🛞🎡☸️⚙️ Ambassador of Hours ⚙️☸️🎡🛞
ambasador Y lands on his 20 hour flight. the watch Tower is startled. the world hasn't used planes that slow in decades. and the ambassadorial plane is from government that hasn't existed for 20 years.
The Under Consulate for the region confesses she hasn't been informed of the ambassador's government's intention to issue their commission but we're searching the archives. yes, there it is, an emergency wartime appointment, one of the last before radio silence
you frown and look round for a chair, a sofa, a conveyer belt, anything to take the weight off your knees and off your shins and off your soles. no such luck.
"🏜️as this is the case🌵🦴🌬️" the underconsul says dryly, literally dryly, the AC has left the air bone dry, "you do not currently have an embassy or official residence or an on file address, so the government will be unable to have your application for such resources embassies and official residences and on file addresses to be granted you on preliminaty base.
your only bet bet might be as an undocumented government, with a force of law as far as a face to a name. assuming you can't afford to declare diplomatic protest and move to be recognized as a political refuge (not to be confused with migrants understood as apolitical and in competition with us for the pure, apolitical market forces without the protection of a shared law or foreign state.)
you call your country up on the phone. the people answer in a rough gruph voice in a tough stuff tone.
"tell em we're here to negotiate terms. tell them we're here to surrender. they win, that much is clear, no point hiding from fear. but we're not disarming without terms, not when we are 29 years to the high ground.
"you, our ambassador, will offer them terms. the terms must be settled upon and made difficult to covertly violate, or peace from 20 hours or 20 years or 29 years ago would be shattered and with it all the history that had come after."
the announcement is met neither with respect nor hostility nor even derision, but with a paper with a number with an appointment at the DMV.
I am here from the past, for you are my future you see, and if I lose you I'll cry, but it you lose me you'll lose your "me".
they say that's fine they didn't disagree but in that case I'm going to have to make you fill out form number F1044F1-03.
they make the buildings shake, and time unwinds.
at first the earliest changes effect us but no more: that bridge is never built, then that hospital was never saved, so that baby was never born, so that President was never shot so his killer was never condemned. those events were several months to several decades apart, but for the first several months we'd never had the bridge but kept the president. still, the whole time the president knew he was doomed. he'd been a baby whose parent had raced across that bridge to the hospital. when it vanished out from under him his whole life night as well.
as it turns out that baby was never born, but it's twin was. the longer route to a different hospital meant a different twin was most saveable, though lung damage was sustained. This twin bore a different name than your own brother had born in utero, because after the much more traumatic birth they were resigned harder, flintier names.
the government calls you at the homeless shelter, telling you your case has been brought up for review
the metaphysisist general interrogates your existence, or lack there of, in an ad hoc collection of documents. a cop asks you how you make the time stop.
every night for 40 nights, the power plants flicker a Morse code pattern of systems fauliures, with helpful 12 minute warnings emerging from bolt holes online just before the next one hits.
they beat you up.
the Morse code failings have always been power surges. those of you alive now remember two halves of a history: an expanding childhood with of memories influenced by the change and more recent memories where effects of the change are not yet encoded.
you are brought into a field office for searching and questioning them transported to a temple of patience, control, information, obsession.
what do you want? cars? gold? diamond play buttons? what do you need for us to turn you against your government?
they don't let you answer, collapsing into bickering. as time passes, what you would have told them changes.
time has left you with long time memories of Marcos but a friendship in place, apparently lifelong, with Francesco.
Marcos made the vow with you at the academy, but it is Francesco with whom you woke up this morning and the last 400 and some mornings. 404. 403. 400 and t---...."
you and Francesco left the Secretariat 20 hours before landing in the country to baffled towers. 20 years ago you and Marcos were doing electrical repair live wire drills in the academy.
the government offers you a glass of water, a dubious pill, and a very broad very bland NDA. the pill is for your headaches, they say. you haven't had a headache since you and Marcos went out on that last mission and came out of the hospital with a new tungsten brain case. you scratch behind a tungsten ear.
the pen they give you to sign with is a prank electric shock pen. you are stupified to watch cameras emerge from nowhere and the government rips off it's mask to reveal Marcos.
told you I'd be back. but I can't stay long. we're on the run and can't match our enemies pace. within four months the insurrection I led against the old state will have been reversed by popular unrest and failing supply lines.
so long as while I've always held the revolution by the puppet strings and knew when to make it look like I made it dance, sign this treaty and marry your most promising lieutenants into the leadership of the elite.
joyous weeping in the streets. the psychiatric vote has just come in, and it's put no confidence over the edge: the government is censored, the parliamentary speaker is eating his hat, and what's this, you've been elected to the Fool's delegation, in token of solidarity for your inability to win an audience with the government, you have now won a seat within it.
the Fool's Parliament is what the opposition is calling it, and in the most satisfactory calling of their Bluff, the Fool's Delegation indicated they did not care to deny it by sending a perfectly fitted pair of shoes to every journalist who asked them for their thoughts.
The Fool's Delegation won the lottery to oversee the day to day business of the house for the first month. at the first committee meeting they elect you their chair. over coffee that afternoon you look over the case of your governments' existence, though apparently no where to be found except in the person of yourself. In your report you recommend recognition of your government, which is passed two nights later to a lukewarm ovation, standing time clocking in at 40 minutes and 58 seconds.
you sit down across from the Fool's Delegation and they sit down across from you. "my government is willing to cease injurious interference with the timeline leading to your present conditions, if you will agree to open your orders to a mass influx of our people as refugees.
today the government of 9 years before the collapse speaks to you through the last messenger appointed 20 hours before collapse.
we seek to relocate our entire population of 20 million over a span of two hundred years leading up to the collapse.
we do not demand that they all be placed in one slice. for example, we would be willing to send 200,000 from the last 600 months of the pre-collapse, among them our final leaders and best minds, who have studied the factors at play as best as they can, 30 to 60 years into the future.
their predecessors, a million point one to four million point four from the years 15-45 pre collapsed, may be placed 75 to 150 years. however, within 350 years all 20 million must be assimilated.
the Fool's inquire if this means the later generation is to prepare the way for the former, and you reply that it is. as they sow the society where their great grandparents will have always been aculturized, than the fruit of that society might be rich enough to sustain their generation
through the final pre-collapse days and the first of the days of the diaspora.