From Now On "Genealogist" Is A Positively Filthy Word

[funranium]

Continuing my social commentary on a future with time travel as inspired by the benchilada.

Barring the possibility of the latest fashion craze exterminating humanity and its elective variants, there is no question in my mind that people down the line will be reading my words.  There is always the chance that fearsome intelligent robots of the future, unlike the servile, chatty, and dim lucases wandering the streets these days, will read them instead but they won't get it.  Even the units for our units don't actually get the concept of sex.

The Campaign For Real Sex did a great job to get the species back on track inserting things into and being inserted by fellow members of the species...well, at least just with mammals, live ones if we catch people on a good day.  For a while there, it seemed like we were heading toward extinction just because we couldn't actually get sperm and egg close to each other in any useful fashion.  Luckily, educational videos like "The Hot Dog & The Blender", "Gila Monsters Don't Go There" and  "Jesus Doesn't Love The Little Children Like That" did the trick. 

Until the advent of time travel that is.

Now don't get me wrong, like any other late 21st century male, I look at the old Marilyn Monroe movies and say, "Wow!  Look how not 3D that image is."  If there is a great crime the march of progress has brought us it is the lack of a third dimension for ol' Marilyn and no Grope-O-Vision for that matter.  Of course, after you've had a few beers while watching the classicine you look over at the Time Hut across the street and start to get ideas.

For the sake of full disclosure, I used to work at a Time Hut after college.  I hated it there and I hated the people.  History degrees these days are worth about the same as one in Hospitality Management from Bermuda College back in the 20th (I highly recommend taking a jaunt back to see what it looked like before the Ezili plague and the Sinking).  All these dejected souls who once cared intensely about a certain period of history now reduced to little better than Time Carnies operating a very peculiar ride.    

A humorist of the late 20th once quipped that the "holodecks" from the tubeshow Star Trek would be the end of the human race if we ever successfully made them.  We never did work out way to create tactile interaction without a lot of gear that somewhat distracted from the experience.  Hologrammatic masturbation, except in the conventional way, never really made it big.  With the advent of time travel, the holosuite chains that punctuated every strip mall in America were quickly replaced by Time Huts, jizzmoppers making way for the Historieers.

So very, very many times I lead those sad perverts clutching their bags synthcotics into the machine and dialed the desired date and location.  You knew looking in their eyes they weren't going to see the event normally associated with a date.  November 22, 1963 - elementary school classes go to the roof of the book depository.  November 22, 1963 - the mickies offer a their drug cocktails to the greiving widow and take advantage of the unconscious Jackie, though some just take the opportunity to wear her clothes.  November 22, 1963 - in one case, there was the guy who came out of stasis with his fly open and brain matter staining the front of his pants.

If someone requested September 14, 1954 in New York, I knew they were heading downtime for a piece of Marilyn after watching the dress blowing scene in 'The Seven Year Itch'.  Instead, I usually made it a point to give those unfortunates a tour of a Siberian psikhushka on the same date and let the KGB try to dissuade them of their interest in filthy capitalist, gangster nekultrny like Marilyn.  Strangely enough, their interest was in Marilyn and that period of history was always greatly reduced though I can't say it made them into good party men.

Now, this isn't a jealousy thing mind you. I've gotten comfortable with the fact that Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, The Virgin (HA!) Mary, and innumerable other female historical personages have probably slept with the vast majority of the living American males of the late 21st century. The restorative nature of time makes it seem like the safest one night stand ever, but there seems to be a bit of paradox there. Theoretically, a historical personage must take the time in their lives to do something of historical significance, not just giving 2.3 million high school students their jollies annually.

This has caused more than a few situations where the chat show hosts need to have their pants surgically removed because they're so excited.  Incest was bad enough before, but if you go far enough back it's hard to find someone you aren't related to.  In the more immediate sense you get the folks who look at the pictures of their great grandparents, wonder what they looked like young, and then the inevitable that really shouldn't happens.  This is fine when the genealogist (a word that's now drifted so far from it's original meaning I can't do it justice) is male...complications can ensue if she's a she.  Thanks to the Campaign For Real Sex, they can't be forced to take contraception before they commit this all too common indiscretion.  It is even worse if the downtime relative in question is still alive in the current.  

The Campaign For Real Sex claims that this is actually for the best since current sperm quality is so inferior.  I really don't think it is worth validating the worst of late 20th science fiction to make this a policy point.

Back to drowning our ancestors in futurespunk, I was assured by the temporal physicists that used to due service work at Time Hut that "All this stuff sorts itself out, don't worry about that" before they padded away quickly in their hemp sandals. I admit to having had a fling with Eleanor of Aquitaine, but it creeps me out thinking of all the SCA people who have probably done the same. I don't even like being in the same room with most of those people.  

Oh yes, the reenactors.

Once upon a time, people used to get themselves geared up and go pretend to recreate old Civil War battles or whack at each other with safety swords.  Time travel was the end of that - why settle for anything less than absolute authenticity?  There is something more than a little disturbing about the accountant that gears up, slips seamlessly into the ranks when he goes back, and guns down his ancestors at Vicksburg every weekend.  Then there's those maze killers that think taking a modern maker gun is like using a cheat code in World War II as they laugh, single handedly mowing down a battallion of panzergrenadiers.  

On a positive note, most people give up wearing swords and armor after their first bout of heat stroke and almost drowning in blood playing crusader in the Kingdom of Outremer.  Hot as Eleanor was, wretching at the smell on my first trip to the privies was more than enough to cure my romantic visions of castles, swords, and princesses.

I still don't understand how the past rebounds from our abuse, how history doesn't just collapse.  The wholesale slaughter, the sexual tourism, just the simple diversion of energy to entertain us should bring it all crashing down.  I can't help but think of Marilyn's last years as she degenerated into drugged madness, with a string of miscarriages.  Maybe those were our children, spontaneously aborted by the persistence of time.  Maybe the drugs and madness were the side effects of her attempts to reconcile encounters with an endless stream of temporal voyeurs.  

No one ever says good bye to Norma Jean anymore, just hello.