming for him, smiling, swinging his briefcase.
Keesling was a man of proportion. A master performer. A strong willed politician of amorphous principles who peddled hatred in one hand and religion in the other. What he lacked in physical attractiveness he made up with the allure of power. What he lacked in knowledge, he topped off with arrogance. He listened to no one, but absorbed the emotion of any crowd instantly, effortlessly. He threw an arm over Frederic's shoulders, drew him in, and turned to the gathering.
He's the next president, they said.
"Ladies and gentlemen. Friends," he said with a disarming smile.
Keesling spoke publicly often, sometimes nine or ten times a week, crossing to the east coast in a few days, then back again. While other political aggressors tapped at keyboards, his fist pounded on doors. When others used phrases and words proven to hold an audience, Keesling grabbed your shirt and pulled you in. He spoke loudly, clearly, inches away from the face of America. When the audiences of other politicians felt their interest sink into boredom, they sagged in their seats, sniffling and itching in the heat. When Keesling spoke, lingerers and sleepers felt their knees buckle. Then they were dragged out or to the floor.
His voice was a force that stirred attackers, swayed his enemies, narcotized the aspiring, collared the ambivalent. In anger, his throat and mouth became a cauldron of insult and venom. In delight, anecdotal, spouting aphorisms from Napoleon and Roosevelt.
One word he never permitted in his presence: toleration. His sole ambition was to reach the highest office in the nation--higher if one could be carved out.
Keesling raised his hand in acceptance. It was a salute, a signal that he'd really begin speaking. The crowd's mix of fury and elation closed into knotted fists and tight jerking anger.
"My friends, today is great day. A memorable day. "
A reporter shouted, "Why are you here, Senator? Feeling generous?"
"For the same reason I presume you are. To get the truth. Generous? The sacrifices I make." He looked hurt for a moment. "I give away nearly as much as I take in. When we strip our actions down to the essential isn't every worthy act a sacrifice for society?" He wrinkled his brow, a worried father, gently scolding a child who's strayed from the path. The crowd cheered. A few boos rumbled low through the noise.
"One of you asked me as I stepped from my car if--" He shook his head and opened his arms in a gesture that calmed the crowd. "Someone asked me if I would give advice on how to make our world a brighter better place. I'll tell you what I told him. It's a battle, I said. Everything is. A soldier in my battle is a noble, a fearless defender of national and social interest. Never let that cause be anything less than the first thought in your head. You can be as rich as Midas, strong as Achilles, intelligent as Isaac Newton or as kingly as Napoleon, but you won't have honor or courage or strength. You will not be noble until you stand face to face with your enemies: the peddlers of lies, the cheats, the godless, the people who throw away society's laws in favor of their own. When you can fight these people. When you can throw them down. When you can crush their jaws under you heel. That is nobility!"
Senator Keesling gave the crowd a farewell wave, stepped around the equipment, out of range of the mic-array and held out his hand to Frederic. (He'd been backing up fearfully the whole time). Keesling wasn't here for speeches. He was here to buy something.
"May I have a private word with you, son?" The Senator's tone was stern and fatherly. He smiled broadly. "You've accomplished something great, and you deserve to be rewarded."
Frederic looked over the line of bodyguards at me for a second, a second of hesitation, a second of dread, the moment before being dragged off to a torture chamber. Then he walked away from the media setup. A drug had taken effect. The two walked into the house, closing the door.
Fifteen minutes later Senator Keesling stepped across the porch. He held his brief case tightly, like a box containing incalculable wealth. In his estimation it was much more valuable than what he'd arrived with. He walked quickly through the crowd, jovial, but silent.
Reporters shouted questions, pursuing him to his car. He jumped in and the big black vehicle roared off.
I knocked on the front door to Frederic's Uncle's house and Frederic opened it slowly, fearfully.
"Hello." The tone of my voice was flat.
"Come in, Zach." His wasn't much better, kind of a I-just-sold-the-earth-to-aliens-who-want-to-use-it-for-target-practice tone.
"You accepted?"
He nodded.
"What did he give you?"
"Two and a half million dollars."
"What'd he want it for?"
Frederic shrugged. "He said we'd all know soon enough. I pushed him a little, and he invited me to his house tonight. He's very pleased about something. He's sending a car to pick me up in a couple hours." He paused. "Do you want to go with me?"
"I'd better."
"Thanks," he whispered so softly I almost missed it.
"You said, 'I don't care how wrong their hands are.' Look what's happened. Senator Keesling's the last guy you want with a complete Hitler bio-cap."
Frederic's defensive mode whined into life. "How was I supposed to know? I didn't think--"
"You didn't think, Frederic."
#
The Keesling estate started up one side of a wide hill and ended a couple hills over. There were stables, out buildings, security towers, old stone walls. The main entrance crossed a bridge over a strong creek. We rode under a black iron arch that opened into the broad paved entrance to the house. The rows of flowers, lining the drive, were sharply groomed, a flash of color, bright but short-lived, a scalpel used instead of the patient sun to open the envelope of a rose bud.
The car stopped. I looked through the dark window at one of Keesling's guards, a big guy in black standing right outside. There were several guards pacing, all wearing black formal suits, talking into comm gear. One pulled open the door, reached in, and ripped me out of the seat by a fistful of my shirt. He leaned me up against the car and pinned me there with one hand.
"Who are you?"
"Zach." I choked on my name "...a friend of Frederic's,"
The guard twisted around, signaled his assistant to report "a situation", an uninvited guest. The assistant called it in, nodded at the reply. He nodded again at my attacker.
The big fist that held my neck and pinned me to the black paint, loosened and extended into a welcome gesture. The guard pointed at the entrance to the house.
Frederic leaned in close as we entered a dim foyer, said, "Security's tight. I thought they were going to kill you."
I rubbed my throat. "Thanks for jumping in and helping me out."
"What am I here for?"
"You're here," I said coldly. "To get the disk back and return the money."
"Only if Keesling's doing something wrong."
"That's assured. He's practically a Nazi already. Having his Führer around will only make him...Nazi-er."
We entered an open room with four long couches angled across each corner. Forty people, mostly older couples, government functionaries, sat talking and drinking coffee. One noticed us. He quickly turned to his companion and shared the news. The guests looked up from their delicate cups and saucers, and with a simultaneous clash of china, every cup hit the low tables in front of them. They stood in unison and clapped, smiled, blurted out approval.
"Well done, boys."
"...made history..."
"...accomplished the impossible..."
Frederic turned red and set himself into the universal uncomfortable-looking stance of nervousness, head forward, right arm straight down his side, left bent at a right angle across his middle, holding his right arm at the elbow.
They clapped harder, nodding their heads, eyes blurry in admiration. It was a frightening admiration. One of joy, of waiting for a lifetime, of releasing a long-held breath, of a savior's return. If we'd captured Aristotle, Galileo or Jefferson, we'd have gotten a few nods, maybe a fraction of a newsfeed. Bring back a mass-murdering dictator and you're a hero. I shook my head.
Keesling broke away from the party.
"Welcome, Frederic, and...Zach, is it?"
"Yes," I said dryly.
"Welcome." Keesling pointed to an empty stretch of couch. "Come, join us. Coffee?"
"No, thank you."
I sat down, trying not to notice the staring attention. Frederic fiddled nervously with the envelope with Keesling's two and a half million dollar credit inside.
Frederic whispered out of the side of his mouth, "What do we do?"
"Find out what the Senator's up to. Probably after the guests leave."
I followed Frederic's fixed gaze, focused beyond me, toward Keesling. I twisted around. A man in a white lab jacket spoke privately with the Senator. Keesling grinned like a kid at Christmas.
Keesling waved over two servants standing across the room, ready at a moment's notice to be brought into the game.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, it is time."
The two servers moved among the party with large silver trays stacked with folds of bright red fabric. Each guest pulled one off the tray, unfolded the cloth. I stood up to get a better look. As they drew closer I saw the white circle with a black swastika centered inside. The guests wrapped the red bands around their upper left arms, some chuckling about proper position and a few mistakenly fastening them upside down. Keesling smiled, softly urging them.
"Come, hurry please, my technician tells me it's almost time."
I looked up at the servant with the silver tray of arm bands.
"No, thank you."
I through a Hitlerean glare at Frederic. He withdrew his hand and backed away from the tray.
Keesling turned and we followed him to an open door at the end of the room. A stairway led down into intense reflected light, a workroom, a laboratory. Keesling's lab was larger than my dad's. Better equipped. More like a commercial lab, except for the Persian rug, antique furniture and a big fireplace on one side. The priceless rug ended, meeting cold gray tile. White panel lights lit up the room and equipment. A warm fire burned in the fireplace.
The technician in the lab jacket whispered more to Keesling, and then went back to work.
I turned to Frederic. "This is it. Time to do something."
Frederic's mouth started to sag open. I turned before he formed a complaint.
I shouldered aside one the guests, some old bureaucrat, and stepped in front of Senator Keesling. I reached over the con and grabbed the card with Hitler's biomap. I held the only existing copy of the Hitler map. Then Keesling's hand locked around my wrist.
"What are you doing?"
I twisted away, swapped hands, lunged toward the fireplace, and flung the map into the blaze. It crackled, curled into a tube and melted over a log, dripping to the bricks.
I gave him a that's-what-I'm-doing smirk.
Keesling released my arm, stepped back and...laughed. "Zach, did you think I needed that? When I have the real thing? I don't need the map any longer now that I have the man!"
My mouth went really dry, skin tightening like someone sewing my lips together. The Nazi's raving mad, I kept repeating to myself.
Keesling swung his glare to one of his bodyguards. "Take him and the other one upstairs."
"Yes, sir."
The guard clamped his hand around my upper arm, pulling me toward the steps. He dragged Frederic behind him by collar.
"Sir," Keesling's technician emerged from one of the back rooms. "He's here."
Keesling spun around.
Adolf Hitler took a few uncertain steps into Senator Keesling's lab, wearing his uniform, his iron cross, his swastika and everything else.
The guests clapped, bowing politely. It was him, in reality. Flesh not a holoform. Keesling had devised some way to create a physical form from the data, not just a 3D.
Keesling smiled, the cold but sincere friendliness of an undertaker. His voice trembled reverently. "My Führer. It is you."
Hitler stood still, his eyes reviewing the party guests contemptuously. They gathered together, a flock of sheep in suits and swastikas.
"Wait!" Keesling turned and pointed up the stairs at us. "I want them to see this. Zach especially."
Hitler's eyes followed Keesling's outstretched arm up to me. He blinked. His mouth dropped open. His lips went tight across his teeth for a moment, then sagged down. The arrogance in his glance vanished at the sight of me. The memory of his first few seconds erupted in his head, the first seconds of virtual consciousness, looking at me in my dad's workroom, telling him that he'd failed, that he'd killed himself. His eyes dropped to the floor. He looked at his hands. One wiped the tears dripping from his eyes. He said nothing. He unfastened the holster strap at his waist, pulled out the gun. Slowly, he raised it to his head. The cold ring pushed into his skin. He pulled the trigger.
"NO!" Keesling shrieked. The guard dropped us, rushing back down the stairs.
The gun shot jolted Keesling's security force into action. Springing from all over the house, they pushed past us, thundering down the stairs into the lab.
I snatched the envelope from Frederic's hand, ripped it up and tossed it over the railing.
"We're done."
Frederic looked back longingly at the scattering flakes of a two and half million dollar credit, then turned and followed me. We walked right past the entrance guard, down the drive. We walked into town and caught a transit home. Frederic didn't speak for an hour.
"Why?" He whispered. "Why'd he do it?"
"He had to."
Frederic shook his head and gave me a you-want-to-give-me-a-little-more-to-go-on? look.
"There's no other way. You were right, back at my dad's place, when I told Hitler he was a failure. It ruined him. It had to ruin him. He had no options, only an end. It didn't matter what kind of life Keesling was able to manufacture for him. He was dead from his second waking. My telling him that he'd failed was like reality slapping him in the face--really hard. His failure was immediate, not looming over him, shadowing him, not the drawn out process it can be. It was providence, with no aspect of redemption or success. Failure to the core."
"I cap'd his brain structure, his memories. Didn't he understand what a value he could have been--not to us, but at least to Keesling's power struggle?"
"Value. That's it. He knew he couldn't have it--or ever have it. He could reach for goals, but once he knew--with certainty--that he would never have the value..."
"He quit?"
"A man like that won't be able to realize it. He can't achieve what he really values. He may be able to reach a goal--seize control of Poland--but he cannot ever have why he's reaching for it. Hitler conquered Poland, Czechoslovakia, parts or all of a bunch of other nations but he couldn't achieve what he was conquering them for. He's like every other dictator. He wants absolute power over thinking, working, living humans, but he can't have it. Thinking, working, living...you can't have them--and also have tyranny."
"But what did _you_ do exactly?"
"I think I made him see failure clearly in those first seconds after the cap. Keesling thought he'd resurrect Hitler, rebuild the Reich...I don't know, kill millions? Who knows? The end would be the same: a short slide into enslavement, war, slaughter, and the new Hitler ending up as before, locked in a bunker somewhere, committing suicide. I think I just nudged him along a little."
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