Welcome to the future

Apathy Jack writes:

Hello again The Internet. For your entertainment (because that’s all we are to you isn’t it? Dancing monkeys! Bastards.) we’re having a theme week where we’re discussing the concept of life in the future. To kick it off, I thought I might just repost something I wrote for an old vanity project, on almost exactly this theme (because, you know, I don’t have any new ideas...) but then I thought I’d give you something well written instead: something I stole from RSJS’s livejournal a while back because I liked it so much. I haven’t asked him if it’s okay, but, y’know, life’s like that sometimes...

(By the by, my original thing is here, just in case any of you were wondering. You weren’t? Fair enough I suppose... On with Jellybean’s thing.)

...

Welcome to the future, population us.

I had a creepy feeling in my neck that the telemavision has been lying to us, that the star-spangled future of warrior Amazons in gold cardboard bustiers and big-chinned jocks fucking aliens with some red-white-and-blue space-cock was a myth and we’re forever going to be trapped in the rather dull and lifeless “now” that seems to be invading our every pore like some temporal Mormon-fungus. But something occurred to me: We can’t all be Captain Kirk. Remember in the schoolyard when you and the other geeks would hide behind the Home Ec. room to play handball and lie about girls and play “Star Trek”? You do remember, oh yes. Don’t come the raw prawn with the “No, I was a jock hanging around knee-deep in uniformed sweethearts and singing Nada Surf singles” you were a geek. You’re reading a fuckrying-out-loud Live Gerbil on a weekday, so stop lying to yourself. STOP IT! The point is, when we were running around wielding our old Casio calculators in the plastic cases which you could flip open like a communicator until the lid broke, and your compass for a phaser, there’d be an argument between nerd alpha-males. Because even in the group of six monkeys, one was going to be Uhura. Some poor sexuality-questioning grey-uniformed preteen was going to be the sucker with the salt-shaker in the ear making coffee for Kirk.

Now when there’s only six of you, and one person has to be tea bitch, and another has to be a fat Scot, and yet another has to be a pudding-bowlcut Davy Jones daydream believer saying “Wessels” all day, you realise that being the Kirk and getting the alien totty ain’t too easy. Now look at the big picture: You didn’t get to be Kirk in a group of six. So why the fuck do you reckon you could be Kirk amongst six million? Fat fucking chance. No matter how much mankind evolves, no matter how far into he future we stumble; for every boldly-going infinitive-molesting spacedog that humps across the Milky Way, there’ll be a few million tea-ladies in short skirts doing fuck-all except opening hailing frequencies and asking if the boys like their coffee black like their women. We are in the future, there are space-travelling xenomorph-boffing chins striding about in the torn shirts. But we’re not the Kirks, we don’t get phasers. Most of us are the bitches who make the grommets that usurp the widgets that transphase the Morons who uplink the downloads and cross-reference the jumbo shrimp to make sure the food replicators on the Enterprise don’t piss hot shit into Kirk’s coffee mug. The only show that really got this right was “Blake’s Seven” in which most of the futuristic wankers were beaten-down mud-covered freaks cowering in caves like dogs. Like DOGS I tells ya. Sure, the antiheroes zipped about throwing photon torpedoes (light torpedoes? Man, they travelled slower than a turd down a playground slide) at each other from wobbly cardboard spaceships, but most people wore brown and lived in mud. That’s the future we got.