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mrsrevmeg
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My middle son (14yo, 8th grade) wrote the following story. I think it is really, extraordinarily good, but then, I am mom. Sometimes I wonder if my mommy pride sees things as better then they really are. Thanks in advance!!

 

As a historian and a literature buff, I could appreciate the irony of being one of the few people able to both describe a dystopian future (a concept much ignored by modern "teaching") and to pinpoint the moment in which society took a turn down that forbidden valley.

Time travel had been a boon to society at first. It would take a scientist to explain why paradoxes are an impossibility, but needless to say all sorts of new technologies and trade opportunities propped up almost overnight. Were you suffering from an incurable illness? Pop into 100,000 AD and check if it had been cured (it had. All diseases were by 40,000 AD). Did you want to try original Roman cuisine? If you played your cards right, you might even dine with Caesar himself!

There were limitations, of course. Paradoxes couldn't be created, which meant that any actions that would create one just... didn't happen. One of the first government-sanctioned time travel missions was, as one would expect, a commando team sent to kill Hitler. They spared no expense, weapon, item or trinket and yet they failed every time. Twenty-two doves flew right across the path of twenty-two sniper bullets at the worst possible time. Two bombs blew up minutes after the Fuhrer had vacated the premises. Poisoned darts failed to inject their venom and even poetic justice-inspired toxic gases were diffused by unfortunate winds.

Despite the limitations, it was as close to Utopia as mankind had ever been. Trans-temporal scientific collaboration increased our research output to dizzying levels. True communism sprang out all over the world, as limited resources were a thing of the past. The only limit to our power was our personal ambition.

This is why I had always been seen as a bit of an oddity. In a world of genetically enhanced super-athletes, models and geniuses, I was merely a historian and a book lover. Certainly, I had an optic nerve implant that allowed me to read at previously inhuman speeds, a language converter and a dexterity modification that allowed me to write as fast as I could formulate the thoughts themselves.

Mine is a hedonistic society, and so unpleasant tasks are relegated to machines. Policing had become one of such robotic fields. When the "Future Transgressions" law had been enacted, no one batted an eyelash. After all, if one could prevent law violations before they happened (and given that, if preventable, it meant that the resulting actions were non-paradoxical), why not save every victim their pain?

It was rather disconcerting then, when a police officer let himself into my apartment and woke me from sleep.

"I am sorry Sir, but you will have to come with me. You have been convicted of future attempts to destabilize society and create mayhem. I must warn you I am trans-temporally linked to myself in the future, any attempts at escaping will be foiled"

Of course, I still tried. I failed.

It turned out that my Treatise on Dystopia, a scholarly work that went mostly unnoticed by my peers, was at the core of a future revolution. I would, allegedly, become a martyr of the cause and the government could not let me become one. So I was to be removed.

Robots were, of course, created with certain hard-coded laws they must respect. They cannot willingly harm a human being, unless actively protecting the well-being of another human. This meant they could neither execute me nor lock me up forever (which their silicon brains had long since established was a form of torture). What we should have expected was that they would find a way around their limitations.

Time travel. That was the answer to all of our modern concerns.

I was to be sent back to a barely historical time, in the middle of a mostly deserted land. I would be sent to die, but the machines would not be pulling the proverbial trigger. Somehow this got around their coded limitations.

I woke up on the ground, to the sound of hooves and laughter. A small group of men, no more than ten of them, approached me. They had all the swagger of successful athletes, but carried contraptions that resembled the drawings of bows and arrows I had seen in one of my textbooks. How primitive. My language chip kicked into action and translated their words into clear, modern English.

"Who goes there?" asked the biggest of them. I couldn't answer, the whole situation rendered me speechless

"Have you got no tongue?" asked the man. His face reminded me of someone I had read about. With little to lose, I decided to name drop.

"I am here to see Genghis Khan. It is crucial that I talk to him" My lips moved in unusual ways, even if the voice I heard spoke in plain English

"Great Khan? Am I not great enough for you? There is no greater Khan than I, you fool!" I had miscalculated, it was earlier than I thought, but my knowledge of the time was limited at best.

The man nodded to one of his lackeys, who raised his bow. With a flourish, he strung a bow and fired it at my chest. My dexterous fingers were able to grab the shaft from mid-air, but I was no hyper-enhanced athlete. If three of them shot at once, I would've been in dire straits to grab the third arrow. It was just a matter of time.

Much to my surprise, the whole party dismounted. They looked at me with expressions I could not decipher. It wasn't until the tall man bowed that I understood their intentions. After all, they had never seen an enhanced human, even one as pathetically enhanced as myself.

They named me "The Great One", or Genghis in their tongue. Given our first meeting, I think it was a joke by Subutai, but the others took it seriously. My accuracy with the bow, an unexpected side-effect, was worshipped by these war-like men. I climbed their societal rungs quickly, and truly became their greatest Khan. It was my turn to rule, and I was ready to shake-up the world and mold it to my semblance. I would leave a mark that even the Police of my time would find hard to ignore.

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