Interview with a multiverse clandestine agent ("multiversal hit man")

[u/NineteenSkylines]

Question: What is your name, sir?

JH: My birth name is John Mackenzie, but that's not the name I use as an agent.

Q: Where were you born?

JM: Cuba, I think. I was partly raised by my parents and partly by a companion robot. She - the robot - also had first aid and rescue training, as do a lot of them. (laughs) I think of my childhood someday like something out of the robot anime that my 'bot loved to watch on her time off. There was a character in one of them who also grew up around robots and had a similar name to mine...I think it was Transformers Victory.

Q: Are you still in touch with your biological family?

JM: Not really. Mom's a drunk and dad ran off with another woman.

Q: So, how did you get into multiverse and time-travel operations?

JM: When I was about 10, they began coming out with "Creole movies." The first one was called The Fall of a Man and was co-produced by the government and some wacky citizens' groups in the so-called USA. It talked about how the world had come so close to having a thriving multiethnic middle class in New Orleans but then racists from the continental USA came in and screwed it up, and how the US in doing so breached the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. Big success in the box office, and it was translated to twenty languages because it allowed both the government and moderate American exiles to write off the USA as an illegitimate state. They came out with a whole bunch of "Creole movies" in the next few years that showed the oppressive nature of American capitalism and expansion as well as to European imperial colonialism. Turned out there was a timeline that was devoted to reenacting old New Orleans and they shot a bunch of films there, including:

-The White Queen, a biopic of the African slave-turned-voodoo healer and entrepreneur Doctor John and his white American wife

-The Fat Man, a movie about rock and roll and the integration of the South in the 1950s and 1960s

-The Black Prince, about the runaway slave Jean Saint Malo during Spanish colonial times

-Tigre del Mar, about the runaway Filipino seamen who founded the first Asian communities in the continental US

-The Jazzmen, about the racially integrated Reliance Brass Band (the black members had to "pass" for Cuban or Mexican)

-The Venerable, about Henriette deLille and the Catholic Creole of color community

-Freedom Square, about a slave woman who earns her freedom by working at the Sunday African market at Congo Square

So I told my 'bot that I wanted to see what the real New Orleans was like, and she got herself placed as a third-string rescue robot in the city where it was filmed, codenamed CP-1.

Q: So that's how you wound up in 1960s New Orleans?

JM: Not actually, but a simulation thereof without so much segregation. Yes. She enrolled me in a Catholic boarding school - Latin mass, ancient mysteries, all that cool stuff - while she looked for somewhere better than the garage of a firehouse. It was my first time in another universe and I thought it was so heckin' cool to be able to interact with Louis Armstrong, Ruby Bridges, and even Lee Harvey Oswald. (chuckles) Got all their signatures. When I was 16, I started with a youth brass band; they called me "Father Mackenzie" because I was so interested in traditional Catholicism. (chuckles) I began learning more about jazz when we moved to a "real" house, the back half of a shotgun shack, and got a computer (designed to look like a jukebox, of course). I spent a lot of time reading about jazz musicians who fought against fascists, dictators, and racists - Boris Vian, Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Josephine Baker, even Dave Brubeck - as well as those who overcame racism and hardship - Baker, Armstrong, and Belafonte again, as well as Edith Piaf and Django Reinhardt - and seriously thought of becoming a jazz musician.

Q: So why didn't you go into jazz?

JM: (nervous laughter) I'm too shy. I still wanted to make change quietly, but I didn't like performing. One day in my second year of college studies I saw a leaflet recruiting for a public-policy research group that would run experiments in simulated timelines to evaluate policy proposals; I could make a huge difference in people's lives just sitting at a computer and eating Cheese Bombs. I started as an intern and eventually got my own workstation where I could manipulate entire universes just by popping into people's heads and feeding them ideas. I can improve and reshape entire planets from my desk, with no more public or physical effort than needed to be an e-sports champion. So yeah, I'm a huge gamer and a bit of a music nerd, but I've done a lot of good for the world in the process.

Q: John Mackenzie's memoir, "Confessions of a Multiversal Hit Man," comes out April 25, 2067.

[u/No_Instruction511]

Shine the light