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

‘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?’

Originally published in The Dragon Chronicles (Windrift Books, 2015), edited by Ellen Campbell and part of The Future Chronicles anthology series, created by Samuel Peralta."

Blurb:The nature of history, of the origins of civilization, and our own human story, may be changed forever by the discovery of an ancient scroll that tells the story of a doomsday device that threatens civilization as we know it. The Dragons, empathic interstellar navigators of uncertain origin, may be able to save some. But where will the survivors go?

To begin with, they weren’t even supposed to be diving in that cave, or even going that deep. It was dangerous. Too far from the coral reefs, possibly filled with tiger sharks or moray eels. But that’s what made it exciting. Watching your air bubbles disappear into the light above, knowing how far down in the darkness you were.

Anything could happen.

David was the good diver, the one with all the qualifications. But Anna wanted to try it, too, and they were sure, certain, that nothing bad would happen. Maybe something exciting, but then, wasn’t that what life was all about?

Then Anna spotted a huge turtle, a gorgeous green and black leathery sea turtle. She followed it, past the depths that David had suggested they keep to. She wasn’t paying attention to depth meters when there were turtles to follow. When David saw her swim into a previously unseen cave, he followed her, panicking. He knew how you could get trapped in one of those things and never come out. His bubbles raced above him, frantic, small.

The turtle escaped them both, finding some hole too small for the humans to hide in. But what they found in there was even better.

In the center of the cave, nestled between corals and illuminated by the lights of their diving gear, sat a giant sphere of glass, perfectly sealed, enigmatic. It wasn’t very heavy, so they lifted it, carried it to the surface. They thought of pirate treasure, or lost artifacts of the Pharaohs. The green bubbled glass glistened in the sunlight as their boat carried it to shore.

There was the faintest suggestion in the glass of the perfect figure of a winged creature of some sort. Probably a dragon, its wings spread wide in a flying pattern. But no one could ever decide. It seemed to be flying around a single star-like circle, the only hint of color in the glass, like a red star.

When they showed it to their professors (they were students on an archeology summer-school course in Egypt, swimming on weekends in the Red Sea coral reefs) the professors were excited. There were some kind of scrolls, some kind of papyrus documents, sealed inside the glass that could be clearly seen, even through the green of ancient glass. They all knew they had to examine those scrolls. It was not lost upon the professors that this area was ripe with both legitimate ancient texts (the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example) and forgeries. Finding out which this was caused an international academic uproar.