Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

It’s OK To Say If You Went Back In Time And Killed Baby Hitler

Admit it. You went back in time and killed Baby Hitler.

Official reason, to avert the Holocaust and World War II.

But the truth? Averting the Holocaust and World War II, that was more like an additional upside.

Your mission’s core driver was brand recognition.

That’s definitely the way Toni felt about things. What better way to roll out the universe’s first linearity disruptor start-up than to kill Baby Hitler?

When you say to people in the street “time travel” they say “kill Baby Hitler.” It’s something people are already comfortable with. That is so important, because with time travel, the negative narratives are out there already.

Killing Baby Hitler is an amazing way to introduce sceptics to where your tech is going to fit into their lives. What could be more memorable than—

Yeah, okay, in a way it wouldn’t have been that memorable. Even if it had worked like it was supposed to. Because if it had worked, then everybody would have been like, ‘You killed who? And this person was a, a baby? That doesn’t sound very ethical. You should go to jail. We hate this press conference.’

Still. Umeko said it best. ‘Going back in time and killing Baby Hitler. It just has to be done. You can’t not.’

Umeko volunteered, in a big way, and the first thing she said when she blinked back to the lab in 2015 was, ‘So like how many people would you say were killed by wars in the Twentieth Century? Ballpark? Asking for a friend. Shit, do you guys speak English?’

‘You didn’t get your guy,’ Toni said bluntly. ‘Am I speaking English yet?’

Umeko stared wildly. ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ she told Toni. ‘But speaking personally? I just went back in time and killed Baby Hitler.’

Toni shrugged. ‘Hitler lived. Nothing’s changed.’

‘I don’t want to get too graphic,’ said Umeko. ‘Is “I beheaded Baby Hitler” too graphic?’

‘Okay,’ said Toni thoughtfully. ‘Did you bring back the head?’

Umeko released her straps. Ambient cerulean refulgence shifted to teal. ‘Could our memories have—no, never mind. You guys, if this is some kind of troll, I have had the worst—’

‘I knew it!’ yelled Belle, to no one in particular. ‘We all knew it, deep down! Great Man Theory is bullshit! It’s all about the economics, you guys. History has a structure. If Hitler wasn’t Hitler, someone else had to become Hitler!’

The room was filling with other people’s feelings. You felt your usual urge to fade into the furnishings. But you did take this moment to murmur, ‘Or just the torso, Umeko? No?’

Because you felt that was important.

‘You guys, we’re not going back,’ Umeko moaned. ‘Never return to the scene of the crime, especially if you’re already still there!’

‘About a hundred and sixty million,’ Liz said in that same monotone she always uses, but which is particularly good for announcing numbingly large numbers of dead. ‘To answer your original question. Fifty-five people million died in World War II. Depending on methodology.’

‘Those sound like they might be the offensive estimates,’ Belle said. ‘Might want to check if those are the offensive ones.’

‘You could go five minutes earlier,’ Cherrie purred. It was her first contribution since Umeko had shimmered back into our timestream. ‘You could kill Baby Hitler again, and be a bit more professional this time.’

‘Hell no, Cher-Bear,’ said Umeko. ‘That’s when shit kicks off. That’s when for some unimaginable reason I hide the real Baby Hitler and replace him with whoever I just killed. Who was Hitler, by the way,’ she finished with a snarl.

‘Come on,’ soothed Toni. ‘This is not bad, people. This is just challenging.’

‘Great Man Theory,’ Belle repeated smugly.

‘Belle, please,’ sighed Umeko. ‘Why would the new Hitler still be called ‘Hitler’?’

Belle frowned and bobbed her head from side-to-side. ‘Okay. Yeah.’

‘Conundrum,’ said Toni.

‘Same timeline,’ said Umeko, and buried her head in her hands. ‘I did the DNA pinprick. It was the Führer. Couldn’t have been more him if he’d had the mustache.’

‘I’ve been thinking of him with the mustache,’ confessed Cherrie.

‘I went back to 1890,’ said Umeko, ‘and I disrupted the fucking incumbent, okay? With a fucking sword.’

‘I knew we should have adopted him,’ Liz monotone. ‘And then my line—’

‘I support you Liz,’ said Cherrie. ‘But none of us think, “We adopted Hitler in 1889. How early will you adopt?” quite sums up our offering.’

‘It’s a good line,’ said Liz.

‘And we’ve made that clear on a number of occasions,’ said Cherrie.

‘Beheaded,’ repeated Umeko.

No one was really watching, so at this moment you slipped into the harness, and began adjusting dials.

‘But take a moment to feel good about this,’ said Toni. ‘I for one am happy I continue to have been born.’

Umeko groaned. ‘Speak for yourself.’

‘So be present in the moment,’ said Toni. ‘Get yourselves into a comfortable posture. Show me yourselves exercising self-care, okay? And then I want you to focus on the crown of your head. And then feel your attention shift to your temples and and forehead. Good job. And then feel your attention shift to some possible solutions. Why are we still in the same timeline? What are we feeling, guys? What’s there?’

Liz threw out, ‘When you change stuff in the past, it simply doesn’t affect the future.’

‘Nice. Run with it.’

‘It’s like you’re editing code that has already run. I retract the hypothesis. I’m seeing so many problems with it already.’

‘Unless I stay behind to watch my edits unfold, all the way to the present?’ said Umeko thoughtfully. ‘Guys, I don’t have that kind of time.’

‘I said I retract it.’

‘Thanks hon. I already have so much on my plate and I’ve had such a horrible—’

‘You have,’ soothed Toni. ‘You have. Do you need some space? We don’t need to do this now. Some of us do but you specifically don’t need—’

‘We don’t need to do anything…at any particular time,’ said Belle, hollowly.

‘This is just something I found,’ said Liz. ‘This is real. It’s called Night. “Suddenly a cry rose up from the wagon, the cry of a wounded animal. Someone had just died. Others, feeling that they too were about to die, imitated his cry. Hundreds of cries rose up simultaneously. Not knowing against whom we cried. Not knowing why. The death rattle—”’

‘Liz, please,’ said Toni. ‘Thank you truly for sharing. But please.’

‘There’s always some massacre going on,’ said Cherrie. ‘People are always being butchered. It’s like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. You can’t think about it all the time. You can’t pretend we’re hogtied in the wilderness when there’s a Starbucks just there.’

‘A hundred and sixty million dead is a tragedy,’ said Belle. ‘One Baby Hitler dead is just a statistical rounding error.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Liz. ‘It’s like, now that we have the time travel rig…none of it is in “the past” any more. All of that death, it is all here. It is in this room. And somehow, it was always like that. All along. I don’t know. I don’t know. You guys, you guys—’

You must have shifted or something and made some sound. Everybody stared at the time travel rig.

Toni double-took. ‘What are you—’

That was when you pinged back to 1890.

And saw what you saw.

‘Guys!’ you explained on your return. ‘It’s okay, I know what this is! We have competition!’

Bleaken Moment, the others called themselves.

If you guys were engineers, then Bleaken Moment were wizards. That thing about advanced magic and technology being indistinguishable? It makes zero sense if you know even the slightest thing about branding.

‘More steampunky?’ you tried to explain. ‘Clockworkpunk? I don’t know. I only caught a glimpse. They seem to have some kind of limited range teleport capacity, possibly with a cooldown. Look, wherever and whenever they’re from, and however their rig works, and for whatever reason they are messing with us…they have the edge on us. They put the stet on Umeko’s quest, and didn’t break a sweat.’

‘Barriers to entry,’ said Cherrie thoughtfully.

You were pleased nobody noticed you’d been away for three years.

It hadn’t been an easy hunt. Bleaken Moment knew what they were doing.

‘You can borrow it,’ said Toni quietly. ‘But ask.’

‘So these rivals saved Baby Hitler?’ said Belle incredulously. ‘Why doesn’t Umeko remember?’

Umeko was halfway through a salt caramel muffin. ‘I feel like I’d remember something like that,’ she mumbled.

‘No,’ you explained. ‘It’s not that. Bleaken Moment sort of…bookended Umeko’s spacetime.’

‘Run with that,’ Toni urged.

You hesitated. After seeing what you just saw, you felt like you had to say “murdered” now. But you softened it by saying “we.”

‘The child we murdered,’ you said firmly. ‘Our competitors whisk him away the moment before Umeko’s first sword-stroke. Then they return him, nanoseconds later, and that version does die. But meanwhile they’ve forked him. Cherrie, please, no? They go to some quiet, out-of-the-way nook of time. They let him crawl around for a minute, then zip him back in time one minute, so then there are two Baby Hitlers. They take the spare one and—’

‘We get it,’ said Umeko.

Belle squinted. ‘Y-eah.’

‘Any chance they’re us?’ said Toni. ‘Future selves, branched selves, folded selves, reverting our own edits—’

‘I mean probably,’ you said. ‘Who cares?’

‘Game head,’ said Cherrie. ‘We’re unbundling Baby Hitler.’

Toni’s eyes lit up. ‘You’re right. It’s a competitive market, a duopoly probably. The resource we’re fighting over is Hitler Seconds. He’s not infinitely reproducible, infinitely fungible, there are limits. The tech imposes certain limits.’

‘Bleaken Moment might be cosmic clean-up crew types,’ Belle protested. ‘Protecting the fabric of reality. God-level tech. Admin privileges.’

Toni tutted. ‘Even so, their interventions can’t take zero time, Belle. Baby Hitler has a granulity, he ages. There’s a sense in which he’s exhaustible.’

‘I agree with Toni,’ said Cherrie. ‘Hitler Seconds are real. At some point you have a grown Hitler situation. But actually, it’ll be Game Over long before that. Can we backward-induct this?’

‘He can become less Hitler-like too,’ Umeko pointed out. ‘That plays to our advantage. Probably.’

‘Killing Baby Hitler might not even be necessary,’ said Liz. ‘We could adopt—’

‘True! Although,’ Toni reminded her gently, ‘killing Baby Hitler is our USP. It’s in the Covenant.’

‘Hitler Seconds,’ agreed Belle reflectively. ‘Y-eah. Hey, left field. What if we go back in time and just continue to work for Airbnb, and don’t spin off our R&D unit into a time travel start-up?’

The rest of you stared at Belle.

‘How does that kill Baby Hitler?’ Umeko demanded.

‘I just hated it there,’ moped Liz. ‘No. I hated the way I felt about myself when I was there.’

‘I was constantly on edge,’ you agreed. ‘“Will this be the day everyone shows up demanding breakfast?”’

‘I’m modelling now,’ said Cherrie. ‘Is the Bleaken time rig hard-indexed to Earth’s gravity well same as ours is? If so, it becomes a question of how quickly you can shunt Baby Hitler out of the space his double needs to occupy. Or his multiples.’

Cherrie started sketching. Moments like these were what you loved Cherrie for. The outlines of a Baby Hitler battery farm formed on Cherrie’s tablet screen.

‘That’s all it is,’ she added. ‘However fast they can get Baby Hitler out of the way, they can copypasta him.’

‘A lot of assumptions here,’ Toni frowned. ‘Loving it. Can we move a healthy ten-month human thirty inches sideways at eight Gs?’

‘Are you saying can we, ethically?’ said Cherrie. ‘I’ve been thinking bodily integrity-wise.’

‘Existential integrity-wise, not just bodily,’ said Umeko.

‘Bingo,’ said Toni. ‘Run with that, Umeko?’

‘Only that the original Baby Hitler,’ said Umeko, ‘the one that grew up and did World War II, was never moved sideways at eight Gs. Intensely formative experiences like that make this baby less Hitler than he was before.’

‘We will need a closeness-to-Hitler’s-experiences-as-a-toddler function and some thresholds,’ said Cherrie, tapping rapidly. ‘Correction, we won’t need our own function and thresholds. We’ll need our best approximation of what they’re working off.’

‘Maybe we should use gamification?’ you said timidly. ‘Sorry, that’s probably dumb. I should mention I’ve been away for three years.’

‘You look amazing,’ Belle told you. ‘You look great.’

‘Move them forward,’ Liz hissed. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt everybody. Just saying to Cherrie. Move the Baby Hitlers forward twenty inches, not sideways ten.’

You reached over and squeezed Belle’s hand. ‘Thanks.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Cherrie. ‘Well, they’ll be shaving it any way they can, right Toni? If they have fine-grained matter transportation, do they even need to copy-paste the whole Baby Hitler? Could they cut their margins by just replacing the specific tissue we assassinate on each iteration?’

‘Nerve splicing,’ said Toni. ‘Love it. Fibrin glue, Photoshopping skillset. Run with it. Can someone get Starbucks? And can someone get a Baby Hitler, just so we know what it is we’re—’

You’re already strapping yourself in.

‘Whoa,’ said Liz. ‘Our competitors keep folding Baby Hitler and inserting him back into history. We keep killing him.’

‘Yes,’ said Cherrie, in a carefully-judged-not-to-be-patronizing tone.

‘Doesn’t that eventually imply an out-of-the-way-nook where we throw Baby Hitlers in a macerator? A death camp for Baby Hitlers?’ Liz started to make a sound that was either giggling or crying.

‘Bingo,’ said Toni. ‘Big picture time. What’s the point of killing Baby Hitler? Who were we when we began this? Well, we all may take our own view. Have you gone yet?’

‘No,’ you lied. You’d been gone about three months, this time. Diversified your start-ups big time. Even put out some feelers with Bleaken.

‘Swear I saw a shimmer. Before you do. I would say that no death camps is—I just feel really strongly on this, no death camps is where we want to be. We need to be crushing the no death camps space.’

Uncertain faces hovered.

‘Death camps is their brand,’ you pointed out, and murmurs of approval ran through the room.

‘Heyyy,’ said Cherrie. ‘You know that spiced pumpkin latte Starbucks “don’t” do at this time of year?’