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(An alternative-history multiversal parody. This is meant to be entertaining and funny, but tyranny is no joke.)
I was awoken from sleep in the middle of a night late in the year 2022 by a thunderous sound. I opened my eyes to find my computer screen and vicinity aglow with what looked like a purplish fog accompanied by an oddly-accented voice saying repeatedly “You got mail”
I turned on my computer and went to my email. Besides the usual, there was one with a subject line saying “Take and read” written with characters with the same glowish purplish tone. I opened the email, and the author line said only “Restore.” I opened and read:
“Do not fear. I come in peace. I come from the year 2191. I, Kuvak Vayhee, a half-human, half-Vulcan timeline technician at the Earth Restoration facility, had been tracing the causes of the Sino-Russian-American War with my team. The nuclear endgame of that war had erased all but a broken fragment of civilized humanity on Earth. Humanity would have died altogether had not Vulcan, after detecting signs of nuclear explosions on that once-promising planet, sent a relief mission to rescue those least damaged by fallout from total savagery and placed that endangered species in a protected reserve to work towards the millennia-long recovery of the world.
Toward the latter part of your twenty-second century , shortly after time travel became possible, Vulcan scientists discovered that Earth contained a sort of wormhole which allowed information on our own and adjacent multiversal timelines to be examined and analyzed, past and future. My institute was founded to study this phenomenon. After study, we found that without a fully developed Earth, there would be no Federation, and without a Federation, the Borg would easily defeat and assimilate its would-be members along with the Klingon and Romulan Empires by 2375.
We then analyzed the timelines that led to the War. Well aware of the Butterfly Effect, we discovered that the key triggering event of that War was not the invasion of Taiwan in 2028. Rather, it was the earlier success of a Chinese project (Silkworm) to secretly promote autocratically-inclined and isolationist groups within the United States, often without their knowledge, that proved the decisive factor in Chairman Xi’s order to invade. We traced the first prototype attempt to a small MidWestern group beginning around 2010. Its success led to full-scale deployment. When the war came, these groups caused significant disruption to the American war effort. Then we determined through computer simulations of timeline data supplemented by fragmentary historical records that the historical event that created this initial opportunity was the creation of an independent tournament in an obscure trivia game due to actions taken by a bartender at a bar in the vicinity of Harvard University in the late 1990’s. We then found that the creator of the creation was a distant human ancestor of mine named Kevin Vahey: our timelines connected directly .
Time travel to alter historical events was extremely dangerous under the best of circumstances. Just the act of travelling could sometimes cause quantum spasms that could erase pieces of space-time and anything within it. Changes of events often did not have the desired long-term effect, and usually had unintentional and unpredictable side effects on history. This particular mission was especially personal for me. Since the fate of billions of humans from the past and trillions of future would-be members of the Federation were at stake, the removal of a single human and the non-existence of his descendants was deemed acceptable, but one of those descendants was me! Nor did the removal guarantee the desired result: someone else from that team could take the same action, just as the removal of someone like Chairman Xi would be unlikely to change China’s decision to invade.
Even more oddly, after many more simulation runs of various timelines, it was found that in some of them, there was a strong temporal correlation between the success of the Beatles and the occurrence of the tournament and war. If the Beatles were successful, the war happened, if they weren’t, there was no war. It was not logical to us, but we had seen stranger things before, and the fate of all those inhabitants depended on some action, so we decided we had to stop the Beatles. No need to remove them, of course; the reason for any connection had to have had something to do with the Beatles’ success or failure. So my team chose me to go back in time and stop the Beatles from becoming successful. I had my ears surgically trimmed and back to Liverpool I went.
To make a very, very, VERY long story short, it was easy. I befriended Paul McCartney, then manipulated him into a series of disastrous romantic relationships which permanently embittered him towards women. He stopped writing love songs and soon penned tunes like “She Hates You” and “I Want To Smash Her Head.” John Lennon quickly became fed up and left the band, Ringo and George soon followed.
So I spoiled Paul McCartney’s would-have-been life and wiped out the Beatles. On the other hand, doing so didn’t wipe me out. Then I was pulled back to my time and place by my not-so-happy teammates. The tournament had still happened; the War had still been fought, and there was not a hint of any Federation to stop the Borg. What had gone wrong?
After exhaustive checking and rechecking, we found we had erred in interpreting the data. This time, we were even able to bring up some video to verify our data. Yes, there was a strong temporal connection between the two events, but we and our timeline twins had caused it. In the altered timelines, McCartney continued to write melodiously misogynistic tunes like “We Can’t Work It Out” and “Man on the Run,” but found few fans besides some divorced men. Eventually, he emigrated to America, to Boston. There he continued to sing his bittersweet songs to bitter men, but to make ends meets, he began to tend bar, which he found himself good at doing. Plus, it gave him an in for solo performances in local bars. One Tuesday winter night, he was working at a place called the Crimson Sports Grille as a substitute for someone named McCarthy, and he was going to start his acoustic guitar set at 9:15. People were watching sports on TV. Some were looking at a TV set that flashed questions while they yelled out numbers as they fiddled around with some ugly boxes. Well, at 9:10, he did some yelling himself. “Nobody is going to make noise while I’m performing” he announced as he turned the TV sets with the questions off.
There was no question of going back to change the change; that would definitely cause space-time damage. On the other hand, while we had been unsuccessful, we hadn’t caused any additional harm, except to Paul McCartney and his fans. Risking our facility and our lives, we overloaded our equipment and began broader sweeps over more of the multiverse. It caused the destruction of a third of our equipment and three lives, but we found out what we needed to know: in the greater multiverse, there was a wide range of results. The war happened with and without the success of the Beatles. The war didn’t happen with or without the success of the Beatles.
We now believe that the turning point on the development of countergroups happened much later than we had initially believed: somewhere between 2022-2025. From our extremely limited analysis, it appears that major variance among the universes begin to emerge around this time: some universes change a lot, some don’t change at all. We have concluded, though with low confidence, that a dispute over the eligibility of a team caused the inclinations of the prototype group to become public. It does appear that the level of change has a major effect on the likelihood of the war taking place. We believe and hope that these communications will be the reason for these variances; some will listen, some will not.
We do know that the prototype organization became highly erratic in its decision-making when their goals and motivations began to be questioned. In this universe, the prototype conceded some decision-making powers temporarily to part of the larger group, but this has not been always or even usually been the case in other universes.
Due to our damaged equipment, we are unable to do any more than send text/email messages to most universes. Replies to texts/emails will probably work, but we will probably not be able to answer individual replies.
What we will try to do is report the events that are happening in this universe, which may give you some insight into what is happening in yours. You can do likewise, though all messages must go through us. As a further check into timeline drift, we will report the scores of this tournament in our universe.
It is normal for there to be differences between universes, some of them minor, some not. We have detected that some of you are playing a McCarthy, not a McCartney Cup. Names and places of locations may differ; it is quite conceivable that some universes will have a much different grouping.
Please take heed. Your world may depend on it.
________________________________________________________________
Duty calls. I will do what they say. I have used our universe’s names and locations for places, sometimes they are different, but
groups appear to be identifiable, this may not prove true.
Feel free to comment.
Red Fox, Cuyahoga Falls, OH 56783
Danny K’s, Orange, CA 48224
Wallaby's, Lenexa, KS 46068
Phat Turtle, Cave Creek, AZ 45189
The Market at John Hall Store, Cecil, AL 45168
Teaser’s, Chicago, IL 45146
Primetime Sports Grill, Tampa, FL 43428
Alien Bar, Albuquerque, NM 43390
Tower Pub, St. Louis, MO 43183
Hanko’s Sports Bar and Grill, Lake Oswego, OR 41509
Moose McGuire’s, Ottawa, ON 41437
Herrill Lanes, New Hyde Park, NY 40144
Time Out West, Hanover Park, IL 39595
Corner Pocket, Montgomery, AL 39464
Blue Horn Lounge, Chapel Hill, NC 38218
Big Guys, Winnipeg, MB 38180
Alabama’s Little Bit of Texas, Wetumpka, AL 33244
Oak Tree Lanes, Diamond Bar, CA 22923
_________________
“When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy . . ., I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.” --de Tocqueville
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