Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America

by Damien Lincoln Ober

  The only person no one is listening to is George Wythe. Every few hours he’ll draw enough strength together to tell the doctors what really happened. “He came from the Dream,” he keeps saying. But they chalk his fractured story up as just another symptom. Vomiting, diarrhea, light sensitivities, wild non‐linear thoughts. Wythe lays there all but paralyzed; his tale never cracks the shell of the room. Never makes it to the Dream.

  During Wythe’s third full day of spiraling toward death, a fourth visitor joins the Richmond doctors. Comes into the sick room with a large canvas bag. Rests the bag on the floor and pulls a chair close to the bed. His head is covered with a hood. He wears thick, dark glasses, making his eyes all but invisible.

  “Thomas?” Wythe inquires. “Thomas, is that you?”

  “No,” the man says. “The President is sorry he could not be here.” The hood draws off. Glasses pulled to rest in his lap. If there were another twin left, there’s no way they could be identical anymore. What chance could there be of two separate men being injured this same way, then healing the same way, all to end up with identical four‐pronged scars like the one that wraps this face? Looks like the flaming hand of the devil has been laid on his cheek, left there until the searing reached bone.

  “Thought you were dead,” Wythe manages weekly.

  “That was the conventional wisdom…” and realizing there’s no one there to finish his sentence, “… was in a coma for six months.” He holds up his right arm, revealing no arm south of the elbow.

  Wythe’s hand, moving for the first time in days, lays atop the last of what was once four identical hands. “I remember when Thomas first made you two. And now your brother is gone.” Wythe eyes the grizzly face. “Still don’t understand how M’Kean got out without a scratch.”

  “He’s M’Kean,” a smile pressed across the twisted flesh. “Mr. Wythe, I need you to tell me what happened.”

  “It came from the Dream.” Wythe’s tongue appears, to spread moisture across his lips. It dries and is gone. He offers nothing more.

  “Mr. Wythe keeps saying he was attacked by a drone. But where would the matter come from?”

  “Maybe it was John Marshall’s boys,” another doctors offers. “Trying to send the President a message. Take out his old mentor, the last Republican in Richmond. I’m going to post it.”

  The twin holds up a hand to silence the doctors.

  Wythe coughs, clears his throat. “He brought me there. Into the Dream. He was a drone.” Wythe stops, exhausted by the effort. “We came out again and I was there… really there…”

  The doctors exchange confused looks.

  “What did he show you, Mr. Wythe?”

  Wythe takes a deep breath. “Through the Dream and New‐net. Crossed through the old Internet, too. All these big frames… the uncompleted firmware of 3net. Way out, out to the west and there it was, right there below us. The Fissure.” Wythe looks into the twin’s eyes, sees them swimming with knowledge. “What is it? What does Thomas know?”

  “Some rather credible intelligence of a pending attack, Mr. Wythe. An invasion, from the deepest sectors of the old Internet. Can you tell me who it was that came to you?”

  If he could move enough, Wythe would shrug.

  The twin shares a look with the doctors and one of them leaves. Probably to get the priest, though nothing is said. Wythe mumbles a few sounds more before the room goes quiet. In the silence, the twin turns from the bed, digs into the bag he’s brought with him, lifts a contraption out to show Wythe, a crude leather helmet covered with wires and transistors. Wythe’s interest piques a breath of energy. The old knight of the Enlightenment. “Is it… Thomas’s design?”

  “You know of Mr. Jefferson’s collages. A bit from this, a bit from that.”

  “It’s going to show you what I saw?”

  “More or less… but it’s quite a taxing procedure.”

  “You mean, I might not survive it.”

  “Everyone we’ve tried it on has. But they’re all young men. Sleep for a day or two. A hangover of sorts.”

  “Haven’t got long either way,” and he indicates to put it on. “If this can help Thomas… then we’d better get… started.”

  The twin eases the cap over the front of Wythe’s forehead, lets loose a light leather flap that folds over the old man’s eyes. He presses a button, and invisible signals dart backward through the air, connecting to the smartpalm on that one remaining hand. Soundlessly, the machine begins to act. There in the palm of the twin’s hand, Wythe’s memories come to life. “My God.”

  Wythe, with his last breaths, “You’ve seen this before.”

  The twin nods. Inside his palm a section of cracked‐open earth, huge jagged shelves of ancient rock framing a gorge of molten lava, flames lapping skyward to bend the air. “In Michigan territory,” the twin says. “This is where Bartlett threw that first crystal. But… this is not what it looked like when we were there.” The skin of his palm returns to its customized main menu, severed from the brain it was connected to. Well, not so much severed, as the feed is gone. The absence brings the twin back to the room, back from the edge of that Fissure, way out west.

  The doctors are leaning over to see the finality. “Well,” one says, “let’s hope it’s not contagious.”

  James Smith :: July 11th 1806

  Twenty miles outside Eerie. Directly west. That’s where James Smith has just moved all that’s left of his existence, what little there is. For twenty years, he’d been off the grid, and not just off the Newnet grid—off the grid altogether. Hidden from society in all its forms, real and virtual. But then last week something happened that forced Smith out of the hole he’d dug in the surface of reality. His mansion—tucked between hills on the eastern edge of Bucks County—burned to the ground. A day later, winds came sweeping in from the west and blew it flat, a grayscale stain streaking the landscape. Not a thing left but the clothes on his back. Which is how James Smith likes it best. That old mansion was okay, but too much life dust had shaken off him there. Place was creating an echo a little too close to real.

  About a week after moving out to his new home, James Smith can’t believe it when he looks out his window one late afternoon. And strolling up the foot path to his front door is the former Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr.

  When James Smith opens the door, the colonel asks him, “Well, Jim, what do you think?”

  Smith waits for Burr to duck his way through the door. And then the door’s closed and everything’s back to how it was a few minutes ago, except now there are two men in the cabin. “What do I think about what?” Smith asks.

  “When you signed the Declaration of Independence, I asked you what you thought about it and you said ask me again in thirty years.”

  “Haven’t thought about that stuff, since, oh, the Constitution, pretty much.”

  Burr smiles. “That’s right, you’ve been off the grid. Way off? Burr takes a few bold steps, letting his boot heels clack hard and sharp against the floor. The wall opposite bulges with heat, a small Franklin stove cooking the place right up. “Pittsburgh?” Burr asks. “All but off the map now, too.”

  “Map keeps getting bigger.”

  “No computer? An old textphone, maybe?”

  “No Internet, new or old. No the Franklin’s Dream.”

  “You can just say the Dream. Or Dream. And it’s Patrick Henry’s Dream America now, for whatever that’s worth.” Burr ponders it. “That fire of yours must have burned the bottom of the sky. Was the point so someone like me could track you down after all this time? Are you looking to get involved again, Jim?”

  “You heard about the fire?”

  “Heard about it? I’ve seen it. Everyone has. Went viral, all over the Cloud, for a couple of days anyway. ‘Signer’s home burns to the ground.’” Burr holds up a finger for James Smith to either see or count. “Your house burning down’s not a moment anymore. It’s forever in Newnet. I bet it’s happening right now some
where, for someone.”

  “And you guys wonder why I’ve been out so long.”

  “Jim, was your Jefferson letter in there?”

  “How do you know about Jefferson’s letters?”

  Burr grins one of several grins he employs. “Thought maybe it was just a rumor, until now. Would love to get my hands on one of those letters. Maybe it’s a way out of this one for me.”

  “Well, mine’s burned up with everything else.”

  Burr appreciates it. “We’re going to need a man who can live off the grid, Jim. These guys have the Cloud locked down, Newnet, the Dream, the whole fucking thing. Eliminating the opposition, in groups and one by one. They’ll be coming for you soon, too.”

  “Which guys? Who’s going to come for me?”

  “Someone with the smell of Jefferson on him. The Governor probably.”

  “M’Kean? What’s he care about whether I’m still alive? I haven’t been a part of this fight since before the dissolve.”

  “M’Kean’s been busting heads all across the state. Throwing Federalist screamers in jail, canceling Brainpage profiles, if you know what I mean. Oily snake even married his daughter to the Spanish minister. Like he’s some feudal lord, assimilating fiefdoms. Who do you think set fire to your house?”

  “I know exactly who set fire to my house, and it wasn’t Tom M’Kean. It was me.”

  Burr is genuinely surprised, not an easy feat. “But why?”

  Smith tosses a log into the fire. Leaves him with a chunk of bark in his hand. He puts a sliver in his mouth and chews. “Get rid of my data.”

  “Your data?”

  “Don’t give me that, Burr. You were there. We did some pretty dark shit back then. Back during the Revolution.”

  Burr waves his hand, but then his eyes settle, settle on that fire. “The Death was happening, remember? Washington had vanished. Seemed like it had all fallen apart. I was a kid, pretty much. Me, you, Read. M’Kean, too. He was a different man back then.”

  “We all were.”

  “You still got some of that old James Smith in you?” Smith chews some more on that bark, says firmly, “We did what we did. But not anymore. Data’s all gone. I die and the guilt dies with me. But you, you’ve been a busy man since leaving office, morally speaking.”

  Burr smiles wistfully. “It was the President’s idea. Lure Hamilton into an affair of honor, let him flail and embarrass himself and back down in the end. Sounds easy enough. Of course, when the plan didn’t go as planned, who’s left holding the bag while Jefferson whistles out the other side?” Burr’s smile looks the same but frozen. “They say I went mad, will be saying it all through the rest of history.” But he does have to give it to Jefferson. I played a rough one too, he thinks. Really rough. “What about that letter, Jim?”

  Smith shakes his head. “No more politics, Burr. Not for me. Not anymore. Stuff makes me sick. Always has.” Smith steps to the window. Outside, the day has begun to break itself down. Amber replacing white dotted blue along the horizon. Shadows lost all constancy. “When Newnet came on, then the Dream, just seemed too noisy. Too temporary. Too much changing too often.”

  “Got to like that quiet deadliness of life when the Internet was illegal, when The Death stalked the land.”

  Smith turns back, spits the bark into the fire.

  “We’re going to take him down, Jim.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “We’re going to get us a tyrant. Connecticut River‐style.”

  Smith smiles wider. “So what, you’re going to sneak into the President’s mansion and slice his throat? Because that’s Connecticut River‐style.”

  “And that is the old Jim Wilson. But no, killing Jefferson would never kill Jefferson. Slice that throat all you want. Put his head on a pike. Bones in the river. He’ll be bee‐bopping down the eway in the Dream the next day, most members in the history of group avatars.” Burr leans back on the wall. “No, we’ve got to destroy Jefferson the old‐fashioned way. And this bill of his, isolating the U.S. Cloud. This is our chance.”

  “Isolate it?”

  “Section it off, huge firewall between us and the Old World. Not even a tickle gets through.”

  Smith turns to lean on the wall beside the stove. The heat up and down the front of his body is almost unbearable. “What’s Jefferson’s play? You were in there for a while.”

  “Not that far in.” Burr shakes his head. “This is some shaky ground he’s dancing out on, maybe the first mistake he’s made. Even his lap dogs M’Kean and Madison are having second thoughts. Gallatin’s taking a shit. A real shit. The fucking Swede.” Burr shrugs, like it’s so simple. “We’ve seen this before, restrictions on the Cloud. Some state declares its independence and Jefferson’s going to tell them they don’t have the right? The guy wrote the Declaration.”

  “So what? Dissolve again?”

  “This time a fissure, Jim. Right down the middle.” “A fissure?”

  “Connecticut, Massachusetts, those guys are itching for it.” Burr smiles. “But we start it in the West.”

  “That’s Jefferson’s territory. He gave them the land, gave them free Newnet.”

  Burr smiles deviously. “Those crazy bastards out there. Suspicious as hell of Jefferson’s virtual warfare, his experimental economic weaponry. Quasi‐war, virtual war. What about a good old‐fashioned war? And who’s sitting right there asking for it in Florida? Those settlers have been itching to kick the Spanish out since they first moved down there and realized the Spanish were already there. Fill her, bust her.”

  “How are you talking about having a war, Burr? With what?”

  “We got an Irishman out there putting up the money. Just like old times. We march down there and kick the Spanish out, prop up a government. Lookie, lookie and line on up. We trading free and clear with the Cloud down here. New England will fissure that second.”

  “A New England Federation, a Western Federation, a Florida Federation? How many Americas are we talking about?”

  “The North and the West will be joined in no time. Big arc around the Mid‐Atlantic. Maybe New York is its own thing for a while. Until the Clintons die, probably. Soon enough, though, it’ll be Virginia and the Carolinas, maybe Georgia, all alone. Jefferson can be president of his little slavocracy, and we can finally get back to being real Americans. Maybe in a few years we come on in and take it over. Give Virginia to the slaves and see what happens.”

  Outside the house, just audible over the crackle of the fire, the unmistakable sound of a flock of birds breaking from a bush nest. Fast and violent fluttering fading as they disperse into higher air. Burr raises his hand to signal they should listen for whatever it was that disturbed those birds. Slowly, Burr draws back the curtains just enough to peek through. “You said you don’t have a smartdevice here.”

  “I don’t! No phone or computer either. No Cloud.”

  “Well, I guess the Cloud is here whether you’ve got a device linked to it or not.” Burr shakes his head. “Damn, these guys are good. How the fuck did they find us?”

  “Us? They followed you here. I should never have set that fire.” Smith moves up beside Burr so he can see who’s out there. “Who is that?”

  Burr checks again. “Local Jeffersonians, probably. Society of Cincinnati?”

  “Thought you were SOC.”

  “There are a few different branches now, if you know what I mean.” Burr rushes over to the Franklin stove, pulling papers from his inner coat, actual papers. He starts shoving them through the open door, two at a time.

  “I could deliver them for you, after they take you away.”

  “They’re not here to arrest me, Jim.”

  Smith considers it a moment, rolls his eyes. “And me?”

  Burr just looks back at him, gives him that Aaron Burr. All his documents in smoldering layers in the fireplace. “Sorry. This is where our paths diverge from destiny.” Burr doesn’t slow down. “What about that Jefferson letter, Jim? Already burned, rig
ht?”

  “This is exactly what I didn’t want,” James Smith says. “Twenty years I managed to keep invisible. Then you show up. Well, give me a gun at least.”

  “Ain’t gonna be no gun fight, Jim. These boys have some weird shit.”

  Smith lets the room operate around him a moment. “What’s that tingling?”

  Thomas Heyward, Jr. :: March 6th 1809

  Light Horse Harry Lee and Junior Heyward sit on opposite sides of a containment tube in Heyward’s lab. It’s the third‐floor east wing of the mansion, where no servants are allowed to go. Not even the butler. Heyward’s on the inside of the tube, which is where he’s going to die at some random moment in the next couple of days.

  “The plan was to set it loose during the inauguration,” he’s telling Light Horse Harry Lee. “Madison comes into office just as another outbreak is hitting. Republicans have been in charge eight years and so try blaming that one on John Adams. It would have been the end of them, Lee. The end of the Republicans: Madison, Jefferson, the Swede, the whole party.”

  “The inauguration is tomorrow,” Lee says.

  Heyward nods from the other side of the tube. “Madison’s gonna stroll over to the Capitol, put his hand on the Bible and Jefferson’ll be right there behind him. Rubbing their goddamned asses in John Marshall’s face.”

  “Just a formality,” Lee says. “Madison’s been in charge for months. As soon as the election was over, Jefferson ported all his avatars and rode off for Monticello.”

  Heyward’s not able to react. The idea fits into his schema of spite for all things Jefferson, but undermines his conspiracy theories about Jefferson’s perpetual control of the American government.

  “Look,” Lee tells him. “I don’t like these guys any more than you do, but another outbreak? Come on, June.”

  Inside the tube is where Heyward does all his most sensitive electrochemical work. It’s in case something goes wrong. Which is exactly what happened a couple of days ago. While he was closing the last carbon octagon—the final touches on his latest creation: Synthetic The Death—something went wrong. Suddenly, the virus was active. The door to the containment tube slammed shut as all the lab’s safeguards kicked in. The floorboards shimmied; it was the jammer signal beginning its transmission, a forcefield of modified sound waves that blocks out the Cloud. Can’t let Synthetic The Death get out from his own lab. What’s the point of an outbreak if it doesn’t look like it was the Administration’s fault? The only reason anyone knew to come to his rescue was a kill switch auto‐text Heyward programmed to go out to the southern headquarters of the Society of Cincinnati: “code 76.”