The return of Friday Fiction is starting
out slow so far, so I’m hosting again this week. Hopefully, we’ll get more
participants soon, as a number of friends expressed an interest in it. As was
the case last week, if you would like to participate, add your link to the
Linkytool below.
This week brings Part 2 of the Historian
Project, and how the system works. If you’re coming to this story for the first
time, you’ll probably want to click over to Part 1 first. For those returning,
the quick recap is that Dr. Manziel, the new President of the University, has
visited Professor Kallas’ Historian Witness 101 class and challenged the
attrition rate of the Historian Program. Kallas, in explaining why the program
continues despite a high drop-out rate, has invited Manziel to experience the
Historian Project first-hand, and as this part opens, they are now in the
system.
The
Historian Project, Part 2
By Rick
Higginson
Manziel
spun around. “This is the control center? There’s nothing here.”
“We have everything we need for this
journey.”
“All right. I’ll play along. Where
are we going on this ‘journey’?”
“To start, that is up to you. Tell
me, Dr. Manziel, is there something you have lost that you would like to know what
happened to it?”
He thought a moment. “My
grandfather, shortly before he died, gave me his grandfather’s pocket watch. I
lost it maybe two months later, and have always wondered where it went.”
“Tell me when and where you last
remember having it.”
He closed his eyes and scratched his
head. “Oh, man, that was, like, twenty three years ago. My grandfather died
during my first year in college, and the last I remember having the watch was
when I came home for Winter Break that year.”
“So, let’s start with December
twentieth, twenty-three years ago. System, calculate and lock date, with local
time of twelve noon.”
A voice sounded in the room. “Target
confirmed and locked.”
“Where was your home at that time?”
Manziel chuckled. “Funny how I’ve
forgotten more important things, but I still remember that address. 7129 West
Lincoln Ave, Cantor, New York.”
“System, calculate and lock
location.”
“Target confirmed and locked.”
“Initiate placement.”
The room shimmered for perhaps a
second, and was replaced by a street scene. They stood on the sidewalk in front
of a modest two story house. A blanket of snow covered the area, and the
overcast sky threatened to add more to the winter scene.
Manziel’s eyes went wide. “Holy –
that’s my parents’ house! And, geez, it’s cold!
I’ve never experienced a simulator with this much detail.”
“Let’s go inside, shall we?”
“So, do we prompt the system to
move?”
Kallas took a step forward. “No, we
walk.” He reached the door, and waited for Manziel.
Dr. Manziel stepped onto the porch,
and tried to open the door. His hand passed through the knob as if it wasn’t
there.
“One of the aspects of the Historian
System is that we cannot touch anything. The feel of the ground beneath our
feet is merely illusory for the sake of natural movement, but to enter, the
door is just as solid as the doorknob seemed.” He walked through the closed
door to the entryway, and waited for Manziel to follow.
“That’s – got to be the weirdest
sensation I’ve experienced in a long time.” He took a deep breath and released
it slowly. “Man, I’ve missed this place.”
“Now, where in this house did you
last see the watch?”
“In my bedroom, upstairs.” He walked
confidently through the living room to the stairway, and then up to the top
floor. He turned right at the top of the stairs towards the room at the end of
the hall.
The bathroom door opened, and a
woman walked out, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around her wet hair.
Kallas watched her pass. “I would
say you either are not home right now, or else your family has a very relaxed
attitude concerning familial nudity.”
Manziel sputtered. “That wasn’t
funny. Depicting my mother naked like that is a rather sick idea of a joke.”
“That was your mother? Dr. Manziel, I
promise you, I have no control over what we shall see, hear, and otherwise
experience while we are here. For whatever reason, on this date twenty-three
years ago, your mother did not bother to cover up walking from the bathroom
back to what I assume is her bedroom.”
“How could the simulator know that
happened? It couldn’t have read it from my mind through the neural interface,
because I didn’t see it happen back then.”
“We are not in a simulation. This is your parents’ home, twenty-three
years ago. Much like Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Past, we are visiting
here like ghosts, unseen and incapable of interfacing with the world around us,
but we are here.”
“You’re saying this system is a time
machine? That’s not possible.”
“We have not broken the technology
yet to transfer a physical body back in time, but what we have developed is a
system that is capable of capturing and decoding the, for lack of a better
term, reverberations of time past. As the Ghost said to Scrooge, ‘these are but
shadows of the things that have been.’ Like reviewing the video from a security
camera, we can see and examine past events, with the added element of being
able to move freely through the scene, seeing it from any angle we wish.”
“No, I still cannot believe it’s
possible.”
“That is why we are here, watching
for your lost item, Dr. Manziel. When
you see what happened to the watch, you can then verify for yourself that what
we see here is actually history. You need to know that what I am telling you is
true, so that you completely understand the real value of this program.” He
walked to the door at the end of the hall. “This is your room, correct? Unless,
of course, you wish to follow your mother and make sure she gets dressed.”
“You’re a bit twisted for even
suggesting that, you know that?”
“Your mother’s state of undress, and
anything else she may or may not do while we are here, is merely information to
me, of the same weight as the fact these walls are painted a pale green. One of
the goals of the Historian Program is to train students how to remain
completely objective in their observations of history. It is our aim to witness
and record events, without adding a bias of approval or disapproval. Whether I
agree with what someone has done does not change what they did, and we have
more than enough historical accounts prejudiced by the opinions of the
recorders.” He passed through the closed door into the room.
The bed was neatly made, and while
the room appeared decorated for a young adult male, the desktop was bare, and
the room lacked any form of clutter that might suggest it had been recently
occupied.
Manziel entered the room and took it
in. His eyes locked on the poster of a long out-of-vogue singer. “I’d forgotten
all about her. I had a serious crush on her during my Senior year in High
School.”
“Judging from the state of this
room, I would guess you have not arrived home yet for your break.”
“So, what do we do now? Try a new
target date?”
“No, we remain here and watch for
your arrival.”
“That could be hours, or maybe days.
I don’t remember exactly when I got home that year.”
“System, fast-forward at thirty ex.”
“We can do that?”
“Of course. Since the system is essentially
playing back events it has recorded from the historical reverberations, we can
move forward or backward at whim. This is valuable in that it enables us to search
for the exact moment we need, but we can also back up, move to a different
location, and witness the same event from another perspective. We should now be
passing an hour’s worth of history in two minutes. That’s fast enough that the
waiting is not tedious, but still slow enough to spot the moment when you
arrive.” He stood by the window, staring out at the street.
Manziel wandered the room, remaining
quiet for a while. He finally stopped in front of the poster, examining it. “Looking
at her now, I can’t imagine why I was so infatuated with her.” He turned
towards the window. “So, if this technology is so incredible, why haven’t I
heard of it before?”
Kallas kept his gaze directed
outward. “The Historian Project isn’t strictly a secret, but we also don’t want
it widely known. If the general populace knew we had this capability, it could
cause problems, not the least of which would be an overwhelming increase in the
requests for our service. We would have people wanting us to help them find
lost pets, or trying to use as a private investigator to spy on a cheating
spouse, or just wanting to use the system for a nostalgic trip down memory
lane.”
“Would that last be such a terrible
thing?”
He released a staccato laugh. “I
already told you that history is brutal. It’s not just brutal in the violence
that was done; it’s also brutal in its honesty. What has happened, has happened
regardless of whether one approves or disapproves. Think about it, Dr. Manziel.
You accused me of a sick prank because your mother walked naked from one room
to another, so what would your reaction have been if we had instead found her
intimately involved with someone you did not know? If we take someone to a
special family gathering in the past, what if they find it different than their
memory prefers it? What if, in our ability to move freely through the past and
the scene, they overhear something that ruins that memory for them?”
“What if they find that some
disappointment to them had a good reason behind it, and it improves their
memory?”
“One of the first things we stress
in the Historian Program curriculum is that people are human. As such, they are also unpredictable in their reactions.
Even if I pose a hypothetical scenario to someone, and ask how they would react,
it doesn’t mean they will actually react that way if faced with that scenario
in reality. No, Dr. Manziel, most people are better left with their imperfect
memories, than risking how they might react if they revisited the scene later
in life.” He nodded towards the driveway. “If you drove a red compact car, then
I believe you have arrived.”
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