A story exploring time travel and societal issues in the wake of 9/11. This is chapter 33. See previous posts for chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, and 32.
After a bunch of tedious drama that seemed like it would never end, Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic Primary. Achieving this result required the full force of The Federation and nearly two billion dollars. Their victory felt short-lived. Immediately after the contest was won, the media establishment refocused the national conversation on Donald Trump and Russian electoral interference on his behalf. And when Donald Trump won the general election, it was as if their accomplishment had accomplished nothing at all.
Even so, events did begin diverging from T2's future history in small ways. His lottery numbers were now correct only about a tenth of the time. His sports scores were even less accurate. Many of the news stories he'd archived were never published. So they hadn't done nothing. They'd done something. They'd moved the needle.
Through it all, T2's financial market predictions remained remarkably accurate. The prices of currencies and commodities rose and fell exactly where T2'd said they would, no matter how far this timeline diverged from the future he'd recorded. It was almost as if the markets were tightly controlled, impervious to outside influences, despite appearances to the contrary. Trading on T2's information, Thomas kept expecting his luck to run out, but it never did.
Trish visited Thomas that winter. She moved into an extra room in his house, having vowed never to spend another winter in a mountainside treehouse. Thomas was glad for the company. His ongoing obsession with the Mind Spheres had not made him into a more social creature. The current conversation illustrated that.
"So while it's possible to encode false memories into working memory, encoding them into procedural memory is much trickier," said Thomas.
"Because of the folded 3-D geometries?" asked Trish, following along.
"That's right," said Thomas. "The sequential activation of folded 3-D geometries."
"And the false memories you're talking about ... ?" asked Trish.
"I've mostly been working with skills and languages," said Thomas. "Like, I've got a program that'll teach me other languages, but I forget them after a few hours."
"So we could go into your Mind Spheres, learn Japanese, then come out here and have a conversation with each other in Japanese?" asked Trish.
"Yup," said Thomas. "We could also learn martial arts, without the benefit of bodies trained in martial arts."
"Could we do blacksmithing?" asked Trish.
"Maybe," said Thomas, grinning. "The experiment I'm the most excited for though is the telepathy test. I can't do that one by myself. You want to volunteer?"
"What do I have to do?" asked Trish.
"Sit in a Sphere wearing a headset, and train the software to recognize you," said Thomas. "Then we both sit in Spheres, trying to keep our minds blank for a few hours while the software observes the relationship between our thought patterns."
"A few hours?" said Trish. "What about, like, twenty minutes?"
Enjoying the novelty of it, Trish agreed to the telepathy test, which ended up taking a couple of days. When they were done, reviewing the results, they found evidence that their minds in the Mind Spheres had indeed been connected, though not consciously. Thomas was thrilled. Trish was happy for him. To celebrate, they went out for Indian food.
"Okay I promise not to talk any more about the results," said Thomas, partway through the meal.
"Let's talk about how we were able to swing an election just by throwing giant piles of money at it," said Trish.
"I know, right?" said Thomas. "But all our money did was cancel out all of the money behind Clinton. We made the fight more fair and Sanders won it on his own merits."
"Yeah, okay," said Trish. "To be honest, more and more, I've been thinking about money as a form of mind control."
"It's definitely that," said Thomas. "Every jerk that's just doing their job for some tyrant is doing their job for money. But then, we've both got money and is it mind-controlling us?"
"Probably," said Trish. "But I've been thinking about it in relation to stories. Like, one of the most important powers money gives you is the power over shared stories. The ability to determine the features of our information landscape."
"For sure," said Thomas. "Working in news media sometimes feels like being caught in a maze made of big blocks of money, all insisting that their version of reality is correct."
"And then there's the government," said Trish. "Did you know there are government agents in Hollywood controlling the UFO narrative for reasons we can only guess at? But what I'm really thinking about is Reed. He was set for life at NIS. Why did he throw it all away? Was it just for money, or was there something else?"
"I think he saw the power of the tech and wanted to exercise that power," said Thomas. "The prospect of power is a seductive thing. And, as always, those seduced by power are unlikely to use it wisely. Just look at what the police did with their newfound power after 9/11. They did all kinds of stuff, with help from Homeland Security and other agencies. They militarized and started gobbling up NSA information when it suited them. They started brazenly stealing from people. What they never did, and probably won't ever do, was relinquish the newfound powers after the initial threat that created those powers proved largely ephemeral. "
"I guess it just bothers me that we could swing an election with a couple of billion dollars," said Trish. "What that actually means is that we don't even have a democracy. Not really. We have a system where the rich pay for opportunities to subject their subjects to propaganda to produce predictable election outcomes. God, it's so ridiculous it makes me want to scream."
"Don't scream," said Thomas. "Whether you see it or not, I think we actually did some good with our money. The way T2 told his story of the future, there was never any real discussion of class or class politics in the general election that followed the primary. In our new reality, when Trump won, it wasn't just one Master of the Universe beating another. It was a New York real estate tycoon beating a lifelong civil servant and champion of the working class."
"So?" said Trish.
"So," said Thomas. "Instead of being forced to always choose between two sides of a single elite agenda, we helped people see another side entirely. The side of average people. Even if that side didn't win, just making it more visible had some impact."
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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