He stared at her with the expression of a sick dog that had just woken up at the vet’s after being anesthetized and felt betrayed by the world. “You?”
She went on. “Bootstrap combined a breakthrough in quantum time travel with a new development in genetic restoration. There’s a thick file somewhere in your papers that explains the scientific details, but I know you hate briefs, so I’ll keep it simple, the way you like it. In short, we invented a Genetic Time Bomb.”
He blinked. “That’s right….It was supposed to make America great again, just like I always promised—the way it was always meant to be….Turn the clock back to before all this diversity and this phony politically correct stuff.”
“Pretty much,” she agreed. “We tested the device on a few subjects. I briefed you on the results. They were very satisfactory. In one instance, the subject was a third-generation Dreamer named Rodriguez, the grandchild of illegal immigrants from Mexico. When we deployed the device on him, he disappeared, along with his parents and grandparents. Disappeared as in literally vanished before our cameras in the holding cell. We investigated and found that he was now a plumber in Oaxaca City, where he lived along with his parents. His grandparents had never entered the United States, legally or illegally. We surreptitiously gained samples of their DNA to verify what our scientists had already told us to expect: They were slightly different people, because of Rodriguez’s mother marrying a different man, and Rodriguez himself was not exactly the same as the man we had detained and experimented on, but the other markers were too close to leave any room for doubt. The Genetic Time Bomb had literally changed his family history.
“In another case, the immigrant in detention also vanished, but in that case there was no present-day equivalent of the subject. A refugee from Aleppo, she and her family had been killed in a pogrom.”
“One less immigrant to worry about, am I right?” the president said with a big grin, getting off the carpet and sitting on the couch. He looked energized by the discussion.
“Several more cases all yielded the same satisfactory results. The conclusion was remarkable: one hundred percent success.”
“Tremendous! I’m going to get Congress to push through another trillion in funding.”
“It was,” she said, “the perfect weapon. Simply slip a dose of the formula into any food or drink consumed by the subject. After a minimal gestation period, the GTB would activate, acting directly upon the subject’s transancestral development at the most fundamental genetic level.”
“Beautiful!” he crowed, rising to his feet.
“There is a certain beauty to it, actually,” she went on. “It erased the person’s racial development, resetting their genetic lineage back to the original code. What Dr. Royce, the head of the research project, called genetic cleansing.”
“I said to Bobby, ‘Bobby, we’re going to take care of all these illegals.’ And Bobby said this MAGA bomb would be like deporting every immigrant without spending a dollar or lifting a finger. No muss, no fuss. Just put this in the drinking water supply and”—he snapped his fingers, failed to produce a sound because of the dried condiments, and settled for slapping his hand on his own thigh—“we would be a great nation again, like the one our Founding Fathers intended us to be.”
She nodded. “I did say all that, and much more. I thought—we all thought—it was a panacea for all our problems. And so it was. But not in the way we expected.”
He frowned. “I’m talking about Bobby. I still don’t know who you are, lady.”
“I’m Bobby, Mr. President,” she said. “Or at least I used to be before the transition.”
His face turned mean. “That’s impossible. I spoke to Bobby this evening, couldn’t have been more than two hours ago. He was a man, an American. I don’t know what or who you are, but you’re not Bobby.”
“In any case,” she went on, unperturbed, “Operation Clean Sweep was a fantastic success. The formula was put into the water supply and people began transitioning. And then, somehow, it went viral.”
The president looked at her doubtfully. “Viral?”
“It mutated, we think. Whatever the scientific reason, the outcome is what matters. It triggered mass transitioning across the country, and then across the world, because America has influenced the entire globe over the past few centuries. We don’t know how or why it began to operate the way it did. But you’ve already seen the results for yourself. They’re indisputable.”
He stared at her. “What results?”
She gestured around her. “Your staff, the Secret Service, the portraits on the wall, the world outside, me. Everything’s changed, and it appears to be permanent. There’s no reversing this now. This is the way the world is now. A genuinely multicultural, multiracial, diverse world. This is America.”
“I don’t get it,” he said, starting to look nervous again. “You’re saying Operation Clean Sweep worked? And this is the result? My staff changing to those people out there?”
“And everyone else too. You see, Mr. President, you gave the order to deploy Operation Clean Sweep because you thought—we all did—that it would be a clean sweep of our country’s racial diversity, restoring America to the white Christian nation we believed it once had been. But that was a myth. America has always been an ethnically diverse mix, a melting pot of races and cultures. History is not a John Wayne western with all the people of color erased and the narrative distorted to match white nationalist mythology. It’s beautifully, wonderfully mixed. Genders, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, cultures, religions…We are the world’s melting pot, always have been. When we deployed the formula into the drinking water supply of American cities, what happened wasn’t erasure of people of color and immigrants. It was the exact opposite.”
The president sat heavily on the couch, staring up at her with an expression of morbid horror.
“We restored America to the way it ought to have been. Native Americans became the dominant racial group in our history.” She gestured to the portraits on the wall. “And everything else changed too. Our attitudes toward politics, violence, sexuality, religion, culture—you name it. The people you’ve seen here already are a microcosm of the America we live in now. Congratulations, Mr. President, you did it. You made America the great nation you promised you would make it again, as our Founding Fathers actually intended, based on the Iroquois Confederacy that inspired them: ‘All persons equal under their myriad gods,’ to quote from our own Declaration of Independence.”
The president shook his head slowly. “You’re insane. You’re crazy. This is some kind of witch hunt. A coup. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Give it a moment,” she said. “It’s only been a few minutes since you had the formula.”
The president jerked like he’d been Tasered. “What are you talking about?”
“You always drink soda,” she said. “You never touch water if you can help it. That’s why you hadn’t transitioned yet.”
The president stared at her pointing finger, following it down to the rim of the glass barely visible below the couch. He balked again.
“Where the hell is Bobby?”
She sat down beside him on the couch. “Habiba, I told you: I’m Bobby.”
“Get away from me. I don’t know who you are.”
She smiled at him. “Habiba, love, I’m your wife. It’s strange how I remember everything but you don’t. They said it would happen this way for a while. In time, the memories of the alternate genetic timeline fade and the contradictions self-resolve.”
“You’re talking crazy again!”
“It’ll all make sense in a moment. You see, Mr. President, I’m from the future. I was sent back to explore and study the transition. One of the side effects was a substantial acceleration of technological advancement. By eliminating violence, weaponry, and war from our history, we devel
oped much faster in every respect. A few weeks after today, we find a way to go back in time. Not to change it—because that’s impossible—but merely to relive it. I was sent back to help you through your transition because I knew firsthand how difficult it was for you. I was the one who suggested it and then volunteered.”
The president stared at her, no longer able to find words to express how he felt. He was clutching his head, mussing his intricately coiffed hair, like a person feeling a skull-splitting migraine coming on.
“I…” he said, then the air around him seemed to ripple slightly and the scent of ripe Apus mango came to the visitor’s sinuses.
In the place where the white man in the bathrobe had been sitting, there was now a transgender person of the same age with almost identical features. They looked around, then found the visitor. They smiled with relief.
“Fatima,” they said, “what happened?”
The visitor took the president’s hand in her own. “You transitioned, Habiba.”
“Then it worked?” the president said in wonderment.
“Yes. No suicide attempt this time, no throwing yourself through the window, no running half naked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue…It worked like a charm.”
“It was your presence,” said the president. “It soothed me.” They frowned slightly, touching the graying hairs on their right temple. “I think it did. I don’t remember much.”
“It’s better that way,” Fatima said. “I remember too much. I wish I didn’t. We were all such horrible people before. I don’t know how we lived with ourselves.”
“Hatefully,” said the president. “We lived hatefully, hating ourselves and hating everyone else. But that’s all gone now.”
“Yes,” Fatima said, staring deeply into the eyes of her life-partner. “Now only love remains.”
ASHOK K. BANKER is the author of more than sixty books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. His works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. His latest novel is the first in a new epic fantasy series, Upon a Burning Throne. He lives in Los Angeles.
RIVERBED
OMAR EL AKKAD
“Welcome to Big Sky Country,” the flight attendant said. Gently, the plane descended over browning farmland and desolate ridges of brush and stone where the prairies met the mountains.
Khadija Singh lifted the window shade and looked down at what had become of Billings. She saw the remains of the big mid-century developments, paid for with out-of-state developer money in the years when everyone thought the Deluge Bowl migration would lead right across the Rockies into Montana and Idaho and the unburned parts of the Pacific Northwest, the high sheltered places.
But it never happened. Instead, the displaced millions had fled the coasts to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, because in those cities it was possible still to live within sight of the water and without sight of the country’s dying rural expanse. The coastal exodus never reached places like Billings, and all that developer money bought was a cluster of unfinished towers, whole suburbs curled up like shrimp tails around their own emptiness.
At the airport customs desk, the officer flipped lazily through Khadija’s Canadian passport. For a moment she thought he might ask her to remove her headscarf, but instead he stamped one of the pages with casual violence, slid the passport back, and waved her through.
Outside in the arrivals hall, she found a man holding a sign with her name on it. He wore an old-fashioned driver’s uniform.
“You Khadija?” the driver asked, mangling her name, using a long i the way some Americans do when they pronounce words like Iraq.
“Dr. Singh,” she replied. She set her bag on the ground and walked past him toward the exit, where a solitary old sedan sat parked. On the side of the ancient car were plastered the name and logo of the Riverbed Attestation Center.
“Hey, lady,” the driver began, but she did not respond. He sighed and picked up her suitcase and followed her to the car.
They drove toward Billings. She knew they would have to drive clear across town to get to the center. It was a deliberately unobtrusive place, nestled against a hillside amid otherwise uninhabited land.
“So you want to go straight to Riverbed?” the driver said, eyeing her in his rearview mirror.
“Yes,” Khadija replied. “No.”
“Well, which is it?”
“Take me there, but just drive around it, and then take me back to the hotel.”
“Lady, the hotel’s downtown, right off the exit here,” the driver said. “That’s an hour of extra driving you’re talking about.”
Khadija looked out the window, ignoring the driver. She’d forgotten how Americans spoke.
Along North 27th Street they drove past the remains of old Billings, the diners and auto shops and the sprawling offices of the Billings Gazette, all now plastered with FOR LEASE signs. The only pedestrian traffic trickled in and out of the pawnshops and the Hundred-Dollar-Or-Less stores and the immigration offices whose lawyers specialized in Canadian visas.
No sooner had the car reached the outskirts of the city than Khadija said, “Stop. Turn around.”
The driver glanced at her through the rearview. “What?”
“I changed my mind. Take me to the hotel.”
The driver tapped the steering wheel in exasperation. “Lady, I’m not…” he started, then fell silent. He slowed and turned into a clearing in the median, and soon the car was headed back to the city in which, fifty years earlier, Khadija once resided.
* * *
—
Father said he wasn’t worried. He said Americans are like this, brittle with privilege. Sometimes anger robs them of their senses and they make bad decisions, but in a way this was really just another testament to American greatness—how adept the United States was at surviving its endless self-inflicted wounds. We live in a good country, he said, and it will be good again.
On the television station that backed the winning candidate, the frothing pundit couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t even stop for breath, all his words like one long word. He said the people the everyday salt-of-the-earth people are angry do you hear that in the big cities in the ivory towers do you hear that the real people are angry and so what if the scientists had been right all this time what good is a temperate summer if all the good-paying refinery jobs are gone and Washington swipes half of every paycheck to spend on relocating some Fijian who didn’t know better than to leave that miserable little island before it sank into the ocean and anyway why’s that our problem it’s not our problem it’s not it’s not.
I watched, hypnotized. Father sat in his easy chair, occasionally shaking his head and saying how this was just the way the cycle worked—one time they vote for what they believe themselves to be and the next they get angry and vote for what they really are. You can’t let it bother you, he said.
I saw John outside, playing catch with his friend in the backyard, oblivious in that way only fifteen-year-old boys can be. And I was happy for his obliviousness, because although I was only three years older than him I’d learned by then to see obliviousness as the surest sign of belonging, and I wanted more than anything for him to feel he belonged.
I thought about what Mother would make of him, of all this, had she lived another year. I thought about the day she sat me down and said, Take care of your brother, Lydia, and take care of yourself; be at all times guarded. And never forget that this country despises above all else this thing they call people of color, sees them not as people at all but as harbingers of a future it can’t control. I remember liking that moniker: of color. What a thing to be in a country so black and white.
The man on TV said Americans are good people you know but they only vote one of two ways with their hearts or with their heads and let’s hope it’s not too late let’s hope it’s not too late but thank the Lord
this time they came to their senses and voted with their heads.
But it didn’t seem to me like they voted with their heads. It seemed like they voted with their fangs.
Two days later, Father went outside in the morning and our neighbors who were out mowing their lawns and washing their cars were all looking at him in a nervous, sidelong way—the way passing motorists look at a driver who’s been pulled over.
We lived back then in one of those suburbs where all the streets are named after flowers and the houses all look alike. The houses were descendants of the old Sears Craftsman homes. You used to be able to order them straight from the catalog. They were defined by their sameness, and in their sameness was a kind of evidence that you’d arrived in America—that you were finally done swirling around in the pot, that you’d finally melted.
At first my father didn’t understand why his neighbors were looking at him this way. Then he turned around and saw what had been spray-painted on our garage door. Two words in bright red, the tails of the letters melting like candle wax, the paint still fresh. The second word took up the entire width of the door and bore within it a history of cruelty so thick it became a compendium in itself—a word the saying and thinking of which had been the source of so much debate but whose saying and thinking had never been outlawed or even really punished, only the volume at which it could be said and the outward glee with which it could be thought. The second word spray-painted on our garage door was the only truly American word.
And the first word was SAND.
In the months that followed, the rumors started. You’d hear other kids and sometimes even the teachers whispering about it in school, about some oversized semis they’d seen coming down the 94, hauling prefabricated vinyl sheets and guard-tower platforms and reams and reams of barbed wire, going somewhere deep in the canyons. Best for everyone, they’d say. Keeps them safe, keeps us safe.
But at first it was just background noise.
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