funranium | Drawbacks Of Fusion

It has been a six months since I last Fucked With

benchilada's Art. That story just continues to inspire.

I've had some things to say about the world since we got the hang of the Machines, most of them are not nice. I'm not done yet. It is finally time to address the All Hitler's Children and fusion.

You know, the time machine, contrary to some people's belief was not humankind's last major invention; it's just the last one contemporary man made. The only reason why we aren't choking on soot right now because of a downward energy step on the energy plateau to coal is because the ITER fusion reactor was a success and paved the way for the rest of the power plants around the world. It was close, for a while it looked like we weren't gonna make the leap but, in one of the few noble uses of the Machines I can think of, we recruited our ancestors to solve our problems.

I'm to understand that once the interface for the computers they took with them were made conversational enough, the fine folks back in Los Alamos in 1943 were quite happy to drop their weapons work and figure out how to fix ITERs problems. There were some very noble people who sacrificed their useful lives to the time debt in order to bring back the answers from people who still knew how to do things. There was a small hiccup when Feynman, slightly inebriated, tried some of his better pick up lines on the Star Trek style female voiced computer. Some files were, shall we say, corrupted.

This triggered any number of jaunts to the downtime to retrieve "lost technologies" because, obviously, if the Ancients could figure out fusion what couldn't they do? Generally there is a good reason a technology is lost, such as it never worked/existed or that other technology over there tends to cause less flipper babies. There was no car that ran on water, no magic beans that thrive in dioxin polluted soils. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a madman who has created the would-have-been world revolutionizing invention in his garage that no one ever heard about at some point in history? We're talking a very small needle in an infinity of haystacks here and those Shakespeare monkeys aren't available to help sort.

Obviously, the solution is to improve your odds by bringing all the madmen together for a common goal, which brings the Manhattan Project and that pervert Feynman to mind again. But no, that's not where people go. Everyone in Los Alamos was there of their free will. It took a great deal of convincing for the scientists who went downtime for the fusion project to convince the researchers that they were:

Not Crazy
From The Future
Not Worth Shooting On Principle

No, when you are on a time table, so to speak, it is important to have a single point of contact to make sure things get done. What is the first name that comes to mind...Mussolini! He made trains...in Italy...run on time and they have ever since. You can't argue with that kind of effectiveness. Unfortunately, all he was in control of was Italy and some unpopular parts of Africa, so you have to settle for Nazis. In some respects Hitler makes an excellent pawn since he was bugfuck crazy in the first place and more likely to believe and trust the average time traveler. Heck, if you are in trouble in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s just remember Time Hut Time Tip #6 "If you need help out, give Hitler a shout", followed by Time Tip #7 "Whatever you do, don't be a Jew".

For the more enterprisingly minded, you can easily subvert Nazi industries and party apparatus for your research needs. Is it unethical, most certainly, but you can't argue with the results. Hell, the whole field of workplace safety can tie many of their legal exposure limits to results of Nazi research. I remember the schism that happened in the Jewish Anti-Defemation League when someone proposed going downtime to recruit Mengele to help find gene therapies for BRCA2 and other strongly community correlated cancers. It was ugly, I tell you and I can't argue too strongly with the detractors. The more time you spend in that kind of environment, the more inured to it you get, the more beneficial it seems. The Nazis are the finest example of absolute power corrupting absolutely we have, but take a moment and think of what happens to the time travelers who become close confidants of the Fuhrer in short order. Your first order of business, obviously, is to make sure the Nazis don't lose so that you have the time you need...

Say what you will about Hitler, but the man was charismatic. The only testimony you need to this fact are the thousands of children of his out there by women who went downtime and just couldn't help themselves. This is the new Hitler Youth, though not perhaps as Uncle Adolf imagined it. If I have any hope for our future it is that none of his children that have gone downtime to meet him have ever expressed a desire to do so again. Apparently his magic only worked on their mothers.

As for myself, I like to go down to the reactor sometimes and listen to the drone of the confinement field. It's as if millions of people were humming contentedly.