Originally Posted by
AuntShecky
“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
A Christmas Carol, Stave IV
O Holly Nite
In the near-eternal eons since the birth of the orbit of our lonely world, its flirty tilt toward the Sun alternating with its shy flinch away from it, there has never been a year without a Winter Solstice. A hundred years from now, the shortest day of the year will still occur in the Northern Hemisphere, but save for an enclave of theoretical scientists,few will note its arrival.
A century from now, however, someone may indeed peek outside into a hard scrabble landscape and momentarily marvel at the sun’s low position in the sky --a sunset that will seem to come a tad earlier than the previous December days. This observation may occur despite of the legislation of the time- tinkerers with their ever-extended “Daylite Savins”, and the fact that for a couple of generation there will not have been a definably clear-cut change of seasons.
In his pod amid the hinterlands slightly west of the former Eastern Seaboard, a man will look at the pink and purple random streaks hovering just above the horizon and will pause at this rare display of natural beauty. Then he will go about his “bizness” – until his progeny, a boy about 7, will interrupt him.
“Pal –“ the boy will say, using the common appellation for addressing one’s parent-figure, which will have etymologically evolved from the Old-Fashioned words “Pa” or “Dad.” (If the boy were to have been female and extremely lucky enough to have a female parent-figure, the mutual form of address would be “girlfren.”)
Indeed, the language will have completely changed in its inevitable forward thrust toward brevity and absolute simplicity in grammar –a minimal use for articles and noun declensions-- inflections, verb endings, tenses, moods will have been dropped into the recycling bin of obsolescence. Speech patterns will eventually echo the format applied by text messengers in the early twenty-first century; and upon the rare appearance of a written text, the spelling will have adopted the proposals by a long line of orthographic reformers, such as a late nineteenth century playwright, although the name George Bernard Shaw will be as obscure to future generations as the names of Greek dramatists seem to so many in ours.
“Wha now?” Pal will say. “Ja do work?” Such work for the boy will have to do withacquiring certain intellectual skills, a task which a century ago had been deemed “homework,” but at this future time, there will be no schools outside one’s pod. The boy will point to a holographic screen, where in the air will appear a elementary exercise in binary math, with every 0 and 1 in its appropriate place. But Pal will still be unsatisfied. “Ja feed frogs?”
The boy will point to an aquarium – or more accurately – amphib-quarium – a cube of synthetic glass, wherein a half dozen tiny peepers will feebly chirp, the croaking sound the province of the males, which as early as the end of the twentieth century had been beginning their descent into annihilation, aggravated by environmental factors. Either the zygotes had begun as males and transexualized into females, or only the female eggs successfully hatched. But somehow the female frogs had survived, reproducing through a process akin to parthenogenesis. (This will be the opposite of what will happen to the two genders of homo sapiens. ) In the case of extant frogs, their relative rarity will elevate them to the former status of “tropical fish,” which will have long since swum their last laps in the waters of the world, and thus frogs will be considered pets, albeit highly prized and expensive.
“Yeah, Pal, they et.” The boy will open his hand and show his father figure a colorful object the size and shape of a sugar cube from the previous century.
“Where ja get that?” The object in the boy’s hand will be an heirloom, as antiquated as a sepia photograph of a sober-faced, straitlaced couple who’d marked some auspicious occasion by having their portrait immortalized in a newfangled studio, circa 1906. It will be what the twenty-first century knew as a “video,” which some decades after it had been shot was put a DVD, and still later reformatted to fit a newer device, itself having been replaced by the Hologram Player, the Hp.
“Display! Display!” the boy will cry, only to see his father shake his head.
“Incompat. Not Hp,” he will answer. Sudden inspiration, however, will prompt the manto take the little cube and try to install it into a device that the man’s grandfather once owned, a Old Fashioned laptop, which over the years somehow had never made it into the Recycle Bin.
The man will exhume the laptop and dispose of the decades of accumulated dust. “Here go nuttin’” he will announce. He will wait for it to boot up + finally, he will insert the video cube + like a miracle, the video will start to play.
Just as twenty-first century viewers of early silent movies had to adjust their perception to accommodate the faster frames and process the seemingly quick motions of the film, the boy’s cerebral cortex will have to downgrade to take in two-dimensional images. In the video he
will see a family (although the both the word and the concept will be acutely foreign to the boy): two adults, a male and a female(!) as well as a young boy all but obscured by strange clothes – with even their hands covered; only their faces visible. The action involves the making of a snow man.
“Wha tha, Pal? White dirt?”
“Think they say ‘snow.’ It use to come down from sky + know how ProteenAde feel ? Cold.” The man will know that the little boy in the video was his own grandfather, a relationship he will not at that time explain to his own son. Instead, he will – as his usual wont – tell him the story of the boy’s origin – how he had sprung from the man’s own seed + from a exquisite, specially-selected egg from the Corpus Luteum, (the CL), which one day will be proclaimed “The Mother of Us All.”
Although he will take the Christmas tree in the video as some kind of Old Fashioned furniture, the boy will feel a slight buzz of recognition, a bit of a personal epiphany upon watching the family unwrap gifts. Some six or seven decades from now, the so-called “Holiday Season” as we know it will have been virtually eliminated. By that time, the problem which consumers had wrestled with in late December – wild, blustery, freezing weather – will have been rendered moot because of the greenhouse effect. More importantly, corporations, allied with the time-tinkerers, will have tweaked the corporate earnings statement so that the high point would not be so heavily weighted toward the Fourth Quarter; placing the furious gift-buying frenzy toward the middle part of the year will have made it, to their way of thinking more balanced. A new holiday will have evolved, called “the Present.” And this will be the frame in which boy’s will view the gift opening segment of the video.
The video record of the meal will, however, assault his tender sensibility. “Aw! Wha they eat? Wha they eat!”
“Tha wha peeps et for holidays. Turkey. Like a bird.”
“They et bird! Eww! Eww!” The feathered creatures with which the boy will have been familiar will be those whose prolificacy and hardy stamina will have enabled them to stay off the endangered species or extinction lists: pigeons, for instance, crows. Yet a hundred years from now it will never occur to “peeps” that a bird is something one would cook and eat. They will recoil from the very thought, even as twenty-first century readers find repulsive the dormice and other exotic delicacies reportedly served at an ancient Roman banquet.
At the same time the video will be finishing with its stars singing an old, unfamiliar song.
“Wha ‘Holly’?” the boy will inquire. The man will boot up the WebStir and pronounce the word. In a parsec a hologram of the evergreen plant will appear in front of their eyes. A disembodied voice will intone: “Holly. A plant, now extinct. Trees and shrubs. Shiny, pointed leaves, red berries. Used as decorations for religious holidays.”
“Pal? Wha ‘religious’?”
At the verboten word, the WebStir will shut down, crash.
“Pal,” the boy will repeat. “Wha ‘religious’?”
The man will look around to assure himself that the Surveil-a-Cam is not watching. He will put his finger to his lips. “Shh! No, Son.” This will be the first time the boy will have heard himself addressed in this way. The boy will think that Pal had said “Sun.”
Outside in the darkening sky three planets will shine brightly in alignment, but, apart from a few esoteric astronomers, few will note this celestial confluence. For the man of the future, nevertheless, it was going to be, it will be – a long, long “nite.”
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