The Library

I decided that my first stop should probably be a public library. I reasoned that no matter how much the world had changed, that would be a place that I could read up on history and see what else was different. It wasn’t hard to ask directions to the city’s big public library (which I wouldn’t have known where to find even in my own universe), so I set off on foot in that direction.

On my way there I had another major culture shock. I was passing an open-air café, much like the one in which I’d been sipping coffee when the professor had found me. At one of the tables, a man who looked like he was about thirty years old was sitting in a chair, and a girl about ten years younger than he was—probably another college student, from the looks of her—was sitting in his lap, facing away from him. Both of them had their jeans pulled down to mid-thigh, and she was bouncing lightly astride his erection. Two or three of the other patrons were watching them with either amusement or obvious lust, but no one seemed to care that the couple was having sex in the café, right out in public.

It seemed that nudism wasn’t the only thing that was now legal in public on the streets of San Diego. I only stood there watching for about a minute before I realized that it would look pretty strange for me to just stand there on the sidewalk watching, when no one else seemed to think it was unusual for the couple to be doing what they were doing. I moved on, still heading for the library.

I spent the next four hours doing research on the internet and in the periodical archives, using one of the library’s public computer terminals. Suddenly, while I was in the middle of reading an article on social development in post-millennial America, I heard a voice in my ear.

“Are you there?” it asked. It was the professor’s voice.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Oh. There you are,” she said. “I’m getting visual now. Sorry it’s taken me so long to contact you, but I had some trouble getting the equipment adjusted properly. So? What’s the world like over there?”

Where to start? “I’m not sure how to begin,” I admitted.

“Well, did World War II happen?” she asked.

“Well … not exactly,” I said. “There was no First World War or Second World War, like we had them, but there were some smaller wars in Europe and Asia during the first part of the twentieth century. The U.S. wasn’t involved in any of them, though.”

“Was there a Holocaust?” the professor asked.

“No, nothing like that happened, as far as I can tell,” I said. “No concentration camps, no persecution of Jews, or deformed people, or gays, or anything like that.”

“Good,” she said with relief.

Oddly specific questions, I thought. “Are you … Jewish?” I asked, trying not to sound offensive with the question but curious to know if that was the reason she wanted to know those particular details.

“Well, with a name like Rosenblum, did you think I was Buddhist?” she asked wryly.

“Actually, you never introduced yourself,” I pointed out.

“Oh. Oh … sorry. I’m Liz Rosenblum.”

“Alan Thornton,” I returned.

“Nice to meet you,” she said. “So … what else changed? Looks like you’ve been doing your homework there.”

“Yeah. Well … there is no such thing as a nuclear bomb, as far as I can tell. There are nuclear power plants, but they weren’t developed until much later here. And it looks like since there was never a nuclear arms race, there was no Cold War, either. Been pretty quiet, war-wise, in this universe.

“Communism didn’t take hold here so much, either. Without World War one or two, it looks like the U.S.S.R. was never much of a world power. It broke up in 1976 here. There was no Vietnam War, either. I think that’s what really made things so different.”

“Different? What do you mean?” the professor asked.

“Well from what I can tell, without the world wars screwing stuff up, the hippie movements got started here much sooner. The thirties, basically. And without a Vietnam War to split their focus, and make other people so divided about them … well, the hippie movement really took off here,” I started.

“Um … okay,” she said, obviously trying to figure out why that was so critical.

“Well, see … the **** movement pretty much fizzled out the same way it did in our world. In fact, from what I can tell it died out even quicker here.”

“Of course,” she said. “There’s no way to keep that kind of overuse self-sustaining.”

“Right, sure. But, well … the, uh … free-sex movement really caught on,” I said a bit self-consciously.

“Oh?” she asked, amused.

“Yeah. Well, see, like I said: without the controversy of the Vietnam War protests and with the early **** of the **** culture, people didn’t fight the youth movements so hard. Eventually they won a lot of concessions at local levels, and then after a while things got pretty well formalized nationally. Overseas was similar, too.”

“What are you talking about, though? What sort of concessions?” she asked.

“Well, I think the first thing was legalized nudism,” I said.

“Really?” she said. “Well, it’s not like nudism is illegal here, really. There are nudist colonies, right?”

“Well, I guess. But here it’s legal anywhere. I saw someone walking through downtown naked, on the way here to the library.”

“Wow,” she remarked.

“And that was just the beginning. Public sex is more or less tolerated too … although I think you can still get arrested for disturbing the peace or something if you’re really flamboyant about doing it in the middle of, like, a symphony or something.

“And the whole ‘free love’ thing is pretty ingrained now, too. There’s more or less no such thing as adultery anymore: people still get married, but they have sex with other people all the time, and it isn’t considered cheating.”

“Didn’t S.T.D.’s still put the kibosh to all that?” the professor asked curiously.

“I wondered about that myself, so I did some digging. From what I could tell, the mainstream acceptance of widespread sex just meant that researchers and pharmaceuticals had more incentive to work harder at curing S.T.D.’s.”

“That actually makes sense,” the professor replied in my ear. “In our world each new S.T.D. ended up being practically ignored by the medical world, patients more or less quarantined and shunned by society for years before any serious effort was made to treat them, all because the implication of extramarital sex had such a stigma associated with it.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Either that, or it just meant that with such a large market of free-lovers in this world, there was a lot more cash to be made here,” I suggested a bit more cynically. “So anyway, most of them are either stamped out or very well controlled. As I understand it, there are some vaccines you get as a kid, and preventatives in your typical daily vitamins for others. Also, it looks like A.I.D.S. never made it out of sub-Saharan Africa here, for whatever reason, and got itself quarantined out of existence after just a few years.

“Sex in the streets and swinging in the neighborhood isn’t all,” I went on. “I haven’t watched any T.V. yet, but if I understand it right from what I’ve been reading, explicit sex on T.V. is totally normal … and I’m not talking porn channels. I mean like on sitcoms … anything. You know how in the fifties it was daring to show a married couple in the bedroom even in separate beds, but in our world today nobody would bat an eye if you show an unmarried couple getting under the covers with the implication that they’re naked and starting to have sex? It would only draw comments to the FCC if there was a little too much suggestive motion under the sheets, or the actors showed a little too much skin in their underwear beforehand?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess so,” the professor replied.

“Well from the T.V. listings I checked out, in this world nobody would bat an eye to see the funny couple on the latest primetime comedy sitcom going at it with the neighbors in a humorously awkward foursome, complete with fully explicit sex.”

“Holy shit,” Professor Rosenblum muttered in awed amazement.

“Another thing I spotted—from banner ads on the ‘net, at first, as a matter of fact—is that prostitution was legalized more or less everywhere. It’s not really like it is in our world, anymore … no hookers on the street, cat-houses, things like that. Apparently, any decent hotel these days has sex-service staff on call … the nicer hotels actually advertise the quality of it in their ads. The line between restaurants and strip clubs seems to be a little blurrier, too. Apparently Hooters is a popular family chain here, but the waitresses go topless and you can order blowjobs off the menu … pardon my language.

“Basically, sex is everywhere, here.”

“I can’t believe it!” Professor Rosenblum exclaimed. “Getting rid of the Hapsburgs made the world into Hugh Hefner’s paradise?”

“Um … ironically, I don’t think Playboy ever really made it big here. Pretty much any ordinary magazine has pictures of naked girls as part of the ads, so there was no real need for those kinds of magazines here. Porn in general is kind of a non-entity, commercially—although some movies and T.V. shows are steamier than others by design, naturally. Porn, per se, only exists here on the Internet, as I understand it. You know the recent fad for ‘sexting’ in our world?” I asked.

“Teenagers sending naked pictures of themselves to their friends with their cell-phones?” she asked, sounding not-quite-certain of herself.

“Basically. Well apparently making a YouTube video of yourself having sex—especially kinky sex of some kind, or sex that has some kind of ‘blooper’ moment in it—and posting it online, then sending the link to your friends was the same kind of fad here about five years ago, and it’s evolved into an almost commercial thing. I guess it’s sort of what music or advertising is on YouTube in our world today, where commercial media companies and your average Joe alike post videos to try getting some exposure. Here, semi-professionals and amateurs alike make sex videos and post them to try to get popular for how funny, or outrageous, or sexy they are.”

“Wow. So … not to change the subject, but what are you going to do now?” she asked.

“Well, I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t exist here … I checked. Evidently my grandparents did exist here, but they never even met. My grandfather was English, and he immigrated after World War II in our world, so that makes sense, I guess. That means I have no identity … no house, no job, and no money except what’s in my pocket—and that would look like fake money to people here, anyway: it’s not exactly the same here. I have my driver’s license on me, but it’ll seem fake here, too. I’m not sure how I’m going to fit myself into society here.”

“Well, do _I _exist?” she asked.

“Hold on, let me check. I didn’t know your name before,” I reminded her.

“It’s ‘Elizabeth,’ with a ‘Z,’” she clarified.

“Okay, hold on,” I said.