BIRTHDAY WISH Tom Mazanec Robert sat down in front of his birthday present to himself. The new computer was a 65536 nano-processor system with petabyte holocube memory, voice input, phased array optics display and laser fiber modem. Well, the Beatles sang about when one's 64; and on November 3, 2013 that was how old Robert was. He might as well get himself something to make it pleasant. "Open Transformation Story Archive." Robert said, planning to dictate the next installment in his Blind Pig serial. The TSA opening screen appeared for a brief moment, then suddenly it blanked out and a spinning, shimmering moire pattern replaced it, then floated out of the screen and hovered above him. "That's odd...I didn't think the image could completely leave the screen!" Robert thought. "Congratulations" said the moire pattern in a strange, hollow voice. "Yours is the 20,922,789,888,000th access to the World Wide Web. This is the magic factorial 16 and, since you did so on your 2 to the sixth power birthday, the phyle-clade of the omnicosmic multiverse has granted you a single wish. Choose wisely!" This was it! Robert had a chance to actually transform! He knew the only transformation that made any sense. He had no wish to be a woman, and an animal might be fun but socially awkward. But a chronomorph - a chance to become young again and gain decades of life added on in the bargain! In another 50 years they may be able to cure aging and he could live forever! 50 years younger, that was the ticket! "I wish I were 14 again!" Robert happily cried. *********************************************************************** "Happy birthday, Bobbie!" came a familiar voice. "My little man is growing up fine!" It was his father, entering his bedroom. But his father had died years ago, and he had not seen this bedroom in more years than he cared to count. He climbed out of bed and began getting dressed. "We're going out to dinner to celebrate after Church!" "Yeah, Dad, sure." Robert walked out into the kitchen and saw one of those old fashioned paper newspapers on the table. The date was Sunday, November 3, 1963 and the headline was about a military coup in South Vietnam. Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese president, was reported dead. The newspaper looked brand new. "This wasn't *quite* what I meant!" Robert thought. Robert, or Bobby as he was now called, was quiet in Church. He was also quiet at dinner. His father tried to cheer him up, and he feebly played along, but it was not very convincing. "I guess you're just thoughtful about growing up." his father said. "Son, I'm very proud of you." There was a tear in his father's eye, and quite soon there was a tear in Bobby's eye as well. Yes, he was very thoughtful about growing up. He was glad to have a chance to see his father again, but he felt he had to do something with this situation he had placed himself in. It was a moral obligation. That night he began to carry it out. He picked up the phone and dialed 911. It felt odd to push a little wheel around instead of pushing buttons. A few moments of silence followed, and then the dial tone returned. Bobby repeated the dialing, and again the phone waited quietly a brief while before resuming its humming whine. "This is crazy" Bobby thought. "How are you supposed to reach the police if 911 doesn't..." Then he caught on. Picking up the phone book, he looked up and dialed the seven digit number for the cops. "Officer, I have reason to believe that President Kennedy's life is in danger..." he began. *********************************************************************** "I don't know, Dr. Muller. He was shook up when his mother died last year, but he seemed to have gotten over it. Then his birthday... he seemed awful serious all day, then suddenly starts calling every police number in the book and says this Lee Harvey Oswald character is gonna shoot the President! I just can't figure it out! And the scene he caused at school...I tell you, the last 19 days have been murder! Are we going to have to...commit him?" "I have great hope of curing your child, Mr. Peterson. I feel he has simply had a most vivid dream. You can live half a century in half a second in a dream, but when he realizes that is all it was, he will be able again to live in reality. The problem is that he so clearly remembers his dream, and this wish-granting entity gives him a rational for being here in 1963. Usually the vagueness of our dream memories lets us distinguish them from the real world, but as his memories of this 2013 fantasy fade he will be reintegrated into reality. I will begin by showing how illogical his version of the future is. For example, he claims that he works writing something called "screen savers" for "personal computers". It is absurd to imagine everybody being able to afford their own computer, but if they could, nobody would use them to display pictures of swimming fish! When the President is not killed as he foretells, this will help, too. Now, this odd name he came up with. Does he have any friends, or is he a fan of any, say, cartoon characters, named "Lee", "Harvey" or "Oswald"?" At that moment, President Kennedy was riding in Dallas, Texas, stumping for the 1964 election campaign. He never even felt the bullet enter his head. *********************************************************************** John A. McCone was not what another generation would have called a "happy camper". First, President Johnson was enraged by the failure of his CIA, and Hoover's FBI, to find any connection between the Petersons and Lee Harvey Oswald, or between them and Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby. In spite of taking the family into custody and subjecting them to the most advanced methods of interrogation known to man, the father insisted that he had no connection to the assassination and that his son had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown on his 14th birthday. Meanwhile, the son continued to spout his Buck Rodgers garbage about the 21st century. But what sent the President into apoplexy was the earthquake that ravaged Anchorage, Alaska on Good Friday. That was another one of the things that the Peterson boy swore was going to happen. "McCone, I am no dang idjit! Even in Alaska, a quake like that comes along once in a thousand years! That brat gave the exact day it hit! That can mean only one thing - that quake was caused! Caused by the only enemy of our country that could possibly have done such a horrendous crime! The conspiracy that boy is snagged up in is even bigger than I thought! Not only have the Russians killed Kennedy, but they killed over a hundred of our civilian citizens! Men, women, children! This is an act of war - and the next quake they cause could be New York! Or Washington! I thank God that agent Brown went over your head and brought this to my attention." "Mr. President, agent Brown is very brilliant but sometimes a little...odd. He has a tendency, sometimes, to jump to conclusions." Boy, the conclusion I might have to give..."The installation at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski is a geological and seismological research station, not a weapon of war." The President's gaze could have burned ice. It was time to go for broke, before this spun out of control and brought something only a lunatic would want. "Mr. President, the Peterson child described superconductors using copper oxide based ceramics doped with rare earth elements. I had our labs look into this, just in case...and we have already obtained this superconducting effect in a material, and at a temperature, that our top scientists say is flatly impossible! Is it just possible that the boy is telling the truth? If so, it could be the intelligence coup of all history!" "Bah! If he knows something our top scientists don't, that just shows that the Soviets are more dangerous still! Hell, his claim we'll lose a war in Vietnam proves his allegiance! I have taken appropriate action and have ordered a military strike against this Pettpap-Kamsky place in retaliation for the Soviet earthquake attack at Anchorage!" *********************************************************************** The fireball and mushroom cloud that took out Washington also ended Robert Petterson's life. He could take any comfort he could if he knew that Moscow vanished three full minutes before he did. Or perhaps his microsecond misery would love the company of the people of Los Angeles, Leningrad, Chicago, Gorki, Miami, Perm, Denver, Chelyabinsk, Seattle, Sverdlovsk, Cleveland, Kiev, Houston, Kharkov, Atlanta, Novosibirsk...
DRIZZLE DRAZZLE DRUZZLE DROME TIME FOR THIS ONE TO COME HOME