I Apologize For The Delay

[funranium]

But schooling and employment caused an insurmountable delay responding to a command to Fuck With benchilada's Art.  The original story, which can be found here, is one of the most pleasing short stories I have read about time travel in ages.  If you enjoy it, or this, he invites any and all to Fuck With His Art.  Without further ado, art fucking...

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The worst thing that ever happened to time travel and America was the US Department of Education.

I'm sure it sounded fantastic back in the 1980's to hand every elementary school classroom in the United States, regardless of whether any of the teachers could use them, an Apple computer in the hopes that we would all become sober technocratic Americans Of The Future.  At best we all played a lot of "Where In *INSERT EDUCATIONAL CAPER HERE* Is Carmen Sandiego?", and some of us really actually learned a bit of geography and history from the experiment.

We all know what really happened.

Kids learned enough basic computer skills that they were 100% ready for the availabilty of embarassment-free porn aquisition the internet revolution allowed.  This, in turn, directly led to the rise of Paris Hilton who, as we all know quite well, was discovered during the Coral Gables Peace Accords to be the root complaint of Al Qaeda's terror campaigns of the the early 2000's.

Many government policies are not well thought out, if at all.  If there is one above all others that should have been better vetted, it was the mandate to install time travel facilities in public schools.

None of the school staff really understood how to use the modules, which was fine since no one else really understood how they worked either, but there is a certain rudimentary understanding necessary to run the control console.  The sharp points on all the machine's corners, even the door, that the machine seemed to require for flawless operation--if such a term can be used--all had to be covered for insurance reasons, thus causing regular glitches.  Strangely, this alteration only seemed to alter the spatial component of the machine's operation, not the temporal.  

How many of us remember almost drowning in the middle of the Indian Ocean on November 19, 1863 rather than watching the Gettysburg Address in person in Gettysburg on November 19, 1863?  I certainly do.  To my gym teacher, pushed into history teaching to maintain his credential, those negative signs in front of the latitude and longitude didn't mean much.  Made me concentrate in math classes that much harder so that I wouldn't make that mistake when I got older.

 

Imagine my surprise to discover an entire community devoted to people that have had that same childhood experience.  They've built a floating campground out there and even have installed one of the old model USDOEd machines, so you can go so Gettysburg like you were supposed to all those years ago in school while you’re on vacation there on the Indian Ocean.  It is one of the small perversions that came out of the mass use of time travel. 

One of the things that was noticed early on in temporal dynamic research is no one seemed to be able to effect any changes in the past.  That is all well and good, but the effect of the past on people from the present has been simply horrific.  How many Israeli and German schoolchildren taking mandatory Holocaust Awareness courses have returned from their stasis with fresh bullet holes from the KZ guards?  How people have been sent to the past by police during interrogation for proper torturing, South African style, back when they knew how to do it right?

There was a family reunion in north Texas where they rented a machine to check out a few members of the family who couldn't attend since they were 200 years dead.  Five died and seventy three members of Payton clan were treated for exposure and severe frostbite; how were they supposed to know that grandma hit a few too many zeros with her shaky hand and would send their midsummer BBQing fat asses to the glaciers that were in that exact place 200,000 years ago?

Speaking of perverts, how many new veneral diseases coursing through our populations do we have that we never, ever, would have known about if it weren't for the sexual tourism time travel allows?  We now know damn well why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed and the KJV bible seems to somehow mistake "fire and brimstone" for "swift death by festering, weeping genital rot".  But this doesn't stop some people from wanting to get "a piece of the Old Testament *wink, wink*" as Genesis Adult Expeditions likes to call it.  Diseases that damn near eat through our carbon microfiber Cockblockers (TM) run rampant among our youth.  Why waste time trying to impress a modern girl, when it is easy for someone who is comparitively damn near omniscient to get under the skirts of a poor rube windback--as the kids these days call their ancestors--babe?  Don't even get me started on the grandpa fuckers...

We are not responsible enough to handle our own past.  The words "live in the present" have never been truer.  If we aren't careful, it will be the end of our future.

Comments

[benchilada.livejournal.com]

I...

...

Wow.

I think that's the deepest anybody's ever fucked my art, and I mean that in the most awesomest way. You took my silly little story, stripped it down to core concepts, ideas, busting even the framework away...

...and turned it into something sweeping and magnificent. I mean, that story was brilliant. Dead brilliant. It reads exactly like a column that would appear in the Newsweek articles I mentioned, the ones that fairyarmadillo and her boy, locura_insomnio did.

You know, this one:

That kicked my ass. Somewhere between twisted and the truth. Well done.

Beats my story all to shit. :)

[froborr-dwiggy.livejournal.com]

Truly great. "Carbon microfiber Cockblockers(TM)" nearly dropped me out of my chair. You win a lensflare.

[funranium.livejournal.com]

Thank you kindly. Luckily, I have polarized sunglasses to cope with that.

On reflection, I realize I should have written "Carbon nanotubule weave Cockblockers(TM) - Strong Enough For The Space Elevator And Your Unit".

[theliznach.livejournal.com]

yes, the first to last paragraph was especially teehee worthy. your brain never ceases to amaze me.

[funranium.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

Did I hurt your brain?