Alternative Fun Facts: The Future is Not What it Used to Be
In the future, we’ll have figured out how to make money off the past | Fiction | Fresh Soup
In this new feature, I will try – in the spirit of the times – to fill your mind with false scientific and historical facts, just to spice up our somewhat bland world. You may learn about secret gravy-waterfalls in the Amazon, about global cooling, about a virus with motion sickness that vomits on airplanes, or any other alternative fact that will help take your mind off the tediously hyper-realistic reality we live in.
In the winter of 2038, Ira Pranab Leibovitch, the eminent Jewish-Indian guru and physicist, managed to prove the viability of time travel. The distance from theory to practice was short, and within a year, Pranab Leibovitch had built a prototype time-machine. The prototype was immediately bought by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was still basking in its space tourism bonanza and was convinced that “time tourism” was the next big thing. TimeX raised a trillion dollars in under twenty-four hours. Yet despite the enormous potential, the enterprise that could have sent a human into the future or the past struggled to attract customers.
The main reason for TimeX’s commercial failure was that although they could transmit people to any point in time, they didn’t know how to bring them back. This made it extremely difficult to advertise time-travel as extreme tourism, when it seemed a lot more like permanent relocation. Another problem was that Pranab Leibovitch’s technology was based on converting mass into energy, which meant that travelers lost weight when they were sent into the past, and gained weight when they were launched into the future. The further in time they traveled, the more significant the weight gain or loss, and in extreme cases it had the potential to result in the total disappearance of the tourist.
By 2040, TimeX had wiped out three-quarters of its value and was on the verge of bankruptcy. But a moment before commercial time travel was permanently quashed, TimeX pulled off a brilliant rebranding campaign that completely turned things around. The company took the lemons handed to it by Pranab Leibovitch’s invention, and squeezed them into sweet, sweet lemonade dripping with cash. All it needed to send its stocks soaring was to relaunch as SlimX, playing down the technology’s time travel aspect and highlighting its weight-loss potential.
The world had never encountered such a scientifically rigorous yet simple diet, and it fell head over heels. Potential clients who logged onto the SlimX site had only to note their current and desired weight, and they were immediately told which historical point in time they would need to reach. The company also tried to entice underweight people to travel into a future point where they would achieve their ideal weight, but this commercial avenue was less successful, probably because in publicity terms, both the future and weight-gain are pretty big turn-offs.
You, dear readers, still have two decades to wile away until you can witness – or even participate in! – this unique technological wonder. Yet even today, we are all experiencing its consequences. Because who are Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Steve Jobs and Rihanna, if not a bunch of fatsos from the future who managed to prove, again and again, that it’s much easier to change the world than to cut out sugar and carbs?
Ironically, Ira Pranab Leibovitch himself became a SlimX client. Although the pioneering scientist initially declined to use the technology he had developed, he eventually had a change of heart and agreed to undertake time travel, solely as a dieting method. Due to his Jewish background and having been born and raised in the scorching climate of Delhi, Pranab asked to be sent to the Middle East. In order to attain the slim physique he had always dreamed of, he had to travel more than two-thousand years back in time. The idea of being sent into the past scared him, but whenever he got anxious, he simply shut his eyes and imagined himself walking under a clear desert sky. In these visions he was slender and serene, and he always stepped lightly—lightly enough to walk on water.
Damn that's a really good one. Great ending, and the observation that the future is as undesirable as weight gain is very bleak, very droll, and very 2022. I'm trying to think of successful fat people but I'm not coming up with anything. I guess that proves your theory!
Brilliant story, everything ties up beautifully. Funny how mass and energy get translated into the worlds obsession with weight! Very original idea. Love it. Like how you brought Elon Musk and Steve Jobs into it too, lots of little interesting branches!