The Revisionists Read Online Free

forces that guide you against your will or without your knowledge. If you are what you do, then what does it mean if others make the decisions for you?
    My previous three gigs were in a different beat, back in the 1940s. One of the things I never thought to ask was how long the average Protector stays on the job. Given the amount of training and expertise necessary for a person to navigate a beat, transfers must be rare. But my current assignment wasn’t so much a transfer, they told me, as a response to an unexpected development. The Department of Historical Integrity was created when the Government realized that revolutionary factions had access to the technology and could navigate time themselves, and since its inception the Department has done an excellent job of determining which Events the hags would target. First the hags tried to alter World War II, focusing in particular on the Holocaust. That had been my beat. The hags wanted to prevent the genocide—they were a Jewish extremist group, though I suppose that’s a redundancy. They wanted to save those millions of innocent lives. An admirable goal. But that would have altered history. Meaning, it would have altered our Perfect Present. The Department’s motto, engraved on the crest that every Protector walks across upon admission to headquarters (a headquarters no one else knows exists, for a Department no one else knows exists), is The integrity of history must be preserved .
    I protect Events that no one in my forward-thinking time knows about. We Protectors are the silent warriors, toiling in a vacuum. We stop the hags from removing the pillars of our Perfect Society and tearing it all down. What would have happened if Napoleon had been killed as a little boy? Or if Mao hadn’t unleashed his Cultural Revolution? Or if bin Laden hadn’t hurled airplanes like darts at his global targets? The hags’ argument is that lives would be saved and tragedies averted, and they’re right, in their shortsighted way. They choose to overlook the fact that such changes would destroy our Perfect Present, meaning that the Great Conflagration, or some similar event, would still be happening, and the suffering would never end. All the problems we’ve solved, all the broken aspects of society we’ve fixed, all the efforts we’ve made to eliminate human meanness and frailty—these accomplishments must be protected, no matter the cost.
     
    After watching the dead hags bob along the river, I drive into the city. My mind is wandering across subjects, across time, thinking of my wife and the home that I will never again visit, when I’m startled by the GeneScan. It turns on suddenly, but it’s not working as it should. I see dots and blips and streaks everywhere, the world before me fractured into a universe of constellations, as unreadable as the stars above.
    I swerve out of my lane, distracted. Some of the dots vanish, but one lingers; the GeneScan seems to be telling me there’s a hag close by. That’s not in my intel, though. I have a detailed agenda of the hags’ targets; I hadn’t expected anything else tonight, and nothing in this particular neighborhood. Perhaps I’ve stumbled upon the hags’ hiding spot—a fortuitous occurrence, as it would give me an opportunity to snuff them all out. I was that lucky in Poland once, finding the distant barn from which they were planning their bombings of Nazi rail lines; I eliminated them with a late-night fire and some well-placed rifle shots, my easiest gig ever.
    I do my best to follow the GeneScan, trying to link it to my internal GPS. It doesn’t work. The geographical info that the Logistics people provided to me was the best they could find, but that doesn’t mean much. The Archives themselves are imperfect, full of errors or taken from the wrong year. Excavators and dump trucks are parked all over this neighborhood, sudden detours rendering my maps useless, the trucks tearing down buildings and creating new ones.