366 Squared Volume 1: January



  366 Squared

  Volume 1: January

  Copyright 2012 Michel Clasquin-Johnson

  Background to cover image courtesy of NASA. All other graphics used in this book or on the cover are in the public domain or are Creative-Content-licensed.

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  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Introduction to Volume 1

  January 1

  January 2, 1860

  January 3, 1957

  January 4, 2004

  January 5, 2005

  January 6

  January 7, 1999

  January 8, 1889

  January 9, 1839

  January 10, 1927

  January 11

  January 12, 1966

  January 13, 1957

  January 14, 1967

  January 15, 1493

  January 16

  January 17, 1806

  January 18, 1892

  January 19, 1983

  January 20, 1885

  January 21, 1793

  January 22, 1927

  January 23, 1897

  January 24, 1624

  January 25, 1890

  January 26, 1808

  January 27, 1832

  January 28, 1911

  January 29, 1845

  January 30, 1948

  January 31

  Day References for January

  About the Author

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  Introduction

  This book series comes from a challenge I set myself in September 2012: write a story a day for a year (and include a bonus story for February 29). I wanted to reinvent myself as a writer, and things were going … slowly. I needed a shock to the system, something to get myself to open that same file day after day and pound away on the keyboard. Even if I didn't work on anything else that day, at least I would have done this one little thing. By the end of one year, I would have created the equivalent of a 130 000 word novel.

  And so, day after day, I opened up the usual This Day in History websites and saw what had happened that was interesting, that I might be able to weave a tale around. Naturally, the best-laid plans of mice and men ... Soon enough I found myself behind schedule. People get sick. People's kids get sick. People get fired up writing on other projects. It also became clear that the Table of Contents for such a book would become ridiculously unwieldy.

  I just decided to be kind to myself: as soon as I had a month's worth of stories ready to go I would put them out there in a collection. If it took me more than a year to fill out the entire calendar, so mote it be! Whether the whole lot will ever be reassembled into an omnibus remains to be seen. If there is a demand for it, sure. Let me know.

  Almost every story in this volume is based on a real event, a celebration, a birth or a death associated with a specific day. But you may have to read carefully to figure out just what that was. I'm certainly not going to give it away in the title: if you need to know in advance what the story is going to be about, then the story itself is a flop. But if the reference is too obscure, you can look it up in the back of the book, where all the day references are listed.

  And it is just a reference to that day. The actual action in the story may take place slightly earlier or later in time. It may even be a reference transposed centuries into the past or future, or into an alternative universe influenced by what did (not) happen that day, in true science fiction style. And historians will sometimes disagree about the exact day on which something happened. Your source may date the Battle of Salamis a day or two later than mine.

  I did say almost every story. For some days of the year, I just could not find something tied to that day in history to write anything interesting about. But fear not! You will receive your daily quota of words. For such days, there will be a little essay, a poem, well, something. And some days just lent themselves to a mini-essay rather than a story, which is why 1 January starts us off that way. If there is no year after the date that serves as a heading, then that entry probably is not fiction. Just so you know.

  These are short-short stories, or flash fiction, if you prefer. I enjoy the discipline of writing to a precise limit, creating an entire world in a single page; it's a little like writing haiku poetry. I therefore considered limiting myself to an exact number of words, but on what basis? 100 words, 500 words, or what? The answer suggested itself: "366 366-word stories" has a nice ring to it, and that ended up giving me the title "366 Squared". I suppose if I ever go into the horror genre I'll just have to do "666 666-word stories". Or maybe not. Feel free to steal that idea. 366 Words per story it is, then. And yes, I use the term "story" loosely here: technically speaking some of them are vignettes rather than formal stories.

  I suppose some reader will feel called upon to count the words by hand, and call me out: "March 23rd has only 364 words!" There's a bean-counter in every crowd. Well, I wrote these stories in different word processors, on different operating systems, and the definition of a "word" varies subtly from one word counting algorithm to the next. If the setup I was working on at the time said 366, that's good enough for me. And here and there, months later when preparing the manuscript, I found a grammatical error to correct that might bring a story down to 365 or up to 367. Go forth and see what Emerson said about a foolish consistency.

  I still consider myself a science fiction writer, but in these stories I gave myself some leeway to experiment with other genres. A stream-of-consciousness story here, a ghost story there … if it isn't fun, why bother? I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

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  Introduction to Volume 1

  By the time this volume came out, I had already been writing stories for five months. But "Volume 1: September" just doesn't quite ring true, does it? There is a free sampler already out in the wild. Please go and download it if you'd like to see where I am going with this.

  For January, we examine some historical events, with special attention to the weird and wacky. Highlights include:

  * The dangers of technology to the moral fibre of the nation, as represented by the introduction of the electric wristwatch.

  * Why planetoids should never be named after sexy TV characters.

  * The futility of trying to change history.

  * Equal rights for super-villains!

  * The true origin of the frisbee and the rollercoaster.

  * Autobiographical reflections of historical characters. Not necessarily the movers and shakers, but the bit players and the might-have-beens. They tend to be a lot more interesting. I am fascinated by people who invented or discovered something important, but failed to see just how important it really was. Or people who fully realize it, but who just don't manage (or care) to build a business empire on top of it.

  What else have we got? A conspiracy theory here, a toe-dip into Singularity fiction/cyberpunk there … Yes, I'd say January turned out to be a good month.

  If you are an early adopter who buys this book within the first month or two of its publication, you have the opportunity to influence the rest of the series. I refuse to put the reference for each day at the top of each story, but if enough of you complain that you hate the way you end up repeatedly having to go to the end of the book to see what THAT was all about, then I could be persuaded to place each one immediately after its story. Speak up now, or forever hold your peace!

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  January 1

  Happy New Year to you. At least if you belong to that part of the human race, admittedly the majority, that uses the Gregorian calendar. If you lived before 1582, you couldn't have done that, because that was when Pope Gregory XIII created this system. You would have used the
Julian calendar instead. After Julius Caesar had created that one, however, it had drifted away from reality so that the spring equinox was ten days away from where it was supposed to be.

  Wars had been fought over the exact date of Easter, which was calculated from the equinox. The pope must have felt that Something Needed To Be Done. How was this effected? Ten days were chopped off the calendar. History records that people complained that the church had shortened their lives by ten days. These ten days were taken away in different years in different countries, so don't be surprised if nothing seems to happen in your favourite place for a while.

  1582 was well after the Reformation, and Northern Europe thought long and hard before accepting this Catholic innovation. Russia, for reasons of its own, didn't accept the Gregorian calendar until 1918, and most of the Orthodox Churches still remain staunchly Julian. Then of course, there were vast areas using Jewish, Islamic, Indian and Chinese calendars for which January 1 had no special significance.

  But even if you were living in a Gregorian area, you might not have had much of a hangover this morning. Countries started the year on the strangest days. Our history books say that King Charles I of Britain was executed on January 30, 1649. But records of the time bear the date 1648! The New Year started only on May 25 for them, and modern historians have to rewrite history in that light. But let's say you were there, on January 30, 1648, and after watching the King's execution you crossed the channel to the Netherlands. You would now find yourself in January 30, 1649, because the Netherlands had been on the Gregorian/1 January system since 1583.

  Whew! This doesn't make life any easier for a humble writer who just wants to write stories based on historical events.

  January 2, 1860

  Interoffice Memo

  From: Director, Earth Long-Term Observation Post

  To: Xenobiology Department, University of Sirius 5

  Our informants on Earth report that a French astronomer named Le Verrier has theorized that a new planet exists. There are certain irregularities in the orbit of Mercury that their science can only explain if there is a small, unknown planet much closer to the sun affecting Mercury's orbit. The hypothetical planet has been named Vulcan after yet another figure in one of the Earth inhabitants' obsolete mythologies, and Le Verrier is mounting an effort to obtain verification of the planet's existence.

  He will not find it, of course. There is no such planet, and even if there was, it would be hard to spot that close to the sun with his primitive telescopes. The problem here is that the mathematics underlying their model of the universe is becoming seriously outdated. They should discover Relativity any day now, and the need to search for this non-existent planet will disappear.

  However, that does not solve our problem. The species' telescopes are getting better all the time, and it would be problematic from both a security and a scientific point of view if they accidentally discovered our Observation Platform orbiting just outside the sun's corona while engaged in this fruitless search.

  We thought we would have fifty Earth years before we would need to move operations elsewhere in the system, but this development has shown that we need to rethink that approach. My recommendation is that we move up the schedule and relocate all activities to Site B, which has been established on Titan, a moon of the planet Saturn. That should buy us another two centuries before we need to deal with this rather erratic species, judging by current rates of technological progress among them.

  Anticipating your approval, I have sent a skeleton staff to Site B to prepare it for permanent habitation by all personnel. As soon as we have transferred all entities, research data and personal effects, we will drop Site A into the sun. I'll miss the old place, but we need to be practical. Please see Annexure 1 for the budgetary effects this move will have.

  January 3, 1957

  Today sees the introduction of yet another new piece of technology that none of us ever asked for, that nobody truly needs, and the possible dangers of which we don't really apprehend.

  The Hamilton Watch Company has introduced a new wristwatch that never needs winding because it runs on an electric motor powered by a battery. No doubt they will sell by the thousands in this age, when "progress" is the false god we all worship, but do you really need one? Should you get rid of the trusty watch you currently wear and replace it with this one just to be part of the "in-crowd". We think not. Let us tell you why.

  Consider this: if you buy this watch, you will have this battery-powered contraption next to your wrist twelve or even eighteen hours a day. Electric motors, even battery-powered ones, emit magnetic and radio waves. How can we know what harm this can do to the wearer? Could it lead to a generation of people with severe ARTHRITIS in their left wrists? And that is not the least of the dangers we face. Radiation is implicated in the development of CANCER. Continuous exposure to electrical fields has been linked to SCHIZOPHRENIA and other mental illnesses. Do we really want to run a massive experiment on the nation's population without further research into the possible effects? Why is the government not putting a stop to this? Is someone being paid off?

  Winding a watch at the end of the day is a moral, even a spiritual, exercise. It marks the end of the day with a finality that brooks no compromise. But if you really are too lazy, yes, let it be said, lazy, or too forgetful to wind your watch every night, then look into the self-winding watch rather than one of these electrical monstrosities. True, they are a little more expensive, but in the end they are a development of the tried and tested mechanical clockwork that has been developed over the centuries. Let us not trust our physical and mental health to untested devices that have no real benefit over those we already have, and that may have quite disastrous side-effects.

  January 4, 2004

  We have observed a small robot from Earth landing on our planet and there seems to be another on its way. Analysis of Earth technology indicates that it is unlikely that they will be able to detect our presence. The dominant life-form on Earth is carbon-based and that is the kind of life they will be looking for. It might interest you to know that this kind of life did exist on Mars once, but that it died out billions of years ago. Indeed, the possibility exists that this early Martian life was transferred to Earth by the debris of a meteor strike.

  That does not make us cousins. Our own form of life, based as it is on a completely different level of quantum vibration, originated independently. To put it bluntly, we can see them (with some mechanical assistance), but they cannot see us, which is why we have been able to send our scientific missions to their planet without encountering resistance. Our reality interpenetrates theirs so completely that calls for the colonisation of earth grow louder each year. We could settle a trillion Martians on their planet and they would never know it. I am on record as opposing such a move on philosophical grounds, but I know that I am in a minority.

  Even so, we must accept that there will be more of these robotic explorers coming our way and we need to formulate a policy towards them. So far, the damage they do seems to be minimal, and as long as they keep on looking for evidence of life on their own quantum level, I suggest we leave them alone. Blasting them out of the sky, as the "Mars-First" faction suggests, is bound to raise suspicion among the Earthlings. Much easier to let them land and subtly influence what they find. If they come to believe that Mars is a dry, boring place with nothing they can use, they will eventually stop sending these probes.

  In support of this tactic, I point to the fact that when they sent actual members of their species to their moon, we did just that, and it's been decades since they disturbed our colony there.

  January 5, 2005

  As far out from the sun as you can go without heading into interstellar space, a planetoid swung around in its 560-year orbit. To human eyes, an exceptionally uninviting place: the average temperature hovered around forty degrees above absolute zero. Pluto? Practically next door. This planetoid was three times as far out.

  Yet even here, life had
found a foothold. Not life any Earthling would have recognised. They were mere wisps of gas, once deposited by passing comets, held together by nothing more than thought. What little energy they used came as much from the stars as from the sun. Yet they too had their lives. They loved, they quarrelled, they wondered.

  They knew about the third planet. The powerful background radiation of a trillion living, thinking creatures shone in their sky far brighter than the largely irrelevant electromagnetic radiation of the sun. Their scientists had even speculated that some of those creatures might be intelligent. But by the time the thought-force reached them, it was diffused, harmless.

  Back on Earth, one astronomer remarked to another, "Could you take a look at these plates? If this is what I think it is, we've just discovered a new planet!"

  In time, calmer heads would prevail and the planetoid would be named after Eris, a suitably obscure Greek deity. But when the announcement was made, they used an interim code name: Xena, the name of a fictional warrior princess who was the secret lust object of half a billion teenage boys, and quite a few of their fathers.

  If human technology had been built around thought-force instead of electromagnetics, they would have sensed interest in the planetoid building over months.

  But to the tenuous, super-cooled beings of the planetoid, whose slow metabolisms measured lifespans in millennia, it came across as an instantaneous and disastrous burst of energy. All of it aimed at them.

  Tidal currents of thought tore at he weak links holding their tendrils of gas together. Nothing could counter it. Nothing. Beings saw their precious gases escaping back into the cometary halo from where they had come. Without a physical substrate, thought too died.

  On Eris, the story of life was over.

  January 6

  I love Wikipedia. I have contributed to it over the years. And I still forbid students to use it as a reference.