The Gaming Outpost

It’s called different things. No, I’m not discussing being a verser, which is called ‘gatesman’, ‘d-traveller’, and/or ‘worldwalker’.  As should be clear, I mean aspie’s, or as its called in various universes, Linear Affective Mindset Disorder, or Genetic Logic Over-Dependence, or supergeek.  I call it Aspberger’s as thats what it was called in the first universe I was born into, before I became a verser.

Even then, that is before I took home the experimental Scriff Inside! keyboard, I was extremely good at computers.  I had a Jaguar XJS, and a guitar used by Mick Jagger by the time I was twenty-two.  Not that I had time to use them as I worked a ninety hour week for TechOptimal, Inc..

By twenty-three, I had put the Jaguar in a ditch, and bought a Porsche, and bloodied my fingers on the Gibson, and spent eight weeks in the hospital for nervous overstress, and another two months to let my bones get back to what they were supposed to be doing after me and the Jaguar parted ways at ninety miles per hour on that curve.  After that, I always wore a seat belt.  Nothing like flying at a tree, sans jet pack, or car to encourage safe driving habits one would think. I smashed the Porsche a year later, but that time I had my seat belt on.  The old truck I hit head first drove away after the police cleared us.  My lime-green Porsche got lifted by a maglifter onto the back of a junk truck, and I went back to the hospital for three months.

By the time I was thirty-two, I had a total of four friends in my life, none of them female.  And my stock portfolio varied wildly as I kept coming up with systems for beating the market. Some worked very well, and others did…not so well.  And I drove a very large, fire-engine red custom truck, with rollbars.

Prematurely balding, with big glasses, and an adenoidal adam’s apple, and what one waitress had told me was a ‘goofy, sweet smile’, I took home the fatal, or at least transformative keyboard.  One can of the Ultrajolt spiking across the keyboard, drat Googleplex, my insufferable Persian cat, and I was out of There, with There having the values of my home timeline.

I woke in Nineteen-Forties America (with a few changes so that I knew I was not time travelling.  Texas was five states, and California was three, and except for the area around Juneau, the Russians owned Alaska.)  I tried to start a business with my advanced technology, which should have been easy, but I got an up close and personal feeling for what living in High Taxia is like.  If, after much labor, and daring, and fear, I earned ten dollars, the government wanted nine of them, and then people spat on me as a ‘filthy capitalists’.

If the War had not come, I’m not sure what I would have done, but all of a sudden capitalists were not a bad thing.  The War needed mountains of supplies, and although I could not take my advanced computational skills to work, I did know how to run what is called Systemology.  I could put together seven hundred different parts made by fifty different companies, and have it come together in a workable tank or fighter plane.  At the time, I was one of four people in the world that could do that, and the other three were also American.

Without us, the War would have gone far differently.

The other three were smart enough to realize that I was a head above them, and to begin to figure out why.  So I explained it, and we got together, and pushed Enigma early, and by the end of the War, the Nazis were reduced to hand-delivering messages as we had so thoroughly compromised their infonets that we had Nazi battallions duking it out with each other on occasion.

From there, it was a quick step to the Internet, and microchips.  About this time, we became aware that Senator McCarthy might be a blowhard, but in essence, he was right.  The way we had treated the Nazis was the way the KGB was treating us.  They were not as smart as us, but they were insanely paranoid, and there was something in the West, a death impulse, that left us vulnerable as sin to their mind games, what later would be called ‘memetic warfare’.  Most of the modern American ways of thought that I had thought weird back home turned out to be weird because the KGB had created them as mind weapons.

We responded by generously electrifying and Internetting the whole of Russia.  They did not want us to, that is the Politburo, but its hard to refuse tens of billions of free gifts for your workers.  Of course, it was a poison pill.  I designed the Russian Net, and it was very, very easy to hide your identity in it, and oh, complain about the abuses of the local commissar to the whole town, or nation, or world.

Lenin barely got started murdering before he was overthrown, and shotgunned to death.  Stalin never even got started.

Now you probably think of this as boasting.  Its not, not really.  Its to let you know how I got married to a lovely girl.  We met, online, natch.  And I liked her, and she found me funny, and sweet, and we got married.  Let me tell you, I was happy.  I look thrirty, and am actually seventy, and I finally have a girl.

Problem is, I occasionally forget things.  Like this is the seventh day in a row that I forgot to buy milk from the grocery store after our gallon jug had curdled in the fridge.  Now given that I had forgotten after my wife patiently reminded me, you might think of me as heading toward the doghouse.

Instead…

She walked in, and heard on the TV that there had been a shortage of milk due to a Federal crackdown on milk safety standards.  So obviously it was not my fault.

Later, I would shuffle some cash back to the milk companies to make up for their loss.  As one of the Secret Kings of the World, I try to be fair to my subjects while making sure my wife smiles at me.

Richard Milhous Nixon sat at the borrowed wooden desk in the room he had never seen before an hour ago, and sweated in his beige suit jacket as he considered his half-full glass of bourbon and ice.  The hypocritical bastards, the Eastern Establishment, had taken JFK to be their own, ignoring his grandfather’s role as a rumrunner which founded the family fortune.  Quite jump, from Mob boss to President in three generations, and Nixon knew he could stop it.

“I could stop it, Hector.” He said quietly, and Hector Wilcombe nodded.

“Yes, sir. Those election results from Daleytown look fishy.”

“They stink. What on Earth was Richard Daley thinking?” RMN cursed.

“He was thinking you’re a better, more generous man than he is.” A quiet voice said from the corner of the room.  Hector spun, and Nixon raised his eyes to see a strangely dressed man in loose khaki pants, a terry cloth shirt, puffy shoes, and an ill-fitting blue jacket.

“You’re here to intimidate me, assasinate me if I don’t take it.” RMN said coldly.  The blue jacket gave it away. It was the same as the ushers in his ‘victory’ party team wore in the convention hall outside the small room.  The assasin had stolen it.  It fit since the Kennedy’s were heavily wired into the Mafia, but, any smart assasin would not wear such odd clothing.  Well, unless it was functional to his job.  RMN studied the clothes, and could think of no reason why an assasin needed such loose pants unless it was to hide a weapon, and he could see no weapon underneath.

Odd.

He looked up, and studied the man.  He had red hair, and green eyes, and a good set of teeth.  But there was no cold killer’s gaze.

“You’re not an assasin sent from the Kennedy’s.” RMN said. One point four seconds had passed.  “You’re some sort of fanatic who thinks he can offer me a deal, thinks he has special powers.”

Hector move to the door, and the door swung shut.

“I am here to offer you a deal, sir.  But unlike your theory, based no doubt on a vast array of nuts you’ve met, I do have special powers.”

RMN blinked, and then pulled out a necklace.

“Get behind me, Satan.” He said, and then kissed the bare cross.

The khaki clad man shrugged, and Nixon shrugged as well.

“Just covering my bases.” Nixon said apologetically.

Hector goggled.

“You, what, how’d you, close the door, get in here…”

“Shhh, Hector.” RMN said. “Just sit down and listen. Angel, prophet, or spy?”

“I like to think I’m on the side of the angels. Lincoln you know. D.”

“Of course.” RMN understood the reference to Lincoln being asked if the God was on the Union’s side, and replying that he hoped the Union was on God’s side. “None of the above.”

“Extraterrestial, then.”

“Close, sir. Extradimensional.  I’m a verser.  Its an accident, most unlikely. And some of us travel to alternate realities.”

“Realities where I beat JFK, eh?”

“You beat him here and now.”

RMN shrugged, and took out a cigarette, but before he could light it, the visitor focused some pyrokinetic force and lit it by force of will.

“I always wanted to be able to do that, when I was a child.  That and fly like Superman.”

“I’ve met Superman.”

RMN’s eyebrows rose. It was only the second time in the conversation that he had been startled.

“Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” RMM said, and the visitor nodded.  It was what was at stake.

“I plan on letting JFK have his cheating victory.  Better that than tear the nation apart.” RMN said.

“In another reality, it worked out. Reagan destroyed the Soviets.”

RMN chuckled.

“I always knew there was more to that cowboy than anyone else thought.”

“But in that reality, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed as spies.  And Alger Hiss, spy, was not Secretary of State.”

“You’re saying that the Great Lie is stronger here, and needs to be confronted.”

The visitor sighed.

“I don’t know, sir. You’re widely considered, in at least eight different dimensions as the smartest president since James Madison.  In some realities, it worked out. In others, byt 2030, there is a Hammer and Sickle hanging from the Washington Monument, and in others, the Monument is melted off halfway up.”

“Hunh?” Hector asked.

“Nuclear war, Hector.” RMN said.  He sucked on the cigarette, and began calculating, his brain racing.  This strange extradimensional had come to dump the problem in his lap, and hope for the best.

Twenty seconds later…

“So, I’m assuming you have advanced tech from other timelines?” Nixon said peering coldly at the man who had hid himself in plain sight in a small room.  The visitor nodded.

“So we roll the dice, and tell that corrupt scum Daley to give us an honest recount, and give the Kennedy’s the fight of their lives.” He smiled savagely.  The visitor hoped, but if it worked then in this timeline there would be no Vietnam, no Bay of Pigs, no Thirteen Days in May, no Dallas, no Warren Commission. What else there might be, who knew?

Liselle Hodtermann, verser, searched the alternate Earth for a convergence of three things.  She needed daring men, uranium ore, and a weak collegia.  After four months on the road, she came to the County of Wenschler, a high mountain area suited for goats, and bears, and tough warriors.  No one ruled here as the land was beaten down enough that no king or duke could rise that far above his fellows.

The dessert rocks, and the small woods held nomadic tribes, and a few tiny one well villages with rock slab walled cottages.  Surveying the land as she rode in on her pony, she thought it unpromising.  But then her Geiger counter started to sing as she took her camp for the night.  And in the night, a half-dozen men charged her camp, and nearly overran it despite the laser pistol stabbing bolts of power into the night.

The next day she rode to the nearest village, and was met by a hard-faced headman, and some men behind him, one of them having the sign of a burnt arm, held in a crudely slung sling.

“We don’t want trouble.” He said flatly, and hands touched swords, and spears.  This lot would gut her as soon as she turned her back.  So she smiled, nodded, and did.  Before the headman could yell, the spears were flying.

She spun her pony about and sidestepped to the right.  Two spears were still infalling on her new location, and she flamed them out of the air with a wave of her lasepistol.  This she then used to cut a line in front of the surging crowd.  This stopped them cold, and they stared at her hostile, and wary, but not yet beaten.

“You’ll do.” She nodded with satisfaction at the mountain villagers in their crude brown pants, and fur layered shirts.  They stared at her in puzzlement.

“Men of the Village. If you build well, create a factory, or make a canal what happens?”

There was some grumbling, but then the headman spoke.

“Star Lady. The men from orbit send a message to us, raising our tribute, and if we pay not, they drop rocks on us.”

She nodded as if this were not perfectly well known to her.

“Is this right?” She asked.

“What matter right? They have the power!” The one burnt said to her.

“I can give you the power if you but follow me.”

“We cannot take them on.” One man said.

“Are you wolves or weasels? If you be wolves, you will gather to take down your prey.  If you are but weasels, then I might as well do this land a favor and rid it of you now.”  She waved her lasepistol about.

“How, Star Lady? Tell us how you will take away the power of the men in orbit, and give us peace in our own land.  And then perhaps we will listen to you.”

Three hours later, after drinking innumerable cups of tea, the deal was hammered our, and the men of that village and the other two near villages would soon declare themselves for the Star Lady.

One thing mountains tend to have is caves.  And so she got them to take timber from the woods, and build supports in a cave.  And in that cave, they took uranium ore, and made bomb-makimg material out of it.  This required the making of tools to make tools to make tools, but she knew shortcuts from more advanced civs, and the men worked hard.  Within a year, they had their first nuke test (in another cave).

And without a strong collegia, they did not have to contend with mistaken ideas imposed by mistaken doctrines that suggested nuclear power opened the gates to hell, and such like.

From there, they had to build the Redoubt close to the surface, but not too close.  It was four thousand tons of rock and steel with minimal control systems.  A solid steel plate on springs at the base of the redoubt spacecraft waited for the Coca-cola can sized nukes to be tossed into the launch chute.

Once all was in readiness, and the thirty man passenger spacecraft awaited, the Star Lady used her lasepistol to etch ‘Safety Through Superior Firepower’ on to the hull.  Thus named, the last of the crew joined on board, and a radio signal was set, and the few feet of the cavern roof were blown out, exposing the Safety to the men in orbit.

But before they could strike, a nuke went off under the pusher plate, and a half-second later, another one.  The Safety was moving.  The nuke drove its energy into the pusher plate, and the plate rocked a bit, and the Safety rattled a bit.  Two more, and it was definitely climbing.

Before the Earth-targetting Kinetic Energy Weapons could be tasked to hit the rising Safety in lower Earth atmsophere, it had passed their attack zone.  Using its two hundreth nuke, it rose into the outer parts of the stratosphere.  By the third hundred, it was orbitting amongst the lower Earth orbit rabble that only dared loot from the weak on the planet below them.

Another twenty nukes, and it was heading up into geosynchronous orbit where the men in orbit lived.  They struck back with lasers, but the huge size of the installation defeated them.

The Safety came into geosynchronous orbit, and then the Star Lady spoke on the EM band.

“Surrender now to the Mountain People, or be nuked from orbit.”

Over the next dozen years, over a hundred redoubts were put into orbit, and where they went, law and order came.  The uncivilized barbarian lands of the outer orbit were united with the land underneath them, and instead of raiding for scarce goods, there was factories built on planet and off, and mines were built, and then churches, and schools were built.  But even so, the men in orbit raised their sons to hate the women who had taken their natural life of pillaging and looting away from them, and eventually one of these got to her, but by then it was too late.  Civilization had come, and any one who wanted to rebel, would have to face the power of the redoubts without blinking.