Story opens in a police interrogation cell (or similar).
Our hero has been arrested for killing some kid named Jeffery Dahlmer (for instance). He explains to the cop that yeah, he did it, but he was a time traveller who was “fixing” the 20th century. The only reason he bothered with a small-fry like Dahlmer was because he’d already fixed most of the problems.
He says he’d started by killing whatshisname-the guy who shot Arch-Duke Ferdinand (“Who?” says the cop). Then, says the guy “I shot a young Austrian guy named Adolph Hitler when he was still a struggling painter in Austria. Then I killed Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and…etc”
Eventually the guy finishes confessing and the cop says (shocked) “IF what you’re saying is true…you’ve killed nearly 100 people! That makes you the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. Nobody has a higher body-count than you! My god. One person responsible for almost 100 deaths?! That’s…obscene.”
The guy leans back and says “I can live with that.”
I’ve kinda wondered what the effect of a Morning Edition scenario would be (the TV show’s premise was that a Chicago average-joe, decent-hearted kinda guy keeps getting tomorrow’s newspaper, and thus rushes around trying to prevent whatever disaster will eventually make the headlines).
Seems to me that over a day, even in a city the size of Chicago, there can’t be that many fatal accidents, kidnapped children, bank robberies, whatever. Assuming he stops as many as he can, wouldn’t the accident/crime fatality rate in Chicago plunge to near-nothing? Statisticians would be going nuts trying to explain it.
Back of the envelope estimate: Chicago’s got a population of about 3 million. The US death rate is about 2 people per day per 100,000, so about 60 people die in a day in Chicago; our hero can probably prevent a couple of the deaths in a day, but he probably won’t have much effect on the overall statistics. Now newspapermen would be going crazy looking for good front page local stories, since our hero would tend to erase those…
Yes, but wouldn’t the vast majority of those 60 be dying unremarkable natural deaths? As I recall, the character was going ou of his way to pre-empt deaths from accidents and homicides, i.e. deaths unusual enough to appear in the paper. If the murder rate in Chicago drops from 2 per day (roughly the 1998 rate, in the middle of the show’s run) to 0.3 per day, that’s going to be noted and studied.
That’s true - and the incidence of crimes with multiple deaths or serious injuries would go even further down. I predict a lot of boasting by the mayor and police chief.
