a company in Atlanta that specialized in satellite terminals. She got some basic information, but she also learned that satellite communications systems were in high demand and that terminals weren't available off the shelf.
She was back at the beach house by dusk, so she and Wirtz sat on the deck and watched the sun chase down the beach to the West. Sally thought it was a good idea to find out more about the client. "What kinds of scenarios have your sponsors asked for, Bill?"
IfWirtz noticed the use of his first name, he didn't show it. "A wide variety of stuff. Of course they wanted to know what would have happened if the Trinity shot on July 16, 1945 initially failed so Truman didn't have the atomic bomb to end World War Two, but everybody asks that. They sent other scenarios like what would have happened if the Prussian Prince Wilhelm had fallen overboard from the battleship "Baden" in 1917 and drowned. The answer is an immediate end to World War I and no World War I I. Another one was what would have happened if the El Nino weather pattern hadn't stayed for so many seasons in the 1990s. Some things were very specific, but a few were general."
"Hmmm. Interesting stuff. So what would have happened without the atomic bomb?"
"It's pretty complex." First, the idea of atomic explosives was being explored in at least five countries before the war started, so even if the American tests had failed, atomic bombs would still have been developed at some time. The most immediate effect if Truman didn't have the bomb would
have been an invasion of the southern Japanese islands by the Americans in the Spring of 1946. Interestingly, almost every scenario shows the Soviets invading Japan from the north at almost the same time. We projected American losses in terms of the tens of thousands, but some projections show the Soviets literally eliminating the ethnic Japanese population north of Tokyo. We never spent the computer time on more simulations, but a divided Japan would certainly have been another hot spot like divided Germany and divided Korea. "
"You have the databases and processing power for those kinds of scenarios?" she asked with some surprise.
"Well, you know that as processing power intensifies, the computers shrink. We have an IBM AS/400 with the new 64-bit processors in the back of the house. I worked on the database for almost a decade, but I gathered most of it after I got this contract two years ago." Then Wirtz shifted in his chair and got closer to Sally. "But the real outcome involves a lot of guesses. The basic problem is how much weight to give to any particular sequence of events.There is a lot of guess work there." The tone of that admittance was something between a delicious secret and a shameful one.
"But how can anyone ever prove you wrong?" Sally asked as she moved slightly away. "No one knows how history would have turned out if any of those things had happened!"
"Ah, but don't forget, we do know how one set of events interacted. That's our own real history. That template gives us valid checkpoints for a lot of assumptions and weightings.
Then, we can test the sensitivity of each assumption to see how much leeway we have in weighting specific events and influences.We set a lot of these weightings on the fly. No, I'll never have proof that we're right, but we can demonstrate good logic and well, I'd bet on our predictions anytime. "
"That's a bet where no one collects. So in some cases it doesn't matter if one individual is never born, but in other cases one birth or death is critical to the unfolding of major events. Wow." Sally lived in a world of data flow and electronics. History interested her when it was linked with places she visited, but some elements of history were too painful and personal to allow her to contemplate the why of historical events.
"Yes, but the forward scenarios, the ones where we try to describe what would have happened if this or if that, those are comparatively easy. The hard ones are the backward scenarios. In a backward scenario, someone sets a condition or circumstance and we have to come up with the best scenario leading there. Suppose, for example, we set a condition where we say that in the year 2000 the American Indians are the dominant culture in North America. What things had to happen, and when did they happen, to make that condition happen? " Bill sat back for a minute and let the question hang in the air. He was testing to see if she got the idea.
"So maybe the American Indians have a strain of measles that they were immune to, but that decimated every party of European explorers and settlers?" Sally
almost snorted, this wasn't science, it was fantasy. But she could play the game.
"Yes, exactly! In fact, we've run that solution several times. The Europeans still dominate by sheer force of numbers, but you've got the idea. My point is that those backward scenarios burn up a lot of time and processing power. Sometimes we come up blank, which is interesting in itself. The people in Indonesia have been giving us a lot of those lately. Some things just never happen unless you make preposterous bends in the events leading up to them."
Later, Sally and Wirtz collaborated on a message to his sponsors describing the alternatives for communications circuits and asking for help in establishing the commercial or satellite circuits in Indonesia. She explained, "A lot has to do with the kinds of computer interactions they want. A satellite link to Indonesia from here is actually a double hop with a relay in Hawaii. The delay caused by going out and back to two satellites and through the relay will be a couple of hundred milliseconds. If they want heavy interactive communications, then the undersea commercial circuits will be a better path because they have less delay, but if they're going to blast files in each direction, the satellite circuits will work. I suspect we'll go with the satellites. "
After Wirtz posted the questions on e-mail, Sally left the house and found a motel down the beach. She was in Atlanta's beach playground, so she was going to enjoy it. She unpacked her bag and walked the beach in the dark. She thought about the strange situation at the beach house. A faceless Asian consortium paying all the bills for a brilliant
geek who lives in a little paradise and produces studies of what would have happened if certain elements of history had changed. She looked out at the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico and thought about what parts of her own history she might like to change.
GOOD BODIES
Tuesday, June 7, 1995
0830 Central
Destin, Florida
Excerpt from the Personal Narrative
of Dr. William E. Wirtz, PhD
Recorded July 2006
UNCLASSIFIED
"Sally was a ball of fire. In fact, she still is!"
The next morning, after an enjoyable beachside breakfast, she drove back up the sandy road to the house thinking about the setup of the communications circuit and the really different work it would support. She didn't expect to find Wirtz around yet. His type usually worked all night and slept all morning. One of the computer crew she'd been introduced to the previous day let her in and produced a printed version of an e-mail message. "This came in when we checked the mail this morning. It's all about comm circuits, so I guess it's for you."
She'd made a few notes on the message when the sliding glass door to the beach opened and Wirtz walked in. He was wearing a brief pair of trunks and was toweling off. A pair of goggles was in his right hand and he didn't have his glasses on. Sally realized that he looked better nearly naked
than he did wearing the ratsy clothes he had on yesterday. "Hmmm, she silently reflected. I guess the clothes, or lack of them, do make the man!"
"Good morning." she said out loud. "So you swim?"
"Swim and bicycle." he replied. "Running kills my knees, so I swim until it gets too cold and then get on the bike. What do you do to stay in shape? No, wait... I have you pictured doing aerobics in a pink leotard in a trendy Atlanta spa. The kind of place with pots of ferns between the machines and CNN on every TV."
His use of the word "shape" had involuntarily caused her to straighten her back. She rose and said, "Let me get my Speedo and I'll tow you around in my wake for a while."
He held out his hands and backed off. "Hey, okay, we can do that, but later. She noticed that he had a great smile. What do you have there?" he asked pointing to the message in her hand. "More games?"
"Directions from your sponsors on the communications link. Somebody at the other end either has been thinking about this for a while or they have excellent connections -um, I mean political connections. This is a list of names and numbers of people to talk to, information on the network router, satellite earth terminal configurations, signaling, compression, and all the technical details. By the way, they're engineering this so we can upgrade to a faster connection than a T- 1, but this is going to cost some bucks. We're going
to need a bigger satellite dish so we can have a better signal to noise ratio. I've got to get to work. What telephone can I use?"
Sally had a double-E degree from Georgia Tech and her consulting business had given her a lot of practical experience. But, creating an international satellite link called for more diplomacy, research, and cajoling than technology. She often thought that women were better at making things happen then men. She found the electronics for a satellite terminal packaged on a palette in a California public television station with more dreams than pledges of support. She got a dish on a truck headed south out of Virginia, found a local contractor who said he could quickly build a cement pad when offered enough incentive, and negotiated the satellite transponder circuits with two major international carriers. Then she got the network router moving in her direction from San Jose. After a little thought she ordered more communications interface modules for the router.
She remembered some fruit and yogurt appearing in the middle of the day, but when she finished the last call to California the sun was racing down the beach again and she was hungry.
"Wirtz!" she called. This time the use of his last name did get some response. Bill's head appeared around the corner of the office divider and his eyes were wide.
"You called?" he said somewhat meekly.
"Swim first or eat first, which is it? Either way, you're buying dinner."
"Get your Speedo." he replied.
They were each surprised when they found they were quite well matched in the water. Bill showed her the landmarks on the beach that took them a mile with the current and half a mile back against it. At the end of the mile and a half each of them was ready to leave the water and walk the rest of the way to the house.
"Well, any interesting tasks from your masters today?" she asked. As she walked she scuffed her feet in the fine powdery sand and found that her feet made barking noises. She skipped away from Wirtz on barking feet.
"Ouch, come on now, the term is sponsors. The other term is a bit too graphic." He jogged a little to keep up with her. She liked the effect.
"Okay, sorry Bill." she stopped the foot noises and moved closer to him.
"But the answer is, yes. My masters posed another backward progression scenario and it's a whopper. They want nothing less than no Vietnam war. And then, as an extension, they want no Vietnam war and no Lyndon Johnson as president."
Sally spoke off the top of her head, "But isn't there a lot of speculation that if Kennedy had lived he would have backed away from Vietnam? I mean there was his meeting with Douglas MacArthur where MacArthur cautioned him
against a land war in Asia. Kennedy had less to prove than Johnson and a more liberal constituency."
"Hey!" Bill stopped walking and regarded her in the fading light. "I thought you were a techno-comm guru. How come you know so much about Kennedy and Vietnam?"
"My father died there." She shook her head and started walking a little faster than before. "I was born after he had left. Heck, I'm older now than he was when he died. But Vietnam is one big "What if" that I've played with since I was old enough to read a history book... or to understand why I didn't have a daddy anywhere. I mean a lot of girls I knew didn't have a daddy at home, but I didn't have one at all."
Bill reached out, grabbed her hand, and slowed her down. He turned toward her and said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you with all of this, Sally. If you want out of the job, I'll understand."
"Ha! Just the opposite, buster. I want in all the way. I want to see how you think things might have been different!" she started walking again, but she didn't let go of his hand. In fact, she nearly yanked him off his feet. "Now, you can feed me."
DISTANT MEETING
Tuesday, June 6, 1995
0900 Indonesian Western
Standard Time
Ammero Group Offices
Jakarta, Indonesia
Retrieved image and sound. Source
TS/ Blackwatch Action
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / BLACKWATCH
"We
will ease the Americans out after we use their talents."
The meeting room was large and well furnished. Nine people sat around a polished wood table. Each of them was related by blood. They shared a common dialect, political goals and personal philosophies. They also shared benefits and risks. Like most of their meetings, this one was about money.
Their business interests included agriculture, shipping, real estate, extortion, and some prostitution and gambling. But the heart of the business, the money pump, involved moving drug pre-cursor chemicals manufactured by the Chinese People's Liberation Army from China to points around the world. The cash generated by this business fueled
everything else. It also meant that the men in this room had sold the soul of their family to the PLA.
Johor Woo served as the treasurer for the organization. He was near the end of a discussion of expenditures. "What is this item labeled History Research?"
The question was aimed at JayaWoo.A man in his mid-50s who sat at a senior position near the head of the table. Jaya replied, "It is a project of my brothers. A low risk project with a potentially high payoff. It is a way to use a knowledge of history, economics, and sociology to predict future actions. And, perhaps to influence those actions."