Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America

by Damien Lincoln Ober

  “We swore loyalty to America,” M’Kean says. “Not to a political philosophy, not to a party.”

  “All this time you’ve been persecuting the press, twisting arms in the back rooms of Washington, I’ve been in Santo Domingo, helping Toussaint kick Napoleon’s armies off the hemisphere. Scared that Corsican troglodyte into selling off instead of turning Louisiana into a French colony.” McIntosh’s look hardens into a dark ironic smile. “You know what would have happened in New Orleans if not for me? We’d be fighting the French all up and down the Mississippi. We’d be forced to fall back under the crown for protection. Now the country’s twice as big, the presidency itself is vindicated and we’re still free and independent. For all Jefferson’s slick political maneuvers, it’s the Louisiana Purchase that’s locked up his second term. So don’t lecture me about parties and politics, Governor M’Kean.”

  “You can’t run side projects,” one twin says.

  “Just because you think they’re good for America.”

  “Not in a republic.”

  M’Kean tilts his head. “They’re right, Lachlan. Washington is gone. C. C. Pinckney’s a good enough guy, but he’s no Washington. And who’ll be president of the SOC after Pinckney, after we’re all gone and the Society is in the hands of men who don’t remember what it was like building this country? You want to leave a lesson for those guys that the SOC can do whatever it thinks best, President and people be damned? Fifty years before they’re marching on the Capitol. Now there’s your curse.”

  Suddenly, the vat begins to bubble. “Who touched something?” But no one has moved. The liquid is bubbling on its own.

  “That’s Francis Hopkinson.” McIntosh watches one twin’s face as he says it. Which is just as good as watching both. The mention of their old ally has terrified them. “Oh, I am well aware of what you boys did to Francis Hopkinson. And so is he. All so Mr. Jefferson could have unchallenged control of the Dream. Well, you can explain it to Hopkinson when he gets here.”

  At first neither twin reacts, but it’s clear they’re all—M’Kean and Walton, too—thinking about what’s just been said. Francis Hopkinson is coming here, into the real?

  “A two‐way portal,” one twin says.

  “You open it, McIntosh, and you may not be able to control what comes out.”

  “From Newnet, the Dream or from the old Internet.” “There’s worse things than Francis Hopkinson in there.” “A lot worse.” “And lots of them, too.”

  McIntosh’s hand emerges and there’s that pearl‐handled pistol, must have had it tucked into a sleeve or something, some old soldier’s trick. M’Kean squeezes his trigger but nothing happens. A misfire. A shot rings out, then rings as it ricochets off different metal surfaces in the room. Impossible to tell where it came from or for whom it was intended. Steam spurts from somewhere now. McIntosh has his gun leveled, pulls the trigger, but a twin knocks M’Kean out of the way. They both go tumbling to the floor, lost in those thickening sheets of vapor. Pistol fire from the other twin. McIntosh winces, straightens. Blood already spreading down the front of his shirt like something grizzly spilled. He takes a deep breath, lifts his gun for another shot.

  For one brief instant, George Walton sees the young Lachlan McIntosh, just as he looked that morning so long ago when he rid the world of that blowhard Button Gwinnett. McIntosh fires and the last standing twin crumples into the waist‐high steam. McIn‐tosh half‐turns, half‐stumbles, lands with his chest against the lip of the vat. He’s trying to lift those legs that look like dead things hanging off him. Walton can’t decide: Help Lachlan in, or help M’Kean and the twins stop him. What waits on the other side of that portal? Francis Hopkinson, after all this time, back to the real? Or something else, the program, The Death, all those haunts and drones?

  M’Kean’s voice comes out from the steam, “Walton, keep him out of the vat!” A fire has started its way up two of the room’s walls. The wooden stairs—the only way out—are ablaze now, too. M’Kean and one twin are emerging from the steam and smoke, struggling to their feet.

  Behind them, the staircase collapses, crashing to the floor in an avalanche of flaming boards. Walton picks one up, holds it above his head. “Well, boys,” he shouts, “I guess we all die here!” The board pinwheels from his hand, end over end, a wheel of flame rolling through the air. It sails past McIntosh’s shoulder and into the vat. A hiss, a moment of stillness and then the entire surface ignites. Fingers of blue and purple flame turn golden then orange at the very tips. The sides of the vat burst and the fire spills out, sloshing and splashing across the floor.

  Walton can feel the oxygen sucking past him. The force of it slams the trap door above, shatters it into loose timber that comes hurtling down where the spiral stairs used to be. The sound is like another gunshot. And when all that air reaches the lab, that’s it. The entire place goes—vats, computers, all the cross‐portal equipment back and forth to the Dream. Everything. And everyone inside…

  Robert Morris :: May 9th 1806

  Benjamin Rush came when he heard his old friend had taken a turn for the worse. Kind of turn—pretty clear to the doctor— that one does not turn back from. W. H. Harrison showed up not long after, sprinted a few different horses all the way back from the western frontier to see his old mentor one last time. Now W. H. has ass on chair tip, leaned forward to be most bed‐side. Rush is more rolled back, sits there nodding through all of Morris’s complaints about The Life of George Washington, the first comprehensive database of an American President. Just been released into Newnet, and it’s taking the Dream and the real by storm. Citizens everywhere are right now hyper‐linking their own paths through, portaling from one amazing Washington feat to the next, dragging favorite quotes to their Brainpage status, unveiling timeless wisdoms as they relive the Revolution in code.

  “Rubbish,” Morris says. “Total rubbish.” He hands the old smartpad to Rush, who lays it inanimate on the bedside table.

  “Maybe it’s better,” W. H. says, “if you read it on a smartpalm or in the Dream, like it was intended.”

  Morris holds out his palms to show how neither is smart.

  Rush has been through this new database a few times himself. Its most startling feature is its narrative consistency. Takes everything the Old Man ever did and makes a clear arc right through— brazen heroic youth to martial greatness to patriarch to immortal.

  If someone someday makes a database of Morris’s life, what story you see will depend on where you click. In 1776, he was the richest man in the colonies, the financial power behind the Revolution. Shipping magnate, Signer of the Declaration, the Articles and the Constitution, too, Finance Minister, railroad man, balloon man, patron of the arts, prisoner, political outcast, land‐poor defaulter, bankrupt charity case, and now here he is, dying dirt poor in a hard‐scrabble one room, nothing to his name but that old busted smart‐pad, a couple of wobbly chairs, little nightstand, cobwebs and torn cloth curtains. Rush has seen the rise and fall and decline of quite a few patriots and Signers; perhaps this ending state is saddest of all.

  “Washington,” Morris says, “has whole sections of the Cloud sectioned off for his memory. More important dead than he ever was alive. Me, they’ll just roll into the ground.”

  Rush pushes a raised pointer finger against his smile. “Sshhh,” he says. “Don’t say anything bad about George Washington.”

  Morris smiles, too. But not W. H. This is the first time he’s been present when something even tangentially critical has been uttered about the Founding Father himself. This is Off‐the‐Grid they’re talking about, the Old Man! Seeing this look, Morris tells his old pupil, “Don’t be so inflexible, William. No one’s challenging the memory of George Washington. Just the reality of that memory.” A wink of the old Robert Morris. “The doctor here, he was questioning the legend before the legend was a legend.”

  Rush steps back decades in the room. “I really did think Washington was going to sink the Revolution. And I was
n’t the only one. Tom Mifflin, Richard Henry Lee. And if it weren’t for The Death, he probably would have. Gone down in history as a domestic terrorist, this whole America thing just a stunted colonial revolt.” The doctor taps his chin, says wistfully, “I still think we could have won it in ’75.”

  Morris sort of asks then—but more like demands—to be moved from the bed so he, “can get a little bit of sun before I die.” W. H. and Rush look around at the dreary one room. No sun outside and certainly not in this place. Been a cloud cover over the whole of Pennsylvania these last few days. Everything in and out, all drenched in gloom. But when W. H. gets his mentor down into one of those rickety chairs, the sun actually does break loose, comes blasting through the pulled‐open curtains. The light revives Morris a bit, gives him a little burst of energy. Rush sits in the other chair as W. H. stalks the room with leaned‐over stillness. “Washington,” Morris is saying, “got his ass kicked in New York. Never would have pulled it together if I hadn’t flipped the bill for him to go off the grid. Off the grid! He may have been off the grid, but he was on Robert Morris’s bank roll. And I don’t see any links to that.”

  Morris takes a drink of water, makes Rush wonder how long that same glass has been there with that same water in it. “It wasn’t a war of military strategy, but a war of finance. How do we afford to move the army here? How do we pay to move it there? When we finally did persuade the Old Man to move on Yorktown, the question was never how, but how much. How much of Robert Morris’s money was it going to take to finish this thing? All George Washington had to do was nod that big head of his. Everyone could see it fine, sitting up high like it always was.”

  Rush slaps his knee.

  “You must, of course, never repeat these things, William. And you must never, ever say them in the Dream. Some kid someday flicks to the history page of Robert Morris and sees he was a heretic.”

  “Seems to me,” Rush says, “you made a little scratch off that war yourself, Robert.”

  Morris smiles at the sentence.

  “Without the Old Man in the way,” Rush says, “distracting the people with those spells of charisma, this place is starting to shape up like that America we all talked about so much during the Revolution.” He leans back, props one leg on the bulb of his knee.

  W. H. pipes in, “Czar Alexander and Emperor Bonaparte will sew up the English Channel any day now. The sea will finally be free of the Royal Navy. And all these wars—and all their rippling messes—will all be history.”

  “You guys sure sound optimistic,” Morris tells them. “But any day now has been any day now for as long as I can remember. And Europe is still at war.”

  “You should see the West, Mr. Morris. The entire Ohio country’s filling with new Americans. From all over the world they’ve come. Everyone knows we got peace and democracy and free New‐net and that you can make a little do‐re‐me in this country with some plans of your own.”

  Morris makes a face like he’s eaten another of those rotten cherries from that tree George Washington was so honest about chopping down, oh so long ago. “Put wireless in the woods and of course it’ll fill up with smartdevices. And each smartdevice has to have a person attached, right?” Morris has a finger wagging. “You should try getting burned by both parties, my boy. It can be quite liberating. Frees you to find the ridiculous in each.” Morris shakes his head. “Don’t have anything against Tom Jefferson personally, or even politically. Not really. But man, those henchmen of his play it so rough. Still smiting from that shit M’Kean pulled on me back in ’00.”

  Rush remembers when Tom M’Kean first started riding around the state in early 1800. Most people thought he was on assignment for the Society of Cincinnati, but Rush knew right away what he was up to. M’Kean had started working for Jefferson. County by county he went, embarrassing the local Federalists by tying them to Robert Morris. The old financier’s real estate gambles had all gone bad. It was the last straw in a growing pile of financial disasters for the state’s most visible symbol of Federalism. The deal had landed Morris in debtors’ prison, which was all the example M’Kean and Jefferson needed. If the head of the state party can’t keep his books in order, what does it say about the rest of the PA Federalists? Man, was M’Kean rubbing it in, and on Robert Morris of all people, locked away in debtors’ prison where he couldn’t say a thing back. M’Kean got the whole state legislature swung over to Jefferson, and all of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes with it—Federalists never knew what hit them. Rush smirks in spite of himself. It was pretty sweet. But why they had to do it so mean, and to a Signer too. Rush remembers when Morris finally did get out of prison; the man was just plain emasculated. Balls never did grow back. One of the many events over the years which disassembled Robert Morris, piece by piece.

  Morris says, “Wish I could go back in time. Bring that old Robert Morris here to be the one who’s dying. Maybe he could do it with some dignity.”

  “It was nothing personal,” Rush assures him. “Jefferson had that going on in every state. Burr in New York, M’Kean here in Pennsylvania. Chuck Pinckney down in South Carolina—last man to see Ed Rutledge alive. Bottom line, the Federalists had to be stopped. Adams, Hamilton, fuck, they had the Old Man out again.”

  Morris shakes his head. “It’s true. Those high Federalists were on a rampage. And you’re right—someone had to stop them. I don’t hold nothing against anyone. But let us assume France does win this war in Europe. You think that’s going to satisfy Napoleon Bonaparte? No. Whoever wins is coming over here next.” He indicates the state of the room, its abject squalor. “I paid for the last war and look how I was treated.” Morris leaves his gaze resting on the ramshackle furniture, the huge, swirling fists of dust that haunt the bare floor. Slowly a smile creeps onto his face, wistful and past‐looking. “It was thirty years ago, Ben, that we signed that thing.” In half a daydream, Morris pulls from his inner pocket a piece of paper.

  “It’s your letter,” Rush says, laying a hand gently over his own breast pocket. He wants to ask Morris what it contains, but the doctor knows full well that no Signer is going to share the contents of his Jefferson letter.

  Morris let the paper flop open so he can stare into the leaning script. “Jefferson is a puzzle that lies at the center of a maze. Just when you think you might know where you’re going, the walls start moving around. The puzzle goes quantum, hides its angles in dimensions only Thomas Jefferson has visited. Strange physics apply in those places.” Morris looks away from the page, at the echoes it leaves on his vision. “You get in Thomas Jefferson’s way, you end up in the dirt like General Hamilton or Jim Callender. Or running around mad like Aaron Burr. On an Off‐Worlder ship maybe. Or worse. Maybe end up like Robert Morris.”

  “Colonel Hamilton,” Rush corrects.

  “But there’s one piece still left undone.” Morris finishes a broad scan of his letter, folds it and slips it back into that threadbare coat. “If Jefferson is going to really win, complete the Revolution as you say, he’s going to need to do something about George Washington.”

  W. H. looks just as confused as Rush. “George Washington is dead.”

  Morris indicates that smartpad, The Life of George Washington, a spine of hyperlinks leading any way you choose through the high, sweeping epic of the age that birthed the nation. “No matter how dead the General is, no matter how large the country gets, how high the population numbers soar, how low the taxes fall, someone’s always going to point to George Washington and start talking about the good old days. And who’s going to argue with that? At least in public anyway.” Morris shakes his head. “Jefferson can have his minions hunt down every Federalist in the North, the South and the Cloud. He can annex Florida and Northern Mexico and Cuba and Canada, too. Hypnotize every Indian into loyal Enlightenment Americans. He can eliminate the judicial branch for good. Get elected over and over, and he probably will. He’ll probably do all of it. And it’ll probably be good for the country, too. He’s already remade th
is whole place once, and I have a feeling he’s just getting started. But taking George Washington down out of the Cloud, that’s a program not even Thomas Jefferson can code.”

  Morris collects himself one last time. “Jefferson versus Washington, way up in the Cloud’s cloud, in the dream of the Dream. Ain’t two men worse to tangle with, alive or dead. If I were still a card‐carrying Federalist, I’d run and hide while I still could. William,” he says. “you’re going to have to tell me someday how it all comes out.”

  Morris turns his face into the thick beam of sunlight. It comes through the window, all the way down from the broken‐open Pennsylvania sky. Falls flat on him to chase away the shadows and a good chunk of years. A slightly younger Robert Morris goes still, then. His brief opportunity to affect the history of the universe has winked away.

  George Wythe :: June 8th 1806

  No one can figure out what happened to George Wythe. Each of the three doctors brought in have theories that overlap only slightly. These are the best doctors in Richmond and thus (according to Richmonders) the best in all the South. But the only thing they seem good for is posting their half‐baked theories to Newnet. Guys treat the Dream like their own personal sounding board, a place to store random ideas no matter how thin and unsubstantiated. When one posts a passing thought that maybe what’s got Wythe is the first case of The Death in something like two decades, doesn’t take but half a recycle for all the Dream to be atwitter with speculation and counter‐speculation. People with only second‐ and third‐hand information feel plenty informed to participate in the crowdsource. Non‐doctors berate the “experts” and their tyrannical monopoly on the interpretation of data. Federalist screamers snap back from life support to sing the end of Jefferson, blaming the yet‐unconfirmed outbreak on the liberalization of immigration policies and the reckless expansion and socialization of Newnet.