Backwash — a Tale of Alternative Days.
A common concept
It’s been said many times over, and again; in books, movies, essays, thesi, speculative fiction, science fiction, horror, psychological thrillers, even comics and graphics. All good ideas, all thought provoking pieces, all fodder to get the creative mind generating juice and spark enough to make it to print and/or screen and get people thinking. We can always have done things in a better way, yes? We all think that at times, it’s the simplest definition of the word regret.
It’s always nice to think about what could have been; oh, if only we had done something different. If only we hadn’t done this, or went ahead and done that, if only we’d followed our gut instead of our leaders. Such thoughts can go on forever, such thoughts can consume one with pity and regret and remorse, and yet such thoughts are positively useless. A waste of time. But what if such thoughts were not useless? What if one could actually redo something and not make a botch of it the second time around, or at least try not to?
Ok, so what is this, another one of those silly time travel fantasy tales? The answer to that is yes, but at the same time, no.
Sure, everybody has those thoughts, and quite often too. From simple things like, “oh, if only I wasn’t such an asshole the other day, I probably wouldn’t have this black eye now…” or “oh, if I only threw away that week-old chicken instead of eating it, I wouldn’t be writing these words whilst I sit on the toilet and fill it with diarrhea…” To more important things like, “oh gee, I wish I hadn’t been in such a hurry, I should have double checked my numbers before I filed the company tax return with the math error the IRS caught, costing the company an extra $400k in taxes and me my fucking job…” or “if I only ignored that woman when she came on to me last year, now I wouldn’t be stuck in a dead-end town with a for-shit job and twins I can’t afford to raise…” I’ll bet that young fellow wouldn’t mind a chance to revisit the place and time in question and make the conscious decision to use his big head instead of his little head. And the other guy, the company accountant? It’s like this — if you don’t have the time to do the job right, how will you find the time to do the job over again after you fuck it up? Yes, that story is quite the riveting tale, that one, and we’ll go into more detail a bit further on, because that is an important one to this subject.
Age-old questions
And the age-old questions, the two most popular amongst those who do any dwelling at all on the subjects of time travel and alternate history. Let us ask them here, and then let us quickly consider the possible answers. The easy answers first, and then the not so simple…
One. If you could travel back to Germany in 1933 and were to come upon the right set of circumstances, would you kill Adolf Hitler?
Two. If you could travel back to Dallas in 1963 and were to find the right set of circumstances, would you prevent Oswald from killing Kennedy?
I think most of us would open our gobs without even thinking and spout a quick “hell, yea!” It’s a simple question at first; hell yes, kill Hitler and save six million Jews and God knows how many others. Hell yes, get in Oswald’s way somehow and save Kennedy, and probably prevent Vietnam and God knows what else after that. Those are the simple answers. The quick, knee-jerk, self-righteous sounding answers that would likely go through most heads at first. But then you start to think about several other things. The most obvious conclusions revolve around the results of such actions; i.e. saving Jewish folks and stopping the war in Vietnam before it starts (fact: the Vietnam war was already underway by 11/22/1963), which are very noble endeavors indeed.
Other Considerations.
But then we think about a few things. In one scenario we are actually going to commit murder, we are going to kill another human being in cold blood, without warning, without preamble. Yes, without warning, I don’t think pointing a pistol at Mr. Hitler and demanding he scrap his plans is going to have much impact. No, we are taking a life here, a human life, and even though it sounds noble (and is), are you able to just approach a man and execute him on the spot? Yes, this man is a monster in a human skin, but so far you are not. Are you prepared to become a killer, like the man you aim to stop from killing others? Some will have no problem at all with that, but then again, there are some who simply cannot take another life, no matter how wretched and monstrous the being holding the life.
In the other scenario we are going to attempt to prevent someone from committing murder, meaning we need to somehow get in his way. He’s got a high-powered rifle in his hands and is already intent on committing magnicide by killing one of the most powerful and important men on the globe, do you think you can just yell, “Hey Lee, don’t do it!” The ironic thing is that by doing that you may distract him just long enough to save the president, but you almost certainly end up as the one shot and killed instead.
And what about the aftermath? Is it not equally possible for things to go wrong instead of right with these so-called do-overs for the betterment of the world? It’s easy to consider all the potential good, but we must also consider the potential harm.
Kill Hitler and (maybe) save six million Jewish people, but… one of them was a psycho capable of doing terrible things. Left alive, and free to do so.
Save Kennedy and (maybe) stop Vietnam, save close to sixty thousand American boys and God knows how many Vietnamese, but… several people on both sides were born psychotic monsters, capable of doing terrible things. Left alive, now free to do so. Also free to procreate, vote, drive and influence others.
Nor does it have to be that simple. The trickle-down could very quickly become a raging waterfall. The butterfly effect could rapidly turn into a flock of ravenous vultures. And while it shouldn’t be so easy to undo things, I have a feeling it would be very easy indeed, because the time-based structure on which our existence is built is very fragile and porous. Like dominoes, like exponential compounding, like expanding downlines in an MLM scheme. So very easy for things to go wrong. It doesn’t take much.
I’m not saying that everything would go to hell if we were able to initiate such changes of historical events; I am merely laying on the table the option that it is equally possible for the revised outcomes to go in either direction.
