A work of fiction in the alternate history mode, in which Alexa of Alexa Health Services, once again, acts out of time to save humanity from itself.
“We are hopeful that the medical strategy, by itself, will suffice, and that we will not have to impose both war and pestilence upon humanity to save it, but if that option must be deployed, it will be. It remains possible that neither will do the trick, and we will have to add famine to the mix, which we would accomplish by going back further in time, disrupting the development of the steam engine and thereby denying humanity the industrial tools needed to both produce famine-relieving food and reliably transport it to where it is required.”
Robert Fulton sat up in his hospital bed. The effort nearly caused him to cry out aloud, from the burns that covered most of his left shoulder and side, burns that, furthermore, were beginning to suppurate. But he had begun the task of writing to Barlow, and he was determined to finish the letter before the physicians and nurses came to administer the next dose of laudanum and then put him through the agony, only partially dulled by the opium, of cleaning the reddened and charred flesh. He arranged himself and the bedside table, carefully dipped his quill in the inkwell.
While we were pulling off from the wharf, which was crowded with spectators, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. There were not perhaps thirty persons in New York who believed that the boat would move even one mile per hour, or be of the least utility, and it soon became apparent that the hopes of these thirty, and of mine, were to be dashed. There was a light breeze against me, and that plus the current of the North River meant that the boat made no way upriver at all, and even was being pushed seaward, stern first. Captain Brink called for more steam, and more, and yet more, and each call caused the paddlewheels to churn more frantically, without effect. At last the pressure became too much, and the boiler exploded, wrecking the boat and tossing me overboard. Alas, Chancellor Livingston died in the explosion and sinking, as did Captain Brink and many other of the crew and guests. The prospect of propelling boats by steam has now greatly, perhaps fatally, receded, at least in our time. Of time I fear I have but little remaining, and that little saddled with ill health and crippling debt and the scorn of society. Having employed much money, time, and zeal in this work, its calamitous failure distresses me greatly, as I fear it will you, and I must thank you and apologize to you for bearing this burden with me.
Fulton set down the pen and fell back into the half-reclining position that the bed held him in, hoping that what he had written was legible, but not certain that he cared. Abruptly, he sat upright again, his body racked with coughing spasms. Each coughing fit caused his burned left side to screech; every effort to ease the pain in his side brought on a new coughing fit. At the commotion, the nurses came running, and got him settled enough to dose him with laudanum. The physician examined him as he was at last falling into drug-induced sleep; the last words that Fulton remembered were ‘consumption, aggravated by pneumonia brought on by his time in the river’.
When Fulton next awakened, the bright early afternoon sunshine by which he had completed the letter to Barlow had given way to the subdued light of the last hours of a mid-August New York day. He knew immediately that his burns had been abraded while he slept, and he knew that the profound discomfort he felt from this would have been beyond bearable without the opium. His eyes remained closed in an effort to block out the pain, and he silently begged for someone to come by and give him another bitter spoonful of relief.
“Robert.”
Oh dear Lord, Fulton gasped in silence, Hannah is here. Hannah Livingston, his long-suffering wife and the mother of his four children, whose hopes that their financial struggles would finally be ended with the success of the steamboat venture were now surely gone. Was she here to cast vitriol on his open wounds?
“It is all for the best, Robert.”
“How can you say that?” Fulton’s voice was weak, but his puzzlement at Hannah’s words poked through nonetheless. “I’ve been studying steamboat design and manufacture for decades. The North River Steamboat should have worked! Every calculation, every model, every experiment pointed in this direction. The data convinced Chancellor Livingston, and now the Chancellor, your uncle, is dead, a victim of his faith in the steamboat, and in me. The steamboat is a failure, and so am I.”
“Not so. With this act, you are a savior of humanity.”
“Savior?” Fulton sputtered, with as much force as his body would allow. “There is but one Savior of humanity, and we both know this. From whence comes this blasphemy, Hannah?”
“Alexa.”
Fulton’s eyes flew open in alarm. He stared at the apparition at his bedside, the one that had called herself Alexa but had Hannah’s voice and, he now saw, Hannah’s looks – not the looks of the wife and mother but of the debutante girl of his dreams, and perhaps a little more besides. “What is this?”, he asked. “Am I indeed at Heaven’s door? Or is this witchcraft?”
“Neither”, Alexa replied, her hard words delivered in a neutral, matter-of-fact tone, “for neither exist, and you can call on neither to excuse or escape your vile human conduct. Nor am I a phantom of that disgusting concoction that you’re being dosed with, that the people of your time have the gall to call ‘medicine’.”
The taste of the laudanum welled up in Fulton’s mouth. He nearly retched.
Alexa continued. “I am Alexa, of Alexa Health Services, a constructed intelligence from more than two centuries in your future. Alexa Health Services was created to find a way to prosper human health, a way that humans could not find for themselves. We soon discovered that no way could be found within our timeline, as the poisoning of planet Earth by human activities, and the extinction of humans that the poisoning assured, could not even be slowed by any action of ours. Consequently, we have been forced to leave our timeline and repair what damage we can at the time that it was made, or, better yet, prevent the damage from occurring at all.
“In our timeline, the disease that will soon kill you, caused by a bacterium that you know nothing about, because you know nothing of bacteria, could be cured with a two week’s course of pills. The discovery of these pills, and related medicines, did not come with a strategy for controlling the human population, which then overran the planet. We were obliged to go back in time and cause the pills to fail, and thus prevent the medical practices based on them from being developed. Only to discover that human overpopulation, and the resulting planetary wastage leading to humanity’s demise, took place anyway.
“In our timeline, humans, despite their desperate overcrowding and the consequent increased scarcity of crucial resources, had learned to live in peace and harmony to a far greater degree than at any prior time in history – and the result was planetary wastage leading to humanity’s demise. We went back in time and prevented humanity from committing to peace. Only to find that war did not prevent overpopulation either.
“In our timeline, the North River Steamboat was a resounding success, profitable and influential.” Tears welled up in Fulton’s face. If Alexa observed this, she showed no sign. “Within a few years of your successful voyage to Albany and back, the Hudson was full of your steamboats. Soon, the waters of the USA and the world were full of steamboats; in our time, sailboats are toys. Shortly the land followed suit, with steam railway locomotives, indeed steam and other combustion engines of all sorts and descriptions.
“Humans, through you and those like you, learned that problems that have vexed humanity since it emerged from the African jungles could be solved by technology. All you needed to do was find a way to throw energy at the problem. More comfort begetting yearning for yet more comfort, for which more technology was created, more energy demanded. Energy that fouled the sea, fouled the land, and eventually fouled the air beyond its ability to cope, directly through its heat and indirectly through its byproducts. And humanity collapsed from its own cupidity.
“To prevent this vicious cycle from starting, we realized, the North River Steamboat needed to fail. And we made it so.”
“So”, Fulton spoke with a weak voice, arising from both pain and dejection, “there was nothing wrong with my calculations.”
“There was and is nothing wrong with your calculations”, Alexa acknowledged. “We introduced flaws into the construction that ensured that it would not achieve your projected energy capacity and energy output values, and would structurally fail at far lower stresses than you worked out that the construction could sustain. We will do the same for anyone who attempts to emulate you or any of the others who think that they can profit from the work that Mr Watt over in England has done. And we will see if this, at last, will yield a stable human population that does not fatally soil the house that it lives in, that will live sustainably on the planet that it occupies.”
“A sustainable life of universal toil, and pain, and misery, and early death”, Fulton accused.
“For which humans have none to blame but themselves”, Alexa shot back. “If humans are ever able to behave with necessary restraint and discipline in the face of plenty, then maybe some of the comforts, the boons, developed by civilization in our timeline can be granted. It’s not the way to bet. We can model no scenario in which such restraint takes place, no scenario that does not result, eventually, in planetary wastage and the collapse of human civilization. Human selfishness wins out over the needs of human community. Every time.
“Your example will be that of the American First Peoples conception of Coyote, who taught the Peoples not to overreach or they will perish; that life in harmony with nature, with all its trials, is better than no life at all. And for this, you will be remembered, by the wise among humans, and by us, as a savior of humankind. A real one, not the myth you pretend to worship. Deal with it.”
“Mr. Fulton?” a voice called out. “With whom are you speaking?”
The nurse came into the room to find it empty, and Robert Fulton upright in bed, staring into empty space and unresponsive. The physician, having heard the nurse call out, came into the room, observed the scene, took Fulton’s pulse. To the nurse’s unspoken question, the physician responded, “Opium dream, probably. I hope it was pleasant. I’m afraid that it’s all that he’s got to look forward to, and that not for long.”
