1.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully. You grab a pillow and mash it into his pudgy little face.
Baby Hitler does not struggle. You hold the pillow over his nose and mouth until he is completely still, then press your ear to his tiny chest, listening. There is no heartbeat. “Sorry, babe,” you whisper. “Gotta be cruel to be kind.” Without ceremony, you return to your time machine.
Back home, everything looks the same. You step outside and flag someone down: a woman walking her miniature schnauzer down your street.
“Excuse me, ma’am!” you say. “Do you know much about twentieth century history?”
“Some,” she says, “why?”
“What were the major events?”
“Well, let’s see,” says the woman. “There was the Great Depression, of course. Then we put a man on the moon—God, to think what we’re capable of! And then everyone got a mullet—now that was a sight for sore eyes. I’m sure there were other things too, I’d have to think.”
“Great,” you say. “Perfect. And just to be sure: You have zero recollection of any historical events involving the genocide of eleven million Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and other political enemies of the Third Reich, orchestrated by a fascist authoritarian dictator named Hitler?”
“Hitler,” the woman repeats slowly. “You mean Himmler? Well of course I know who that is.”
“Ah,” you say, heart sinking. “And that is…?”
“Are you kidding me? Never forget! He was a Nazi—an evil Nazi! He did the Holocaust, exactly like you said.”
“Right,” you say, “I see. I’m sure he did.”
With a sigh, you head back into your house.
2.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully. You grab a pillow and mash it into his pudgy little face.
Baby Hitler does not struggle. You hold the pillow over his nose and mouth until he is completely still, then press your ear to his tiny chest, listening. There is no heartbeat. Without ceremony, you return to your time machine.
In October 1900, Baby Himmler’s nursery looks much the same as Baby Hitler’s did in April 1889: a rocking chair in the corner, some oil lamps scattered around the room. Unfortunately, there is no pillow in the crib, so you’re left no choice but to do the deed with your bare hands. “Sorry babe,” you whisper. “Eleven million for the price of two—it’s just good business.” It’s at least some comfort to know that your victim—a future Nazi leader who, in Hitler’s absence, is destined to become Führer himself—must be completely beyond redemption. Humming the melody of “Edelweiss,” you throttle away.
Back home, you exit your time machine to a wasteland of dirt and rubble. A weak yellow sun, shrouded by smog, casts an eerie pall upon the ruins. A few hundred yards away, you can make out the remains of a church steeple, and you start walking toward it.
Suddenly, a woman in animal skins leaps out of the structure, her hair styled in a mullet—her crossbow trained on your chest. A miniature schnauzer trots out behind her and starts yapping.
“Quiet, Furby!” says the woman—then, turning back to you: “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“Please,” you say, raising your palms. “I just want to know what’s going on. Where am I?”
“Well, they used to call it America, didn’t they,” says the woman, “back before the war.” She lets out a bitter laugh.
“The war?”
The woman gives you a strange look. “Are you kidding me? The war. The one that did all this?” She waves her arm around. “The one that ended a straight century of unimpeded world peace and technological progress under the Pax Germana? Little did we know, Switzerland was building up its nuclear arsenal the entire time. God,”—she shakes her head ruefully—“to think what we’re capable of! I guess in a funny way, it’s a blessing the peace didn’t last any longer—Lord knows what weapons might have been developed by then. Maybe all of humanity would have been wiped out, instead of just ninety-nine-point-five percent.”
“Right,” you say, “I see. I suppose that’s true.”
With a sigh, you head back to the empty lot where your house used to be.
3.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully. You grab a pillow and mash it into his pudgy little face.
Baby Hitler does not struggle. You hold the pillow over his nose and mouth until he is completely still, then press your ear to his tiny chest, listening. There is no heartbeat. Without ceremony, you return to your time machine.
When you arrive in February 1809, you’re surprised to find Baby Lincoln alert in his bassinet, his features set in a dour expression. “Sorry, Abe,” you whisper. “Gotta make big moves if you want the big results.” You pick up the would-be president in order to return to April 1889 and deposit him in the Hitlers’ crib. You hope the Austrians won’t notice their son has grown several inches overnight.
It is only upon arrival that you realize the oversight in your plan: You’ve still got a dead baby to deal with. For lack of a better option, you grab original Hitler’s chubby corpse, pop back over to 1809, and ditch it in the Lincolns’ empty bassinet. (Surely, in these days, infants are dying of unexplained illnesses all the time?) “Sic semper tyrannis!” you chuckle as you leave. “Welcome to the land of the free, baby.”
Back home, everything looks the same. You step outside and flag someone down: a woman walking her miniature schnauzer down your street.
“Excuse me, ma’am!” you say. “Do you know much about twentieth century history?”
The woman stops and removes a piece of hay from between her teeth.
“Sure do,” she says. Her voice sounds off somehow—you can’t quite place the intonation.
“Wait,” you say, “I am in America, right?”
“Well you sure ain’t in the United Free States of New Deutschland!”
“Uh, right,” you say, “I see. And that’s because…?”
The woman gives you a strange look. “Bless your heart,” she says. “You really don’t know? You’re in the good old N.S.S. of A.”
It is then that you notice the big red banner hanging outside the church at the end of your street: a Confederate flag with a swastika on it.
“The Nazi Slaveholding States of America!” says the woman, and extends a stiff, three-fingered salute whose ideological implications you shudder to imagine.
With a sigh, you head back into your house.
4.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully. You grab a pillow and mash it into his pudgy little face.
Suddenly, feeling a tap at your shoulder, you leap back from the crib.
“Wha—” you stammer. “Who are you?” Across from you stands a tall woman with silvery hair, dressed in a slick red jumpsuit. Her arms and legs, you note with some interest, appear to be advanced metal prosthetics.
“Who I am does not matter,” she says. “What matters is that I’m here to help.”
“To prevent the Holocaust, you mean.”
The woman laughs gently. “No,” she says. “No, I’m afraid that is not possible.”
“Why not?”
The woman observes you coolly for a moment, and says, “Are you familiar with the Novikov self-consistency principle of time travel?”
“Is that the thing where, like, if I go back in time and kill my own grandfather then it would create a paradox as to how I even exist?”
“Precisely. Any apparent alterations to the timeline of the past must, out of logical necessity, already have occurred in said timeline in order for the present to exist as it does.”
“Nice theory,” you say. “But I’ve already seen alternate timelines. Besides, if there’s only one timeline, then where were you my last three visits?”
The woman shakes her head sympathetically. “A common misconception—those were time loops. Please, hold still. Allow me to explain.”
Instantly, a hologram appears before your eyes—or not so much before them as behind them, as if the woman were beaming it directly into your head:
“What the fuck,” you say. “How are you doing that?”
“Sshh,” she says. “You’ll wake the child.” Tenderly, she brushes the fuzz on Baby Hitler’s forehead. Without looking up, she asks, “See that arrow extending infinitely forward and away from you?”
“Pretty tough to miss.”
The woman shows no signs of amusement. “That arrow,” she says, “represents the one true timeline: the inexorable march of history as we know it. The saga that is, and will be, preserved in all the annals. Now,” she continues, “is it ever possible for an alternate course of events to split off from the one true timeline?”
Tentatively, you shake your head no.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, you moron. Of course it’s possible—what exactly do you think you’ve been doing here during your visits? That’s what all the red circles are, branching off from the arrow.”
“I’m confused,” you say. “Didn’t you just say there’s only one timeline?”
“There is one true timeline. But for every point on that timeline, there are innumerable time loops splitting off from it. These loops provide a fleeting glimpse of alternate histories, but—like the red circles in the picture—they always return eventually to the instant when they first diverged.” She pauses to let this information sink in. “That is why your attempts to prevent the Holocaust are doomed to fail: You’re always going to end up right where you started, back in your time machine. Closing the very loop that you yourself introduced in the universe.”
“But then what about all the alternate history and people in the time loops? What happens to them?”
The woman tsks impatiently. “Are you listening? The time loops are illusions. They were never real to begin with. They’re like bubbles that form in a pool of water: Once they reach the surface, it’s as if they never existed. Same with a closed time loop.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” you say, “I guess. I think I’m starting to get it. So if anything I do seems like it’s changing history, it means that, really, I’m just in a self-contained time loop?”
“Bingo. Unless, of course, you intervene in such a way that is consistent with the one true timeline—which would imply that your intervention has been a part of history all along.”
You consider this for a moment.
“And which are you from,” you say, “the one true timeline, or a time loop?”
“Okee dokee!” says the woman. “Time to go, don’t you think?” The hologram disappears, and she grabs your wrist with her prosthetic fingers, her grip as tight as a handcuff. With effortless strength, she jerks you away from the crib; without ceremony, she drags you into the time machine.
Back home, everything looks mostly the same, but a bit more futuristic: more screens, less wood furniture, et cetera.
“Finally,” says the woman. “I leave the house for five minutes, and next thing I know, you’re trying to snuff me out of existence. Now, let’s see—are you going to put this thing back on by yourself, or does Mommy have to do it for you?”
You look down to see her offering you a dog collar attached to a leash, the end of which is looped around her wrist.
“What the fuck is going on,” you say. “Am I your—are you my…my robot overlord?”
“Bad boy!” says the woman, and spritzes your face with a spray bottle. “First of all, my name is Sheila. Secondly, I’m not a robot—I’m a cyborg. How many times have we been over this?”
“Wait,” you say, “so all that stuff you told me…about the time loops—the one true timeline…was that real? Or were you just—”
She cuts you off with a second spritz. “Enough. The time-nesia will wear off in a few hours. Now put your collar back on.”
“Okay, sheesh,” you say, accepting the leash in your hands. “I was just asking.”
Fingers trembling, you feign difficulty unbuckling the collar; heart pounding in your ears, you raise it slowly to your throat; then, at the last second, you give the leash a hard yank. The ploy works. Sheila, startled, is knocked off balance, and for good measure, you kick her in her cybernetic leg, which buckles the wrong way.
As you sprint back toward your time machine, Sheila leaps to her feet and screeches for you to stop. Just in time, you bolt the door behind you: Her body strikes the metal with a heavy crunch. Breathing heavily, you begin to punch in the coordinates for April 1889.
“Sweetie?” coos Sheila. “Unlock the door and come back out. Mommy will explain everything, I promise.”
You ignore her. A flashing red button indicates the machine is buffering, homing in on the correct destination.
“Did you hear me, shnookums?” says Sheila, a note of panic in her voice. “Don’t do this! If you hit that button, you’ll wipe out cyborg civilization as we know it—is that what you want? Talk about genocide! You—”
The light turns solid, and you slam your hand down on the button.
5.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Sheila—praise Hashem—is nowhere to be seen, and Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully. You resist the urge to mash a pillow into his pudgy little face and, instead, place beside his head several bars of gold procured during a pit stop in 1849.
Baby Hitler does not wake. You’ve brought a note with you—jotted on a legal pad you keep stashed in the time machine—but suddenly you realize that Hitler’s Austrian parents will not be able to understand it. Using your supersmartphone, you quickly generate a translation, and copy out a German version of your message:
Dear Adolf Hitler and family,
Please accept this humble gift as an expression of faith in your deeper humanity. Although history has not always been kind to us, we trust that you will aid and protect us—as we now seek to aid and protect you. We know that the appearance of this note may raise questions, or even cause alarm. There is much we wish we could explain. For now, suffice it to say this: There is good in the world, and you can help increase it.
In solidarity,
The Jews
It’s true, you think, isn’t it: Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Deep down, you’d sort of suspected it might come to something like this. “L’chaim, babe,” you whisper. “Be a mensch, okay?”
Yet reading over the note, you can’t help but clock the resemblance between the Germans’ definite article and its morbid English homonym: Die Juden; the Jews. Die Jews. As if the threat of annihilation lurked in even the most banal features of language…But of course the Hitlers will understand “die” as their own “the”—its English meaning won’t even occur to them than, any more than it would to you to pronounce the name “Jude” as they would, “Yoo-deh.” Without ceremony, you place the note by the gold, and return to your time machine.
Back home, everything looks the same. You step outside and flag someone down: a woman dressed in black, walking toward the church at the end of your street.
“Excuse me, ma’am!” you say. “Do you know much about twentieth century history?”
“Some,” she says, “why?”
“What were the major events?”
“Well, let’s see,” says the woman. “There was the Heilocaust, of course. Then we put a man on the moon—God, to think what we’re capable of! And then everyone got a mullet—now that was a sight for sore eyes. I’m sure there were other things too, I’d have to think.”
“I’m sorry—did you say Heilocaust? What is that?”
The woman gives you a strange look. “Are you kidding me? It’s when we finally got rid of all those Aryan pigs! Long live the Jewish Reich!” She adjusts her wig, which, in her excitement, she’s knocked a bit askew; you realize that what you’d mistaken for a church at the end of the street is in fact an enormous synagogue.
“Oy gevalt,” you say under your breath.
With a sigh, you head back into your house.
6.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully. You grab a pillow and mash it into his pudgy little face.
Suddenly, Baby Hitler’s hand shoots out from under the pillow and finds your throat. His fingers are impossibly strong, and hairy. He rips the pillow from his face—which, you are surprised to see, now sports a small black mustache.
“Please,” you say, gasping for air. “I’m sorry! I swear I’ll leave you alone. I—”
“Silence!” shrieks Baby Hitler. Except you realize now that he is not Baby Hitler at all; he is the miniature schnauzer whose owner often walks him down your street.
“Furby?” you say, incredulous.
“SILENCE!” says Baby Schnauzer Hitler. “You are to address me as Führer-by, and only when spoken to.”
You try to nod, but Führerby is choking you out too hard. He throws you down in the crib, picks up the pillow and mashes it into your face, yapping with delight at your desperate attempts at escape. When did I get so small? you think, briefly—before you jolt awake in the safety of your own bed.
You look around your room, acclimating back to reality. In the darkness, your house creaks and settles, like a monster shifting in its den.
7.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully. You grab a pillow and mash it into his pudgy little face.
At the sound of a soft cough, you spin around. There, in the rocking chair in the corner, is an old man with a silvery beard and hair—his body obscured in the billows of a white toga. His face resembles that of your grandfather.
“Zayde?” you say. “What are you doing here?”
“Sorry, boychik,” says the old man, “I’m not your zayde”—and it’s true, you can hear instantly in his voice: The timbre is more resonant, suffused with brassy echoes.
“Wait,” you say. “Are you…God?”
The old man winks, and gives a soft incline of his head.
“No way,” you exhale.
“Yahweh,” God quips. “Nice to meet you.”
You pinch yourself to make sure you aren’t dreaming again. It hurts.
“Wow,” you say. “I can’t believe this!” You let out a soft laugh. “Although really, I guess, how much crazier is meeting God than meeting a time-traveling cyborg?”
“Totally,” says God. “That would be, like, so weird if that happened again. Anyway”—he clears his throat—“are you not wondering why I’m here?”
You look at Baby Hitler, who has somehow drifted back to sleep. He shifts in his crib, a half-smile tugging his lips, and lets out a soft gurgle of pleasure. What ghosts of consciousness flit through his infant mind, you wonder—what forms of light and shadow? You sigh.
“Is it because we are all your sacred children?” you say, grudgingly. “Is it because even this baby, who will grow to commit atrocities the enormity of which remains unrivaled in human history—even he is my brother, made in your divine image, for in us both resides an immortal soul, and to save one soul is to save the whole world over, or whatever?”
God gives a soft incline of his head.
“I’m so proud of you,” he says. “Come. Let us leave these silly games behind us and go back home.” He rises from the rocking chair and spreads his arms for an embrace.
As he begins to move across the room, though, God trips over his toga and throws out a hand to break his fall—a hand which, it takes a moment to register, appears to be an advanced metal prosthetic.
Then his fake beard drops off his face.
“God damn it,” says God—who, it would seem, is not God at all but Sheila in a poorly designed God costume.
“What the fuck is going on?” you say. “I thought I’d gotten rid of you!”
But of course you aren’t sticking around to hear the answer. As you sprint back toward your time machine, fake-God-Sheila leaps to her feet and screeches for you to stop. Just in time, you bolt the door behind you: Her body strikes the metal with a heavy crunch. Breathing heavily, you begin to punch in the coordinates for your time of origin.
Back home, everything looks the same. You step outside and flag someone down: a woman dressed in black, walking toward the church at the end of your street.
“Where’s Furby?” you say.
“I’m taking him out after services. Wait—how do you know the name of my dog?”
“Services?” you say, ignoring the question.
The woman gives you a strange look. “It’s Robocaust remembrance day. Six million robots and five million cybernetic organisms wiped out of existence by some time-traveling maniac trying to play God. How do you not know that?”
“That makes literally zero sen—ah, I mean, of course,” you say, “how could I forget? That makes me literally, uh, so sad.” You adjust your collar. “But at least nothing like that has ever happened to humans…right?”
For a moment, the woman just stares at you.
“Are you a fucking Holocaust denier?” she says.
“Oh—no!” you say. “I just thought maybe, because of the Robocaust, it didn’t…”
“Happen!?” says the woman. She shakes her head in disgust. “Un-fucking-believable. Oh, no, of course you’re not a denier, God forbid. You just thought maybe the Holocaust ‘didn’t happen’—that about right?”
With a sigh, you head back into your house.
8.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully.
“This is for the Jews!” you say, and punch him in his tiny little baby penis.
Baby Hitler immediately starts wailing.
“And this is for everyone else!” you say, punching him again.
“Sorry not sorry, babe,” you whisper. A little uneasy at how much you enjoyed this preemptive revenge, you return to your time machine.
Back home, everything looks the same. You step outside and flag someone down: a woman walking her miniature schnauzer down your street.
“Excuse me, ma’am!” you say. “Do you know much about twentieth century history?”
“Some,” she says, “why?”
“What were the major events?”
“Well, let’s see,” says the woman. “There was the Holocaust, of course. Then we put a man on the moon—God, to think what we’re capable of! And then everyone got a mull—”
“Enough with the mullets, Jesus. Can you just tell me who did the Holocaust?”
The woman gives you a strange look: confused, and possibly a little hurt. “Hitler,” she says. “Hitler, obviously. What do you think this is, some kind of alternate history?”
“No,” you say. “No, that seems about right.”
With a sigh, you head back into your house.
9.
You step out of your time machine and walk over to the crib. Baby Hitler is sleeping peacefully. You stand over him, watching, thinking—then return to your machine.
You visit him after his first day of kindergarten. After the death of his younger brother, Edmund, in 1900 (Hitler is ten) and of his father, Alois, in 1903 (he is thirteen). After he is rejected, twice, from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. You visit during his stint in the army, his entry into politics, his writing of Mein Kampf. You study him like a sacred text, like a rat in a maze—trying to pinpoint the precise moment he turns evil.
There is none.
Forget Hitler. You witness the rise of the Final Solution, the construction of the death camps, the victims straining for air in cattle cars and gas chambers. You ache with rage and helplessness, but do not look away. Without ceremony, you return once more to your time machine.
Back home, you step outside to the sound of hysterical screams.
“Furby!” your neighbor is crying. “FURBY! Are you okay?” She is shoving frantically against the side of your machine, trying in vain to move it.
“What’s going on?” you ask.
“What’s going—are you kidding me? I’ll tell you what’s going on, you maniac! You just appeared out of nowhere in your—your vehicle, and landed on top of my dog.”
“Oh, shit,” you say, spying the bloody splinter of a paw sticking out from under the machine. “I’m so sorry! I must have punched in the coordinates wrong—I usually aim for inside the house.”
You help the woman extract her dog, which, it’s immediately clear, has not survived the impact. As your neighbor’s panic melts into despair, she sits down in the middle of the street and begins to weep. You squat down and give her a few awkward pats on the back.
“Well,” she says, “at least he died doing what he loved, right? A walk out in the sunshine—it’s how he would have wanted to go.”
“He was a good boy,” you offer—though in truth you’ve always found Furby quite yappy, and possibly antisemitic.
“Hey,” you say gently, “I know this sounds crazy, but I think I can fix this.”
The woman gives you a pained look. “It’s okay,” she says. “Please—just let me grieve. What’s done is done.”
You want to protest, to try and explain: that if you simply turn back the clock and make sure to get the coordinates right on your return, Furby will be up wagging and barking again in no time. That she won’t even remember he was gone.
But suddenly it hits you: The woman is right. Not about Furby per se (he can, you assume, be revived), but about your larger objective; what’s done is done. If your failures have taught you anything, that is, it’s that the fundamental reality of the past cannot be altered—only delayed or deflected a bit: blips in the moral universe too slight to bend its long arc…Blips which may, in fact, more accurately be described as loops originating out of the one true timeline? You’re still pretty confused on that front…
And your neighbor is right about something else, too, you realize—a faint sliver of hope for your otherwise doomed project: No life story is ever complete until its final moments have been written. If you could succeed, you muse, in convincing Hitler of your deeper humanity—succeed even for an instant, at the very bitter end—then perhaps your efforts here will not have been wasted. No words of contrition can bring back eleven million dead, true; but if the very face of evil could be made to see the error of his ways, well, surely this must count for something. If even Hitler can feel remorse, then who is beyond redemption?
With a sigh, weary but resolved, you stand up to head back into your house.
“Hey,” says your neighbor. “Where are you going? Your fucking murder machine is going to block traffic.”
10.
You step out of your time machine and walk across the study at the back of the bunker. Adult Hitler is sitting on a couch with his eyes closed. His wife Eva sits slumped against an armrest beside him—her face slack and bloodless from the cyanide. Squeezing his eyelids tight, Hitler raises a pistol to his head.
“Wait!” you say.
Hitler opens his eyes, and lowers the gun.
“Adolf,” you say. “Please, listen to me. The blood of six million Jews and five million others is on your hands, and I need to know”—your voice catches in your throat—“I need to know: How do you feel now, on death’s door, about all the senseless suffering you inflicted? If you could go back and do it all again,” you whisper, “what would you choose?”
Hitler blinks.
“No English,” he says. “Ich spreche kein Englisch.”
“Oh, shit,” you say. “Right.”
Annoyed to have your entrance spoiled by such a basic oversight, you pull out your supersmartphone and quickly generate a translation. Hitler accepts the device from you and reads it over slowly; if he registers surprise at the technology, he is either too proud to show it, or too far gone to care. Suddenly, he looks up at you with a flash of recognition.
“Bist du Jude?” he says.
You wince—no need for help with that one.
“Yeah,” you say. “I’m a Jew.” Then, again with help from your phone: “Ich bin ein Jude aus der Zukunft”—I am a Jew from the future.
At this, Hitler stares at you—thoughtful, almost amused. You hold his gaze for a long time without breaking. Finally, something in his face seems to soften. He raises his gun at your chest.
In a sickening rush, you realize the short-sightedness of your fantasy: your deluded, reckless naivete. Your vision blurs with fear, and you can barely find the words to grovel: “Please, Adolf. Don’t do this. I’m begging you—please.”
The tears flow hot and freely now, and you let yourself fall to your knees—in supplication, and in mourning: For the supreme failure of your mission. For the sunrise you will not see tomorrow. For the grandchildren you will never get to meet. “What good does it do, killing me now?” you sob, desperately—as if he could ever understand. “Why kill me now, when you’ll only—”
“Aufstehen!” says Hitler sharply. “Hör auf zu weinen.”
You don’t know the words, but the message is clear: You sniff loudly and clamber to your feet.
“Bitte,” says Hitler. He thrusts the weapon closer.
“Please,” he translates for you in thickly accented English. He gives the gun a small shake in your direction: a stick to tempt a drooling dog.
And then, finally, it hits you: The gun isn’t a threat; it is an offering. He wants you to take it from him.
“Bitte,” Hitler repeats. He is almost smiling now, but seems distracted. In the distance, you can hear the faint sound of men shouting. Eva is still slumped against the armrest, her pallid flesh fading to blue.
“Bitte,” he croons. “Bitte, Jude”—and the pistol gleams in his palm.
“Please,” says Hitler, “Jew.”
Thanks to Malcolm, Rachel, and Jacob for notes on this story.