On return

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Time Traveller Reports

1991 AD

I've just returned from the past – 1991, to be exact! I emerged from my time-machine before a crowd of mildly interested onlookers, totally clothed and after a very nice lunch. Those fools! They would not heed my claims at first; they demanded proof. I reached into my pocket and withdrew a simple 10-pence piece, and lo! Inscribed upon it was the date “1991”. Thus armed with incontrovertible evidence, they humoured my argument.

“How was the past?” - they demanded details.

“Why ask for this information? It wasn’t that long ago – and you were all alive there – you, and you, and you!” – here I pointed out some faces from the crowd – “and you, well, you were in a coma but you’re OK now”.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

5 minutes hence

I’ve just returned from the future – from 5 minutes in the future! Now, everything feels like “déjà vu”, that is, everything wait a minute I’ve written this before.

14,800 AD

I just returned from the year 14,800 – the end of humanity’s long reign upon this Earth! That’s when we all started dying out, you see – to be more specific, after the previous year, 14,799, no more children were born. Thus the last generation was decided, and after that, all wombs were barren. And no-one knew why! We called these last babes “the Omega generation”, mostly because we thought it sounded all cool and space-age and shit.

At first, we were worried about the lack of new births, but very soon we became complacent, distracted by the hum-drum concerns of the world. And yet eventually we noticed strange consequences. Within a year of the last human being born, most nappy manufacturers had gone out of business – there was simply no market to supply (well, I should also mention that old-age incontinence had been cured by this time by revolutionary technology and some euthanasia). Next down, next to fold, the manufacturers of baby-formula. In similar fashion, producers of prams and teething rings closed their shops, and makers of those bright coloured dangly things that hang in prams. No, I don’t know what the fuck those things are called either.

Thus the lack of newborns affected our economy like a creeping cancer. When the Omega generation reached the age of five, the last Harry Potter action doll was made by human hands. We realised then that if we did not solve this crisis, then – too soon, too soon – all our businesses would cease.

Our scientists sprang into action at once, and applied all their technical skills to studying the problem. Drugs were patented, sexual positions categorised and re-categorised, new medical procedures were suggested. Oh, it was such a time of action, of new ideas! How happy we felt – how useful! – as we dissected another woman alive and cut parts of her womb out to study.

And yet still the gradual obliteration of our industries continued. Can you picture the abandoned toys, the no-longer desired children’s clothes – the whole detritus of the generation that was – who no-one else would ever be? Picture the lines of 12 year-olds marching sombrely to the museum, to dump therein last years’ Christmas presents, or posters of no-longer-cool musical groups. No-one else wanted them, no-one ever would. And I myself, so moved – and out of a sense of history, and in the hope that some traces of human culture might somehow survive and – in ten thousands years’ time – perhaps be looked on by some alien traveller’s eyes – I led the public movement to have the last Boy Band snap-frozen in carbonite.

By the time the Omega generation were all 16 years old it was decided that the best hope of reproduction lay with them, and thus they were all given flats in economically-deprived areas and asked to smoke cigarettes and swear and listen to that music, you know, the kind that those girls listen to that have all those babies and no-one knows who the father is and isn’t it disgusting.

But for years, nothing helped, nothing worked. Eventually, the Omega generation were all middle-aged. Even makers of outrageous snowboarding hats and very, very baggy trousers had ceased their manufacture and closed up shop. We gave up all hope. At least the Undertakers – the last economic sector to retain its market – at least they would survive until the end.

But one day, a miracle occurred – a baby born, where least expected! The Omega generation began to produce, to fall pregnant! We were saved! Well – not us personally, we were actually pretty fucking old by then, and no one could remember how we used to stop ourselves shitting our pants all the time. So – yeah.

5 minutes hence

I’ve just returned from the future – from 5 minutes in the future! Now, everything feels like “déjà vu”, that is, everything wait a minute I’ve written this before.

2,761 AD

I’ve just returned from the future – the year 2,761, when a cure for cancer has just been found! To celebrate, we burned down every second-hand shop run by a cancer charity, and we rounded up bald people and executed them, because they reminded us of the terrible grief of seeing our loved ones go through chemotherapy. Oh, you will probably say that that was capricious. But – trust me – I’ve been to the future, and by their standards you are all such horrid and primitive microbes. Well, that’s what they said to me when I first got there!

Anyway, we all decided to continue our festival by taking up smoking, oh, about ONE THOUSAND cigarettes. Sure, we stank and our aerobic fitness was shit, but – fuck me! – I’d been waiting over 700 years for a fag.

Yesterday

I’ve just returned from the past – from yesterday! Oh, how I loved it there, and then, when all my troubles were so far, far away! And yet, now I find that I need a place to hide away – for today I’m being pursued by bears – shaggy and fierce!

Of course, it’s all my own fault – for yesterday I insulted them, I mocked their fetish for salmon, I satirised their impossibly powerful claws. Then, I went back in time, and insulted them again! “What fun!” I thought, and yet, in hindsight, how foolish I was.

If only I had listened to that famous expert on these ursine beasts – Ol’ Craggy Mountain Whistlin’ Joe! You know him, of course: he lives up one peak of Single Peak, and he has one arm, and one eye, and one ear, and one leg, and one testicle, and one butt-cheek, and one kidney, and one long-lost lonely love called Lulu, who he ain’t not seen in one year, one month and one day, and he has one piece of good advice: “never insult a bear twice”.

How I wish I had heeded that sage maxim, wise sentence! But, you see, the thing is, Joe is such a fucking terrible interlocutor. He’s always hopping around, making ancient gags about his multi-mono-disability. “I don’t feel half the man I used to be!” he will say, or “you know me – I’m a Unitarian!” or “I’d give you a hand with that – but I only gots one!”. Oh, It’s good that he keeps his spirits up, I suppose – but really, it does get tiresome and sometimes you fantasise that he is being pursued by bears, or something.

Anyway – that’s why I believe in yesterday. I really do.

150 million BC

I’ve just returned from the past – from 150 million BC, the age of the dinosaurs! Oh, how I loved walking with their lizardy kind, admiring their enormous, awful size, and quailing at each primeval roar they gave! But of course, my mission there was not one of mere tourism, mere ogling. I had gone back specifically to tell them the “good news” – that every word in the Bible was true, evolution was a lie, and the dinosaurs did not, in fact, exist!

To their credit, they listened attentively to my arguments, nodding in places where they felt we could instantly agree, and asking probing questions when I made a point they didn’t understand. Our discussions continued long into the night, and then we retired to our supper. At which point, one of the enormous beasts, a mighty diplodocus, took me aside to speak with me in private.

“If I understand you correctly,” the leviathan began “your scriptural sources do not mention our kind; and the biblical geneology of the human species, from Adam, created at the dawn of time, down to the blessed redeemer, leaves no period in which we dinosaurs could have roamed the ancient Earth”.

“Dear diplodocus,” I answered, “you have understood me perfectly – how intelligent you are! It is an undeniable consequence of the truth of the scripture that you are, in fact, wholly fictional.”

“I must admit that this news perturbs me,” continued the beast. “I’m sure you can understand my feelings. But as you have been so kind to inform us about your holy book, the pinnacle of your literature, I would like to also tell you about our own scriptures.”

“Please do!” I cried, feeling that I had, at last, found a fellow being with whom I could share my truest and innermost thoughts and feelings. I must admit, I felt such a rush of fraternal emotion that I placed my arms around the great beast’s neck in an embrace. When I had control of myself again, my mighty friend spoke on.

“As you know, we dinosaurs do not write in the normal manner. We have not the hands, you see – or if we have claws that would suffice, we have no manufacturers of pencils, with which we could scratch out prose. But do not, I beg you, think that our literature is wholly dumb. We write our history with our bones, and the page is clay and earth.”

“I see you are confused, but please let me continue. Each of us, when we are about to die, seeks to find a final bed with the necessary qualities. Tar, or soft clay, or rich mud – each chooses a different coffin for him or herself. We write our stories with our own bodies; leaving an impression of all that we are in the dirt, and shaping the rocks to ourselves.”

“This is a strange corpus of work!” I exclaimed. “Written in a language older than Hebrew, and yet eternal – the language of calcium, of science!”

“Yes, that is true,” the diplodocus said. “But it is difficult to write it. Your own stories are written without much harm to your own bodies. But we are different. Even now, we are all so keen to tell our stories that we rush towards the grave, eager to contribute to the tale. Soon our kind will be extinct – yet our history will sleep under the ground, and will be read again as – I’m sorry to say it – a criticism of your own bible-books”.

“My dear diplodocus,” I said “I had thought, perhaps rashly, that we were so similar, yet what you say causes me to doubt it. Are we so wholly different?”

“I don’t think so,” said my friend. “I have told you that we need to lie in the Earth to tell the truth about our species. And you also have to lie to tell the truth.”