by John Helfers
‘‘Clones?’’ The president grimaced in disapproval. ‘‘Can’t say I approve of that. Thought I signed a bill to make that illegal.’’
‘‘I wasn’t talking about that kind of clone,’’ the vice president said. ‘‘It’s like this. You see, when we get to where we’re going, there’s going to be another president there—that’s you—and another vice president— that’s me—sitting in the Oval Office. Our Oval Office. I mean, your Oval Office,’’ he added, correcting himself. ‘‘And we have to take their places. I mean we have to take our places in their place.’’
The president pursed his lips and screwed up his eyes even more, looking extremely perplexed.
‘‘Look at it this way,’’ the vice president said. ‘‘Think of that other guy who looks like you as an imposter. What he’s doing is taking up space that’s actually yours, and you can’t have two people in the same place at the same time. So you’re going to have to take him out.’’
‘‘Didn’t count on anything like that.’’ The president stared at his weapon. ‘‘Couldn’t we just send ’em back here? We’d be gone, and they could have our spots.’’
The vice president shook his head. ‘‘Too complicated. Might not even work. There’s no way to guarantee they’d even end up here.’’
‘‘Yeah, but who cares?’’ The president’s voice rose to a whine that could have shattered glass. ‘‘At least we wouldn’t have to kill them, and they’d still be alive.’’
That didn’t sound like the guy who had refused to pardon any of those inmates on death row while he was still governor. On the other hand, it did sound like the guy who had made sure he had landed a cushy berth in the Air National Guard during wartime. ‘‘Too complicated,’’ the vice president said. ‘‘We’d have to convince them to go, maybe force them to leave. Tie up the loose ends—shoot’m and be done with it.’’
‘‘I dunno.’’
The vice president struggled to contain his exasperation. If the president got cold feet now, well, he wasn’t about to wait around here and get impeached and removed from office, even if he did have to get rotated by himself. And if the president started blathering about the Rotator to those Fox News gasbags and all the other sycophants he had been inviting to the White House more frequently these days, they’d just assume that he had finally cracked under all the pressure.
‘‘You’re up to it,’’ the deputy chief of staff piped up. ‘‘You’ve got the balls for it.’’ His eyes roved around the room, then peered at the president through his thick glasses. ‘‘Look at it this way—that look-alike’ll be taking up a space that’s rightfully yours. You’ll need to take his place if you’re going to go after all those goddamn liberals and lefties. You’re the decider, not him.’’
‘‘Besides,’’ the vice president added, glad of the help as he picked up the conversational ball that the deputy chief of staff had thrown his way, ‘‘you won’t be able to go after the terrorists here if you’re impeached. But once you’re rotated, you can go after them there.’’
The president’s face brightened. His eyes took on a glow. ‘‘Then I guess we better get goin’.’’
The vice president had been somewhat apprehensive about being rotated, even though he had been assured that his pacemaker would remain unaffected. To his relief, the rippling of the air and the sudden feeling of disorientation passed quickly, leaving him feeling only slightly nauseated afterward. It helped to be inside a tank, and he didn’t bother to ask about looking through the periscopes to see what was going on outside.
‘‘We’re rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, sir,’’ the officer sitting in front of him at the commander’s station announced. ‘‘We should be passing the Old Executive Office Building in about five minutes or so.’’
‘‘Any sign of trouble?’’ the vice president asked.
‘‘Folks are just watching us pass,’’ the officer at the gunner’s station replied, ‘‘like we’re some kind of parade.’’
Good, the vice president thought. He had been wondering if they might encounter some of the groups that had been gathering outside the White House in recent days, knots of people who looked mean and angry and carried signs with obnoxious slogans like IMPEACH THE COMMANDER-IN-THIEF and REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME and MY TOYOTA GOT BOMBED BECAUSE IT’S SMALL, FOREIGN, AND FULL OF OIL and other phrases that dared to compare him and the president to Nazis and criminals. Apparently, they’d arrived in a variant where the citizenry was more docile and less likely to cause them any trouble, which would make it easier to do what they had to do now.
At last the tank rolled to a halt. Two officers climbed out ahead of him, while another was just behind him, ready to help heave him out of the vehicle if necessary. He was panting by the time he clambered over the side. The driver was already standing below him, and held out an arm to help the vice president down to the ground.
The sky was cloudless and blue, the morning air crisp and cool without a hint of global warming. By now, his wife would have taken care of her counterpart and, with the help of the trusted aides and Secret Service officers with her, secured the vice presidential residence. Other officers and aides were climbing out of tanks and sprinting across the White House gardens,knowing that they would not be challenged; after all, the vice president was with them.
He looked around and finally spotted the president; it was important that they head for the Oval Office together. He waited as the president trotted up to his side. ‘‘All set?’’ the vice president growled.
‘‘Yeah.’’ The president had taken on his steely-eyed look, the expression he occasionally wore whenever that old bag who was still hanging on in the White House press corps shot off one of her more impertinent questions at a press conference.
The vice president slipped a hand inside his pocket, feeling his weapon; too bad all those jokers who insisted on making wisecracks about all of his draft deferments would never know that he could be one hell of a brave warrior when it counted. ‘‘Then let’s go,’’ he muttered.
He and the president were the last ones to enter the White House. They made it all the way through the hallways without seeing anything more disturbing than a glimpse of the deputy chief of staff standing over his dead counterpart before the door to his office closed. It would have been a lot easier if the bodies could just fade away and disappear, the way they had done in a sci-fi TV series he used to watch, but the Rotator didn’t work that way; the DARPA researchers had told him that they would have to dispose of the bodies themselves.
Two Secret Service men, two that the vice president could trust completely, were moving down the corridor ahead of him and the president. Among other things, the pair had made sure that the Veep wasn’t left holding the bag when that clumsy pal of his got in the way during their hunting excursion and ended up with a face full of buckshot. A couple of Secret Service officers were outside the northwest door to the Oval Office, and maybe it was just his imagination, but they both looked just a little bit heavier than their two rapidly approaching counterparts.
‘‘Mr. President?’’ one of them said, looking puzzled. ‘‘Nobody alerted us.’’ He tapped at his earpiece.
‘‘Thought you were still inside,’’ and then his ey
es widened as he stared at his own twin.
The president cackled. ‘‘Thought I’d slip out into the Rose Garden and catch some of that nice weather we’re havin’. Decided to take the long way around and come back inside this way.’’ He struck his chest. ‘‘Stayin’ in shape. Every little bit helps.’’
Even as the Commander-in-Chief was yacking, the four Secret Service men were reaching for their weapons, but the two who had been rotated, knowing what was coming, had drawn theirs just a second or two faster. They aimed and fired, one round each, right at the heads of their alternate selves, and two men lay dead on the floor. The vice president reflexively clutched at his chest, hoping his pacemaker would hold up under the strain; this was where things could have really gone wrong, and they weren’t exactly out of the woods yet. The president had a sickly look on his face, as if he was about to toss his cookies.
They passed through the door into the Oval Office. A quick look around the large round space revealed that the same volumes of history the president had lately been browsing through were still on the bookshelves, the same paintings of Western scenes still hung on the walls, the same slightly uncomfortable sofas faced each other, and the same brightly colored rug with the presidential seal lay on the floor. He stared past the sofas and the rug with the seal and saw the two men right where he had expected them to be. The president’s counterpart was behind his desk and his own doppleganger sat in one of the armchairs near a window.
The sight of his double unnerved him for a moment. He hadn’t realized how bald he was getting, and how jowly his face was, but those cold glittering eyes behind his spectacles looked reassuringly familiar.
‘‘What the fuck?’’ his double muttered.
The president’s double stood up behind the desk. The vice president was reaching inside his pocket for his gun when, next to him, the president shouted, ‘‘No-body else gets to be me!’’
‘‘What’re you talkin’ about?’’ the president’s double said.
‘‘I’m the president, and you’re takin’ up my space!’’ The president whipped out his gun and fired. ‘‘I’m the president!’’ he shouted as his double fell across the desk, nearly drowning out the staccato sound of the vice president’s gun as he shot his own twin.
The balding man fell. A red stain was spreading across his chest. ‘‘Fuck you,’’ his doppleganger said with his last dying breath.
‘‘Fuck you,’’ the vice president replied, aiming carefully, and shot him again.
‘‘Holy shit,’’ the president whispered. They sat down on the sofas, facing each other, and waited for the cleanup crew who had been rotated with them to arrive.
It was taking the president a while to recover. The two bodies, their heads covered by black hoods before they’d been stuffed into body bags, had been taken away. The laptop the vice president had requested had been brought to him, and still the president was sitting at his desk, staring up at the presidential seal on the ceiling, perhaps seeking some heavenly guidance. He looked like he could use a stiff drink, and the vice president could have used one himself, but that would have to wait until he was back at his own place. He and his wife could toast themselves with some of that single-malt he kept in one of his underground vaults.
An hour of Googling various news sites and blogs had already told him what he needed to know. In this variant, they’d held on to a majority in the Senate and had a two-seat edge in the House—slim margins, but enough so that they wouldn’t have to worry about hearings or oversight, let alone any impeachment proceedings. There would be no challenges to claims of executive privilege or declarations of extraordinary powers. They had landed in a place where their people were worthy of their efforts, where they’d be free to secure the world’s resources and their own interests and cement their status as the world’s one and only superpower. He thought of what the DARPA scientists had told him about the possibility of events being mirrored across the continua. That might mean that if they succeeded here, then they’d be increasing the odds of America’s dominating all of the other variants as well. Maybe well out to infinity.
Master of the multiverse, he thought. The title had a kind of appealing ring to it.
The president coughed. ‘‘This is weirding me out,’’ he said from behind his desk.
‘‘What’s weirding you out?’’
‘‘Can’t figure out if I’m the president or an assassin.’’
The vice president was about to reply when he heard the door behind him open. He turned to face himself, a gun in his hand, with the President standing right behind him. ‘‘What the fuck?’’ he muttered, and then a hammer struck him in the chest.
He fell forward, then rolled to one side. Somebody was shouting; he recognized the president’s voice. ‘‘I’m the decider,’’ he was shouting, ‘‘and nobody else gets to be me!’’
The vice president looked up and saw a dark form bending over him. ‘‘Fuck you,’’ he managed to say, wondering how many times this was going to happen.
‘‘Fuck you,’’ his double responded before everything went black.
ACIREMA THE RELLIK
by Robert T. Jeschonek
Robert T. Jeschonek has written fantasy and science fiction stories for Postscripts, Abyss & Apex, Loyalhanna Review, ScienceFictionFantasyHorror.com, and other magazines and Web sites. He has also written for War, Commercial Suicide, Dead by Dawn Quarterly, and other comic books. Robert’s Star Trek fiction has appeared in an e-book and anthologies, including New Frontier: No Limits, Voyager: Distant Shores, and Strange New Worlds Volumes III, V, and VI. His story, ‘‘Our Million-Year Mission,’’ won the grand prize in Pocket’s Strange New Worlds VI contest. Robert has worked in radio, television, and public relations, and currently works as a technical writer for a defense contractor in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. His Web site, www.robertjeschonek.com, features news, original fiction and The Flog, a fictionalized blog with an emphasis on fantasy.
THE GREAT STATE of Missouri lay across the Speaker’s bench at the front of the House of E-REPRESENTATIVES, wrapped in the American flag. His eyes and mouth gaped, and his arms and legs hung over the sides, dripping blood on the carpet below.
‘‘Oh, God,’’ said Connecticut, her shaky hand hoveringover Missouri’s motionless chest. ‘‘He’s not breathing.’’
Manitoba stood on the next tier down and wouldn’t come any closer. ‘‘Is there a—what’s it called? Heartbeat?’’
Connecticut lowered her hand, then jerked it away. ‘‘That’s in the throat, right?’’ Nervously, she scrubbed her palms on her smart red pantsuit. ‘‘Or is it the arm?’’
That was when Nevada had finally had enough.
Without a word, he pushed his tall, lanky body through the crowd on the floor of the House and charged up the steps to the Speaker’s bench. Without hesitation, he pressed two fingers against the side of Missouri’s throat and felt for a pulse.
But nothing was there.
‘‘No pulse.’’ Nevada said it loud enough for the whole crowd to hear. ‘‘The Speaker of the House is dead.’’
A great gasp went up from the crowd—the computer-generated, artificial intelligence-driven avatars of ninety-eight of the one-hundred states of the United States of America. Though none of them had flesh-and-blood bodies that could be murdered in the physical sense, they were stunned by what they had seen and heard.
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‘‘But how?’’ Connecticut slipped off her gold-rimmed glasses, let them hang by the diamond-studded chain around her neck . . . then slid them back on a second later. ‘‘And why?’’
Nevada pushed up the sleeves of his tuxedo. He took Missouri’s head in his hands and turned it gently to one side, exposing a gruesome wound. ‘‘Blow to the back of the head.’’ Accepting the wound for what it appeared to be instead of what it was—an electronic simulation of a wound—he looked around for a simulated weapon that could have caused it. ‘‘What did it and why, I don’t know.’’
‘‘What’s that?’’ Connecticut pointed at bloody marks on Missouri’s left arm.
Nevada put Missouri’s head down on the bench and walked over to look at the arm. Wiping some of the blood away, he realized the marks followed a familiar design.
Someone had cut a number into Missouri’s arm. ‘‘One hundred,’’ said Nevada. ‘‘It’s the number one hundred.’’
The crowd murmured and moved restlessly. Nevada could tell the e-reps were confused because they usually acted more decisively.
They were AI avatars of the United States, guided by the aggregate preferences of the human electorate in the world outside. Perfectly attuned to the people they represented, perfectly immune to corruption, they never hesitated or doubted themselves.
That was why their confusion was unusual . . . and it didn’t last long. As Nevada examined the body on the Speaker’s bench, three of the e-reps broke from the pack and stormed toward him with jaws and shoulders set.
Sinaloa, in the middle, flipped his red-lined bull-fighter’s cape over his shoulder. ‘‘This is impossible.’’ An American state since Mexico had disbanded twenty-five years ago, Sinaloa cultivated an air of insolence and false bravado. ‘‘What we see here is the product of a server malfunction.’’