Right, okay, now just imagine this one, right

You go far into the future. Many thousands of years into the future. You find yourself among a race of humanoid creatures not overly dissimilar to how we are today, who live in a world barren of obvious habitations and urban areas. A world which stretches off into the distance completely devoid of any signs of concentrated human life. You find one of these humanoids and explain to them your situation. After the reasonable period of confusion and subsequent amazement and interrogation has passed, a thought occurs to you. You ask one of them whether they have ever heard of Coca-Cola. They shake their head and look nonplussed. You ask them about McDonalds. About Pepsi. Again, nothing.

This is amazing. You have outlived seemingly immovable, impenetrable, omnipresent bedrocks of the society you were born into*. Admittedly, you cheated some. You haven’t been a constant feature in the timeline they inhabited, but even so, you were there when they were, and now you are here after they have fallen. This raises so many other questions. How did they fall? When? Where? What has replaced them? But you know none of these can be answered now. There will be plenty of time for research later, since your time machine seems to be a little on the dented side, and you have to get that fixed before you can return. For now, though, you have one more question. “Okay, how about this one?” you say.

“Jesus Christ. Ever heard of him?” There’s a pause, and the people turn to each other. They begin to smile. Then laugh. “Why?” One of them asks. “Who was he?”

“Do you know him then?” You ask**.

“We didn’t know he was a real person. It’s just something you say, isn’t it? Like; ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, not again’, right?”

You tell them you’ll explain later. For now, you’re rather dumbstruck by how interesting this all is. Gosh, it’s interesting.

==========

Time passes, once again at the now rather staid and tedious rate of sixty seconds per minute, and you fix your time machine in a matter of weeks. You learn a lot about this new society, and they learn a lot about you (”You grew up without the Internet? NO WAY.”). Eventually it is time to go home.

But you overshoot, don’t you? You silly little creature, you forgot to fix the dial, and it’s all wonky and you put the numbers in the wrong order, because while you were trying to fix it, a future-woman was telling you something simply fascinating about sentient dishcloths, and now you find yourself in the past, in a long-forgotten society before pens and paper, when the natives worship an omniscient being they call Gordon Bennett.

Tom

*and at this point I apologise to people who fall upward of my target 16-25 demographic, to whom this may not apply.

**I know putting direct speech into your mouth is a tad presumptuous, and not least a little bit insulting to your imagination, which I’m sure could do perfectly well on its own from herein, but… oh, just humour me.