[Issue 2025.73]

‘The Anarchivist’, Owen Leddy

Art © 2025 Ellis Bray

---

The duty of the Anarchivist will be to denounce reality itself.

—Pachakutiq Qispe, The Anarchivist’s Charter

---

Linh was lost. It was the first day of the semester, and Haskell Hall had turned out to be a maze-like warren of fake-gothic passageways and cramped staircases that never seemed to lead to the floor she expected. She had hoped to run into someone who could direct her, but somehow she had ended up on the basement level, and the hallways were deserted whichever way she turned.

Finally, she thought she heard a voice and hurried toward it. She turned down a hallway lined with framed images. One appeared to be a faded political poster—Poor People’s Campaign Rally—June 7th 1975—Dr. King to speak. It snagged some part of her brain as she rushed past it. Hadn’t Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. been assassinated in 1968?

At the next picture frame she paused to look more closely. It held a photo simply captioned “Kinshasa.” It showed a glittering city skyline of glass and steel towers—offices and high-tech laboratories visible in the nearest windows, and wide, verdant boulevards and parks in the distance.

The next frame, tiny compared to the others, held what appeared to be a postage stamp printed with a seal that read United Iroquois Confederacy—1946. Was she reading that right? What was going on here? She felt even more lost and confused than before.

She approached the door to an office and paused to listen. The voice she’d heard was coming from the other side. The plaque next to the door read Assistant Professor Aaliyah Mervis—Anarchivist. Linh knocked, but the voice continued uninterrupted. She hesitated, glanced at the clock down the hall. Already 10:03, and class was supposed to start at 10:00. She had no choice.

She pushed open the door. “Excuse me. I’m so sorry to—oop.”

Inside the office, a woman wearing a VR headset and bulky headphones stood behind an unbelievably cluttered desk, stacked almost to the height of her shoulders with papers, folders, and books. Filing cabinets, bookshelves, and a shelf containing hundreds of hard drives crammed the tiny office. A 3D printer was assembling something in the corner, filling the windowless and poorly ventilated space with the noxious smell of melting plastic.

The woman—presumably Professor Mervis—pulled off her goggles and headset, unleashing her curly hair. Her piercing eyes fixed on Linh. “Yes? Can I help you?”

“I was just looking for—” The 3D printer chimed and trilled loudly, startling Linh mid-sentence.

Professor Mervis seemed to momentarily forget Linh existed. She rushed over to the 3D printer and opened the semi-opaque plastic cover that protected the print bed. She lifted a small object out and held it up to her desk lamp, examining it closely.

“What is it?” Linh momentarily forgot what she had been about to ask, caught up in Professor Mervis’s enraptured expression.

“It’s a military decoration,” Professor Mervis said, without looking up. “A medal awarded to those who fought in the South African revolution of 1964.”

“But…” Linh was about to object that there hadn’t been a South African revolution in 1964, but she hesitated. She was speaking to a history professor, after all.

“It’s a fascinating situation,” Professor Mervis went on, still not looking up at her. “If just a few key figures in uMkhonto we Sizwe increase their influence in the ANC marginally, revolution breaks out. But if they don’t, then the uprising mostly consists of peaceful protest. If the U.K. intervenes on the side of the Afrikaner government, then it’s suppressed for decades, but if Cuba or China intervene, then things go completely differently. There’s even a possibility that in 1965—”

Linh suddenly remembered the time. “I’m so sorry, professor, but I’m late for class. Do you know where I could find room 359 by any chance?”

Professor Mervis looked up as though waking from a dream, looking a little taken aback. “Um… Left out this door, two flights up the staircase at the end of the hall. It should be the second or third door on the right, I think.”

“Thank you so much,” Linh breathed. She wanted to rush out but felt bad for cutting Professor Mervis off. “I… uh… I’d be happy to come back later to hear more about the… uh… South African revolution.”

Unexpectedly, Professor Mervis’s face fell. “Thank you, but frankly you probably don’t want to have anything to do with me.”

Now it was Linh’s turn to be taken aback. “Why’s that?”

“Ask the Faculty Committee on Academics,” Professor Mervis said drily. “You can watch the meeting recordings if you like. I’m sure you’re going to hear the gossip from someone in the department, so you might as well hear it from me.” A pause while Linh tried to parse what that meant. “You’re late for class, remember?”

“Yes,” Linh said. “Right. Sorry.” She rushed out.

---

Linh wasn’t sorry to have missed the first fifteen minutes of lecture. It turned out to be a rather dry review of early 17th century European history, and Linh found it hard to convince herself to care exactly which Habsburg had sat on which throne in what year. Many hours later, after her work-study shift at the library, after arguing with her little brother over the phone for an hour to get him to do his homework, after coaching her grandmother through setting up an email account, she finally collapsed into bed with her laptop to slake the curiosity that had been gnawing at her all day.

1964 south african revolution

None of the search results indicated such an event had ever happened. So what had Professor Mervis been talking about?

united iroquois confederacy 1946

None of the articles or pages about the Iroquois Confederacy ever prepended the word “United”, and the Confederacy had by all accounts been displaced from most of its land by white settlers and largely ceased to exist as a sovereign state by the end of the 18th century. It certainly wasn’t issuing postage stamps in 1946.

kinshasa

Photos taken by residents showed a sprawling city of small apartment blocks and motorcycle traffic, not so different in some ways from the part of Vietnam where her extended family lived. Images taken by Western journalists of refugee encampments and informal settlements on the city outskirts appeared further down the page—barefoot kids, women carrying water on dirt roads. But even the most recent and flattering photos bore little resemblance to the soaring, ultra-wealthy metropolis in the image on the wall outside Professor Mervis’s office.

Linh had also been right that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered in 1968 and couldn’t have been leading a rally in 1975.

What did all this mean?

uchicago professor aaliyah mervis faculty committee on academics

One of the top results was a video of a sub-committee meeting of the University of Chicago academics committee. Anarchive funding review committee meeting. She clicked the link.

---

Recording.

Professor Mark Banner chairs the review committee. Even seated at the head of a polished oak table in the vaulted neogothic meeting room, the gentle, balding sociology department chair doesn’t look particularly imposing. As Professor Mervis—the Anarchivist—enters the room and carefully closes the heavy wooden door behind her, Banner gives her a wry smile, as if to say we both know I’d rather not be doing this.

To Banner’s left, Professor Harendra Kaur, the computer science department chair, leans back in his seat, lanky legs crossed and hands folded imperiously. Suit jacket. White dress shirt. No tie. Top button undone.

The new head of the history department—Professor Diana Randal—has a written report open on the table in front of her, marked up heavily in red ink. She regards the Anarchivist curiously from behind tortoiseshell glasses.

A friend, an enemy, and a stranger confront the Anarchivist.

As the Anarchivist sits opposite them, Banner clears his throat. “Um… Well, I think we can get started. I’m sure Aaliyah needs no introduction, but—she joined the faculty six years ago to fill the position of… ah… Anarchivist, an endowed professorship created by a donation from the Qispe Foundation.”

The Anarchivist frowns, seeming concerned by the fact that even the apparently friendly Professor Banner couldn’t seem to say her title with a completely straight face.

Banner goes on. “Aaliyah’s classes have been consistent favorites among students across a wide range of majors, her teaching evaluations are second to none, and she has made substantial and original contributions to the research literature at the intersection of multiple disciplines. We’ve all hopefully had a chance to read Aaliyah’s proposal to keep her research group operating now that the foundation no longer has the resources to support the position—so I’ll open it up to questions from the committee.”

Immediately, Kaur leans forward. “Yeah, so—can you explain why you’re having to come to our departments for this funding? If grant agencies and foundations aren’t funding you, why should we?”

“The most common feedback I get from grant agencies is that my work is outside their disciplinary scope,” the Anarchivist explains. “Social sciences study groups tell me it’s too focused on algorithms, and computer science program officers tell me it’s too focused on ‘soft’ social sciences. As for foundations—they’re less transparent about their feedback, but honestly I think some of them are afraid to look too closely at history and the role their founders and donors may have played in it.”

“So,” Kaur continues, “supposing we accept your premise that your lack of funding isn’t your fault, what exactly is the value proposition of your research, then? Can you give me the thirty-second elevator pitch?”

The Anarchivist seems to struggle to control her expression. “I’m running a research group, not a startup,” she says evenly. “I gave you much more than a thirty-second summary in my written—”

Kaur cuts her off. “I’m just trying to understand how your research creates value and what’s so supposedly innovative about it. We’re basically deciding whether to invest in your research continuing, so think of me as an investor. Sell me on it.”

The Anarchivist closes her eyes for just a second, takes a steadying breath. “Is that why the administration gives your department all the money? Because you produce so much value?”

Kaur raises his eyebrows, affronted. “Our students go on to six-figure salaries right after graduation, or they go on to found companies worth tens of millions.”

“And where has that gotten us?”

“Us?”

“Us collectively. Mass surveillance? Algorithms that reinforce bias and structural imbalances of power? Precaritized, underpaid jobs and union-busting?”

“I understand the tech industry has its downsides, but it’s our responsibility to prepare our students to succeed!”

“But succeed at what? That’s the question my research addresses. What kind of worlds could we create if we could only imagine them?” The Anarchivist pauses to take a breath. “Fine. If you want the elevator pitch for my work, here it is: I use generative AI models trained on large historical archives to produce detailed renderings of artifacts from plausible but counterfactual timelines—pasts, presents, and futures that might have been but weren’t. I study and document these alternate histories.”

Professor Randal looks up from the notes she’s typing at a furious pace. “Can your research be said to contribute to new knowledge if the events you study never happened?”

With some apparent effort, Anarchivist keeps her voice even and controlled. “We are so often told that the way things are is the way they must be—that there are no alternatives, no other paths. But often these supposedly universal truths or inevitable states of affairs are in fact contingent on the specific course history took. My work shows that—and shows that we have more power to change these historical trajectories than we generally think.”

“But the plausibility of these counterfactual scenarios is fundamentally unknowable, isn’t it?” Randal presses.

“Well,” the Anarchivist shoots back, “part of what I’ve contributed to the field is the development of methods for modeling probability distributions over historical trajectories using deep neural networks and sampling—”

“Methods that are controversial to say the least,” Kaur cuts in.

She talks over him. “—sampling these trajectories to generate fully realized alternate-historical artifacts.”

“We all know history only happens once, of course,” Banner interjects, directing his remark at Randal. “A historian like yourself can hardly be blamed for being skeptical of these ideas, but—”

“I appreciate your point, Mark,” Professor Mervis says, “but I think we disagree philosophically about this, actually.” She gives him a taut smile. He looks frankly shocked.

Kaur takes another rhetorical swing, and it goes on and on and on.

After the interrogation ends, Banner approaches Professor Mervis, now standing just outside the frame of the camera but still within audible to the microphone.

“Aaliyah, you know I’m on your side here, but you’re not helping your case by antagonizing your review committee.”

“I’m not trying to antagonize anyone,” she responds coolly.

Banner scoffs. “Well, personally I feel just a bit antagonized. You need to be more—”

The recording ends.

---

Linh closed her laptop and lay back on the bed, overwhelmed by a sense of loss. Were they really going to cut Professor Mervis’s funding and force her out of the university? She longed to see the vast space of possible worlds Professor Mervis had described, and they might be gone before she even had a chance to begin exploring them.

She thought of the scars history had left on her family, how it had scattered them across the planet. She thought of how her grandmother still murmured her grandfather’s name at night, trying to warn him the bombs were coming. She thought of her mother sitting on the edge of her bed and breaking into tears when she learned she was losing both her job and her first chance to travel home in years to the COVID-19 pandemic. She thought of the tense silence that would descend over her friends every time someone mentioned the latest wildfire or superstorm, as they sat with the dread of inheriting a destabilized planet.

She had so often struggled to understand the perspective of some of her classmates who seemed content to live on the thin soap bubble of the present, as though the world was remade anew every few years—the past irrelevant and the future out of their hands. Linh, meanwhile, felt that everything around her was drenched in the residue of the past. She had chosen to study history because it had always seemed to have more to say about the mechanics of her life than did physics, engineering, or chemistry. From the nineteenth century policies that had created the public schools she attended to the late-twentieth-century ones that had turned them into a shadow of their formers selves. From the waves of violence that had passed her hometown of Long Beach from indigenous peoples to the Spanish Empire to Mexico to the United States, to the worldwide events that had propelled immigrant communities to carve out new homes for themselves there.

The only thing better than understanding what history had given shape to the world around her would be to understand how and why.

No, nothing would deter her from going back to the Anarchive. Not even the Anarchivist herself.

---

Workers in coveralls and caps march down the streets of Vienna. It is supposed to be the middle of the workday, but if there was ever a time to go on strike, it is now. They carry signs denouncing the Federal Chancellor’s seizure of emergency powers and demanding a return to democracy. They keep the mood light, singing union songs, but they are under no illusions about what will happen if the Chancellor and his political allies gain power. In recent years, they have gone from dangerous overwork and grinding poverty to dignified conditions and rising pay. They have gone from miserable, overcrowded, yet expensive tenements to beautiful, sunlit public apartments. They have gone from groveling at the feet of their employers to negotiating with them as equals across the bargaining table.

They are not going back.

As they round a corner, they encounter a line of police and soldiers spread across the street, rifles at the ready. The singing stops. Anxious murmurs ripple through the crowd. Does the army mean to kill them?

They call out to the soldiers—remind them that this government doesn’t serve or care for them either. That they are exploited just as the factory workers are exploited. That they, too, should want government by and for the people.

The soldiers waver. The officers scream at them to hold the line.

The crowd bursts into song again, beckoning the soldiers to join them. Cautiously, hands raised, some of the bravest of the strikers approach the line until they are practically touching the soldiers’ bayonets.

“Stop them! Stop them!” the officers scream.

Fingers tighten on the triggers of rifles. The crowd gasps, flinches from an anticipated storm of lead.

Then the foremost soldier loosens his grip. He crouches down, sets his rifle gingerly on the ground. A second soldier does the same. And a third—and then all, and the swell of cheers drowns out the dire threats and howls of protest from the officers. They march on arm in arm to claim the democratic rights of a sovereign people.

But, of course, that’s not how it happened.

---

We fought hard, but the historical moment was not right for social and economic revolution. We lost, and we lost badly. We underestimated our opponents, underestimated the resilience of entrenched hierarchies of power and wealth. Many of my comrades have never forgiven me for saying this. Many have never spoken to me again since I turned to means within the system to obtain the resources I would need to ensure that our movement wasn’t completely in vain.

When it turned out that the land the government and the multinationals ceded to us and our Quechua sisters and brothers in the peace settlement included deposits of valuable minerals, I played the part of the reasonable moderate, a pragmatist who could partner with mining companies to drive “economic development.” I buried my true beliefs and hopes deeper than the deepest copper vein. We ravaged the land, and Pachamama wept tears of lithium-rich brine. But there is little power in this world without money, and now the Foundation has both. Enough, at least, to make things like the Anarchive possible.

We didn’t have all the answers then, and I’m not sure I do now. There’s no one idea or ideology I hope to preserve—except that nothing is as certain as it appears. To my comrades who believe that it is preferable to keep one’s hands unsullied by capitalist wealth and face a final disempowerment in death or prison, I say this: the only question now is whether the belief in a multitude of possible futures will survive, or if the new generation will grow up believing that “there is no alternative.” If I must become what I despise to prevent that, I think it is not too high a price.

You, the Anarchivist, will determine whether I am right.

—Pachakutiq Qispe, The Anarchivist’s Charter

---

It took Linh three days to work up her courage, but finally she went back down into the basement of Haskell Hall and knocked on Professor Mervis’s door.

This time, the professor answered. “I thought I told you that you shouldn’t want anything to do with me.”

“Professor,” Linh said, “as part of my program, I’m required to do a research thesis. Would you consider teaching me how to do what you do?”

Professor Mervis frowned. “You watched the review committee meeting?”

Linh nodded.

“Then you know I’m probably about to lose all my funding,” Professor Mervis said. “Probably get kicked out of this place.”

“Then I guess I don’t have any time to waste,” Linh responded. “How soon can I start?”

Professor Mervis shook her head and laughed. “Fine. Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She stepped out into the hall. “Let me show you a few things.”

The Anarchive’s research group was housed in a small office space upstairs that held desks for Professor Mervis’s two grad students, plus tables cluttered with 3D printers, VR hardware, and stacks of papers.

Akiko, one of the grad students, was examining a strange, spindly object that on closer inspection turned out to be a 3D printed model of a lunar lander with the flag of Guatemala on it. She was so engrossed that when Professor Mervis introduced her, she only glanced up for a moment to say, “I work on post-colonial alter-futurism.”

Linh tried to nod thoughtfully as though she knew what that meant.

“Akiko is interested in timelines where parts of the Global South were spared the ravages of colonialism and became world-leading economies,” Professor Mervis explained.

The other grad student, Brenda, was coding, electronic music emanating faintly from her headphones. She pulled the headphones down around her neck as Professor Mervis approached.

“I think the social physics engine is improving,” she said without preamble. Linh struggled to follow the conversation as Brenda and Professor Mervis pored over the code—something about Markov chains and ergodic sampling. Realizing just how much she had to learn was both exciting and frightening.

“So how does the model decide what artifacts to generate?” Linh asked.

“We provide prompts—like this…” Brenda switched to a different window—a bare-bones command line interface. She typed, “Spanish Republicans win civil war,” and pressed “enter.” After a few moments, the Anarchive began to generate a flood of multimedia responses. Photos of Franco on trial in 1939. Text of newspaper articles about Spanish soldiers fighting in France on the side of the Allies as Nazi troops breached the Maginot Line. Designs for the flag of an independent Basque republic. 3D renderings of the decorative columns of a new building for the Spanish Congress of Deputies. Matrices of probabilities representing the likelihood of upstream and downstream events—a 24% chance of the Republicans winning the war against the Nationalists on their own, but an 83% chance with greater support from France. A 52% chance of Catalonia declaring independence after a Republican victory.

Brenda was grinning. Linh realized she had been gaping at the screen in total awe.

“I think you’ve got her,” Brenda remarked to Professor Mervis.

The Anarchivist smiled. “I hope so.”

Linh felt her face get warm—flattered and embarrassed. It hadn’t even occurred to her that Professor Mervis was actively trying to recruit her, hoping she would join the research group. It felt good to be wanted. She hoped she could earn it.

They moved on to the next desk, which appeared to be a stolen library carrel—bookshelves and all. It was unoccupied but piled high with notebooks, printed photos, and loose-leaf handwritten notes. “One of my students, Caleb, recently graduated,” Professor Mervis said. “I’m hoping you can pick up where he left off.”

Linh examined the chaos on the desk. A mixture of photos and newspaper clippings in Cyrillic had been taped up on the partition of the library carrel along with a series of post-it notes, forming what seemed to be a timeline. No tanks outside the House of Soviets—compare NY Times and Washington Post Oct. 5 1993. Under a newspaper clipping: USSR dissolution proceeds, but Gorbachev in office as Prime Minister of Russia in 1994. Where does Yeltsin end up in this timeline? A post-it with the words RUSSIA CONSTITUTION PROJECT served as a heading.

A notebook on the shelf above the desk was titled with the handwritten words 50 constitutions for the United States. Tentatively, Linh picked It up.

“Can I…?”

Professor Mervis nodded encouragement. Inside the notebook, printouts had been pasted in every few pages. They looked like photos of old documents written in quill pen on vellum or parchment. The margins, opposite pages, and even parts of the printouts themselves were covered in notes and annotations. Two presidents?? one read. Roman consul style.

On the next page: Unicameral legislature—no senate. Pasted on the opposite page were news articles hailing the passage of pieces of legislation Linh was sure hadn’t really happened—a $15 federal minimum wage in 1987, a universal minimum income in 2009.

While most of the old documents had the words Constitution of the United States of America at the top, there were exceptions. Yikes—this one came out as a constitution for the “Empire of Columbia,” read one margin note. In another, the Third Amendment was circled. Instead of the right to refuse lodging to troops, it instead concerned redistribution of under-used property to the poor, with the margin note legalizing land reform hell yes. The same constitution outlawed slavery, leading to mini civil war sixty years early, as another note stated, with an accompanying engraving of a battle scene.

What struck Linh the most was the level of detail in the accompanying notes and documents. The AI model hadn’t just generated superficial pastiche of Jeffersonian language and U.S. legal jargon but had manufactured entire alternate textures of civic life, with a greater or lesser degree of participatory democracy, more or less economic and racial inequality, more or less policing and authoritarianism.

It took her a moment to realize Professor Mervis had moved on to the next room and was waiting in the doorway for her. She rushed to catch up.

“This is where all these alternate timelines actually live,” the Anarchivist said.

The next room looked completely out of place in the stuffy neogothic history building. It had been converted into a makeshift data center, with floor-to-ceiling racks holding stacks of servers, coolant lines pumping water over their heat sinks. Their hard drives, Professor Mervis explained, held the digitized archives of countless museums, newspapers, libraries, historical and archaeological societies, and municipal records offices from around the world—the raw training data for new and better generative models of historical timelines. In the dimly lit room, the indicator lights of the servers were like the stars of a vast, unexplored multiverse.

“So,” said Professor Mervis. “Ready to get started?”

---

Lord Moctezuma meets with the representatives of the Confederacy of Tlaxcala on the shores of Lake Texcoco. He feels that he has humbled himself with this gesture, in recognition of his recent battlefield defeats—standing on neutral ground with men far beneath his station. But the emissaries of Tlaxcala are smug and intransigent, thinking that the Spaniards’ march is unstoppable and they will be on the winning side.

Lord Moctezuma contains his frustration. At a word from him, the Eagle Knights at his side could riddle these insolent rebels with atlatl darts, but this is no time to act without thinking.

The fate of the entire Triple Alliance is at stake.

The Spanish are not your liberators, he insists to the representatives of Tlaxcala. They will bring only new and worse forms of servitude. They will force your people into the mines. You won’t escape their greed for silver.

At first, the representatives of the Confederacy are unmoved. Yes, the Spanish are brutal, they agree, but perhaps no more so than the lords of Tenochtitlan. Tlaxcala has chafed for too long under the Triple Alliance’s demands for tribute and conscripts. With Spanish cavalry and cannon on their side, they will finally break free.

Tribute payments can be cut, Lord Moctezuma offers. Conscripts can be returned home. Tlaxcala does not need to fight a bloody, costly war over this. All they need to do is withdraw far from the shores of Lake Texcoco and never speak to Hernán Cortés again.

Not long after, with blood practically still fresh on their hands from the massacres at Cholula, the Spanish march confidently into Tenochtitlan. Moctezuma will never know whether his plans have come to fruition. A series of violent absurdities and an apocalyptic plague end with both him and his brother dead and the Spanish fleeing the city in disarray, leaving half their number slain, the rest pursued closely by the armies of the Triple Alliance.

Staggering to the end of the narrow causeway that joins Tenochtitlan to the shores of Lake Texcoco, Cortés and his five hundred Spaniards cry out in relief and triumph, expecting to flee into the arms of the hundred-thousand-strong army of the Confederacy of Tlaxcala.

But the shores of the lake and the plains beyond are deserted. Tlaxcala has abandoned them. The few Spaniards who survive to reach the fleet anchored at Veracruz bring stories not of fabulous riches but battlefield horrors and an empire greater than they could ever hope to defeat.

Newly elected to the throne, Lord Cuauhtémoc summons diplomats and translators to ply his vassals and tributaries with friendly words—preparing his missives not only in Nahuatl but Zapotec and Mixtec too, hoping for a more sympathetic hearing in the distant reaches of his sphere of influence. Now is the time to tear down walls and build bridges, to cultivate a loyalty that is stronger than fear, to end city-state rivalries and strengthen the Triple Alliance. The Spanish will be back, he’s sure, but this time there will be no cracks between Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, Tlacopan, and their tributaries for the invaders to pry apart, no desperate thousands eager to throw off the yoke of tribute and conscription. Next time, the Triple Alliance will be ready.

But, of course, that’s not how it happened.

---

To question received interpretations of history is an attack on the very foundations of power. Your detractors may hide the steel fist of ideological conformity in the velvet glove of professional cordiality, but make no mistake, Anarchivist—the moment you step into this role, you will be at war.

—Pachakutiq Qispe, The Anarchivist’s Charter

---

Linh lingered awkwardly outside Professor Mervis’s office for a few minutes. The door was open, but she was aware she was early. Finally, she poked her head in. Professor Mervis was typing, brows knit and shoulders bowed as if under a heavy weight. She didn’t look up until Linh rapped lightly on the doorframe. Instantly, Professor Mervis’s posture straightened, her face relaxing into the illusion of an easy smile. Linh couldn’t help but admire her strength—her determination to shield her trainees from the strain of fighting for the research group’s survival. Linh appreciated it deeply, but wished Professor Mervis didn’t have to bear the burden alone.

“How are things going?” she asked tentatively as she took her seat on the opposite side of Professor Mervis’s desk.

The Anarchivist offered a wry smile. “It will be what it will be. They’ll keep me or they won’t.”

Linh didn’t know what to say. The thought of losing the Anarchive was gut-wrenching. Over the past few months it had come to feel like her home away from home, her wellspring of inspiration and hope.

“And how are you doing?” Professor Mervis added quickly, smoothing over the awkward silence. “Are you holding up okay?”

Do I look that bad? Linh wondered. She usually disliked makeup but had put some concealer on the dark circles under her eyes that morning in the hopes of sparing Professor Mervis some worry.

Truthfully, she was exhausted. She felt she was living in at least four worlds at once. In the first, she attended classes, went to parties, spoke with classmates and advising staff about possible careers in software engineering, in consulting, in marketing, in design, in entrepreneurship. She and her peers debated whether it was better to move to Boston or New York, Seattle or Silicon Valley. In the second world, she stayed up late with postdoctoral researchers who were organizing to form a union or with local activists opposing gentrification, debating points of strategy and sharing artifacts Brenda had generated from alternate histories and futures that she thought they might find inspiring. In the third, she sat in virtual reality in the simulated chambers of the U.S. Congress or the oval office as long-suppressed debates about colonialism, empire, and militarism came to the fore and the legitimacy of the U.S. constitutional order shook to its very foundations. She lay awake in bed late at night, tracing the ramifying paths of history in her mind, reconstructing the roots of coups, wars, and police crackdowns—and finding paths that routed around them. In the fourth, she placed calls to doctors and pharmacists eight thousand miles away in Da Nang and cajoled her grandmother over the phone into making an appointment to get a diagnosis and prescription for her COPD.

Of the four worlds, the first felt by far the least real.

“I feel like I’m making progress,” was her non-answer to the question Professor Mervis had asked. “Let me show you what I have.”

She took a deep breath. She was nervous, she realized, to show Professor Mervis the artifacts she had plucked from the most recent timeline she had explored. This would be the first time she showed real data on certain concepts and directions she had only hinted at before.

Linh placed the photos on Professor Mervis’s desk, spreading them out for her to see. She had printed them on old glossy photo paper, trying to create the impression they had really been shot on mid twentieth century film. The first was a grainy, washed-out color photo of two U.S. marines leading a man in a navy officer’s uniform down a beach, apparently in handcuffs, with lush foliage in the background. The officer looked solemn—even angry—but the two marines seemed surprisingly joyful, grinning and waving at someone off-camera.

The next photo was a dramatic image seemingly shot from the deck of a PT boat, showing a navy cruiser firing an artillery shell into another smoke-shrouded warship at almost point-blank range. Both flew U.S flags.

“Whoa,” Professor Mervis said. “What exactly am I looking at here? And how is this connected to the constitution project?”

“June 17th 1968,” Linh began. “Growing discontent with the massive sacrifice of American lives for an unjust war in Southeast Asia boils over. The U.S. Second Fleet, stationed off the coast of Vietnam, mutinies against its officers, and enlisted sailors commandeer twenty-seven ships. They unilaterally offer to pull the 5th Marine Division, the Army 9th Infantry Division, and the 11th Marine Expeditionary Brigade out of Vietnam and take them home to the U.S. The Army and Marine Corps tell their troops they’ll be tried for treason if they leave, but thousands of enlisted men call their bluff, take their officers prisoner, and board the commandeered ships.”

The next photo showed the U.S. capitol. Navy planes flew low in formation overhead—the distinctive circled-star insignia on their wings crossed out in red paint. Below, the capitol grounds were lost in a sea of humanity. Protest signs denounced the war and hailed the homecoming troops and mutineers.

“Public sympathy swings heavily in favor of the enlisted men,” Linh went on. “Mass protests lead Congress to revoke its authorization for the war.”

Next, a photo of American GIs on the docks at the navy base in Long Beach, embracing friends and family.

“Johnson refuses to withdraw from the war, saying it’s a matter of national security and therefore his presidential prerogative. But the public condemnation is so overwhelming that instead of bowing to executive authority, Congress proposes—and the states ratify—the 27th Amendment. Not the 27th Amendment we know, but one that explicitly revokes the president’s exclusive authority over the armed forces and places them under closer congressional oversight.”

The next image showed the text of the amendment itself, typewritten on yellowish paper, as if sent over a telex machine.

“The national security loophole for executive overreach is closed, and the U.S. constitutional order changes forever—with a weakened executive and a less autonomous military.”

Then, a document entirely in Vietnamese—which Linh knew Professor Mervis couldn’t read.

“It also changes the constitution of Vietnam,” she explained. “The enlisted troops negotiate their own terms of peace with the NVA. In some timelines, things still get very bad inside Vietnam after that—a violent campaign against shopkeepers, educated professionals, and intellectuals. But in other timelines, the U.S. troops are not yet as thoroughly defeated as they would be by 1975 nor the NVA as embittered by the betrayals of liberal democracies, and they negotiate guarantees of political self-determination for Laos and exceptions to one-party rule so that Saigon and other parts of the south can elect regional leaders.”

Then, the photo Linh had stayed up all night staring at, that she couldn’t tear her gaze away from. The photo was taken in the midst of a crowd. Its intended object was clearly an NVA official and a U.S. marine riding together in the back of a Jeep as they left the peace negotiations. But what had captivated Linh was a man on the right-hand edge of the photo.

“That—” She pointed. She took a deep breath. She knew what she was about to say would sound insane. “That is my grandfather. Or, you know, looks exactly like him.”

Professor Mervis looked up at her. “Your grandfather who…”

“Who died in an airstrike on the town where he lived in 1970. A civilian farmer.”

Tears spilled over. She knew it was impossible—that the Anarchive’s generative models couldn’t actually know anything about her grandfather or extrapolate whether or not he would have survived if the course of the American war in Southeast Asia had gone differently. And yet that was what she saw when she looked at this image. Her grandfather, alive in 1971, smiling, in a country about to be at peace.

Professor Mervis shook her head. “This is…”

“I know,” Linh jumped in. “This wasn’t really the intent of the project. But I felt like if we only kept our focus on the founding and the constitution’s early history, we were missing crucial moments of potential contestation later on, and… and this…” She gestured to the photo that looked so uncannily like her grandfather, choked up again.

“No, what I was going to say,” Professor Mervis said, “is that this is brilliant. It’s original, it’s unexpected—and it explores radically divergent outcomes arising from antiwar resistance within the military that I think most people don’t even know existed. I think it’s the perfect thesis topic.”

Linh was at a loss for words. Professors in her classes had discouraged her from pursuing topics that touched directly on her family history—viewing it as non-objective, a distorting emotional bias. Professor Mervis wanted to honor her grief, to let her explore what might have been.

“I guess I’d better get to work, then,” she finally managed to say.

Professor Mervis’s expression soured a bit. “And quickly,” she agreed.

---

Recording.

The interior of a seminar room. Professor Mervis has just finished a presentation on algorithms for integrating data across textual, visual, and auditory domains for training generative models of historical timelines. As soon as she hits her conclusions slide, Professor Abrams’s hand shoots up with a question.

“Do your models exhibit political biases? Your tenure case documents emphasize your efforts to create an inclusive teaching environment, but have you given enough thought to the inclusion of diverse political perspectives?”

“To paraphrase George Box,” Professor Mervis replies without missing a beat, “all models are biased; some models are useful. But more to the point—we balance our training data sets across a wide range of historical artifacts and sources without regard to their ideological bent. And that’s essential for the model to be useful. Even modeling possibilities for social progress isn’t very useful if you can’t accurately estimate the magnitude of the possible backlash.”

“But many of the examples you showed—” Abrams presses. “They display a certain interest in protest, revolution, civil disruption—and portray certain increases in conservative power in a negative light—”

Professor Mervis’s eyebrows shoot up. “You think the consequences of a right-wing coup in the U.S. wouldn’t be negative? I believe that’s the example I gave that you’re referring to…”

Abrams seems flustered. “No, of course I’m not—I just mean, do you think this particular slant could exclude particular points of view from this area of research?”

“Do you suppose,” Professor Mervis asks, “that students who think markets don’t allocate capital or set prices in ways that serve the public good feel that their ideas are especially welcome in your Introduction to Microeconomics class? Yes, I have my own set of interests in my research, and they’re no more politically neutral than anyone else’s. But my models are open source, and others are free to pursue their own hypotheses and trace whatever counterfactual paths through history interest them.”

Abrams still isn’t deterred. “But the difference is in your field, the space of possibilities, of valid ‘alternate history,’ is determined by the model, not by objective facts.”

“And that isn’t true in economic theory?”

Abrams looks chagrinned. “Point taken.”

Another hand. Another question. “Have you talked to hedge funds or VC firms about licensing this technology for financial forecasting? Couldn’t you use it for economic modeling or to predict investment outcomes?”

The Anarchivist visibly takes a breath before answering. Her eyes reveal her sorrow at being stuck in the narrow thinking of this one timeline, the fervor of her desire to explode her colleagues’ unstated assumptions, to expand their minds to a wider range of historical, social, economic, and technological paths. She takes a breath as if to launch into an explanation of all of this, the full scope of her frustration and despair and disappointment. She lets the breath out.

“No, I haven’t,” she says, and moves on.

---

The delegates from South Africa and India take the microphone first. To the chamber of assembled World Trade Organization delegates, they describe the nightmare unfolding in their countries—SARS-CoV-2 filling their hospitals, killing their doctors and nurses. Oxygen supplies running out. Tens of thousands of makeshift funeral pyres in the streets, outside the overtaxed crematoria. Millions will die if nothing is done.

The vaccines, they insist, must be shared. Their pharmaceutical manufacturers have the know-how to make millions of doses, if only they could license the patents, could get access to the key scientific insights that publicly funded research produced and a few private companies now monopolize.

Nonsense, the delegates from Germany respond. You’re not technologically ready. You would hurt innovation. You wouldn’t be able to distribute the vaccines anyway.

The delegates from Colombia get up to speak in support of the technology transfer agreement, then Peru, then Ecuador, then Thailand, Vietnam, and Botswana. But the delegates from the rich countries seem unconcerned. Their voting power and enforcement power in the WTO is proportional to the size of their economies, so what do they care if these second-rate economic powers object?

Then, throughout the chamber, phones begin to ring and vibrate, interrupting the delegate from Kenya’s address. Murmurs of concern ripple through the seats. The delegates from Germany and Canada, from the U.S. and Japan are beginning to learn what their colleagues mean when they call for a new non-aligned movement, a new coalition to take a stand for their survival in the face of lethal greed.

Opening news apps and websites, the delegates learn that at oil wells in Nigeria and Sudan, at mines in South Africa and Chile, at garment factories in Bangladesh and Mauritius, at ports from Sao Paolo to Jakarta, workers have left their posts and walked out. Supply chains already wracked by the pandemic are cut off completely.

In the U.S. and Europe, protesters flock to legislators’ offices, research funding agencies, and pharmaceutical companies, demanding an end to vaccine apartheid and preaching global solidarity in the face of the pandemic.

What are you doing? the U.S. admonishes the developing countries, You’ll kill your own economies, alienate your trade partners.

You are killing us anyway, India and South Africa respond. We have no choice but to fight.

To restore the global flow of everything from cobalt and copper to soy and coffee, the rich countries give in. In a matter of months, decentralized molecular foundries spring up in Nairobi, Bangalore, Saigon, Manila—cleanrooms filled with reactor vessels churning out mRNA and microfluidic devices producing lipid nanoparticles. Concerning coronavirus variants are detected in India and southern Africa, but a profusion of cheap and effective vaccines suppresses them before they can circulate widely or mutate further. As COVID declines and the global biotech sector booms, research centers in Cape Town and Bangkok circulate new vaccine designs: mRNA sequences encoding immunogens against HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, and zika, ready to go into production and clinical testing.

But, of course, that’s not how it happened.

---

It was almost 11:45 pm by the time Linh finished submitting her code to the Anarchive computing cluster to generate the next set of artifacts from a series of timelines where instead of triggering a constitutional crisis, President Johnson resigned and left Hubert Humphrey in charge of winding down the U.S. war in southeast Asia.

She rushed to the dining hall. Lights still on—thank god. Just enough time left to fill up a plate and smuggle it back to her dorm room. When she got there, Kavita, her roommate, and Amy, a mutual friend, were sitting on Kavita’s bed, notebooks and laptops spread out around them.

“Problem set?” Linh asked.

“Studying. Finals are in a week and a half,” Amy pointed out.

“Right…” Linh had been so wrapped up in finishing her honors thesis that she’d hardly started studying for her exams. For a moment, she felt a bit lightheaded.

“Are you alright?” Kavita asked.

“I’m fine…” Linh realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She sat at her desk and ate ravenously.

“Worried about exams?” Kavita pressed.

Linh shook her head. “More worried about my thesis advisor, honestly.”

She explained the situation—the Qispe Foundation funding running out, Professor Mervis’s tenure case. “Her meetings with the academics committee haven’t been going well. Her seminar talks either. I mean—her presentations are always great, but some of the more senior faculty—it seems like they’re just out to pick apart everything she says.”

“They can’t just fire her, can they?” Amy asked.

Linh nodded. “At this point, I think it’s very likely.”

They sat in heavy silence for a moment.

“I took her class and absolutely loved it,” Kavita offered. “Everyone else in my section did too. I think a lot of people would be sad to lose her. So many first-generation students have told me they feel like she’s the only one who understands them.”

Linh nodded grimly. It had been hard to find friends—let alone faculty mentors—who didn’t take for granted her familiarity with various aspects of university life and the academic system.

Amy still seemed incredulous. “Why would they want to get rid of such a great teacher?”

Because she scares them. Linh thought. Because she tells them the system that placed them on top of the world isn’t natural, isn’t permanent. Because she tells them the truth—that things could be different.

“Wait,” Linh said, sitting up suddenly. “All those people in her class with you—do you think they would care enough to try to prevent her from being fired?”

“Well… I think some of them would be upset at least,” Kavita said. “What do you think we could do? Write a petition for people to sign?”

Linh felt as though she had just started a new modeling project in the Anarchive—started exploring a new fulcrum of historical divergence. She could imagine the possible pathways events could take, ramifying in her mind, the actions that would shift the matrix of probabilities.

“Maybe,” she said. “But I have another idea.”

---

Recording.

Professor Banner is already seated at the head of the long table in the meeting room, Professor Randal at his left. Professor Merivs and Professor Kaur enter, eyes fixed on each other as they stalk to their seats like gladiators circling the blood-soaked sand of an arena.

Professor Mervis puts on a serene mask as she takes her seat. Smiles pleasantly at Banner. Banner returns a sad, sympathetic half-smile.

“Well, since we’re all here,” Banner says, “I think we can get started. Aaliyah, I don’t want to keep you in suspense, so I’ll just be frank and get to the point. The committee has decided not to renew the funding for the Anarchive. As a result, since the Anarchive houses the key resources that would be required for you to continue your current program of research, the Department of Computer Science and the Department of History have jointly declined your application for tenure.”

The Anarchivist’s composure slips. Weariness descends over her face. Her shoulders bow. She rubs at the corners of her eyes. The grief in her expression is quickly replaced by a strange kind of relief. Her fight—or at least this fight—is over, and she is so, so tired.

Harendra Kaur’s back is to the camera, hiding his face, but his body language is gloating—relaxed back in his chair, one leg crossed over his knee.

“Now,” Banner goes on, “there are a multitude of reasons for this decision, including the financial realities of our budget constraints, and differences in departmental priorities, that have nothing to do with a lack of respect for your work or for you personally, which I can go into more detail on if you’d like, but…”

Banner pauses, turns to look over his shoulder at the door to the meeting room. There is a disturbance in the hallway outside, a cacophony of muffled voices.

Banner has just opened his mouth to continue when the door opens. Undergraduates pour into the room—tentatively at first, then gaining confidence as dozens of young people surge through the doorway, carrying signs that read Save the Anarchive, We ♡ Prof. Mervis, Chair Banner don’t silence historians, Alt. Hist. studies are ESSENTIAL.

Kaur stands up, backs defensively away from the conference table. Someone starts a chant. “Let her stay! Let her stay! Let her stay!”

A careful observer might be able to read Banner’s lips as he addresses the protesters. “Please leave the room! This is not a public hearing! Please—”

But he is drowned out. “Let her stay! Let her stay!”

The Anarchivist is beaming. She stands up from her seat, head held high again as several students work their way through the crowd one by one to hug her.

“We love you Professor Mervis!” someone yells from the back of the room, eliciting cheers and laughter.

Kaur is shouting over the protesters now. “Please get out! This is a private meeting!”

The chant changes. “We’re not leaving!” Clap. Clap. Clap clap clap. “We’re not leaving!” Clap. Clap. Clap clap clap.

The committee gathers to confer somewhere near the camera, just outside its field of view. Banner’s gesticulating hand comes in and out of the frame as they deliberate, talking over one another.

Banner: “See, this is what I told you would—”

Kaur: “—believe that those brats think they own the university. They can’t just—”

Randal: “Isn’t there some way we can stretch the budget to accommodate—”

Banner: “—would almost certainly be enough to cover salary and equipment costs for a small research group if we could just shift some of the sponsorship money from—”

Randal: “—and with an endowed instructorship, it wouldn’t even be that expensive to—”

Kaur: “—can’t believe you’re seriously considering reversing our—”

All the while, the chants grow louder, the Anarchivist standing arm in arm with the students.

But, of course, that’s not how it happened.

---

Professor Mervis emerged from the front door of the computer science building about an hour after the meeting had begun. Her shoulders were stooped as she squeezed past the three campus police officers stationed at the entrance, casting a nervous glance at the handguns and riot batons in the officers’ utility belts. She made her way to where Linh and a handful of other students who had shown up to protest were milling around. Amy and Kavita were sitting on the grass, using their protest signs to shield themselves from the sun. Some students were still halfheartedly waving their “Save the Anarchive” signs at passersby, but they’d given up on trying to hand out flyers or talk to anyone. Hardly a single person had bothered to even make eye contact or take off their headphones all morning. That had been painful enough already, but it hurt Linh’s heart far more to see the look of resignation and defeat on Professor Mervis’s face.

“So I suppose you know how that went,” the Anarchivist said.

Linh nodded. Across the quad, movers had already started clearing out the rooms that housed the Anarchive. More campus police stood nearby, keeping an eye on the racks of servers and hard drives piled on a tarp on the grass.

“I’m so sorry,” Linh said. Her stomach was a knot of guilt and shame. She’d failed Professor Mervis, failed her colleagues at the Anarchive. “We should have done more, started earlier—”

Professor Mervis offered a thin smile, shook her head. “You can’t blame yourself for this. I’m just so grateful that you all showed up to support me. It means a lot.”

They fell silent for a few more moments.

“You know,” Linh said, “I thought I really believed everything you said in those meetings—that the ways history might have gone differently matter, that in some probabilistic sense those other outcomes and possibilities are very real. But it’s so hard to believe that now, knowing the outcome.”

“You have to show up for your Paris Commune or you’ll never have your Bastille,” Professor Mervis said. “You have to show up for your Reconstruction or you’ll never have your Civil Rights Act. You have to show up for your Vellore Mutiny or you’ll never have your Purna Swaraj.”

Linh couldn’t help smiling. Before meeting Professor Mervis, she doubted she would have known what half of that meant.

“Keep creating possibilities,” Professor Mervis said. “Maybe next time things will go differently.”

But, Linh wondered, would there be a next time? “What are you going to do now?”

Professor Mervis pulled a business card from her pocket, handed it to Linh. “Something a little more fun.” The pain receded from the Anarchivist’s expression for a moment, and an impish grin made her eyes sparkle.

Superposition Interactive—the card read—alternate history VR games. Below that: Aaliyah Mervis, Ph.D., Creative Director.

So Professor Mervis would be alright. She would also—judging by the address on the card—be in California, thousands of miles away from them, from the students whose lives and worldviews she could have shaped, from the colleagues whose minds she could have changed.

“But what about the Anarchive,” Linh asked? “Is the whole field of study just going to disappear?”

Linh didn’t have to worry about her thesis anymore, at least. She had submitted it to the department a few weeks before, and Professor Banner had approved it surprisingly quickly—perhaps pre-emptively trying to make up for what he and the committee were about to do to Professor Mervis. But Linh had daydreamed about a future doing research of her own—building new algorithms and incorporating new data types into their training archives to explore what factors could push history onto one path or another.

“I don’t think it’ll ever really disappear,” Professor Mervis said, “as long as people keep imagining other pasts, other futures.”

Maybe, Linh reflected, this was a blessing in disguise. It was a chance to go beyond abstract imaginings and try seeking out potential alternate futures in the real world instead. It was a chance to escape the pressure of the academic environment before it exhausted her will to kick history off its predetermined course.

“Before I go—” Professor Mervis dug in her shoulder bag, pulled out a gift-wrapped book. “I have a present for you—something that will explain everything you need to know about being an Anarchivist.” She handed the book to Linh. “Goodbye, Linh. And thank you.”

She started down the path across the quad.

Linh tore off the wrapping paper. Underneath was a macroeconomics textbook—the utterly conventional, orthodox kind that Professor Mervis had so often criticized. The kind that hid neocolonial dynamics of debt and trade behind anodyne systems of equations. The kind that presented exploitation and inequality as inevitable consequences of mathematics, as hidebound as the laws of Newtonian physics.

Linh leafed through it with a mixture of surprise, distaste, and disappointment, until she noticed a short inscription on the inside cover:

To derive the core tenets of being an Anarchivist, begin with the following premise: there is always an alternative.

The rest is left as an exercise for the (extremely capable) reader.

– A

Linh couldn’t help grinning. She looked up, hoping to share one last mischievous glance with Professor Mervis, but the Anarchivist had already disappeared around the corner of the physics building, and it was up to her to imagine what might happen next.

© 2025 Owen Leddy

[Issue 2025.73]

Comment on the stories in this issue on the TFF Press blog.