Future Imperfect

My God, sir, the future is in jeopardy! And not the good kind, like Celebrity Jeopardy.

I found this out most recently, with my keen inductive powers, and a little help from my ham radio. Longtime commune readers, a species rarer than the bald eagle, are familiar that we frequently receive transmissions from Future Bob—it's this constant flow of information that keeps us reassured our actions in this time period don't louse up the future for generations to come. We've upheld this burden well for a long time. But then guess what happened.

That's right. The future's gone flunky on us. Well, not all of us, perhaps, but flunky on me, and that's more than enough. I was sharing a delightful conversation with Future Bob most recently, discussing the various odors of cheeses and our favorites, when I asked him about the Bagel clan of his time. He was puzzled, and told me he hadn't met any Bagels in his time. What a disaster! Only a few years ago, when we first met, he assured me the Bagels were around and quite prominent in his time. Either he was a complete fake, not in the future at all, or the future had been devastated by our actions in their past. Being a huge fan of The Terminator movies, the obvious choice was the latter.

I could hardly believe it, but it wasn't quite the first time. Other incidents reported by Future Bob, such as the Fruit Famine of 2003, or the complete nuclear annihilation of the world in 2004, have failed to come true. Not without a great amount of work on our part, I assure you—everyone at the commune reported these incidents and made major changes to their lifestyles to make these possible futures not come true. Omar Bricks gave up eating genetically-altered nuclear apples altogether. Future Bob himself, for his part, was quite happy to hear we had made his stories become complete works of fiction. But it's been a constant battle, needless to say, and all the stories he's reported on so far have never hit so close to home as this apparently innocent remark.

No Bagels in the future? What's gone wrong? Where have I failed? Was it not asking out that checkout girl at One-Stop? The mole put me off a little, that's all. Good lord, what if that was the future mother of the Bagel dynasty? I would ask Future Bob if the matriarch of the Bagel clan was a Rosie Bagel, as the girl's name tag read, but unfortunately, he's not been shielded from the time transition by a quantum bubble. Damn that Star Trek technology! Where are easy-to-use, low-cost quantum bubbles to protect us from ripples in the timeline? If the future doesn't have them, we're screwed. Maybe it's another thing one of my offspring would have invented, had I bothered to boink them out already.

It's quite depressing, to realize you're as old as I am (let's not deal in numbers here) and have inadvertently doomed your name to extinction. Who's supposed to carry on the Bagel legacy? My brother Gay? He will never have children, for quite obvious reasons—he despises them. So is this truly the end of the Bagels? Once and for all, the gene pool dries up here?

I will not allow it. Sir, I must make it my personal mission to go out into the world this very night and have as much unprotected sex as humanly possible. But this time it's not to win a wager, although I do enjoy the small TV/VCR combo I won from all that. No, this is to save the Bagel name, and perhaps time itself, from disappearing into history's cornhole. Wish me luck, and many coupling experiences.

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