SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

‘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.’