Be The Change You Want to See

Shirley, Tom, and I sat at the kitchen table in our tiny shared New York City apartment, arguing over who was going to brave going outside to see if the relief food delivery drop had made it last night.

The relief drops were about the only way anybody in the city ate anything other than rats and even the rats were scarce these days. And, we all knew the rats had been feeding on the dead, so it was too close to cannibalism for most of us to stomach.

The food drops were supposed to come on Thursday nights and if they happened, you had enough food to last until the next Tuesday, assuming you rationed it well. Wednesdays and Thursdays were usually pretty hungry days.

They gave us plain rice, some beans, and when we were really lucky, there would be an expired can of vegetables or some tiny packets of soy sauce collected from god knows where. And there was a gallon of water for each of us.

The delivery boxes were biometrically coded to the three of us. Every household had coded boxes. Until they were opened, they were no good to anyone else. But there were a lot of roving gangs who attacked people as they were retrieving their boxes. You didn’t have to be alive to open the locks, just had to have the right DNA.

Rumor had it that things were better if you got out of the city, but no one knew how exactly you were supposed to do that. The tunnels were filled with rotting corpses, a makeshift burial ground crawling with mutated rats, and the bridges had long-since collapsed.

The ferries? Well, the ferries were run by a cartel of enforcers. They wanted a minimum of three weeks rations, paid upfront, to even consider taking you across the river. If they were about to get boarded and you didn’t have legit travel papers, you got tossed in the river. I think some people got tossed in just because they could.

Most people died almost immediately from the poison clogging the river, but if you somehow lived through that, you still had to swim to one side or the other. At this point, damn few of us knew how to swim.

Over the last couple years, we’d developed a routine. First, we’d argue about who was going outside. Then, when we got bored with arguing, we’d decide what random chance we were using to make the decision this time. We’d spend another hour or so arguing about that.

By then, it would be noon and the warmest, brightest part of the day.

Of course, the radiation would be the most dangerous then too. Without the atmosphere, or at least with most of it gone, the solar radiation was killer. Whoever went outside would bundle up like it was a sub-arctic winter, covering every inch of their flesh.

It was also the best time to grab the box without much risk of gang attack. No matter how organized they got, the gangs didn’t have any better defense against the environment than we did. That also made the environment our best defense against them.

“Sam, it’s your turn to go get it. I’ve been keeping track. You haven’t had to go get the box since December. The probability of you winning all those weeks without cheating is astronomical. Tom and I are united this time. You are going to get the box.”

Well, damn, I suppose I had been a little greedy.

I figured out late last year that when it came to random decisions, Shirley and Tom were both remarkably predictable. If we played rock, paper, scissors, there was no way they were going to beat me.

Drawing for the low card? Please. Anyone could stack a deck if they practiced enough.

Rolling a die? Well, turns out that was a little harder to predict. So I invented a bit of a time machine to let me make sure I won those rolls too.

What? You think it’s a stupid reason to invent a time machine?

You haven’t been out there. It’s terrifying.

The world basically ended six years ago. I think they were trying to fix global climate change, but it didn’t work. Think Australia’s ozone layer damage, but more widespread. In fact, think most of the planet without an ozone layer.

Yes, it’s more complicated than that, and no, I don’t know the specifics. I’m a physicist not a climatologist.

All I know is that one week we were worried about the last of the polar icecaps melting and the potential for gravitational shifts due to the water and the next, it wasn’t safe to go outside in major parts of the day.

It shifted where we can grow food and what food we can grow, hence why most of the world is getting relief boxes. I think there are some parts of coastal Canada where they farm the rice, but honestly, I’m not even sure about that.

Anyway, I’m pale and blond which means that solar radiation burns my skin even at dusk, so I try not to go outside. At the end of last year, I figured out how to avoid it.

The machine only works in one-minute bursts, so it’s not like I’m going to be changing the world here. If I were, I’d be going back further than just six years ago. Maybe if I went back 75 years, to the nearer the start of the century I could actually change things, but I don’t have the equipment to make the machine better.

So yeah, I guess I’m going to go outside today, because Tom and Shirley aren’t going to let me get away with asking for a roll off again.

How do I know?

I’ve tried 57 time to convince them. Every time they shut me down within the first minute. I'd reset and try again. Then I failed again.

I suppose I could… Do you think that might work?

I could tell them exactly how I’ve been beating the system. Of course, they’d need some sort of proof, but that might change things. They might make me do all the pickups for the next three months to make up for not doing any in the last six months.

I broached the subject, my finger on the button, ready to go back and do things differently if they reacted poorly.

But they didn’t.

Shirley asked some pointed questions about the time dilation monitor and then ran to her closet. She came back with wire cutters, some high-grade copper wire, and a boombox. The boombox was an antique, a gift from her grandmother, because she knew Shirley loved the 20th century. Mrs. Robbins gave it to her the day we started our doctoral program.

Tom was a little peeved at first, but then he started talking about the butterfly effect. Yeah, you know it. The theory that if a butterfly beats its wings, it may cause a polar bear to die or something like that.

He’d tried to tell me about it, but honestly after about two minutes, I was strapping on my hat and gloves to go outside.

“Damn it, Sam, would you listen to me?”

“Will you get to the point?” He rambles, a lot.

“If we can identify the right moment in history, maybe we can avoid all this,” he gestured around him.

Suddenly, I was listening again. If we could avoid the mistake they made trying to save the world, we could maybe actually save the world.

“So how do we identify when and what we need to change?” I was pretty sure by that point that Shirley would be able to extend our travel period. Just the questions she asked made it clear she’d figured it out.

The solar radiation has made some communication difficult, but we were all doctoral candidates and we figured out how to upgrade, or is downgrade, our internet connection in the first weeks after the incident. There were very old coaxial cables in the building and with a little bit of ingenuity, they could form a link to the local library. It’s not gig speed wifi, but it gets us our basic research needs and some socialization outside the apartment.

Tom ran to the ancient laptop we all share and began trying to get a connection. By the time he succeeded, Shirley had figured out the range problem.

“You need a better time dilation counter,” she said, ripping apart the boombox.

I gasped.

She had once threatened my life if I so much as scratched it. And she’d refused to forgive Tom for two months after he left a battery in it and it started to corrode. He had to clean the entire thing to get the corrosion off before she even acknowledged he existed.

After five minutes of looking at the inner workings, she stuck out her hand.

“Give me the device?”

“The device?”

“I am not calling it a time machine. Think of another name and give it to me,” she demanded.

“It’s a historical actuator,” I replied, putting it in her hand.

“I guess that’s better than time machine.”

It says something about us that although we argue about who has to go outside to get the rations box, we instantly believed that we could do this. None of us questioned the other’s competence. We just sometimes hated each other’s guts.

I finished wrapping up like I was headed for a dog sled race and grabbed our food while Tom and Shirley worked on the device.

When the rice was done, I mixed it with some red beans we had left from last week, and I threw in a spice packet marked as Louisiana hot sauce. We’d all be a little stronger once we had some food in us.

We all shoveled food in our mouths as quick as we could on Fridays, trying to pretend there would be enough for us to eat like this all week.

But this week was different. Tom stopped, between bites, to suggest we go back 6 years, to 2077 when things went terribly awry.

I nodded, thinking it was a good place to start and Shirley said aloud what I was thinking. We never spoke when we ate anymore.

Chatting over a meal is something you do when food is plentiful. I miss that. I miss going out for coffee or having dinner with friends. But once Tom and Shirley started talking over our lackluster dinner, we couldn’t stop.

By the time we had all scraped our dishes clean, we had a plan. We’d go back to 2076, just before the decision as made to try the Jane Plan. The Jane Plan was a decision of multiple world governments, ostensibly under the jurisdiction of the United Nations and in conjunction with the Paris Climate Accords.

As smart as the three of us are, none of us truly understood what exactly they had done.

Our plan was to go to the major players and explain to them that the science was bad and would go horribly awry.

It sounded simple enough. After all the UN meets here in New York. We should have been able to just explain the problem and change the world, right?

Well, not exactly.

After years of terrorism and threats of terrorism and mass shootings, you apparently can’t just walk into a United Nations committee without an appointment. And we were scruffy, sort of smelly nobodies who claimed to be from the future.

We ended up having to do an emergency time jump to avoid getting hauled off for a few days of mental health care courtesy of the local police.

Tom suggested we go to our former selves and ask for assistance, but I had no idea what that might do to the fabric of reality. I mean every time-traveling movie or show I’ve ever seen says you can’t interact with your past self without “grave consequences.”

I wasn’t ready to risk whatever those consequences were.

Maybe we’d both just get irritable bowels, but even that was too much.

We jumped back to our own time and gathered as much cash as we had lying around. We were certain our credit cards and pay apps would be useless in the past.

“What if we robbed ourselves?” Shirley asked.

It made a weird sort of sense, I guess. We’re weren’t stealing from anyone else, just breaking into our own old apartments while we aren’t home and stealing our old credit cards. Worse case scenario, we created some charges that the former us didn’t recognize and had the cards cancelled for fraudulent charges.

“I taught an undergrad lab on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I’d definitely be out of the house all afternoon. And I never carried my cards. I’d just pay with my phone apps if I needed coffee,” Tom suggested. “We don’t even have to ransack the house. I know where I kept them.”

We decided to get some rest and try again the next day, all of us really wanting to enjoy a spring day in the city that was.

“If we go early, we can get bagels,” I offered.

I think that sealed it more than anything else. We all wanted to taste the way things used to be.

***

We went to our favorite coffee shop for bagels and hot coffee while using their internet to plan for the rest of the day.

Once we knew former Tom was out of his apartment, we’d go break in with the key he forgot to return when he moved out. Then, we’d stop at a thrift store to buy some fresh clothes.

We considered using Tom’s apartment to clean up. None of us had enjoyed a real shower since before they implemented the plan.

One of the things they had contaminated was most of the fresh water, hence why we got water rations with our relief boxes. For keeping ourselves clean we had to resort to dry shampoo and the occasional sponge bath.

We rented a hotel room for the day, renting remotely so we didn’t get turned away based on our appearance.

Then we spent the better part of four hours remembering what it felt like to be clean and well-fed. We took everything from the mini bar, figuring we might need it if our plan failed and we had to go back to our grim future.

We ordered pizza and burgers, making ourselves more than a little sick wince it had been so long since we’d had meat protein.

And then we tried everything we could think of to get an appointment with the environmental council.

Nothing worked. We were still nobodies; we just smelled a bit, okay, a lot, better.

I flopped back against the clean sheets and sighed.

“How are we supposed to get access?”

“They’re having some sort of fancy gala tomorrow with all the decision-makers there. We need to get an invite,” Shirley suggested, pointing to a story in the Times.

Tom took one look at the guest list and then dismissed that idea.

“We don’t have the kind of money it takes to get into something like that. The tickets are $5,000 apiece. That’s way more than my credit limit on these cards, and we have nothing to wear.”

“So where do we get the cash to make it happen?” Shirley asked.

This time it was my turn to have a brilliant idea.

“We know how things go in the future, so what if we invested in something and then used that cash to get us access?”

Shirley nodded. “Not a bad start. But what if we made enough money to make sure they couldn’t ignore us?”

Tom’s the one of us with the best knowledge of history, so he was the one who came up with the final plan.

“Do you remember the stories from the beginning of the century when they were first beginning to understand and use cryptocurrency? We could invest in bitcoin when it’s cheap and then sell a few years later when it’s outrageous.”

“Or, we could go even further back and mine a bunch of coins before the rush begins,” Shirley suggested. “No one really knows where bitcoin came from, so what if we are where it comes from?”

In just a few minutes, we had a comprehensive plan. We’d go back to 2007 and start laying the groundwork to become the first huge cryptocurrency miners.

Shirley’s the best with programming, especially historic programming like we needed, so she started drafting the code. When it was done, we raided her antiques collection for a flash drive we thought might be compatible with computers that old.

Then, we reprogrammed the actuator and headed for 2007.

Once we got here, we didn’t want to leave. People here were vaguely talking about climate change, but the world was still bright and blue and beautiful.

We invented our secret identity Satoshi, Sam-Tom-Shirley, and then, deciding that sounded Japanese, added the first Japanese family name we thought of, Nakamoto.

Tom figured out enough historical data for us to blend in and Shirley faked us up some 2008 identification. She even used some deep fake technology to invent a “face” to go with Satoshi.

We had so much fun, enjoyed being able to breathe and stand in the sun so much, that we debated aborting the plan. Instead, we’d just take our bitcoin and live happily ever after.

Probably would have done that too, but nosey journalists and regulators were spending too much time trying to figure out who Satoshi was. We offered up so red herrings, finished our mining with just over a million coins and then jumped to the future.

We landed in 2070 to give ourselves time to build up rich philanthropist personas that would be likely to be invited to the environmental council gala. The biggest problem was getting around the DNA scans that showed all three of us were still college students.

With a lot of careful planning and being reclusive, we avoided detection and made it to the week before the Jane Plan was to be implemented. By then, we’d gathered enough information to see that the end results – the massive casualties, the poisoning of the atmosphere and the water, and even the resulting food shortages were predicted by the scientists in charge of the plan.

They knew they were going to ruin the Earth and they didn’t care. They were zealots and nothing we could say would change their mind.

So, we went over their heads and sent memos, along with hefty campaign contributions, to world leaders.

Most of them took the money and ignored the data. But the Germans read through the data and pressured Britain and the United States to veto the Jane Plan.

Then, we jumped home.

The tiny flat was still tiny, but it was clean. Water came from the faucets again and our cupboards were stocked with all the junk food we could want. We still need to address the warming of the planet, but it’s not as bad now as it was then.

And, Tom tells me that Satoshi Nakamoto is credited with the “invention” of bitcoin.

The three of us laugh about it, all the way to the bank.