By Mab Westell
Wednesday, September 3rd 23HY
First flowed on Zero Flux Given. Reclipped as-is
.flow open.
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce is the only known person with the dubious distinction of disappearing mysteriously in every timeline at the same point, even when circumstances were completely different. It happened December 27th, 1913, when he was 71 years old.
And I know why.
Probably.
Even if I don’t believe it.
A warning, this story will be deeply unsatifiying to a lot of people. They’ll reject the conclusions.
But as they say in Legacy, sorry not sorry. I’m not writing this for a satisfying story.
In Legacy, on December 26, 1913, Ambrose Bierce wrote a letter from Chihuahua, Mexico, where he supposedly had joined Pancho Villa’s army as an observer, it ended with:
I do not know how, nor when, you are to get this letter; There are no mails, and sometimes no trains to take anything to El Paso. Moreover, I have forgotten your address and shall send this to the care of Lora. And Lora may have gone to the mountains. As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.
That was the last he was heard of.
In InterAct, Ambrose Bierce had had the same plans to go to Mexico, but had fallen ill in October, soon after he set out, and was forced to return home to Washington DC for the next two month to recover. Regardless of how different that situation was, he finally set out for his supposed trip on December 26, and left this somewhat mysterious note for visitors
People sometimes say I cannot keep friends. I cannot argue with this, as arguing is how I tend to lose my friends. Regardless, if you are one of those, or think you might be even if wrong, and have visited me during my illness, I thank you. I do this if only to prove that I do have human sympathy before I leave here tomorrow. Which I do for an unknown destination.
That was the last he was heard of.
In Commonwealth, the situation with the revolution in Mexico was fairly different, in ways that are much too complicated to explain here, due to political meddling by the time travelers of Commonwealth Next. That means Pancho Villa’s Army was not moving at the time, and Ambrose Bierce did not ever plan to go to Chihuahua, Mexico. Instead, he went on a trip to San Francisco to look into the somewhat interesting political things that were happening in the city he’d lived in two decades ago. He did successfully make that trip, we know he arrived from a friend of him that he was visiting, Blanche Partington. He had just gotten there two days earlier and as far as she know, had no plans to leave, which made it odder when he apparently left this note for her with the hotel he was staying with on December 27th, a day later than the other letters:
I must apologize for leaving without saying farewell, but at my age, I do not have the luxury of waiting for people to return just explain I shall part from them again. I feel my trip must begin if it is to end, although at this point it has been delayed so long I find myself uncertain as to the path. I hope you can forgive my impatience. If anyone asks, I leave today for an unknown destination.
That was the last he was heard of.
As far as I know, I’m the first person who noticed this. In case it’s not clear from the byline, I’m Mab Westell, I run Zero Flux Given and vaguely make a nuisance of myself. This my first attempt at serious journalism, I guess.
I’m from InterAct, came here when I was 17. And I loved Ambrose Bierce growing up. I remember the first time I ever saw his name, it was a lazy auto-generated ‘Your birthday in history’ clipping on the Link. He was both June 24th, 1842, I was born June 24th, 2042, exactly 200 years later. Seeing that and that he was a writer, I was curious, I checked out what he had written.
It was pretty funny. Some of it that was pretty dark and made me think. I’d already read one of them in school, The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I recommend it, it’s certainly an interesting thing to think about while you’re here in Haven. Perhaps we all merely died, and we are all just hallucinating this escape from reality. It would certainly explain this story.
And he was a journalist too. That got me interested in journalism. In a way, that’s why I became a reporter. Or at least part of it, I had other influences, but he was one of the people I wanted to be like.
Ambrose is standing there frowning at me as I write this, claiming that if I intend to be like him, I have failed, as this doesn’t sound like him at all. Or like his writing. It’s not supposed to, and modern audiences expect much less formal speech, and compared to him, everyone is modern. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.
I don’t know if I was the first person to notice he’d disappeared in every timeline, but that fact alone would not be odd. 1913 is early enough that a lot of stuff is identical between Commonwealth and the others, and Legacy and InterAct are often indistinguishable. Likely if someone heard a mention about his vanishing in a different timeline, they would assume it was the same situation.
But the situations in different timelines were not the same at all. Even slightly. He’d vanished in entirely different cities, in entirely different situations, with apparently entirely different plans, such that we could make of his plans.
And he said on December 26th that he was leaving tomorrow, or on December 27th that he had left today, for an ‘unknown destination’.
Each Timeline has various theories, of course, Legacy thinks he just got killed in the fighting in Mexico, Commonwealth has a theory that he went to the Grand Canyon to commit suicide, and InterAct has a theory that he relapsed in his illness and died somewhere unknown on the way to Mexico and no one realized who he was.
But all of those immediately fall apart when you know it happened in all timelines. With the same phrase, ‘unknown destination’. It almost has to be the same thing, right? But…what?
So I set out to figure out what had happened.
My first attempt: Go to the day he left and ask him where he was going, or just follow him.
The Mexican Revolution in Legacy was a little too dangerous to try to track him down in. I know that sounds absurd considering I ended up in the Civil War later, but that is much more documented, ironically often by Ambrose himself.
And trying to visit San Francisco in 1913 in Commonwealth is one of those situations where Res Ops will immediately materialize from thin air and tackle you to the ground because you’ve wandered way too close to their own origins. Indeed, Blanche Partington was directly involved with the Bay Area social scene and knew basically everyone who was anyone, although she was semi-retired since the earthquake. These people included the time travelers actively manipulating history right there. No way I was getting close to there.
So that left InterAct, my home turf.
Ambrose keeps grumbling about how short my sentences are, that I am writing like a child, that he knows I can express myself better. Do you want to write this? No? Okay.
So I went back to December 26th, 1913, in Washington DC, and tried to contact him. He would not open the door or talk to me in any manner.
So who would he talk to?
Could I flirt my way in? He’d had relationships with younger women, including Blanche when she was 26. But that was when he was fifty-one, not seventy-one. But maybe he’d still fall for a hot woman, and I like to think of myself as someone shaped like a hot woman, so maybe.
No, I’m not going to explain exactly what I mean there, Ambrose, I do not have time. Being a woman is more complicated than you think. Yes, I’m going to keep writing everything I’m saying to you, so be quiet.
So I jump into another thread, and try to flirt. The flirting did not work either, although it was incredibly embarrassing, both because I’m very bad at flirting, and also because…how do you flirt in 1913? What topics should you bring up? How do you hint at being interested?
No, I’m not going to put your suggestions in there. You don’t want me to write that.
Clearly, I wasn’t going to be able to get to Ambrose without a lot of work, and before I did that, I thought that maybe I should just try to figure out where he went.
I stake out the place. He does not leave his house.
I go until morning, sitting there looking at the time, and I realize his friend is about to show up, talk to his staff, and get shown the note. And instead, Ambrose greets him.
It appears that he did not leave.
Had I changed something by trying to flirt with him? I must have. I tried again, I jumped back Haven, then to the night before, making another thread, and waited, making sure I was hidden well.
I almost fall asleep, having been up almost 40 hours at this point, but I am awake enough to see his friend show up…and Ambrose is once again there.
Was history just recorded wrong? Were people just lying? I jumped back in time an hour to get into another thread that I hadn’t stayed overnight in, and watch that friend walk up again, and this time Ambrose is not there to greet him. There is a member of his staff, shaking his head apologetically and holding a note.
So, to summarize the situation: If I showed up before he left, and watched, he didn’t leave. If I showed up after he left, he had already left.
Time doesn’t work like that. It’s not quantum mechanics, merely observing things isn’t supposed to change it like that.
I cannot describe the face Ambrose is making at me, but I also feel exactly that way. He gets that expression every time we talk about this. The fact he has somehow become an impossible mystery that he does not know the solution to is intolerable to him.
Well, we both know what must have happened, but that itself is intolerable to believe.
I had no idea what do to. So first I went home and got some sleep before I passed out. I always feel my mind is clearer when I wake up, even more than other people.
Then I dressed again in my hot woman outfit, and waited all night. And then, exactly when I know his friend showed up, I started walking towards the door also, and fell in beside him. I already knew his name, so I nodded to him with a very rehearsed ‘Good to see you Mr. Mims, it has been quite a while. I hear Mr. Bierce was feeling better yesterday, but I wasn’t able to stop by. One can only pray his recovery continues.’. He frowned slightly for a second, but was unwilling to admit he had no idea who this person was next to him while we were visiting our apparently mutual friend so just continued to walk and pulled the bell rope pull thingy when he got to the door.
When the door opened, I rushed inside and latched the door behind me before Linus could enter. Ambrose was very startled, and Linus also, who started banging on the door.
I admit, at that point was a little punch-drunk, even with my sleep, and finally happy I’d managed to speak to him and that my plan to get inside had gone off hitchlessly, so the questions I asked were perhaps not the most coherent. I asked “What is this unknown destination nonsense, where are you going? And why is it always on December 27th?”
And he froze, completely and stared at me, and said, and I quote exactly:
“That cannot be the date. If that was the date I would know that was the date. That would be fifty years. Fifty years exactly, in just a few hours? Wouldn’t I remember? But I didn’t. I would have to remember, or…I wouldn’t be here. I can’t be here.” He seemed incredibly concerned about this, despite it making no sense.
At that point, the pounding from Linus on the door had summoned two members of Ambrose’s staff, who proceeded to kick me out. They were going to let in Linus, but I heard Ambrose tell them no, and they promptly shut the door on him also.
I have this on a recording, and the most I listen to it, the less sense it makes. Ambrose, the younger version here with me, agrees.
But, no matter how little sense it made, I now had another date to look into.
All I have to do was get to Ambrose Bierce on a specific date. Exactly fifty years before that day, then a ‘few hours’ after that. December 27, 1863, sometime around 10 in the morning. Easy enough for a time traveler, you think.
Ha.
December 27th, 1863 was the middle of the civil war. And Ambrose Bierce was…somewhere in all that mess.
History said he was with the 9th Indiana Volunteers in the Union Army. And that particular regiment was supposedly encamped in the Union-occupied area of Chattanooga following the November battles for control of the city.
Okay, thank you history, now let’s go there.
Interesting fact I discovered in person: When history says ‘the Union-occupied area of Chattanooga’, they mean a lot more than Chattanooga itself! And ‘Union-occupied’ doesn’t mean ‘no Confederate soldiers’, because there appeared to be a lot of those wandering around taking potshots at people, and people taking potshots at them, and there was a lot more shooting than I am generally comfortable with.
There was also the fact I didn’t have the right accent. I’m not sure what accent that would have been, or what my 200-years-in-the-future Californian accent was being understood as, but just talking made people suspicious. I had assumed my moderately dark skin color, which is really from my Indian-American mother, would have me assumed to be Black in a 1863 that hadn’t really seen a lot of people like me, immigration from India was basically zilch in the 1800s. And thus, if I’m Black…I’m not on the side of the Confederates, right? Obviously I’d be on the side of the people trying to free the slaves, right? Just as a default assumption?
But apparently I just confused everyone I ran into. And I got out there pretty quickly, as I was in way over my head.
As always with time travel, if you fail, try again earlier.
First back home and to research.
The Brown’s Ferry offensive happened two months earlier, on October 27–29. It was a successful attempt, using pontoon boats under the cover of darkness, to surprise the Confederates and reopen the supply lines for the Union army trapped in Chattanooga, who were starving at the time. They landed and built a pontoon bridge, and brought a bunch of supplies in.
Again, thank you history.
But when armies bring in supplies, they don’t…bring in the supplies themselves, right? Not people in the army.
So I sat and planned. Arrived with tools. And figured out where those supplies came from. And I just joined there. There was a lot of Black women there, free…women? Ambrose, what’s the female form of ‘freeman’?
Okay, just ‘freewoman’, obvs. So, I passed myself off as a freewoman who was helping bring the supplies for the Union Army. Loading carts, driving them…I am in much much worse shape than I thought I was. So much physical labor just being there.
I’m not sure I fooled any of them. At all. My features don’t really say African-American up close, my accent was still wrong, and I was just generally incompetent at everything.
But no one shot me, so that was good.
I realized once we got there that that there had been a much easier way: Just be a prostitute.
Okay, ‘camp follower’. They weren’t all prostitutes. There were seamstresses, or cooks, or women selling things…things that weren’t their own bodies. In addition to women selling that. And, astonishingly, some men apparently also selling their bodies to both women… and men, which…did not expect that in this time period. Exactly how much of that history had been left out of the history books, anyway?
Regardless, there were people who followed the army around and provided various services. And they had been cut off by the Confederate siege of Chattanooga, and had just learned there was a way in.
It turns out that the problem I had in Chattanooga in two months was I’d been doing it wrong. I was just a random women wandering around in a suspicious manner. But what I was supposed to do was approach the unofficial leader of the group, an older white women named Lucy who basically seemed to be keeping the entire universe running and making referrals and matches between soldiers who needed various things and people who provided those things, a job I’ve never even heard of and history books are completely blank on. They just imply it’s random, and maybe it normally is, but here, this women coordinated things with an iron fist.
I told her I was Mabel, unspecified last name, and I was looking for Ambrose Bierce due to him and I having an unspecified arrangement about unspecific things. She seemed to, as intended, understand that I was a semi-kept women and wanted to hook back up with him for some money, and hadn’t been able until now.
And just like that, my search was over. I was told to wait and she’d get someone to set things up. I think she took pity on me because I had clearly never been in a camp like this before, and was just somewhat desperately searching for my man, who probably didn’t care for me at all. Which wasn’t that wrong an assessment of the situation, strictly speaking.
So within an hour, I had the loan of a tent. And I was told that I would have to pay for the use of that out of whatever he paid me when he got there.
And I suddenly realized, I hadn’t thought this situation through. My plan was to give him a locket from me, ask him to carry it, and it had a locator beacon in it. So I could find him in two months.
But he was about to arrive to see Mabel, an assumed prostitute who had been trying to find him to have sex with him for money.
Oops.
I could just ditch this thread. Now that I knew about this women, I could jump forward to another thread, try to find her later in Chattanooga. But what if she wasn’t there? Or I couldn’t find her?
I couldn’t ditch the tracker plan on a possibility. The tracker plan was good. Give him the tracker now, follow it to him later. It’s just…giving it to him would require a…compromise.
Sometimes you have to do what you have to do for a story, right?
Oh, don’t you DARE look at me like that, Ambrose. I remember you being there also, and you weren’t even trying to get a story, you just were willing to pay me for sex. Do I need to explain what a double standard is again?
So, yeah. I did that. We did that, because there were two people involved in that. I got paid for it. Let’s just move past that, and go to the point where…he not only was kinda hot, but afterwards funny as hell, and not as cynical as I remembered.
I had mentally thought of him as middle-aged, or even the 71 he’d been earlier, but obviously this was 50 years earlier, so he was 21-years-old, one year younger than me. And he pulled the mustache off by itself really well, I always thought that looked silly, but he looked pretty good. Although he’s insisted on growing out his beard also, now that he can get away with it.
I want to emphasize that while I had always loved his writing, I had never thought of him in that way before that. That is not why I came back.
He didn’t understand why I had shown up asking for him, and I refused to explain, but that just made him more interested in me. I think he realized something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t quite who I said I was…he’s nodding a little.
He says I didn’t comport myself like…you shouldn’t use that term for sex workers, Ambrose. I’ll explain later.
Eventually we got kicked out of the tent because other people needed it, I handed the tent owner everything Ambrose had given me instead of trying to figure out what her cut should be, and just…walked around, talking.
I really hadn’t intended to do that, I hadn’t intended to interact with him at all. I started this to solve a mystery, not…start to fall for the guy. Or, bed him first, and then fall for him.
So, got a little too close to the subject, but, that’s fine, it’s not crossing some journalistic standard, he wasn’t really a source or a target of an investigation, he was just a piece of history that I was trying to track the location of. It’s not even really journalism, it’s basically anthropology, right?
Seriously, that was entirely ethical. Assuming you assume sex work is ethical, but if you don’t, screw you.
I jumped forward in time two months to December 27th, 1863, making sure to stay in the same thread with the ‘keep a time machine hidden and running’ trick.
I made my way into Chattanooga, this time carefully looking for the camp followers. They were isolated off to the side, but I didn’t need to talk to them, just to be able to claim I’d come from there and was going somewhere at Lucy’s direction, which would likely satisfy any questions. Once I knew where they were, I followed Ambose’s tracker.
This is where the story gets very weird. If anyone disbelieves me, I remind you, I am journalist and have a memory implant that records everything I see and hear, and I can kept a copy and can show you these events.
I track Ambrose to a hospital. An real hospital, the Union forces had all of Chattanooga so had the hospitals. I’ve done research, since then, and learned that this was one of the better situations that medical care was provided in, a captured city with supply lines. But it was a nightmare inside, incredibly unsanitary-looking to my non-medical eye, and I don’t want to talk about it.
Unfortunately, I want to talk about what I found even less, but I must.
When I got to Ambrose, there was a woman talking to him. She was unsettling. This doesn’t seem to come across in the video. In the video, she looks like a completely normal contemp, in civilian clothes.
As I walked up, she looked and me, and froze for a second, glanced back at him, then gave a smirk, and said, “You already staked a claim, I see. You can have this one, I still have the others.” and walked off.
That barely registered, because Ambrose was very clearly half-dead and mostly out of it. I turned to him, and he’s slurring his words a bit, but I got it at the time and rewatching the recording, you can clearly understand him saying “Mabel, you think I should take it? Her offer? 50 years?”
I starred in sheer astonishment as my mind put this all together, along with what she had said, and turned around to try to find the woman, but she was gone.
Look, I’m a rational woman-shaped person. It can’t really be that, right? She couldn’t have been offering him 50 years of life right? Exactly fifty years and then…what, a unknown destination? What? The world doesn’t work like that!
But regardless of having my entire universe flipped upside down right then, he was still dying. He passed out as I stood there.
I panicked, starting the temporal flux buildup right there, with both time machines, and eventually managed to lift him over my shoulder and take him to modern InterAct, where they shot him full of antibiotics various fluids and kept him alive.
In theory, I should have been able to take him back to his timeline, he was probably still connected. But…I wasn’t going to do that. Because I had a very unsettling idea of how he had remained alive.
He doesn’t remember this, he was incredibly sick at this point, very infected from a gunshot wound weeks ago that history will swear he did not get at this point. He remember getting shot in battle and the next few days after that as his fever got worse, then waking up in the InterAct hospital.
But he’s seen the video.
And thus, I arrived here with Ambrose Bierce.
That was three months ago.
There are rumors going around that I was fascinated with Ambrose Bierce, which is true, so I went back in time and got one for myself. That I kidnapped him out of time just to get a boyfriend. No. But I refrained from correcting people because the story got so weird at the end.
But at this point, I have to talk about it, apparently.
And you can wave away what I saw by mundane explanations.
You could assume that my interaction with him at the end of October changed his behavior during the December battle, causing him to get wounded. Sure.
Maybe the older version spotted me spying on him in 1913 and that changed his behavior there also. Sure.
Most of the conclusion is the result of a weird comments by an startled-and-recently-ill older Ambrose losing his facilities, a ravaged-by-infection young Ambrose who was so out of it he can’t even remember saying those things, and a women who could have been talking about anything, maybe she had been trying to seduce him but recognized me from the woman who seduced him months ago. Sure.
I get why you really don’t want to believe this story. I don’t want to believe this story either and I was there.
But even if you think I’m a liar or a lunatic or misrepresenting or misinterpreting what I saw and have recorded, there is one problem in dismissing all this, and that’s the original impossible coincidence of this happening in three different timelines, in three different ways, on the same day.
Regardless, I can prove he was almost dead. I can show you the doctor saying so, that he was hours from death without treatment…treatment via targeted antibiotics, which he could not have gotten in 1863, far before penicillin. And if you dismiss the obvious conclusion staring you and in the face, the only other conclusion is that he was a contemp that a time traveler, namely me, accidentally got killed, and it is entirely reasonable for me to rescue him and bring him here. Right?
That isn’t true, I’m fairly certain he was going to die across all threads and even all timelines, and in all of those, someone…some entity…stepped in and offered him fifty more years.
But either way, I didn’t kidnap him to be my boyfriend because I was fascinated with him. And I don’t really need the rumors.
As for Ambrose, he thinks this is the weirdest fucking thing he’s ever heard of, and is intensely annoyed that he is the center of it. I know you didn’t say it like that, I’m paraphasing.
And I can’t help but remember that his most famous book was sarcastically called The Devil’s Dictionary.
The universe is a good deal stranger than even those of us on Haven think it is.
In other news, since I’m here and this flow is already too long as it is, and as they say, the only way out is through, so let me make it longer:
As most of you know, Ambrose are starting a ‘newspaper’ together. We’re calling it Zero Hour and it will be officially launched in two weeks.
No, I put newspaper in single quotes for a reason. It isn’t a newspaper. We would have to publish ev
This is Bierce, I have seized her device. It will be a newspaper — the sort that this island sorely needs — to point out th
You can’t just take my console from me while I’m working, and you realize how weird it is to call yourself by your last name when I’ve been calling you Ambrose? But we’re not calling it a newspaper because we’re not going to print it. And stop using em dashes, that looks weird!
Hey, no, that’s wildly inapp while I’m trying to work, it’s sexual harassment, what are y
I have successfully distracted Miss Westell for the next few moments. Do not fear, she is not complaining. I am telling you, we are going to print a newspaper. I’m sure it will mostly exist in this ephemeral medium of electronic text and images — to whatever extent such things can be said to exist in the online realm — but it also will be paper that you can hold in your hands. An record of the truth or at least a reasonable approximate of the truth — one that cannot be destroyed by a few taps on a piece of glass and plastic you hold in your hand. And when the usefulness of the approximation of truth ends, you can at least use it to line your birdcages. The details
I cannot believe this man. It’s a little impressive he was able to type during that. But I’m just going to end this flow now because Ambrose cannot be a professional and keep his hands to himself while we’re working.
What?
Yeah, I guess I should tell them that.
We’re also engaged.
Anyway, this has been Mab Westell.
.flow close.