Mister President
By David Hurwitz
The President of the United States sat at his desk,
alone, grabbing a few quick moments to relax and ponder the
policy options of his upcoming meeting with the Prime
Minister of Iraq.
Damn, he thought to himself.
The second
minister this year and I finally memorized the name of the
last guy.
He sighed and turned the page of the briefing
comforted by the fact that he was alone.
He was gregarious
and loved socializing, working a room, meeting people.
But
he hadn’t realized that as president, he wouldn’t have a
moment to himself most days.
Now he had a half hour to at
least gather his thoughts and not have to make small talk
to some pompous head of state from an obscure country that
would be more fun to blow up than visit.
He glanced up over his desk and noticed three small,
mousy-looking men in strange clothes standing at the foot
of his desk.
“Mr. President, may we speak with you?” the
nearest one said.
2
“What the hell! Who are you?” he said, sitting upright
with a panicked glance at the closed doors to the Oval
Office.
A quick look around the room confirmed that it was
empty save for the three strange-looking men.
He pushed
the emergency buzzer on his desk but there was no sound, no
secret servicemen pouring through any of the four entrances
to the room.
He felt a cold sweat pour down his back.
Apparently, their leader, if he could be called that,
sensed his discomfort and said, “Relax, Mr. President,
we’re not here to hurt you; we are here for the contest and
just need to make a few changes in your genome.
Allow me
to introduce myself, I am Kotar and these are my
colleagues, Mexel and Petri.”
“How did you get in?” asked the President, eyeing the
window behind his desk for a quick escape.
He was
surprised to see that outside the window was...nothing,
just a gray dense fog.
A few minutes before, it had been a
sunny spring afternoon.
He arose, walked to the window
casually, heart pounding in his chest and prepared to step
out on the balcony.
The door wouldn’t budge and there
seemed to be nothing at all outside.
“Mr. President, sir, for your own protection you won’t
be able to leave this room while we are here,” said Kotar.
Now Petri spoke.
“Would you please sit down, sir?”
3
“I think I will stand, if you don’t mind,” spoke the
president, as he edged toward the east door of the Oval
Office.
Petri aimed a small device at him and he found himself
walking, against his will back to his desk and seating
himself in the presidential chair.
frightened.
want?
Now he was really
Who were these creatures and what did they
He had only been in office 2 months; was he to be
assassinated by this crew of near-dwarves before he had
hardly made a mark on the office?
How did they compel him
to walk to his desk, and for that matter, where were the
White House grounds, so recently outside his window?
“Mr. President,” Kotar spoke.
“We have come a long
way to see you and practice our art.
It will be painless,
take only a few minutes, and you are not going to remember
it anyway.
Again, you have nothing to fear.”
The president tried to get up from his desk, but to no
avail.
He could turn his head, grit his teeth, put his
hands on the desk but his legs didn’t work.
“Why can’t I
move?” he asked.
“Oh, that.
Sorry we didn’t tell you.
Petri is using
a neural disruptor on you to control whatever part of your
brain that we need to. It will have no permanent effects.
Now I need to explain to you our mission.”
4
“I wish you would,” he said, pinching himself but
finding that he was not waking up and the bizarre scene in
front of him was not dissolving into the White House
bedroom.
He hadn’t even had a drink last night, had gone
to bed early.
Couldn’t be a hangover.
“You see sir,” spoke Kotar in his best deferential
manner.
“We’re genomic sculptors.
We are going to make a
few small changes in your genes and be on our way.”
“You are planning on improving me?
improvement.
I don’t need
If I thought I needed improvement, I wouldn’t
have had the balls to run for president.”
thought occurred to him.
Ned Banks.
Suddenly a
That’s it.
Banks,
the opposition party chairman had been really sore about
losing Congress and the Presidency last fall.
payback, some kind of joke.
This must be
But how could he pull this
kind of a caper off?
“No, not improving, just changing,” Kotar replied.
“You see, we’re artists engaged in a contest, the greatest
contest of them all.
You are newly installed as president
and we have come to ply our craft on you, in competition
with other genomic sculptors. As I speak, groups of artists
are traveling to parallel universes to make you and your
other selves look older.
The artistic group that does the
best work will win great honors.”
5
“Wait a minute,” said the president.
sense at all.”
“This makes no
He had calmed down a little and though
still anxious, he was starting to try to make sense of the
situation.
He had always been a quick thinker, adaptable,
and now he was desperately trying to get a handle on this
bizarre scenario playing out in front of him.
“What do you
mean ‘making me look older’ and what do you mean by
‘parallel universes’?”
This last statement seemed to be some kind of cue for
the previously silent Mexel, who had a sonorous voice out
of proportion to his small frame.
“You may have noticed,
sir that American presidents age badly during their time in
office.
After two terms totaling 8 years, a president
looks like he has aged 20 years.
Look at George Bush; he
was 54 when he entered office, only 62 when he left office
but he looked 80.”
“Well, George had a pretty rough time of it,
particularly the last two years of his administration.
Can’t say I’m surprised,” replied the president, still
trying to move his unresponsive right leg.
“Oh, but if we hadn’t intervened, he would look only
about 8 years older.
Think about other presidents, like
Bill Clinton,” Mexel said proudly.
at the end of his term.
“Look how old he looked
That’s our work.”
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“For Crissake, Bill Clinton had a heart attack and a
bypass after he left the presidency.
Is that your work
too?” asked the president, heart pounding again.
“Dear me no,” interjected Petri.
“President Clinton
ate too many hamburgers and stopped his cholesterol
medication.
We wouldn’t harm anyone’s health.
We just
make presidents look older.”
It occurred to the president that he had no idea who
or what these people were.
He calmed himself down and
asked, “Where exactly do you come from?”
“Oh, from Earth, of course,” said Kotar, picking up
the thread of the conversation.
from a parallel universe.
“Not your Earth.
Our earth diverged from your
timeline over 2000 years ago.
We’re similar but much more
advanced scientifically than you are.
the various universes.
We’re
We’re able to cross
We chose yours to work in because
you are so quaint.”
“You are from a different universe?” said the
president, trying to recall what he had read about parallel
universes and what he remembered.
Not much, he had to
admit.
“Yes, there are an infinite number of universes,” said
Kotar.
They arise as a result of probability, when an
event could have two possible outcomes.
Things go one way
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in one universe, and another way in a newly formed
universe.
Thus, two universes may differ by only one
event.”
“What separates your Earth from our Earth?” asked the
president.
“As far as we can tell from historical records, Jesus
Christ was never born in our universe.
record of him.
yours.
We can find no
That changed history dramatically from
Christianity never developed.
The Roman Empire
didn’t split; it transitioned into a democracy and we had
no Middle Ages like yours.
We landed on the moon in what
would be equivalent to your 1289 AD and fought our last big
war in 1523,” Kotar continued.
“In the last two hundred
years, we have had a golden age of science.
We have
learned to cross the parallel universes, explored the solar
system and traveled to the nearest stars,” he said proudly.
“Is there life in the universe besides ours?” said the
president hoarsely, caught up in the moment.
“Yes and no,” responded Kotar.
“Mr. President, we need to finish what we came to do,”
said Mexel.
We are in competition with many other groups
working in adjacent timelines on you and your counterparts.
If we’re to produce the best version of you, we have to get
started right away. It takes an enormous amount of energy
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to maintain the bridge between the universes and we must
return to our own soon.”
“Wait a second,” said the president.
“If you’re so
advanced, why do you look like boiled shrimps?”
There was
no response but he thought he detected a look of discomfort
on all their faces.
passed in here.
“And by the way, a lot of time has
People are going to be worried and bust in
to the Oval Office soon.”
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that, Mr.
President,” said Kotar.
on the Oval Office.
“We have imposed a temporal field
Time is now running much faster here
than outside your office.
When we leave, this whole
process will have taken 1/100 of a second in your time.
No
one will notice.”
Wiping his brow with a handkerchief, the president
continued, “I don’t understand why you would work on
something so trivial as aging.
With your powers, you could
help us eliminate war and disease.”
Kotar responded, “We are artists, Mr. President.
Our
whole world will be watching the results of the
competition, watching your various selves rapidly age. Bets
will be made, large sums won or lost on wagers.
truly be an exciting event.
It will
Our group has won this contest
before and we wish to do so again.”
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“Why age me? That’s the best you can do with your
advanced science?”
“Oh, this contest is very important to us,” replied
Kotar.
“We revere the elderly, those over 300 years old,
in our culture.
Making you look older is the highest
artistic achievement we can aspire to.”
The president put his face in his hands and moaned.
Perhaps to placate him, Mexel spoke up.
“Sir, in the
past we did have two contests to try and improve your
history by subtly interfering with your electoral process.”
“And...”
“We made sure that Warren Harding and Richard Nixon
were elected.
After that, for obvious reasons, we
abandoned that type of competition.”
“Mr. President, we need you to come over here,” said
Petri, opening a table that had inexplicably appeared in
his hands.
Now the president saw a large open black box in
the corner of the room with all kinds of strange-looking
equipment in it.
How had he missed that?
“I think I’ll stay where I am while you use up your
energy,” the president said but immediately found himself
getting up and walking over to the table, unable to control
his movements.
ceiling.
He lay down on the table staring at the
10
“Mr. President, this won’t hurt you at all.
We will
do a genetic analysis, make a virus with the needed
changes, inject it and be gone.
Oh, and by the way we will
erase the memory of this encounter from your brain so you
will have no recollection of our visit.
It’s much better
that way.”
The president, immobile, watched as a large saucershaped object flew over him and hovered in the air.
He
could see flashing lights and a clear area in the center
behind which there seemed to be a milky liquid.
of blood was taken somehow without sticking him.
A sample
He could
see a thin stream of blood travel from his arm towards the
center of the device for an instant and then it was over.
The large disk then flew away and positioned itself over
the big black box and he heard a few whirring noises
followed by silence as Petri looked on.
Petri returned
with a small black cube and pressed it to the president’s
right hand.
A moment later he said, “All done, sir.
The
virus with the altered genes has been introduced into your
system.
You will be our masterpiece, the best work we have
ever done. I am sure we will win.”
The president found himself walking back to his desk,
and involuntarily sitting down.
Mexel came over and took
the notes he had hurriedly scribbled to himself while
11
talking to the trio of artists.
Then all three of them and
their equipment vanished in an instant.
desk, immobile.
He sat at his
Soon there was a knock at the door.
secretary peeked in.
His
“Sir, while the Prime Minister of
Iraq was in the air, they changed Ministers again.
The new
one is on a plane and will be here with only an hour’s
delay.
The Secretary of State can move up his meeting with
you, but the First Lady asked if you would have tea with
her this afternoon before you meet with the new Prime
Minister.
What do you want to do?”
“I’ll have tea with the First Lady,” he said, getting
up and walking to the door.
Damn the Iraq situation; now
it had given him a headache.
--------------------------“Hey Mike, come here,” Darryl called.
evening at Ye Olde Irish Pub.
It was a noisy
The flat screen TV above the
bar was showing a presidential press conference.
Nobody
could actually hear what the president was saying and few
were paying attention to the closed captions.
“Look at
that guy, in office only 10 months and he looks 5 years
older.”
“Yeah, my wife was mentioning that the other day.
Creepy isn’t it?
I guess it’s a tough job.
president for any amount of money.”
I wouldn’t be
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“Well, nobody would vote for you anyway, you look too
young.
Buy you a beer?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
The End
©David Hurwitz July 2007.
May not be reproduced or
published without permission of the author