This week we conclude my two-part series on how I would change the world if I could go back in time and why the science fiction story had planned to tell based on that concept probably would not work.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 35 of Contemplating Life.

After last week’s episode, I detailed the outline of a science fiction/fantasy novel I considered writing about how I would change history during my lifetime if I had the opportunity.

I concluded that in order to have the power and influence to make major historical changes, I needed to be filthy rich. I outlined how I would have started my own software company and beat Bill Gates and Microsoft at their own game. I know the things they did right that I could duplicate and I know the mistakes they made that I could avoid.

If you are just joining us, or to refresh your memory, the scenario I’m working with is that a man is given the opportunity to live his life over again from the beginning yet retain all of the memories, intellect, and experiences of his first lifetime. He is going to use that knowledge of the future to effect change. Also, the idea for this story started out as an exploration of what it would be like for someone with a disability to relive their life without one.

The working title of the story is “The Reboots” because our hero, a guy named Eric is given the opportunity to reboot his life. Note the title is plural because along the way he’s going to discover other people who have similarly rebooted.

Eric would coin the word “reboot” explaining that he didn’t want to use the word reincarnation because it has religious overtones. Although the phrase “born again” would be highly descriptive, that’s even more linked to religious meaning. So he decided and his colleagues simply rebooted. When you reboot your computer, you start from scratch. Everything on your hard drive stays intact but the system itself goes back to its original state. And it’s a catchy title.

Under the scenario I developed, my reboot hero had only one opportunity to make a major change in history because once he had changed the timeline, the history that he knew would no longer exist. So it had to be something big. I decided our merry band of reboots would try to stop 9/11. And if we couldn’t do that, we needed someone other than Bush 43 and Dick Cheney in the White House at the time.

Note it’s not that I blame George W. Bush for 9/11. I blame him and Dick Cheney for the aftermath. I blame them for the unnecessary war to find WMDs that weren’t there, the illegal detention and torture of people without any due process, the Patriot Act, and other erosions of our Constitution.

How do you stop Bush 43? You need to fix what was wrong with the 2000 presidential election. If I’m in the computer business, I need to strongly promote accurate, reliable, foolproof computerized voting machines to avoid the problems experienced in Florida with their crazy punch card system and the hanging CHAD.

The major problem that made it tough for Al Gore to win the 2000 election was that he couldn’t run on the legacy of the Clinton/Gore administration. During that administration, we were not involved in any significant armed conflict. The economy was booming. We had a balanced federal budget and were beginning to pay down the debt. It was an amazing record that he should’ve been able to leverage to an easy victory. But he had to distance himself from Bill Clinton because of all of the scandals.

As with most political scandals, it’s not so much what you did wrong but in the attempt to cover it up. Liberal pendants will say Clinton was impeached for having an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. But let’s be fair, he was impeached for obstruction of justice. To a certain extent, the same was true for Nixon. He didn’t plan or order the Watergate break-in. He orchestrated the cover-up.

So to help Al Gore get elected, we have to get rid of the Clinton scandals.

In a nutshell, the secret to stopping the post-9/11 consequences is to get Bill Clinton to keep his pants zipped!

But how do you do that?

As a young man, Bill Clinton dreamed of being president. He wanted to create a legacy for himself. If you could go to him early in his political career, convince him that you could accurately predict the future and that his destiny was the Oval Office, but similarly convince him that his unchecked libido was going to destroy that legacy, it might be enough to keep him out of trouble.

One of my favorite scenes in the film Terminator 2 is when John and Sarah Connor along with the Good Terminator, visit Miles Bennett Dyson who developed the supercomputer chip at the heart of Sky Net. Sky Net was the evil AI that tried to destroy humanity. They explained to him the consequences of his invention. Dyson says, “You are accusing me of things I haven’t done yet.” I could imagine if you sat down with Bill Clinton and told him that his extramarital affairs meant that we had a weak president in office at the time of the most deadly terrorist attack in US history he would’ve said something similar.

If you had Bill Clinton’s ear, there is a lot you could do to prevent 9/11 even if you couldn’t stop him from having a scandalous lifestyle and ruining things for Gore. The Clinton administration had the opportunity to get Osama bin Laden and missed it. You could have convinced him to make that a higher priority. There were intelligence failures that should have prevented 9/11 and didn’t. You could advise him to ensure that didn’t happen. I’ve already mentioned that you could fix the problems of the 2000 election. Clinton could have promoted a federal election law that sets standards for and promoted the use of better quality computerized voting equipment. You could institute some of the security measures that were implemented post-9/11 such as reinforced lockable cabin doors and stricter passenger screenings.

You might write a book about a fictional hijacking based on your knowledge of 9/11 to call attention to these issues. Then again, if no one heeded this cautionary tale, you would be accused of planning the hijacking for the terrorists.

How do you get your foot in the door with Bill Clinton? How do you convince him that you have credible knowledge of the future?

You have to demonstrate that knowledge. You have to make predictions for him that you are confident will come true. The problem is… I’m terrible at history. As I established last week, I can’t remember the dates or the details of historical events. Okay, I know when 9/11 was. I remember the date of the JFK assassination. But I didn’t recall the date of MLK or RFK assassinations when I talked about them a few episodes ago. I had to look it up.

I need to add another gimmick to the story to make it work. I hate to do that but I couldn’t see any way around it. In science fiction, I abhor what I call “plot-driven technology”. I define it as a gadget or gimmick that works the way it does solely for the purpose of making the plot work the way you want it to. Well-written science fiction uses “technology-driven plot.” You invent a technology and then see where that takes you. Unfortunately, in this instance, I need some gimmick to make the plot work. Someday I’ll probably do a whole episode on plot-driven technology complete with extensive examples. For now, I’m just confessing and dipping my toe into those waters.

We can’t just reboot our hero, send him back in time to the day of his birth, and have him grow up with knowledge of the future. We have to give him a photographic memory of the events of his life.

One of the problems of creating a superhero is you need to put limits on their superpowers. Every Superman has to have some sort of kryptonite. So rather than have my hero Eric have a perfect memory of everything that occurred in his life, let’s give him, and other rebooted characters, a photographic memory of particular areas of interest.

Eric, who is based on me, would have total recall of everything he ever learned about computers. He would have detailed knowledge of the APIs of CP/M, MS-DOS, and Windows so that he could easily re-create these programs himself.

Since this is a story that was born out of my own fantasies, we have to give our hero a love interest. In this case, she would be based on my teenage crush Rosie who you’ve heard about in previous episodes. I would call her Julie and she would have total recall of world events. If it was something you would see on the evening news or read in the newspaper, she could tell you the date of any major event. By the way, there are people in real life who have such an ability.

Later we would introduce a character who had total recall of medical knowledge about infectious diseases and we would develop his storyline where he could try to develop an early cure or treatment for HIV/AIDS.

Perhaps we would introduce a space enthusiast based on my friend Christopher Lee. He would try to prevent the Apollo 1 fire and or the space shuttle Columbia and Discovery accidents.

Eric and Julie using mostly her knowledge of “current events” would type up a list of predictions. This would probably occur during the Watergate scandal. Eric would come up with an excuse to interview Bill Clinton perhaps for a school project. Maybe he was writing a report about Rhodes scholars. After getting a sitdown with Clinton, he would say something like, “Mr. Clinton I have come here under false pretense. Please give me just 10 minutes of your time. In all likelihood at the end of 10 minutes, you will shake my hand, wish me well, and plead with me saying, ‘Young man. Please get psychiatric help because if you truly believed or expected me to believe this bullshit story then you truly must be crazy.’”

Eric would explain that he had accurate knowledge of future events but would not tell him how or why he was telling him this. He would hand Clinton a typed list of near-future events and say, “When you are more certain than not that the next item on the list is going to come true, call me and I will tell you why I’m letting you in on this secret.”

About six weeks later Clinton would call and say he was a believer.

One of the problems our hero would face was that he could possibly convince someone that he had credible, accurate knowledge of the future. But he couldn’t prove how he came about that knowledge. To say that he was given the opportunity to reboot his life and live it over again is less credible than if he made up some weird story about inventing a Time Machine that would allow him to read the evening newspaper in the future.

Only after Clinton was convinced that Eric could predict the future would he tell him that if he didn’t keep his pants zipped, America would be in deep trouble with a weak president during a deadly terrorist attack in 2001. Eric could also give him an outline of other things we discussed that he could do to positively change the future.

I think it’s a pretty good idea for a sci-fi novel even if it is a little bit far-fetched. It would illustrate the butterfly effect that small changes can have big consequences. For years I was very excited about the possibility of trying to write this story.

There are also some serious moral questions to be debated in this scenario. In my get-rich-quick scheme, outlined last episode, I would be stealing the legacy of Bill Gates and Ernő Rubik. What did they ever do to me that I would ruin them? Gates, unlike other billionaires such as Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk, has been a significant philanthropist. Maybe to assuage my guilt I would offer Gates a job or a merger between my company and Microsoft. Gates isn’t just a skilled programmer. He is a shrewd and at times ruthless businessman.

What are the difficulties of keeping such a secret? How would you apply your knowledge of the future on a personal scale? Would you make the same friends? Would they be interested in being friends with you if your life was significantly different? Would you warn friends about mistakes they were going to make and could you convince them without revealing your secret?

Would the lies you had to live weigh you down? I imagine if someone said to Eric, “Did you really invent the Twisty Cube at age 14?” He could reply truthfully, “According to the US patent office I did.” You can tell I’ve studied politics. I know how to answer the question I wanted to answer and not the one that was asked.

What does our hero do during his teenage years he wants to explore his sexuality in ways that he could not with a disability? Let’s say Eric dies and reboots at age 65. When his rebooted self is 16 and wants to have sex with a 16-year-old girl it’s not a pair of 16-year-olds. He is essentially 81 years old. That’s statutory rape. He would face some tough moral dilemmas. There is no guarantee that Rosie… whoops I mean Julie… would fall in love with him the second time around even though they would share this amazing secret existence.

So… I’ve gone into a lot of detail to tell you the outline of the story that sadly I’m never going to write. One of the problems is that many of my sci-fi story ideas take place in the very, very near future. And by the time I get the story written, the real world has evolved to the point where the story no longer works.

My plans for this great sci-fi/fantasy alternate-history opus began dying in 2016 with the election of Donald J. Trump and culminated with the events of January 6, 2021.

By that time, the greatest threat to democracy and the United States of America was no longer 9/11 and its aftermath. The greatest world crisis in public health was no longer HIV/AIDS.

I thought about writing the story with my hero dying in 2016 before Trump was elected. Then perhaps he comes across a reboot person who died in 2023 and who had knowledge of the events between those two dates. Our hero could then change his plans in such a way that he could stop 9/11 and stop Donald Trump.

At one point, I decided to do it that way. Eric would die in 2016 shortly before the election he would think that Trump was going to lose and he would continue with this plan to rewrite history as we’ve described. Then he would come across another rebooted person and he would have to rework the plants.

I started to write that story. I wrote the first chapter. When I finished it, I realized that the first chapter was a pretty good standalone story. I submitted it to seven magazine and website markets but it was rejected everywhere.

But I have news for you. My first ever Patreon benefit other than the early release of the podcast. I’m going to record a reading of that first chapter under the short story title “I Can’t Say.” No, I’m not being coy. The title is literally “I Can’t Say.” Patreon will also have the text of the story. Both the audio and text versions are available now to Patreon subscribers.

The reason I haven’t continued beyond that first chapter is I don’t know where to go with it. For the past five years or so, I’ve racked my brain to come up with an alternative way to tell the story to prevent Trump from becoming president.

All I had to do to stop 9/11 was convince Bill Clinton to keep his pants zipped. But no simple nor complex solution to stopping Trump and Trumpism has occurred to me after countless hours of trying to find a way to do it. First of all, assassination is off the table. And it’s not just stopping Trump. I have to stop the climate that allowed him to rise to power. As Rachel Maddow said recently, when history looks back on these days, it won’t ask, “How did a former president come to be indicted with dozens of felony charges?” It will ask, “How did such a man get to be president in the first place?” Even if I get Hillary elected in 2016, the January 6 riots just come 4 years early. The threat to democracy will continue.

I think over the past two episodes, I’ve demonstrated what a vivid imagination I have. I can come up with insanely crazy detailed scenarios for changing the world and changing my life. But I lack the imagination to find a simple way to stop Trump and the erosion of public trust in our institutions including law enforcement, the judicial system, and the press. I don’t know how, even if I could go back in time and rewrite history I could keep him out of office so that a competent president would have been at the helm when COVID emerged.

Directly or indirectly, Donald J. Trump has systematically assaulted our values, and our American life, and cost us hundreds of thousands of lives.

Not in my wildest fantasies can I fix what’s wrong with the world right now.

I lived through the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK. I witnessed the Iran hostage crisis, Reaganonmics, Newt Gingrich, the TEA party, the 2008 financial collapse, and wars in Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine as well as the ongoing issues between Israel and the neighbors.

None of that compares to the crisis we currently face.

I can only hope and pray that the assault on democracy fails. There was a glimmer of hope when Joe Biden defeated Trump. That glimmer faded on January 6 and proves that the fight isn’t over. The GOP’s failure to deliver big results during the 2022 midterm elections is a good sign. On the other hand, indictments in four jurisdictions with over 90 felony charges have only served to strengthen Trump. Biden, if he can be relected, will be the most disliked incumbent President to ever be reelected.

A huge percentage of the country has fallen under Trump’s influence and it seems that no amount of reason or logic can sway them from their cult.

My hope and my prayer is that I live long enough to see us emerge from this crisis with democracy intact.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.