[FIC] Genie in a Bottle, PG, Lathe of Heaven/Terminator/Rat Patrol/Matrix/Quantum Leap/X-Men
Title: Genie in a Bottle
Author: William Parsons
Fandoms: The Lathe of Heaven, The Terminator, The Rat Patrol, The Matrix, Quantum Leap, X-Men
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: This story does not proceed from either the 1979 PBS production The Lathe of Heaven or the 2002 A&E Television Network production Lathe of Heaven, but rather from the original novel The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin on which those two films, the former outstanding and the latter not so much so, are based.
Characters: George Orr, Terminator, The Rat Patrol, Hauptmann Hans Dietrich, Admiral Al Calavicci, the X-Men, Professor Charles Xavier
Summary: George, a disenfranchised youth of the grossly-overpopulated year 2047, keeps changing the world--literally--to mirror his own dark, aching heart. Each time he has an "effective" dream, he awakens to discover he has all the memories of a life different from the one he still remembers from the day before. As these "lifepaths" pile up, he finds himself in World-War-II North Africa, encounters the Terminator from those decades-old movies he found in that little shoppe, thwarts Skynet's plan to circumvent the "inconvenience" of Judgement Day, dips into the numbing fantasy of the Matrix, leaps into the Waiting Room at Project Quantum Leap in the midst of the Age of Apocalypse to be greeted by the telling irony of the still-smiling and still-jovial Al the Guide, and finally emerges in a world in which the X-Men are the subjects of headlines, not comic-book titles. George, having been a teenager, a soldier, a fetus, and a middle-aged man, learns that one man can throw the shroud of sadness and hatred over the entire world or he can rip that shroud away and bathe that same world in the light of love and friendship. Sure, the latter may be harder and take more sacrifice, but better to face one's fears than to allow them to drive you headlong into nothingness.
Warnings: The Ratties and Herr Hauptmann Dietrich die (nobly, though, and for the greater good).
"This is how the world ends./Not with a bang, but a whimper." T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
George Orr is a dreamer.
George's dreams come true.
George can change the world.
Part I
George had had a very bad day. He should have been used to bad days by now, the way the bullies targeted him in school, tripped him in the hallways, taunted him, and stole his card so he couldn’t get his ration in the Autocaf. George’s stomach growled as he pushed his way through the downtown crowd-there was always a certain degree of hunger that gnawed at him, as it did everyone else, but yet another day without lunch was really starting to wear him down. If only they would leave him alone, let him be-all he wanted was to be ignored, like the seven thousand other kids at LeGuin Memorial High. He knew it would be better if he didn’t let it get to him, but, the way they treated him, well, it just hurt, that’s all, deep down, where your soul ached, like it was bruised. Today, though, it was his heart that was black and blue, and that was what made this day, more than the others, so bad. George’s thin shoulders sagged under the weight of his thoughts and his thick oilskin and the rain, the unrelenting rain.
George had really thought Marly had liked him. He couldn’t believe it when she’d actually said yes when he asked her out three weeks back. He hadn’t done too bad, managing not to spill his drink all over her in the crowded movie house (crowded not because word of mouth had it that the movie was any good, but just because Portland, like everywhere, was, well, crowded-mankind in the year 2047: 7.72 billion and growing strong). Afterwards there was dancing in a club they were both too young to get into but she said she could get them in and she had. Things seemed to be going great. He thought it promising how that first night she hadn’t minded his stepping all over her toes with his two left feet. The ensuing weeks found them on more dates, at more movies and at friends’ apartments for parties, where the lights were low and she let him press up against her and put his trembling hand on her breast and let him kiss her, clumsily but with passion.
And then today the bomb that cracked his skull wide open-that was how it felt. She told him she couldn’t stand him any longer, that a dare’s a dare, sure, but enough is enough, he disgusts her and always did. If he touched her one more time, she was going to puke. "George Orr, my boyfriend? Please!!!!" She turned and walked away, leaving him standing there in the middle of the hallway, people laughing at him, the wreckage of his life there at his feet for them all to see.
George sniffed and wiped what he told himself was rain out of his eyes. He got shoved and almost fell, but kept his balance and resumed plodding home.
Soon enough he came to his apartment building, a glass-and-cement edifice that lorded over him in all directions. George ducked into the foyer. He shrugged out of the oilskin and removed the nor’easter, shaking his head and then running a hand through his damp hair (no amount of gear was ever enough). He glanced heavenward, wondering if that gray overcast was really there, pouring down on everyone, or rather just a mirror of his black mood and dumping on him and him alone. He shrugged. What did it really matter? It hadn’t stopped raining on Portland in years, and that was just the way it was. There was nothing you could do about it. Right?
Minutes later the elevator disgorged him onto the twenty-third floor. George unlocked the apartment door and stepped inside, closing and locking it behind him. He hung his gear up in the hall closet, a dim bulb giving him barely enough light to see. He kicked his heavy rainboots off. He knew his parents weren’t home yet, but still he expected to hear the radio. And he stood there, still, for a moment, waiting for his mother’s sister to call after him, asking him how his day had been.
He shook himself out of his reverie. That’s right, he’d almost forgotten: on top of everything else, he was going nuts, stark raving. Here was his evidence: Aunt Ethel had moved in with them six months before, getting a divorce and wanting to escape the bum-that and she really couldn’t get by alone and not working, receiving only Basic Support as she was. Her living with them was fine, he guessed, though she had been driving him steadily to the looney bin, being rude to his mother and coming into his room in her topless pajamas (for thirty, she’d kinda kept her figure, but, still, she was his aunt). She hogged the bathroom-since they were both employed, his folks figured they could swing an apartment with an extra bathroo. George coped with all the disruption his aunt had brought to their lives. Or he thought he did. Two months before she had talked him into taking her to the movies and then afterwards, when they had returned home, she had come on to him, flopping around on his bed and telling him his parents were, after all, asleep. George fended her off and got her finally to leave him alone, and that night he had a dream, a very vivid one he recalled perfectly upon waking, not the hazy, piecemeal recollection of normal dreams. Even before stepping downstairs George knew his aunt wouldn’t be there, knew she couldn’t possibly be there, because after all she had died six weeks earlier in a car accident in Los Angeles after having left a lawyer’s office where she had started her divorce proceeding. Ethel had never come north to live with them. As he stepped into the small kitchen, with its small table at which his two small, beaten-down parents sat, he could see the sadness that still creased his mother’s features. He’d known why she was sad, though, even before seeing his mother’s face, because he had lived that history, just as completely and assuredly as he had lived his current one, both lifetimes existing perfectly intact in his mind, neither imagined nor conjured but lived, really and truly lived.
Yeah, he was going nuts.
The apartment was silent as he made his way into the kitchen, where he swiped a slice of bread out of the box on the counter. He knew his mother would notice his thievery and scold him, but, frankly, he didn’t give a damn. He chomped into the pasty-white, bland slice and chewed slowly as he slipped down the short hallway to his room, slamming the door behind him.
The place was a dump. Black checkmark beside George Orr’s name #457: his parents had been on his case to pick up his room. George let out a pent-up deep breath and tossed his satchel down onto his bed, where it spilled its contents of several notewriter padds (one of which, George now remembered, had a fading screen-he’d forgotten again to bring it to the attention of Mr. Delacorte, his homeroom teacher), discs containing the information he needed about World War II and its technologies, specifically computers-the moronic, leviathan ancestors of the ubiquitous micro- and nanocircuitries which ran and ruled the world today. There were also a disc reader he’d also borrowed from the library, and sundry other items needed by a seventeen-year-old high school student and no one else. George pulled out the chair to his desk and plopped down in it, and he stared down at the schoolwork facing him as he rested his gaunt cheek on his hand, his elbow on the desk.
The report on WWII was his last hope, especially after this afternoon, when Mrs. Campbell beamed his previous term report back to his padd with notes indicating her disgust. She’d really been on his case lately, insisting he had the brains and the drive to be handing in much higher-quality work. How the hell did she know what he had?! Oh, well, if he were honest, he’d have to agree with her. Frankly, he was a poor student, at best. He’d liked learning at first, but that was when he’d been a kid. Now, everything seemed so pointless. Who cared how computers got their start and their impetus in the demanding chaos of some long-ago war? He didn’t, not really-it just seemed the kind of interesting, off-the-wall topic (most kids just went for easy, recent stuff, like the 2033 Isragypt debacle with China) for which his history teacher would give him a good mark for tackling.
His face a mask of sadness and despondency, George glanced around his room. The unmade bed. The closet door halfway open, spewing dirty laundry and forgotten toys. The bottom drawer of the end table, at the bottom of which were buried some sexmaggs. The shelf over his desk, on which sat a stack of compilations of a forgotten medium, comic books, entitled X-Men (being paper and cheap cardboard, they were obviously old-George had found them discarded and dog-eared and bought them for a song and made them all the more ratty with his voracious reading and re-reading of them). An eye-catching poster for an otherwise forgettable movie tacked a bit crooked on his wall. The small array of entertainment discs he’d collected of an old, old series, The Rat Patrol, into which he disappeared again and again and again (the one character, Dietrich, who he supposed was intended to be the bad guy was his hero and the real reason he loved the 60's half-hour war drama so much, though he kinda liked the Rats, too). There were also a few other discs up there, storing a smattering of other vintage "television", but it was The Rat Patrol he cherished. Even endless rewatchings of those, though, had gotten a little stale of late, and he’d found some old movies at a little shoppe that specialized in vintage entertainment and brought some titles home, which now sat in a jumbled heap beside the more lovingly arrayed RP’s: The Terminator, its three sequels, The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded (he’d looked it up and discovered there were other sequels, but he couldn’t find them). Oddly similar movies with similar characters and situations and premises, made around about the same time (the same couple of decades at least, a long, long time ago-long before he’d been born, at least, and that was long ago enough). Maybe that said something about those times, what they were like, what the people who were watching them and who were making them were like. George shrugged. No matter. The movies were good, and he liked them. They were wild and edgy and off-the-wall. They took him to another place, and that’s where he wanted to be.
With effort he got to his feet and grabbed one of the movies (The Terminator-why not start them over again, in order?) and shoved the wafer-sized disc into the player in the wall. The screen, caked with dust, immediately winked on. George pushed the stuff out of the way as he climbed onto the bed and sat, cross-legged, arranging his schoolwork in front of him. He picked up the one notewriter padd, glanced at its contents, and tossed it aside, picking up the other one. He rolled his eyes. He couldn’t believe he had to write another report for the old battleax. Oh, well. It had to be done. If he had any hope of making it through the year with anything approaching passing marks, he’d have to do this. He put a disc in the padd’s disc reader and started perusing the research as the movie’s apocalyptic opening filled his room and surrounded him with its pulsing immediacy (he liked his stuff loud-he didn’t care how much his parents pounded on the door). Between the movies and the schoolwork George hoped the memories of his day, the worst day of his rotten life, would be shunted to some forgotten, musty corner of his subconscious, where they could rot. He plunged into his work.
Five hours later, the end credits of T2: Judgement Day blaring at him, George’s limp form was slumped back against the cold, metal headboard of his bed. His lap was filled with the disarray of his frustrating, nearly abortive plunge into the annals of a long-ago war. His eyes danced under the lids. George dreamed.
*****
Georg squinted because of the North African sun-a year stationed here, he should have been accustomed to it by then. This sun, still merciless to their nordic features, beat down on him and his fellow Afrika Korps troopers.
For a second Georg’s eyes met the hauptmann’s, and the seventeen-year-old soldier gulped, hoping the officer approved. Dietrich nodded one time, curtly, and moved on, and Georg allowed himself to exhale again. Within five minutes the hauptmann dismissed the company, and they all fell out, Georg discovering to his relief he wasn’t the only one glad to get out of the sun. Immediately they all headed for the tents and their promise of shade. Georg looked up and grinned as Wolfgang Brüner, a year older, slapped him fraternally on his back. He nodded when his best friend asked if he was going to get in the chow line now, but otherwise kept his attention on Dietrich and two waffen-SS officers, one large and the other, clearly a subordinate, more on the average size. Herr Hauptmann was speaking to them in front of the company commander’s tent. Slowly the grin disappeared from Georg’s tanned face as he couldn’t help but stare at the large man, with muscles bursting the seams of his smart uniform. Georg stopped in his tracks and swallowed hard and suddenly noticed his heart was pounding in his chest.
Wolf shook him on his shoulder and looked him intently in the face. <> he prodded him, <> He glanced over his shoulder at the officers at whom his young friend couldn’t stop staring and then regarded Georg again with concern.
Georg finally tore his eyes away from the big man and looked at his friend, mustering a grin and a small chuckle at the fellow private’s joke. He nodded quickly and gestured in the direction of the mess tent. <>
Wolf frowned, then shrugged and moved on his way, joining other comrades at the flap and disappearing inside the tent.
Georg watched after him and then moved over to a nearby post, against which he leaned and crossed his arms. He watched the three officers for the half a minute longer they stood outside the commander’s tent, talking. They then walked out of sight around the side of it. Georg folded his knees and let his back slide down the post till he was sitting. He wrapped his arms around his legs.
He let out a good laugh, immediately stifling it and glancing around him, lest anyone think him becoming sun crazy. Of course: the hauptmann, Hans Dietrich. The Rat Patrol. The sight of this new officer in the camp forced Georg to accept the truth of his life, the truth he had first realized but immediately dismissed the day before when he had first awakened. Now, it came rushing back, refusing to be ignored. He had lived another life. That sounded crazy, even to him, but he had, nonetheless. It was not a life he had dreamed, though he could remember, very vividly actually, having had a dream and that it was somehow responsible. And it wasn’t a case that he had been someone else-the idea of reincarnation was anathema to his faith and upbringing, but, beyond that, he simply knew that he, Georg Orr, had the memories derived from two-he blinked-no, three previous life "paths," for lack of a better term. In those others he had been called "George"-<> he shrugged-and had lived many years in the future, in America, in a city called Portland, where he had been born and raised. This history existed seamlessly beside his history, the one now he would have to accept as "new" though he recalled it going back to birth. He was a German lad born in a small Bavarian village in 1925, had grown up poor but happy, shielded from the growing deprivation plaguing their great land until he had become old enough to understand things for himself. He enlisted in the Wehrmacht, determined to help put right all the wrongs Germany had suffered at the hands of so many petty and jealous peoples. Numbers were needed in the Afrika Korps, so that was where he went. The desert sounded like a grand, exotic adventure-1001 Nights.
This officer, this hulking SS-Oberführer, not this other, younger man, was from that other path, which had in no other way to his reckoning so far intruded on this one. He had not yet been frightened by this thought of living multiple lives-he prayed for understanding of this miracle that obviously came from God, but not for deliverance from any fear, because none was there, just a wonderment, a peaceful sense of something peculiar and unique to him. Now, though, an unease crept into his awareness as he thought on this man, an actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had portrayed a terrible weapon, Terminator, a machine that looked alive and human but in no way was either and couldn’t be stopped and from a future well beyond Georg’s own real (or, better, "other") one. Why would this man be here? Maybe, Georg thought, sitting up with his back against the post, this miracle from God was not unique to him alone after all. A grin of relief cracked his intent expression as he clambered to his feet, his worn and sand-blasted boots loudly scraping in the gritty terrain of this baked and parched place. He loped in the direction he had seen the officers go, and his grin broadened as he caught sight of them, talking on the edge of the camp. Maybe together he and this fellow traveler of lifepaths could figure out-
Georg skidded to a stop, his eyes wide with terror. A dog, Maximilian, the camp mascot pampered and allowed to run loose, had trotted past the three men and now stopped and barked at the SS-Oberführer with hackles up in a ridge along his entire back as he raised an unrelenting alarm. As the hauptmann waved at the beast, the SS-Oberführer turned toward the dog in a smooth, one would say "mechanical," motion Georg recognized. This was not the actor. This was the machine, Terminator. It was no longer a figment of a dark and twisted imagination put on a far-future motion-picture screen. That horrible creation borne of a nuclear apocalypse was real. And it was here.
Parts 2, 3, and 4 of 4