You can probably guess the rest of the story, at least the obvious parts. The Pacific Rim countries wired themselves up, pell-mell, putting in communications capacity they would never need, all in hopes of accessing the treasures of the parallel worlds. And by the mid-’80s, it became apparent they had made induction work: the enormous number of innovations in consumer products, in electronics, in just about every field, crushing our homegrown companies, causing unemployment and misery all over our land.
Oh, in a few places where we had supercomputers and the alternate universes had them in the same place, we maintained a minimal set of contacts, so that places like Los Alamos and Sandia and NASA occasionally got the rare jewel of research information. But nothing really useful to society at large.
This is, of course, the obvious part, something everyone could figure out, given the true picture of parallel worlds.
But there were non-obvious, nonpublic consequences as well, things that we at AT&T didn’t find out till later, too late. It turned out that each of the newly independent Baby Bells went hell-bent for induction, each on their own, and were already prepared, secretly, at the cut-over date, to maintain their own parallel induction capabilities. They didn’t miss a lick, although there were problems. Trouble was, rather than having one large, coherent system, the induction was locally strong in some places, weak in others. Result was, some Baby Bells could access some of the usual six parallel worlds, but because of massive concentrations in some cities, other Baby Bells started picking up many more parallel universe systems.
Some of those new worlds were really weird, I found out later. The information anybody over here got was sporadic, sometimes nonsensical (ESP machines? Inertialess drives? Video games?) Some worlds had their inductive wiring systems jammed up in one or two regions; there’s an Etowah Nation that talks in Cherokee to what used to be BellSouth; a Republic of Fremont in the Bay Area only; an Arabicspeaking parallel nation in Arizona. An incoherency of alternate worlds, which turns out to be a real mess.
All of that occurred real quick-like on January 1, 1983—the Real Day Everything Changed, when the alternate worlds began to get out of synch. There were bigger problems to come, though, much bigger. We had the seven Baby Bells wiring up to beat the band, and the Pacific Rimmers doing the same. You add to that the gargantuan increase in wiring our cable TV systems in particular, and by the late ’80s we were getting much too coupled to those other worlds. Sometime in that period, the past itself began to waver.
Since Bell Labs had been mostly broken up into ineffectual consumer-product groups, and since nobody else cared too much about nationwide telephone network research, there hasn’t been anybody to study the problem, but the last I heard was this: because of the scattered concentrations of wiring interconnections, some kind of balance among the parallel worlds was upset. Things got chaotic; result was, the past of World One (ours, naturally) got interchanged with the past of another world, and they all got mixed up, fairly randomly. We at AT&T began tracking the manifestations—people who swore they’d read that one famous person or another had died, but then found out it hadn’t happened. Things once lost turning up where they been searched for before, and vice versa. Anomalous artifacts in archaeology, weird lights in the sky, strange cults and sects, independent Presidential candidates, the whole works. And worst of all, a vague feeling permeating society that Something Had Changed.
We at AT&T grew horrified—suppose last month’s long-distance calling charges got shifted to another world as well? What if our past got shifted into some world with higher taxes? An accountant’s nightmare! We couldn’t have all our remaining investments at risk. So we got together with the other long-distance carriers and in unison we attacked the problem on all fronts, even got the Feds and all of their Labs involved. Suddenly, networking studies, neural nets, AI, became the big tiling. Our secret Internet fairly hummed with hypotheses, with possible solutions.
What we found was, with the profusion of more and more electronic products, with more and more PCs and laptops, the problem is just getting worse. Pockets of past-shifting are occurring randomly all over the world; business records, investment accounts, even genealogies are no longer solid. Historical “revisionism” is rampant, as different sets of scholars write on things they actually researched and remember, from sources that once were valid. Politics have changed so sharply that forty-year trends have reversed themselves; one election the people want big government, the next, a smaller one; and the most incredible politicians, ones who would’ve been jailed in previous years, get themselves elected over and over again. (Well, when the past changes, memories get confused and the populace responds accordingly—unpredictably.)
Actually, there is one solution to this situation, and all of us Phone Companies decided to do it a few years back, but it’s rather scary, too. With secret help from a government agency that was in The Know, we have been going full-bore to wire the whole world up in one unified network, to grow the Internet—with its information-rich video and sound version, the World Wide Web—so wide and far and fast that we will quickly warp our whole planet into one unified, stable history line, presumably a consensus past acceptable to most of us. The uncertainty is unnerving, but at least we’re better off than some worlds, at least we have a chance to stabilize our own past. And we Phone Companies here in World One are pushing as hard as possible, before another alternate world steals our history.
Because as bad as our known history is, we could have done worse. In some of those unfortunate other worlds, various incarnations of Monopoly still reign; weird things called a World Soviet Union, a Unified World State, a Corporate Continuum, an Axis Hegemony, and Le Monarchic du Monde de Napoleon XII. And in one particularly pernicious parallel universe, their version of the US government is even trying to add a ‘back door’ to each of their communications chips, a secret way into the network so that Big Brother can subtly intervene electronically whenever it senses a threat to itself, and prevent its Phone Companies from stabilizing their world’s past. From that regime’s horribly perverse viewpoint, a changing past is preferable to an unknown past that might kick them out of power.
Of course, you might expect such shenanigans from a world in which the US re-elects as a President some oversexed Yuppie yahoo. Thank the Eight Hundred Gods that in our own enlightened world, the Co-Regents are both ex-sci-fi writers who understand these kinds of things and are letting your Phone Companies, like us here at Alternate Telecoms & Telechron, try to nail down the past once and for all.
You just can’t be too careful about History!