If yer like me, you've seen the movies, read the stories, and watched the news. No matter where ya' look, the future seems to be a pretty bleak place to live. It ain't. So relax.
There still ain't no flyin' cars, no androids walkin' around killin' people. People ain't livin' under ground! We've not been forced to live on the moon or Mars! There're no mutants, monsters, or aliens...well, no aliens you gotta worry any about.
Shit, it's fuckin' rippin'! I love it here! Today, on the news - and believe me, there are hun'erds of t.v. stations t' choose from, but I turned to CNN-Q2 (Yeah, all 'em mergers an' takeovers an' digital channel thingos have given a lotta stations some funky names; my favorite's WB2LI1xTNT-TV. I don't know, so don't ask me) - well, on the news, they showed a picture of some old guy. Said he was one hun'erd eight years old. Not "a hun'erd and eight." That's not how you say it. One hun'erd eight! Yeah, one "o" eight, and he died. Guess what? - and I love this - he was "the last livin' 'hippie'!" Is that the coolest thing y'ever heard!? The guy dies, and an entire bullshit culture goes with him. I mean, okay, he was a 'yuppie' after he was a 'hippie,' but to some degree we'll always have them damn 'yuppies.' And, I guess, kids'll always wear tie-dyed shirts. But it's officially over now.
See, they brought me to the future 'causea one thing: some fossil I found. Turns out the fossil is from the future - sorta - and through a whole big loada time-travel crap with scientists, some crazy woman, and a flyin' ship, I got here.
The fossil was from an animal nobody knew existed. Apparently this nutbrain future lady wanted it that way, so she came back to my time an' buried the thing. So me, diggin' a well for some farmer, I find it. And I keep it, make a few calls. Nobody'd ever heard of anything like this. It was some sort of lizard with little useless wings and, they said, hair - like a mammal. Now even I know that don't make no sense. Anyways, I learned that this thing was livin' in the rain forests, for like years they say. And it has a cure for a disease that attacks your res - respite - shit. Breathing...it tightens up your throat, filling it quick-like with gobs an' gobs a mucus, and in forty-eight hours, you can't breathe. You die painful. Sometimes people die faster'n that. I'd heard one person who got it severe? And he died in three hours.
I saw it all happen in front of my face once. On the first trip "forwards"- you know, like in Time.
It was on the New York subway - well, at a stop. And this guy was apparently headin' to a hospital with his friend, 'cause they realized he was in the last, um, stages, of the disease, right?
So a guy saying he was a doctor - and after you hear this, you'll know he wasn't, no doctor would pull this shit - he runs up to the guy, a kid, and lays him down. He asks for a knife, someone gives him one - a large one at that, but no one asked any questions. Then he, and this is it, he actually slices the guy's throat open saying it's a..."traykeyonomy." He says this thing'll help him breathe! So - and no big fuckin' surprise here - of course, the kid dies! I mean, geez! Even I know you don't slice someone's throat open.
Needless to say, I told everyone we should beat the crap outta this guy, and then I was grabbed and "thrust forward in time" some more...
So a Dr. Maneszewski told me that that's how it is in the future. But in the future they find this animal who can cure it...then some nut-job thinks that they shouldn't mess with nature, that the disease came from nature, that nature will one day stop it - this, while people are dying everywhere and have been for a buncha' years.
But I'm gettin' ahead of this little story here.
The time machine guys, they wanna go back - just a little - and give the animal to someone and let them discover that this animal's piss will save the world - and a lotta lives! So the nut-job...by the way, the nut-job is the young chick I mentioned b'fore, a med student. Sheila Bermudez-Kowalski (apparently you gotta be a Pollak in the future), an' she had pert titties. She travels across the country overnight, in one of those commercial 7-2000s they got now, and gets to California where she steals the animal and uses the time machine. And she goes back a couple hun'erd years, and she buries the animal.
I know, so what? Get another animal! Well, I have some good news and bad news: the good news is: the rainforests're back! And they're huge I'm tellin' ya'! The bad news is, we ain't allowed in or even near 'em anymore...countries now shoot people who enter or disturb their rainforests...and you really don't wanna' hear what they do to you if you're a hunter - especially if you hunt whales! Even the Asians stopped huntin' whales because of the World Preservation fanaticals.
Well, they can't get another animal because they hadda get special permission that one time to enter the rain forest to test and see if they could get a cure! And after only eight months, the schmucks scored - got real lucky - and found something. Oh, hey, this disease? It's only in the U.S. and no one's allowed in or out of the country - borders are sealed and, strangely, everyone thinks that's normal...something about a panic back when the last Vietnam Vet kicked the bucket! ('Parently some guy whose dad was a big-time general happened t' tell his son about all sortsa covert shit that the son, the Vet, then revealed on his own deathbed.) I mean, I think if any country deserves to be screwed this way it's ours. The people here're disrespectful of each other an' the government, and they still think the world owes 'em. White, black, red, or yellow, if you're born in the U.S. you're under a incorrect impression the world should bow before you - screw that...everything's gotta be earned in life.
It's not like you can't go out, it's not like everyone is dying of it. It's like that AIDS, only they're unsure still how it's passed, and only about one out of every 5,000 people have it.
Now, ya' can't just travel back a thousand times. There's always something that'll change. Like, if you was the one which went back and built that big Stonehenge stuff. You took machinery back and placed a bunch of rocks on this place, because ya' knew someone was gonna', I dunno, put a goddamned ugly lawnjockey there or soemthin'. Well this "monument" would stop that from ever happening. Future is thus changed!
Look, some chick just went back a few centuries and buried an animal. What'd it do? Well, at some point - somewhere - it made me twenty-five large richer. That's an effect of this whole time-traveling thing. It runs on hard-to-find chemicals of some sort, the time machine. Some rare "ores" or something - I didn't really listen, didn't care. The word "ore" sounds right. Doesn't really matter.
Okay, but here's the deal, the whole story: this Sheila went back and buried the animal. I found it in my time. The fossil was put in a museum, I was given twenty-five thou for it. In the future, by the time she's returned, the fossil is seen in a showcase in a museum by some smart, sane guys. They trace where it came from and come find me in the past before I sell it...which is something I don't remember doing, but I saw it, so I remember seeing me do it...and we go back to my time and then go forward again (they said that's how it has to be done, I have to decide in the past to give it to these future people or the future where I sold it will still exist and when we appear in the their future, the fossil will be back in the museum even though I was holding it because if we just continued from the moment where I was given the check, then we're on that time-line even though it seems like we'd be on another one where I went with these white-coats on a time trip but it doesn't work that way and they don't know why. I ain't repeatin' that, so I hope you got it all.). So they show me how people're dyin' all over. Then they take me further into the future.
I know, you're wondering what the heck I'm doing here. Some guy apparently told the scientists that I'd be of some help, because of my "integral" role in the past...someone told them it would be good karma. And, hey, who'm I t' argue with karma? If karma gets me to travel inta the future an' stuff, then karma's friggin' cool wit' me!
Now, this Sheila gal, see, is in custody and won't talk they say. I'm only interested in what this machine can do. It's like somethin' out of Popular Science t' me. I try t' scare 'em and say, "What if you crashed in my time, you'd be stuck there." But they just shrugged and one guy said, "Never heard of automatic pilot?" So that makes me wonder what airbags in the future're like, 'cause I was in an accident once - asshole hit me hard almost head on - and the airbag saved my life, but the piece of crap nearly suffocated me and didn't deflate right.
I did learn that in the future the gas ain't polluting the air even a hundredth of what it was. Electric cars can go one-hunerd-seventy-five miles an hour and self-charge too! Cops finally give tickets to the asshole people goin' too damn slow on the highways. There're no sex diseases! You have no idea how cool that alone makes the world. There've been improvements in salene and silicon like you can't imagine - another cool thing! An "ol'-fashioned" giant t.v. costs two hun'erd dollars, cause there ain't a big demand for them anymore, now with the DVs being the big electronic store item. Oh, an there's a pill you can take that'll make you feel full once you've had an amount of liquor that "relates to your body weight," so that way you don't have to worry about drinkin' too much. Works great. Los Angeles has a good sewer system and good public transportation and they know when an earthquake is comin' about two weeks in advance. And lastly, the boys at NASA regained respect when they, and I mean our boys alone, saved an alien space ship. The whole thing was televised.
Just one guy up there actu'ly saw the aliens - and they do look like that guy you always saw on them tabloid covers, with the big eyes an' all…y'know, from the astronaut describin' 'em - and we still haven't had any actual communication with the freaks...as a matter of fact, they was, um, reluctant to let the astronauts help (but no one thinks it's any kind o' coincidence that the secret t' time travel was discovered a few days after this). So this is all real cool. And then there's a disease that's killin' people.
So maybe you're thinkin' this disease makes it sound all really bleak and all, but this is the great thing: the time machine travels through time, right? Well, it's also a mini airplane-type thing, so you can actually go anywhere you want. So, what they figure out, is that Sheila flew as far as Cincinnati before kicking that baby into timewarp mode. This means that she was flyin' while she was time-traveling - not a rec'amendation unless you know where you're landin'. So me, mister simple guy without the white coat, tells them to send me back before she buried the animal. But they don't get me. They say, "Hey, we don't know when she buried it." So I say, "Well, then just send me way ,way back." And they say "why," and I say, "shut up," and they say "well...," and I talk them into givin' me a shot and gettin' me some materials.
So it's like the 1800s or something, and there's nothin' around - but I'd seen some Indians and a wagon-coach thing. It takes me and these other guys about a month (one pussy had never camped out before, so he was drivin' the rest of us bonkers), but we were able to build three big walls, each with, like, a, uh, cryptic symbol on it so that folks in the future will think they're these important monuments (Yep, one born every goddamned minute!)...Walls're about eight feet thick, so that if she arrives in a hun'erd years, they'll still be sturdy, ya' know? All facing different ways. Each one about fifty yards from the spot that Sheila'll one day bury the animal. So when they come back for me and these other guys who helped me put the walls up there, we're in the future again, an' I notice that the time machine is different, and they tell me it all worked...
In 1842 on August the 11th (which is the day, two hun'erd years later, that that Robin Williams guy dies), at four-thirty-six in the morning, Sheila flew the time machine right past a giant wall which was facing south-west...four seconds later, about fifty yards away, she hit a wall facing directly west. When it crashed, airbags - in the front, back and sides - all shot out, cushioning the inside of the ship. The nose of the time-travel machine was crushed at that moment of th' impact...this kicked-in the auto-pilot which sent the ship back to what they like to call "present day": 2058. It appeared in a barren field. Some goof passing by in a car at the time saw the thing appear and called the police on his phone...In an hour, the white coats and me were at the scene. Inside was Sheila - out cold. Shaken up bad, but okay. In the back, in a cage, was this weird, small animal.
In 2052, on December the 25th, at noon, the phone rang at the home of a scientist. This scientist, by no coincidence - and this was done just to be "ironic" - was a Dr. Bermudez, dad to nice-titties-Sheila. Five days later a cure was found for a disease called the Tracheal Grippe - a term, the 'coats say, which doesn't quite, uh, fully describe the disease.
So, in 2066, on the spot where the "Three Walls" had sat for, around, two hun'erd twenty years, they demolished 'em and made way for this amazing - and I mean cool - and huge entertainment park where almost any dream can come true...with the help of "extreme reality" (The thing that followed the bullshit "virtual reality"). Since they was on private land, the walls weren't never really considered any sort of monument until people heard they were gonna' be torn down. The people who put up a stink, lost.
I still live in the future...but, by the time this is read, it'll be the past and there'll probably still be books and movies and stories about bleak futures. They're all crap.
END
About Keith Planit: A writer of finite wisdom, Keith was blessed with a surname that makes him the perfect sci-fi writer...or real estate salesman. Published by Marvel Comics (a Spider-Man story), he is working with the Noggin Channel to develop a kids' series (keep your fingers crossed). Keith is also a stand-up comic. No, really...
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