have I gone back and tried to kill Hitler before he rose to power? (Part 1)
The butterfly effect is debated among quantum scientists. I personally believe that one person is too insignificant to alter the course of human future.
If you believe that the universe can be altered by the actions of one person, then the butterfly effect is a great danger.
But I do as I please in the past, not too careful about disturbing the balance of time and space.
There is an entire black market sub-niche of time travel tourism that involves killing historical figures. Ex-militia tour guides run these expeditions. Beforehand, you are trained in several physiological and cognitive ways.
It’s harder to kill baby Hitler than you would think. When you look into that innocent child’s eyes, you don’t see an evil, genocidal warlord — you just see the vibrance of new life reflected back at you.
These tour guides train you to suppress human emotions in order to kill. Choose your Hitler’s age: baby, adolescent, teenage Adolf.
These expeditions launch from the 24th century. There are many different companies, some more legitimate than others, that provide this experience.
The legality and morality of killing evil historical figures is one of the most hotly debated political topics of the 2300’s. It’s even more controversial than whether or not to release Kanye West from his hyperbolic time chamber.
The ultimate ruling is that Hitler is the only figure who it is completely legal to murder. This opened up waves of protests and uproar. As a result, the only government sanctioned expeditions are ones to Austria and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, underground companies in the business of killing any ‘evil’ historical figure are easily accessible.
These are unregulated tours. That is partly why the legal ruling was so controversial. The legal expeditions allow only humane methods of taking Hitler out. On these black market tours, all is fair game.
It’s a choose your method of murder type deal: poison, strangulation, arson, whatever you like.
And when I type out the word ‘evil,’ I get flashbacks to my undergrad philosophy classes and want to go back on a black market expedition to take my own historical self out. There’s not much that interests me less in Philosophy than the debate of morality and evil. I’m not here to debate the qualifications of what makes someone evil.
Anyway, I’ll tell you the story of when I went on one of these murderous expeditions.
The year was 2347. There I was, standing in an abandoned twelve-story meta-mall with five other tourists, listening to a procedural lecture by a former Macedonian war criminal. Although this was a Hitler trip, it was not a government sanctioned expedition. So, there were no restrictions on what you could do to the young genocidal-to-be artist in Austria.
Was this a bad idea? Probably.
We were given instructions to carefully choose our method of murder. Based on our choice, we would be given a three day seminar guiding us toward a successful mission. I actually had no intentions of killing Hitler, however, I didn’t tell anyone in this group that at the time. So the method of murder that I chose I was death by hippopotamus. If you didn’t know, hippos are one of the most aggressive and deadly-to-human species in the animal kingdom.
I thought that the declaration of this method would be an unspoken signal to the former warlord that I didn’t want to partake in the actual act of killing, that I just wanted to go along as a witness, as hippopotamuses are not so easy to obtain and smuggle into ancient Europe.
However, the warlord simply grunted at my request and unbeknownst to the laws of nature, a hippopotamus was brought into the training room the very next day.
And so we began training.
The other tourists took on firearms practice or concocted potions and worked on seduction skills. One of the men there wanted to seduce a twenty year old Hitler, take him on a date, and spike his drink with an acid-based poison that would slowly disintegrate his innards over the course of a week.
I became fast friends with my hippo, who was actually pretty chill. I could tell he wasn’t very murderous.
Three days went by and it was time to set out for Europe.
AUSTRIA
I stood out on the terrace, dagger in my hand, looking up at the ineffectual moonlit sky. If only I had gone through with it, I thought.
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