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

Agents of Change

Originally published by Samuel Peralta for the alternate history issue of The Future Chronicles, Alt. History 101.

“Orwell never intended Nineteen Eighty-four to be an instruction manual,” said Claudette.

“Claudette, that doesn’t matter to us now.”

“I know, it just came to me.” She always tried her best to rip the piece of tape in a straight line. A lot to be said for duct tape. She never liked taping across hair. That just seemed wrong. She would tape the hands. If she had to, around the head to cover the mouth, but angled downward from the nape of the neck. A body shouldn’t be found with hair ripped out of its head from duct tape. She’d had to stick a copy of the book in her hip pocket since they’d had to rush to retrieve Senator Gabel. For an old man he ran quicker than he had a right, and went down hard.

Syndell hated to run. Hated it especially as a cop, but as a retriever, passionate, intense anger brought out something close to the worst in him. He treated the ducks without respect.

So he’d pulled out his gun.

They now rolled Senator Gabel over the edge of the cliffs of Dover. They cleaned up. Then they went to a pub.

This was their pub. The meeting hall of the gods. Full of their people. No guilt. No worries. There were drinks, and there was loneliness, and there was even reflection of a kind. Retrievers sat wondering, and often regretted everything. Behind it the taste of gin in metal tins. Oily. As though they were lubricating robot parts and not people.

Folks openly killed one another in this day and age. But things had to be clean. There had to be respect. Leaving Gabel there to be obviously found wouldn’t have done. The cliffs of Dover would recycle him. Bit by bit. Even something so wretched as an American politician could eventually serve some good. A family of mollusks could be fed.

“Daniel,” said the man behind the bar. He didn’t tend bar. He was Mr. Fabulous, named on account of how hideously inept he was at mechanical matters, and so named was all the explanation one needed for why he was behind the bar. He held a tin under a spigot for an extra few seconds, took a drink, then set a separate cup for Syndell.

“Everything feel all right to you, Fab?” asked Syndell. The drink went down like it did every time: brush fire.

Fab nodded.

Daniel Syndell remembered growing up. Remembered being recruited. He gave the impression of slightly wincing whenever anyone used his first name. The two names were almost an insult, because he surely wasn’t Daniel Syndell, not in his soul anyway, not some boy grown poorish and unremarkable along Rhysham Way to be looked back on with vague discomfort. Syndell’s father had done the unremarkable thing that most fathers do: he’d gone away. It was the cataclysmic break in life that signals what was to run far away from what’s to be. Best that way.

“Praises to the Ages then,” said Syndell. Claudette hated that expression. He grinned a bit watching her peruse the day’s specials.

It felt odd to Syndell to have grown up in a time when industry ruled with an ironclad commercial fist and to actually remember it. Memories of it in this age felt antiquated.

Only a few clairvoyants even knew the timelines were being jimmied. They’d wake up vaguely remembering dreaming about someone named Hitler, whoever the hell that was. Or knowing that horses had been used for something else before the mounted police turned to neutered velociraptors.

This bar, by the consent of all agents inside, and, by extension, of the Difference Machine was effectively off-limits from time alteration. Mr. Fabulous kept watch on that.

“A new agent, Daniel,” said Mr. Fab. Every agent inside knew the others. A new face showed up, they knew that too. Fab, annoying as he could be with his questions about what had changed and what didn’t, felt out new minds and intentions to be sure they belonged. Agents weren’t beyond summary dispatch if need be. “The guy. Something wrong with the guy,” said Fab.

Of course there is, thought Daniel. I’m on tap duty this week. Bloody hell. “How many drinks has he had?”

“Two.”

“Give me another. Hard. Claudette?”

Claudette positioned herself at the bar in clear but inconspicuous view of the newcomers’ table, eyes practically peering through her ratty paperback.

Syndell went directly to their table, giving a nod to the retrievers sitting there but placing a drink beside only one. “Pleasantries,” said Syndell.

The female agent, whom he knew as a friend, pushed her seat out her own inconspicuous tad. Claudette caught her eye and gave a slight shake of her head.

“We won’t waste time. My job to feel you out, lad,” said Syndell sitting, hand on the butt of his gun under the table. “What’s your overriding theory on this circus?”

The man seemed prepared and eager for this. Syndell hated eager.

“So, Edison tries to screw Tesla, ends up electrocuting himself and winds up in an institution, Tesla gifts free power to the masses but wants nothing in return except for a houseful of books, and tea, and solitude. Maybe a cat.”

Daniel Syndell looked from the man to the woman, who was looking at the man as though acutely, albeit resigned by duty, aware he was made of snot.

“And you think one of us engineered that?” said Syndell.

The young man shrugged. “Dunno. Don’t much care.”

“We’ll never know how this started, will we?” said the young man’s partner, her clipped Somali accent about the most real thing in the entire exchange. “I mean, we’re the gods of history sitting in this one bar, right?”

“For the moment,” said Syndell. “Till somebody wipes us out. Enjoy your drink, lad,” he said and returned to his barstool beside Claudette. Two tiny brown women at a table nodded at him as he passed.

“Corrective measures?” Claudette said, still reading her paperback. It was a good book.

“The team from Sri Lanka signaled me that they’ll keep watch on him. He’ll behave. I’m off to sleep, luv. Big day tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow never comes, Syndell,” said Claudette, the official joke of the agency. She held her cheek out for his kiss. He obliged.

“Don’t see why you never date me in that case,” he said. “Good night, Claude.”

Sleep rarely came easily. The mind turned and turned. Possibilities were like compost in a barrel…which made the universe a huge dirt plot. About right. Agents were to remove problematic roots. Who made agents gods? The Machine. Orbiting, networked supercomputers the size of small countries calculating and recalculating a billion times a billion times a second courtesy a far future minus the greed of ninety-nine percent of human history. Perfection was not attainable. Neither was order. Trust, however, they could create that. The system worked. Time flowed. Constantly. No one atrocity was ever allowed to define the Earth, and for that the death of a homophobic senator intent on funneling financial backing to underground hate groups was a small thing, particularly as it prevented him ever becoming president of that backwater country U.S.A.

Just another idiot rolled into the drink.

What do you get out of this, Syndell? the question posed as he stared upward, fingers laced behind his head. He knew why sleep rarely came easily. Time was a trap. Always ready to drop a body somewhere a body, no body, should have been. Wasn’t the devil people needed to fret over. Was never the devil.

Nothing. What do I get out of this? Focus your question, lad. It’s what I get to put into it. Syndell sighed deeply into the darkness of his bedroom.

I am a god.

He rolled over.

Nice work if you can get it.

Claudette woke him up early the next day.

“Hell’s all that pounding?” he bellowed. “I know it’s a big day but contain your enthusiasm.”

He opened the door. She said, “We got big troubles,” and moved inside. She was not alone. Two more agents were with her: the Somali, Arliyo Gaal, and one of the elders of the group, a redhead with more stories to tell than there was time in the sky, Fiona Carel.

“Existential or physical?” he asked. That’d be helpful in deciding which guns to pack.

Claudette held out a folded three-by-five card. “This was on the bar at breakfast.”

Someone had written HT on it.

“That guy was American,” said Syndell. The ladies watched him and waited for him to catch up.

“HT,” he said.

Claudette snatched the card back. “Harriet Tubman.”

“No frikking way.” Son of a bitch. “If they were going after Tubman, they were crazy. No way would the Difference Machine let them anywhere near her,” he said.

Clearly this gathering thought otherwise.

“The Machine does weird things sometimes,” said Claudette.

“But it never tries to commit suicide. Arliyo, Fiona: you think this means Ms. Tubman?”

“I do,” said Aliyo. Fiona nodded.

“The Machine plants tests of our resolve,” said Arliyo.

Syndell hated cat and mouse. “All right. Let’s find the bloke.” He placed hands on Arliyo’s shoulders and touched forehead to forehead. She was an excellent person. “Li, I’m truly sorry for anything that happens then.”

Dorchester County, Maryland’s cold season was, wet, uncomfortable and loud. Industrialization, thought Syndell spitting out an errant splash from the constant bits kicked up by horse, carriage, and a high wind.

March, Eighteen twenty-two. Tubman’s birth date.

They’d protect her. Birth to death. It was what agents did. It was the worst thing and best thing about time travel. You’d live and age in the past or future but the moment Time returned you where it liked you best you were you again, full of heavy memories. There were no old Agents of Change. Just a lot of dead ones.

“This thing rides up a bit, dunnit,” said Syndell outfitted in the breeches of the time.

“Don’t be flip,” said Arliyo, stripped to the waist and unkempt. Her unblemished brown skin was entrancing. Claudette’s freckled pink skin was entrancing. Even the backs of Syndell’s pasty pale hands were entrancing.

He did not want to go.

“We’re about to enter hell,” said Arliyo.

There were rules to the game, deep-conditioned ones. None of this going-after-the-grandfather business. Even a supercomputer got bored with infinite permutations. It was direct or nothing.

This was the height of this particular country’s insane clamor for supremacy. Truths held self-evident. All created equal. Generations enslaved.

They had to sell Arliyo to the family enslaving Harriet’s family.

Syndell cried hard that night.

He and his new wife Claudette became fast and wealthy friends of the piggish, unthinking bastards in that large house. They had property adjacent. Unable to bear children they took interest even in the Negro children, particularly baby Harriet.

No one was better protected, no one more closely watched, than one quiet, genius child. Syndell often caught the little one watching his and Claudette’s interactions. It was as if she knew. Arliyo grew old over the years. Scarred and angry but always Arliyo. Scores of agents came through as needed, yet not a one was brave enough to attempt to alter the vision of what was clearly becoming madam Tubman’s plan.

She charmed the displaced. The hurt. The Shawnee. Ibo. Pawnee. Zulu, Beijing. No one in the large houses that bartered her off as she matured saw the roads to freedom she laid.

But never once an attack on her life traceable to an agent.

Every night Syndell made love to Claudette. It was that or grow mad seeing another mark on Arliyo.

They all grew old.

By Harriet’s forty-first birthday, after the Underground Rebellion led to the surrender by Lincoln to the Free Displaced Confederacy and all plantations burned—every single one after a long war that left a million dead and a million more likely under the scientific advances at Tubman’s command—every agent knew it was time to go home.

Instead of red, the herring had been gold. No matter.

If the United States of America had been allowed to continue unchecked the world would have likely ended in nineteen fourteen.

They returned to the pub. Syndell looked at Claudette two months after that.

My gods, we were married for 42 years.

“Remember that book,” he said to her. “Before we left. Nineteen Eighty-four. What’s that about?”

They were in his apartment. She laid a hand on his face. “It’s about love.”

A tear tracked down his face. “We were in hell, Claude. A whole life.”

“It fades.”

“What about Arliyo?” he said.

“In no more pain than the last guy we dumped off Dover,” she said.

“I’m done.”

“The Machine hasn’t decommissioned you,” said Claudette.

“What did we make a difference to? A machine trying to maintain its immortality?”

“You planning to walk?” she said, seeing him through memories of the man as her husband.

“Yeah.”

“Right then. I’ll pack up with you.”

“I don’t know where I’m going, luv,” said Syndell.

“Does it make a difference?” she said.

He looked at Claudette. Her skin was rosy, her freckles plentiful, her eyes forever warm. “You sure you’re coming with me?”

“Aye.”

“Then I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Arliyo found Syndell’s handwritten notes after his disappearance.

I hold these truths to be self-evident. That time is a bollocks. That the Difference Machine is a sham. That Claudette is better for me than I deserve.

The notes were turned over to the Machine, which read them with a sense of pride. Syndell was not the finest agent, but he could read a blueprint with the best of them. The Machine would have Arliyo, undisputedly the best, find him after enough positive aspects of his absence had presented themselves. For now, let the man walk. Let him think he was disappeared.

Leave the man his illusions till the Machine deemed him vital again.