It’s a well-established ethical principle that brains in vats are eeeevil; thus the brain should use the eeny-meeny-miney-moe method of decision and laugh (to itself) with maniacal glee over any dastardly consequences, real or imagined (how does a brain in a vat know the difference, after all?), that result.
Ivan Ivanovich, the brain’s loyal henchman, rough and tough and used to hardship, is about to face the toughest decision of his life, however. After a fit of conscience he smashes the vat and dumps the brain out to die on the trolley tracks. Ransacking the secret laboratory that the mad brain used to conduct its evil experiments, he finds an old collection of notes taken by the brain many years ago, before it was reduced to a floating cerebrum. The notes lay out a design for an almost-working time machine, and Ivan realizes in a flash the final modification needed for it to succeed.
Building the machine takes months of grueling toil, but Ivan Ivanovich is rough and tough and used to hardship. Finally it’s ready. He flips the switch, the air around him turns inside-out, and in a few instants he finds himself in a field, at harvest time, surrounded by burly peasants. With a thrill Ivan recognizes the antiquity of the technology and the people’s clothing–it’s worked! He’s in the past!
Unable to understand the peasants’ language, he is taken for a simpleton and put to work slaughtering pigs from dawn till dusk; it’s nasty, dreary, unrelenting work, but Ivan Ivanovich is rough and tough and used to hardship. After two and a half months as a farmhand he has almost forgotten his former life when a stranger, a Russian, comes to town with disturbing news: all able-bodied and sentient-minded men and boys in the village are to be conscripted into the Tsar’s army, to be marched off to war in some godforsaken foreign land. It’s a death sentence–but Ivan rejoices because with his rudimentary grasp of Russian (he learned it from his grandmother) he has finally found someone he can communicate with!
The stranger is mean and unsympathetic, and refuses to help Ivan get a berth on a steamer to America until Ivan gives him the tube sock full of marijuana he’s been keeping in his pants for a special occasion, but Ivan Ivanovich is rough and tough and used to hardship. Within a week he’s halfway across the ocean. One day in steerage he meets a mysterious green-eyed devushka who shows an unusual interest in him. He takes her up on deck and they stand at the rail together, watching the cloud-dotted horizon and the sea speeding by. Something about her face is haunting him, something from his memory. He can’t put his finger on it. She, on the other hand, seems mostly interested in his rugged physique and the promising bulge in his trousers (actually his other tube sock, filled with cocaine) and puts her finger on it almost immediately. The touch startles Ivan and he pitches forward over the railing.
His life flashes before his eyes. It’s not the impending impact with a lower deck that shocks him, for Ivan Ivanovich is rough and tough and . . . well, you get the idea. No, it’s the monumental ethical dilemma now before him. For in an instant of free-fall Ivan has realized who the mysterious woman is. That face! That accent! And his grandmother’s strangest story, the tale of the unknown man who seduced her on the ship from the Old Country–I am my own grandpa!, shouts Ivan (to himself). And now . . .
Should he nail her, committing foul incest and giving rise to a line of thieves and henchmen whose wickedness Ivan knows firsthand? Or abstain and damn himself to nonexistence?
