white paper

They scour even themselves, reflect but invariably accelerate backwards to the previous decade, desiring that they will once again free the world of one more evil, until another one will be identified.

They glance at their post-Singularity, AI-powered temporal devices in order to check the date--22nd March, 1943--when they notice what looks like the Khatyn massacre (in Belarus).

They leave as a barn full of Belarusian men, women, and children is set on fire by Nazis; but while their temporal devices help Alice and Lloyd escape from yet another violent historical event, echoes of the victims' desperate cries can still be heard.

They struggle with their consciences and the new space-time navigation system; the devices hum for a moment, but their advanced robotic technology gradually ventures to travel to a different yet connected time and place.

In Germany -- Munich, 1923 -- the National-Socialist German Workers' Party throws a political spectacle of young men struggling to breathe, panting, and following Adolf Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, animated against everything pertaining to the cultural and political establishment of the Weimar Republic.

But once again, Alice and Lloyd allow their AI temporal devices to bring them backwards in time as they hurtle on a psychedelic, roller-coaster ride through time and space. A newborn morning welcomes them in its maternal embrace.

The year is 1887; the place is the town of Braunau am Inn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Adolf hasn't been born yet, but one of his siblings--his brother, Otto--has just arrived in this world.

Alice and Lloyd materialize in a small rental unit on the morning of Otto's birth. The Hitler family cannot hear or see them, but Alice understands German while AI does an excellent job for Lloyd.

"You're all useless eaters!" Alois yells at his three children, two of whom are from a previous marriage. "We can't afford to have another child," he tells his wife, Klara, as she tightly swaddles her newborn son. "Let's send Otto to the local baby-killer."

Alice and Lloyd opt to use their temporal devices again, but the AI teleports them slowly just a few days into the future, in a different apartment in which an Engelmacherin, who gets paid to murder infants, resides. She's drunk on beer and extremely pregnant. Her two children, a baby boy and girl, are wrapped in old, fetid swaddling cloths.

"Don't you dare bring me another girl," her husband says. He hits her in a fit of rage.

"I think I'm going to give birth," she says.

"Right now?"

...

After a gruelingly painful delivery, the Austrian Engelmacherin gives birth to twins: a girl and a boy. Her husband throws the female infant violently against the floor, breaking the baby's back. Her mother, perhaps wishing to ensure that her "weaker" child is completely free and dead, crushes the baby's skull.

Alice and Lloyd are traumatized by having to witness such a horrific scene, but they gloomily agree that this is not the best moment to intervene, even as Klara is about to knock on the Engelmacherin's door.

...

They teleport nine years into the future only to find Alois brutally whipping Adolf (his only surviving son with Klara). The young boy, Adolf, looks dissociated, calm, silent.

Alice decides to intervene after Adolf's been whipped more than thirty times.

"Your father hurt you; it's not right," Alice addresses a young Adolf.

"My father says that I was born evil," Adolf replies.

"You were not born evil. Love--"

Their devices suddenly teleport them to the future.

When they return to their time period of origin, they are shocked to see swastikas everywhere. In the midst of a Dionysian celebration, a massive map of the world has been hoisted on display across a bridge--a grotesque banner painted in lurid colors.

"Apparently, it's not the Republic of Belarus and the Russian Federation anymore," Lloyd observes. "whiteland."

"No," she says incredulously as she stares, wide-eyed, at the vast expanse of land which is stylized and italicized simply as whiteland