The License
Nathan Rees was twenty-two years old and had very short blond hair, green eyes, and no facial hair. He wasn’t ugly, nor was he particularly handsome. He was an average guy, one who was unlikely to stand out. On the fateful day, he was wearing a plain blue sweater, carrying a backpack, and heading to his class at Ohio State University.
Then he vanished, appearing again in a town in Maryland. For him, the event was traumatic; his entire reality shattered. He learned that there was a parallel dimension, another universe, with another United States of America. To Paul Everett, the policeman who picked him up, the occurrence was ordinary, expected. For some reason, this one particular town in Maryland was where some entity decided to dump people it abducted from that parallel universe. Everett didn’t know why; that was far above his pay grade. Everett took Rees into protective custody and seized his clothing and belongings for analysis by some kind of special science team. Rees, sitting in a prison gown in an interrogation cell, was told that a therapist would be arriving shortly. A man who could empathize with him because he underwent the very same ordeal.
William Walsh was thirty-nine, with short, combed dark hair, brown eyes, and light skin. He introduced himself calmly and told Rees he had arrived from his world nineteen years prior. He told Rees he worked for a government-funded charity, the Traveler Aid Society, which provided lodging and a small stipend to “travelers,” giving them time to grieve and helping them integrate into society. If he judged Rees to be not a danger to himself or others, Walsh offered Rees the help of his charity. Rees felt he had no other option but to accept.
After Rees was released from jail and told that his personal belongings would not be returned for some time, Walsh drove him for four hours to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Walsh told him that in Pittsburg was a 50,000-strong community of travelers and their descendants. He explained that some travelers chose to stay in Pittsburgh and some chose to leave and integrate into the surrounding world. Whatever choice he made, Walsh said, he would support it; there would be no social pressure to join the community. Rees was somewhat suspicious during the ride over, but this evaporated once he reached the community center and was given a warm welcome by about a dozen people. There was a woman, identified as Walsh’s wife, some children, an elderly man, and a pastor, in case Rees needed “spiritual counseling.” (He didn’t, being a lifelong atheist.) They fed him dinner and told him they would get him anything he needed. He had a room upstairs.
For the first week, Walsh met with Rees daily, helping him to accept the horrible reality that he would almost certainly never see his friends or family again. Another man, a reporter of some kind named Nicholas Kryger, was very curious about what was happening in the parallel dimension Rees came from. Sometimes Walsh silenced Kryger if he felt he was putting too much stress on Rees.
Looking back on it, Rees realized that he should have been suspicious of the fact that Walsh and Kryger consistently discouraged him from leaving the community center. They wanted to get his testimony about his home universe while he was still “fresh,” uncontaminated by knowledge of the terrible truth of the world he fell into.
You see, the parallel universe appeared at first glance to be deceptively like Rees’ universe. It had cars, airplanes, bowling alleys and donut shops. But it is an evil universe, where nearly all non-travelers thought it was perfectly normal to enslave children for sexual abuse. Wealthy and middle-class people actually did it. Poor people aspired to do so. I could tell you the lurid details about how these slaves are produced and distributed, but, dear reader, you probably don’t want to hear that, do you?
At first, Rees could scarcely believe it, yet everyone was telling him it was true. The world he saw when he stared out the window during his drive to Pittsburgh looked entirely normal. The gutters were not clogged with blood. How could a world in which people behave so evilly also have enough social cooperation to maintain an advanced industrial society?
Walsh told him that most people, in both worlds, are not moral philosophers. They do not think logically about rights, obligations, utils, and so on. They just absorb whatever is the surrounding moral system, and in this one sexual abuse of children is okay and theft is not. Rees should not personally be afraid, Walsh said. People in this world regard travelers as part of the moral community whose rights must be respected.
After Rees passed the state of denial, he entered the stage of anger, fantasizing about violence. Going out, at once, in a hail of gunfire. Or perhaps going from town to town, murdering people at random. Walsh told him it wouldn’t do any good. He was just one man. Even if the entire traveler community took up arms, they would be crushed, and the atrocity would continue.
Next, he entered the stage of bargaining. Could we not create a peaceful movement to change minds, the way we abolished slavery in our own world? After all, the alt-United States had freedom of speech. Walsh was not being hauled away to prison for expressing his abhorrence for The Evil. Walsh told him not to bother. The natives of this world were in the shape of human beings. They can walk like us, talk like us, and even have children with us, Walsh said. But there is some kind of genetic difference that makes them incapable of understanding moral arguments against their behavior. Even in the very rare case when one of them called themselves an opponent of enslaving and sexually abusing children, it is invariably a product of insanity or self-aggrandizement.
After this, Walsh entered the stage of depression, but he eventually came out of it. There was no point thinking about it all the time, he told himself; there isn’t anything you can do about it. Being outraged or depressed does nothing to aid the victims. He had to accept it for what it was. He got a job working for a traveler-owned restaurant in Pittsburgh and moved out of the community center and into an apartment he shared with two other young travelers. Unlike him, they were “natives” of the world, having heard about the alt-universe from their parents and grandparents. They were as curious about his world as he was about theirs.
Rees continued to learn about the experiences of prior travelers. Their only commonality was age and location, most were in their twenties and all were in the United States or Canada. Other than that, they came from all walks of life, rich men and poor men, effective altruists and criminals. The simplest approach was to stay in the Pittsburgh traveler enclave. They were people like him, who understood him, who he didn’t feel morally revolted by. The enclave was too small to make complete isolation practical. You could marry a traveler, have only traveler friends, send your child to a school taught by travelers, and work for a firm owned by travelers, but said firm would probably still have non-traveler clients. But it was substantially possible in Pittsburgh and nowhere else.
There were also reasons to leave Pittsburgh. Some just hated the weather. You couldn’t ski or surf there. The restaurants were not nearly as good as in Manhattan. There were few jobs in software or finance. If you wanted to become a millionaire, Pittsburgh was probably not the place to be.
Rees decided to stay in Pittsburgh. He joined a community with a very strong ingroup consciousness. If you came from the other universe, you were a traveler, presumed initially to be One of Us. If you were born in the community to traveler parents, you were a traveler too. Travelers who left the community were traitors. Walsh had told Rees he would support any choice he made. Later he told him he only said that to maintain his government funding. Within the community, all other divisions, race, religion, and attitudes toward capitalism and socialism, were considered unimportant. The great dividing line was between Us and Them.
Rees eventually accepted that his girlfriend from his own universe was gone forever. He asked out a woman he met through the enclave’s dating service. She was a native, and he hoped he could assimilate fully by marrying her. He soon noticed that the longer he stayed in the community, the harsher people spoke of the outside world. It was as if they didn’t want to admit their true views should he leave and report them to the wider world.
Rees was told that the only possible way to combat The Evil was to have lots of children. The total fertility rate of the Pittsburgh community was 3.5, compared to 1.7 for the alt-United States. From a base of 50,000 people, this strategy would take a long time to work. Though Rees didn’t say so, he thought it was a pleasing eschatological story as much as a real political strategy.
Why was the community’s fertility rate so relatively high? Rees came up with a theory he called Insular Swelling. The total fertility rate of Pacific island small states seemed to be higher than one would predict based on their GDP per Capita. The Faroe Islands had a higher fertility rate than any Nordic country. The traveler enclave was a society of just 50,000 people. If you want to “see the world” and not leave the enclave, well, there isn’t much to see. The wanderlust that leads people to delay marriage and child-rearing goes away fairly quickly in the enclave. If the enclave grew to a million people, that would no longer be true.
At first, Rees continued to work as a chef. He was majoring in business in his own universe, imagining he would work in one of the many towering office buildings of his hometown of Columbus. Those buildings in his adopted universe were inhabited by Them, so he had no desire to work there. He initially accepted that he would be a cook, or occupy a similar menial job, for the rest of his life. But soon he made himself known as an intellectual of sorts, volunteering at the community center and helping integrate new travelers. Walsh made subtle hints that he might be his successor. This would be much preferable to working as a cook, but, Walsh warned, there were only so many jobs to go around. For now, Rees would have to make do as a volunteer.
In his discussions with the natives of the enclave, they told him that their absolute worst fear was that their children would leave the community. Those who left embraced pedophilia only very rarely. They weren’t wired for it. But if they married a non-traveler and had non-traveler children, well, that would be the end of the family. To dissuade this, travelers had to raise their children to hate and fear the outside world.
This fear and hatred occurred in a context, Rees recognized, where the outside world was not particularly hostile to the community. They gave it public funds to integrate newcomers. They gave it funding for its own schools. They allowed its members to preach their “weird” ideology. They allowed travelers to own guns. They didn’t seem bothered by the travelers’ high fertility rate. This tolerance was not total. Sometimes they sued traveler businesses for discriminating against non-traveler employees. But they were a whole lot more lenient than they could have been.
Yet the travelers felt no obligation to reciprocate their “generosity.” Would you, dear reader? Think about it from their perspective. You have no choice but to live amongst people behaving in a way you consider horribly immoral. Yet these people, for whatever twisted reason, see you as their fellow. They are willing to cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma. Why wouldn’t you feel entirely justified in defecting?
That was how the travelers saw it, and that was soon how Rees saw it. The government was “their” government. It was entirely justified to pay as little tax as possible while collecting benefits you aren’t really entitled to. The forest was their forest. It was entirely reasonable to litter in it. The community’s only real impact was on the city of Pittsburgh, where it functioned as a vote bank for whatever politician promised its people their pork. Abstract considerations of justice and ideology never factored into how travelers voted. Nor, at the federal level, did the travelers care about abstractions like “their” national debt.
This was not to say that all kinds of exploitation of non-travelers were acceptable to Rees. Cheating non-traveler business partners in an obvious way might make non-travelers less likely to do business with community members, harming the entire community. But there was no moral problem with it.
As to how the rest of the world saw the travelers, hostility was common but mild. In an opinion poll conducted by Pew Research, 81 percent of Americans had a “negative” opinion of “the traveler community,” 17 percent had a “neutral” opinion, and 2 percent had a “positive” opinion. (The lizardman constant applies in the alt-world too.) But in that same poll, just 6 percent of Americans agreed with a proposal to repeal the Mahony Act, which granted automatic citizenship to travelers who arrived on U.S. soil.
Because of the mysterious circumstances of the travelers’ arrival and their “perverse” ideology, they had an outsize presence in conspiracy theories. But this was only in the form of listing them amidst a panoply of other evil groups, elites, freemasons, Jews, bankers, etc. Travelers were not accused of controlling the media or impacting foreign policy. One conspiracy theory disputes the very existence of the other dimension, claiming it is a hoax to justify more funding for the military-industrial complex. The travelers, in this theory, are actors or dupes.
It has been observed that there are two kinds of prejudice, “personalized” and “abstracted.” Personalized prejudice occurs in the context of direct contact with a disliked group. Maybe they are associated with crime, economic exploitation, or having rituals you just find really disgusting. In abstracted prejudice, the disliked group is far away. Maybe they are said to be controlling the media, filling the airwaves with garbage, or pushing wedges into one’s ingroup, destroying national unity. Maybe they are said to be in league with a foreign power.
Prejudice against the travelers was always abstracted, as the travelers constituted just .02% of the United States population and .4% of Pennsylvania’s. But in Eastern Pittsburgh, they were more like 5% of the population, and here Rees encountered a more primal, personalized prejudice. One incident stuck out in his mind particularly well. A young male traveler was in the process of defecting and had left his parents’ home. Rees was tasked with trying to talk him into returning. The man had moved in with a non-traveler, a young, handsome, well-muscled blond man named Dave. Once Dave learned who Rees was, he launched into a rant against the travelers. After a long rant against the way traveler businesses discriminated against non-travelers, he turned to attacking traveler political behavior. Why, he asked, were the travelers not serving in the army, when most of them voted for the politicians who started the war?
To Rees, the answer was obvious. He supported the war; after all, he didn’t want travelers to get killed in terrorist attacks. But why should the moral people get themselves killed? Let the evil people take a small step toward redemption by falling in battle. He wasn’t going to accept ANY moral condemnation by a non-traveler, full-stop.
He didn’t say this to the young man because he didn’t feel it was necessary. All he said were two words: f*** off.