by Ian Whates
Constitutional implications? Kimber said. But our scientists have shown that we can’t have an impact on history. So we can’t meddle with the Constitution–
My dear Professor, Hillary had said with a bright smile that always surprised people. Of course we can meddle with the Constitution. It’s a living document, after all, one that we “interpret.” And the group on this particular court is very happy that it will not be interpreting the right to privacy for long-dead Americans. Think about it: Do we value their privacy rights over our right to publish treatises about the past? Is that free speech? Do we have the right to invade each other’s homes at the most vulnerable times? Is there truly a need to know? Or is it just historical voyeurism?
At the time, Kimber had thought Hillary was worried for her past self, particularly about those days when the Monica Lewinski scandal broke in the late 1990s. No matter who you were or how famous, you really didn’t want some historian listening in as you berated your husband for his adulteries.
Later, though, Kimber realized that Hillary had more pertinent concerns. With the cult of Lincoln, and the serious scholarship happening around FDR, those two historical figures probably never had a moment of real privacy. Scholars watched their every move – literally.
Fortunately, Kimber would say when an occasional student brought up this concern, the historical figures had no idea they were being watched.
But what if they did?
She shuddered. Hillary was long dead now, but had she, at some point in her life, known that the whole world was watching?
Still, would that lead to séances?
Twentieth-century American politicians were not Kimber’s area of expertise, although she knew more about them than she knew about Lincoln, partly because she’d met a few of them, and partly because she’d flirted with writing about all the major twentieth-century cataclysms, until she realized that they did not suit her. She preferred more genteel times, and more genteel questions. It wasn’t a coincidence that Hillary had discussed the Constitution with her.
Kimber wasn’t a Constitutional scholar, but she was a student of the Constitutional period. The men of that era fascinated her. And as much as academics wanted to talk about Abigail Adams, the woman really had been relegated to the sidelines. The Constitution of these United States had been built by the men, for the men, and of the men, and it was only by understanding those men, Kimber believed, that the world could understand what the United States had become.
Besides, she found the young Thomas Jefferson a lot more sexy than she had expected – something she admitted to no one, not even the ex-husband before he became an ex.
Kimber was now taking all of this change seriously – with the séances (now numbering four that she could easily find), the Lincoln sightings (which seemed to be growing exponentially), and that regrettable “I’m Mr. Burns” incident nagging at her more than she wanted to admit.
She went into what she called The Pit, and the others called the Viewing Rooms, and talked to technicians, who left her more confused than she had been when she arrived. Then she talked to the university’s scientists, including those who had worked with the developers of time travel. They all told her the same thing: time paradoxes were impossible, given the way that time travel actually works. For a paradox to happen, the travelers had to interact with their environment, and it had been proven time and time again that these travelers did not interact.
“But isn’t a sighting an interaction?” Kimber had asked.
“Prove to me that the sightings – if they happen – have changed the course of history, and I’ll let you know,” one of the time travel techs had said.
So she went to two scholars, one who specialized in Eleanor Roosevelt, and one who specialized in Hillary Clinton.
Kimber met them off-campus, at a dive bar that felt like something out of a spy thriller instead of a place for a private discussion. The bar even had a jukebox – or a jukebox replica (theoretically, it played music accessed on an ancient cloud, as if that were supposed to make everyone feel better). The music that afternoon was some twenties techno-fusion-funk, which was hard to listen to, and drove the other patrons out of the bar.
The professors, Leonard Hughes and Connie Caio, seemed intrigued enough, especially after Kimber found a booth far enough away from the music that everyone could be heard.
“What I really need,” Kimber said, after giving them all of the preliminaries, and listening to Hughes’s repeated “I knew it! I knew it!”, “are documents that you’ve had in your offices for years, things that haven’t touched any media source from the cloud to the web to anything else you can think of. These documents can’t have been near any portals either. I just want historical stuff, maybe even the hard copies of the calendars from the days of the séances, showing that the séances didn’t happen.”
“What if they did?” Connie Caio asked. “I mean, we don’t know everything.”
Kimber hated having her own words turned back on her. She shrugged. “I guess we accept it then.”
“In the meantime, though,” Caio said, “you want us to look for proof that things have changed.”
Kimber tilted her head back. The music throbbed in her skull, like a never-ending headache.
What would it prove if the actual paper documents had no mention of séances? Prudence on the part of the participants? Or proof that the presence of the ghostly scholars actually changed history?
“Both women kept official and unofficial diaries, right?” Kimber asked.
“Yes,” Hughes said, and then looked at Caio uncomfortably. Perhaps he had answered for them both without knowing what he was talking about.
But she nodded, so he smiled.
“Get me copies of both,” Kimber said. “Copies that are made from the actual documents, not from –”
“Any other media, we know,” Caio said. “I’ll have mine for you tomorrow.”
“Me, too,” Hughes said.
Kimber thanked them, but her mind was already working on another problem. This conversation convinced her the problem was more complex than she even realized.
She didn’t just need to know if the scholars had an impact on the past. If they did, she needed solutions.
And she needed them before (if) anyone else figured out that problems actually existed.
4.
“AS FOR SURPRISING [President] Taft, [Lillian Rogers Parks] wrote that it occurred on one of her first visits to the White House in 1909. Her mother turned down the president’s bed and then left her daughter [Lillian] in the bedroom, ordering her to stay put while she took care of some brief duties elsewhere. While she waited, a ‘very stout,’ ‘jolly’ man came into the room, took one look at the girl wearing a prim white dress and said, “Well, what have we here? Are you the little ghost of the White House I’ve been hearing about?”
“Ex-White House ‘insider’ Lillian Rogers Parks dies,”
The Houston Chronicle
November 13, 1997
KIMBER CALLED A meeting with the other department heads in Physics, History, Biology, and Time Travel itself, to discuss all that she had learned and what she hadn’t.
She decided to hold the meeting in the VIP guest observation booth above the Pit or Time Travel Central, as the university called the Time Travel wing of the Physics Building. Eventually Time Travel would get its own building, but in the beginning the funding had to come out of Physics and History, because the alumni were scared to fund the project.
After the alumni had gotten to see it – first in this glass-enclosed viewing booth (like the VIP suites at the football stadium) and then on the floor below where they used protected observation portals for the first time, they started throwing money at Time Travel and Living History. But it had taken a few years.
Usually Eoin McKinty oversaw the alumni visits. McKinty headed the Time Travel division. He didn’t discover time travel – hundreds of scientists over dozens of universities had done that – but he did
invent the systems that allowed any old graduate student to confirm his hypothesis about Cromwell, if he so chose.
McKinty looked a lot younger than he had the right to. He was in his seventies now, but he looked no older than forty, and if someone commented on his appearance he would joke that time travel kept him young.
Kimber wasn’t even certain that McKinty had time-traveled since he set up both the wing and the systems. He sat at the edge of the conference table now, chair pushed back, watching the students work the portals with one eye while keeping track of the other division heads at the same time.
The other division heads scattered around the table, looking a bit confused. It had probably been a decade since this group had been together outside of a general faculty meeting. Marcy Wolfson, the head of the Physics department, hadn’t even been a full professor ten years before, and Janet Hsia, the head of the History department, might not have been out of high school yet.
Both women had gotten their appointments around the point that Kimber had, enough that it prompted the local media to say that the university was on a female hiring spree, something Kimber believed shouldn’t even get noticed in the latter half of the twenty-first century.
The senior person here was eighty-five-year-old Isaac Brenner who ran the Biology department. He looked his age, bent and tired, except for his eyes, which were bright, sparkling, and full of humor. Kimber had always liked Brenner, who was said to be on the shortlist for the Nobel for his research into the biological development of consciousness.
That research, more than his department head status, was the reason she wanted him here.
Her stomach fluttered. She hadn’t slept well since this whole thing began – well, since she heard of the Hillary Clinton séances, anyway – and she wanted the drama to end soon, although she suspected it wouldn’t.
She had received actual paper copies of the diaries, which told her precisely nothing – or at least, nothing she hadn’t expected. Nancy Reagan’s personal diary did not list a séance, but did list several meetings with astrologers.
Hillary Clinton’s diaries, personal and public, were as practical as the woman herself.
Which meant that the older paper documents downloaded or copied decades ago were different from the same documents downloaded today. And, if those new versions of the documents had records of séances, then that might prove that the scholars were having an impact on history.
But they might not.
Because, if there was record of the rumors on paper documents going back before time travel, then the stories of séances might have existed all along – as rumors. Back in the early 1990s, a lot of Hillary detractors said truly stupid things about her, things that her later actions (never mind her spokespeople) discredited.
Kimber couldn’t think about any of that. She had to focus on the what-ifs, which she found a bit ironic, given what she was dealing with.
The what-ifs, as she presented them to the department heads, were simple: What if their new-fangled time travel and its scholarly uses actually had an impact on history?
It took her a while to get the others to discuss the actual what-if. Wolfson wanted to discuss the possibilities; Brenner wasn’t sure any of this fit into his expertise; Hsia believed that history wasn’t fixed at all; and McKinty jumped from that to a long discussion of alternate realities.
Finally, Kimber slammed her palms onto the table. “I know you find this fascinating. I do too.” (Okay, she was lying about that; the discussions just got in her way.) “But here’s what I need to know: if we are, indeed, having an impact on history, changing it, what do we do about it? Do we shut down the Time Travel and Living History departments?”
“Well, it’s not just us,” McKinty said. “Other universities have similar programs –”
“Do we all shut the projects down?” Kimber said over him. “Worldwide?”
“Why do we have to decide that now?” Hsia asked.
“Technically,” Brenner said, “if a scientific experiment goes awry and it has an actual impact on others, then the project gets shut down everywhere. Everyone stops working on it until whatever has gone wrong has been fixed.”
Hsia frowned. No one shut anything down in History Departments. They simply disagreed with each other, usually in some formal way, like a presentation or a paper, filled with video footnotes and lots and lots and lots of attribution.
“We have to define impact,” McKinty said. “When we talked about the impact of time travel in the early years, we were looking at the Butterfly Effect.”
Kimber felt that urge to roll her eyes again. Because she’d been in a thousand meetings where McKinty discussed that ridiculous butterfly/thunder story by fiction writer Ray Bradbury.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kimber said. “A time traveler stepped on a butterfly in the past, and changed the course of history because of it. It’s just a stupid story.”
“No, it’s part of chaos theory,” Wolfson said. “And it wasn’t a story. It was from a paper presented in 1972 –”
“I don’t care,” Kimber said. “We all understand the butterfly effect.”
“The point is,” McKinty said, “we expected the changes to be big. You know, if someone steps on a butterfly in fifteenth century Illinois, did that prevent Abe Lincoln from being born, and if he wasn’t born, were the slaves freed? That kinda thing. This clearly isn’t it.”
“Really?” Brenner asked. “You think if more and more humans believe in ghosts that’s not a problem. What if they all start finding proof of ghosts? Entire worldviews change.”
“I don’t think they would change,” Hsia said in a tone that suggested she was about to lecture the entire group. “We’ve had ghosts as long as human culture has existed. Think about it. In religion alone, we have more incidents of ghosts than anywhere else. Even in Christianity. It refers to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
“I thought it was Holy Spirit,” Wolfson muttered.
“Certain parts of Chinese culture have accepted ghosts as real for thousands of years,” Hsia said, not put off by the muttering. Kimber wondered if she was used to students muttering during class. “And the Mesopotamians referred to ghosts all the time. Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I know there are lots more.”
“Are there?” McKinty asked. “Or are we already in an alternate timeline? Did any of us believe in ghosts two years ago?”
“Do any of us believe in ghosts now?” Brenner asked Wolfson. She shrugged.
“My point,” Hsia said firmly, “is the same as Professor McKinty’s. What does it matter?”
“I thought you were making a different point. I thought you were pointing out that it did matter.” Brenner glanced at Kimber as if she could clear up his confusion.
She shrugged. She wanted solutions, not this intellectual banter.
“The thing is,” McKinty said, “if we are having an effect, it’s a relatively minor one. And besides, we’re already on this road. It can’t get worse. I don’t think we shut anything down or worry anyone. We haven’t proven anything.”
“He’s right,” Hsia said. “Four references to séances and a few mentions of ghosts don’t mean anything. I can show you more than that in Arabian Nights.”
“That’s a story,” Wolfson said.
“So’s the Bible,” Hsia said.
“Some would argue –”
“All right.” Kimber shook her head. She wasn’t going to get anything from them, and they didn’t see it as a problem. Or, at least, as a problem that they had to think about yet.
Either she made decisions on her own that would have an impact on the entire scholarly world, or she had to acquiesce to an academic timeline.
She was an academic, after all. She acquiesced.
“If we call for more study,” she said, “who does it?”
“I think we set up an international committee with quite a few experts,” Wolfson said. “Let’s put out the call, bring in people from other
disciplines, see what the historical record produces, see if anyone can show harm that a belief in ghosts engenders, and go from there.”
Brenner and McKinty nodded. Hsia, for once, looked a bit shocked. “That’ll take years.”
“I think that’s the point,” Kimber said. Her frustration level had gone up, something she hadn’t thought possible.
There must have been some kind of change on her face, because McKinty patted her hand.
“Kimber,” he said gently, “what you’re missing is this: if the changes have already occurred, I have no idea how they could get worse.”
Maybe this was where they needed Ambra. She would have no trouble imagining how things would get worse. She would probably have some this-is-the-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenario that would stop everyone in their tracks.
Of course, no one would believe the scenario because Ambra came up with it. Which simply echoed Kimber’s experience with this topic so far.
“I don’t have a dog in this hunt,” Brenner said, using a phrase Kimber hadn’t heard since her grandmother died. “I don’t care if your programs continue or not, but here’s what I think, Dr. Lawson. We’re discussing a what-if that could take away your life’s work. It would definitely take away Dr. McKinty’s life’s work. Don’t we owe it to both of you and everyone else who works in Time Travel and Living History to be absolutely certain of two things – one: that our methods actually cause ghosts to appear in the past, and two: that those ghosts actually cause harm?”
“Ghosts have an impact,” Hsia said. “The past has an impact on the present. Don’t we owe it to history to preserve it?”
“Do we really know what history is?” Wolfson asked. “Nothing is certain. If we look at chaos theory –”
“If we look at all theories, we’ll be here all day.” Kimber couldn’t quite keep the annoyance out of her voice. She had thought these people would help her.