This choice: In a cruel military way (Like the Gernan Navis) • Go Back...Chapter #5World of the Rising Sun by: Unknown Big shock number one occurred as Jake immediately fell to the floor as he passed through the mirror.
“What the heck?” he mumbled, rising to his feet.
The room around him was completely different now. For one thing, all the furnishings had completely disappeared. Jake was simply sprawled out across a sparse, barren floor. The room itself was smaller than before, but well lit and quite clean.
As Jake rose to his feet, he discovered the next big shock of this strange new reality.
He was a girl.
He was also a considerably shorter, thinner person than he had been. The color of his skin seemed to have deepened as well. He was now wearing a long, navy skirt, a pair of white, loose fitting knee socks, and black maryjanes. A sailor-style white blouse with a red tie was on over his torso. Jake could feel long, straight hair brushing against the back of his neck as he looked about examining his new self.
“Why am I a girl now?” he whispered.
Then he discovered big shock number three.
Jake was no longer speaking English. The words that came from his lips, in fact the very words that composed his thought processes right now, were Japanese – not English.
And as soon as he had uttered something aloud in this strange tongue that he suddenly spoke with the fluency of a native, Jake had become fully aware of the non-English nature of his words.
“I'm in some weird, parallel universe where … what? I'm a Japanese schoolgirl?!” he muttered, staring down at the skirt wrapped about his legs and the tiny but firm, perky breasts pushing up from beneath his sailor's blouse.
“I've got to find Aunt Diane's mirror in this reality and use it to get someplace else,” he said to himself.
As he prepared to leave the room though, Jake happened to spot something that immediately kindled his interest. A textbook sat neatly propped up in the corner of the room, as though someone here had just been studying from it. The title read: Hokubei-ken no zukai no rekishi – The Illustrated History of the North American Prefectures.
“What sort of strange new world is this?” wondered Jake.
Figuring he could always go off in search of Aunt Diane's mirror (or its equivalent in this reality) at some later point, Jake sat down with what presumably was his own school book and started reading.
Evidently, in this version of reality the United States of America no longer existed as Jake remembered it. The nation was now called Kitaamerikashu and was a puppet state controlled, just like the rest of the western hemisphere, by Imperial Japan. The former United States was now populated by the descendants of several waves of wealthy Asian settlers who had re-colonized North America, seizing it from the Americans in much the same way as European settlers had taken the land from the Native Americans. Caucasians were now poor second-class citizens in this strange, new world. Having come from an educated, middle class family before, the only way Jake could have maintained a semblance of his prior life was to have been transformed into someone of Japanese heritage.
“And apparently a girl, too!” he laughed, again looking down at himself, this time with more humor than shock. He sat in a most unladylike fashion, with his legs comfortably spread wide on the floor and his skirt draped between, almost like a blanket. He might have been granted the ability to speak Japanese in this new reality, but he had certainly not gained any of his analog's feminine poise or mannerisms.
Jake continued to read more and more, becoming thoroughly engrossed in this weird, alternate history, delving deeper into the timeline of the textbook he read.
Japan and Germany had won World War II. That much came as no great surprise by this point. The Nazis had conquered all of Europe with the exception of Italy. The Italians in turn ruled North Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean. The Japanese somehow had seized not just all of Asia but the entire western hemisphere!
As Jake plunged deeper and deeper into this new version of history, he finally came across what he believed was the fracture line that differentiated this world from his home. Apparently on Feb. 15 of 1933 in this world, an assassin named Giuseppe Zangara had killed Franklin Roosevelt less than a month before the inauguration. FDR had never been president – never even been sworn in! He was just a historical footnote: a president-elect killed before day one on the job.
Without Roosevelt, the great depression lingered much longer and the succeeding presidents (John Nance Garner, Charles Lindbergh, Henry Wallace, and then someone called William Dudley Pelley) had all insisted on a strict policy of American Isolationism, refusing to be drawn into World War II – which apparently had dragged out much, much longer in this reality!
When Senator Robert Taft ran against President Pelley in 1948, there were widespread accusations of vote tampering having been responsible for Pelley's landslide reelection. Millions of Americans who knew they hadn't voted for Pelley took to the streets rioting over the alleged theft of the white house. The U.S. Army had even mutinied, refusing to obey President Pelley's commands to restore order through violence. When the army itself had failed to support the commander-in-chief, Pelley suddenly became interested in the ongoing World War. He invited Japanese occupation of the United States to restore order. Forty divisions of Japanese troops were shipped to America. And although a brief civil war had ensued, the Japanese had won and President Pelley's power had been cemented.
Only now, he owed allegiance to the Japanese.
World War II finally ended in 1950 when Dr. Yoshio Nishina perfected something called the Ni-Go Project – Japan's atomic bomb. It's successful use against a pair of small, Chinese towns marked the end of World War II, as well as the end of any meaningful resistance in puppet states like America.
After the war, the U.S. Constitution had been repealed and the Third Continental Congress was convened to draft a new constitution. The result was Kitaamerikashu – the Union of North American Prefectures. The new nation was to throw its doors open to wealthy Japanese emigres, who would be given free homes and land as well as cushy government jobs in exchange for relocating to the new world.
The rest of history read like a strange, wonderland of Buck Rogers style science fiction with everything but flying cars! The new owners of America were wealthy, highly educated, technophiles who pushed grand, new industrial innovations upon their new homeland. High-speed monorails were built, electronics research was strongly funded, automated factories run by robots were produced, blazing fast computers were developed, space travel blossomed, and the world had quickly become a technological utopia.
The first satellites had gone up in 1953. Man had landed on the moon in 1959. Manned exploration of the asteroid belt had started in 1979. A plethora of permanently occupied space stations dotted Earth's orbit now, and seven small lunar cities existed in self-sufficiency on the surface of the moon.
Highly advanced holographic technology has become widespread, available for three-dimensional entertainment throughout the industrialized world much the way movies and television had been in Jake's own world. Likewise, vividly realistic virtual reality worlds were now possible thanks to the development of both ultra-fast computers and amazingly realistic holography.
The medical advances as well were astounding. A cancer cure had been developed back in 1973! Cloning techniques now enabled a severed limb to be re-grown. Genetic engineering advances had eliminated a host of a congenital diseases. The common cold still existed, but that seemed to be about the only disease this world hadn't yet eradicated!
“Maybe this world isn't so bad after all,” Jake said to himself … in Japanese, with a high-pitched girlish voice, he noted silently.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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