The Year is 2040 and Things Are the Same (Except for Elm Scurvy and Some Other Things)
Joshua Benjamin
The year is 2040. [Ever since the Great Terrible Thing that Came for Us All and Left Few Things Unobliterated and Few People Unmaimed, even the best calendars have been off by a few months, so it could still be 2039.]
Brayden, Emilee, Juliana, and Jaykob are in their late twenties and work at a breakfast tech start-up in the Tungsten Hills. [Ever since the Great Terrible Thing that Came for Us All and Left Few Things Unobliterated and Few People Unmaimed, Silicon Valley and most of the West Coast have been submerged to a depth of six inches in something that’s sort of like water but reeks of uncapped Sharpie.] [Tungsten is a thing now, but most doctors agree it leads to elm scurvy.] [Elm scurvy is a thing now.]
Brayden, Emilee, Juliana, and Jaykob are part of a team developing an app-based cereal that will help children use their wifi-enabled telbows to enhance their immunity against elm scurvy. [Telbows are a thing now, but most doctors agree they put children at significant risk of elm scurvy.]
Brayden, Emilee, Juliana, and Jaykob have completed all their education virtually, since most school districts and colleges realized the cost savings of remote learning and sold off school buildings to become Amazon distribution centers, leaving only the most affluent and most loved children to still attend artisanal school. [Amazon is still a thing. Ever since the Great Terrible Thing that Came for Us All and Left Few Things Unobliterated and Few People Unmaimed, it has been the only thing.]
Brayden, Emilee, Juliana, and Jaykob are sitting around a table, tasked with brainstorming solutions to a glitch in the cereal that causes children’s telbows to hum. [Teach-bots, which are a thing now, fucking hate humming telbows because it makes it hard for the other children to learn in their own Zoom cubes.] [Zoom cubes are a thing now.]
We are about to eavesdrop on their conversation...
Brayden: Hey d-bags, the guys down in R&D just handed me some of their test results related to the whole humming telbow situation. Let’s stick these bad boys up on the wall so we can take a look and start spitballing. Emilee, send me a link to the masking tape over there on the table, will you? [Calling people “d-bags” in the workplace is still not a thing.]
Juliana: Emilee is on mute, dicksprout. [Calling people “dicksprout” is a thing now, but not in the workplace.]
Brayden: Juliana, how about you? Can you send me a link to the tape, or do you want to be an assbrain about it? [Calling people “assbrain” is very much a thing now, both in and out of the workplace.]
Juliana: My image is freezing. [Juliana is an elm scurvy survivor, with lingering symptoms that include believing she has a poor connection, even in non-virtual settings.]
Brayden: Jaykob, pardon my Swiss, but can you pass me the fucking tape? [Ever since the Great Terrible Thing that Came for Us All and Left Few Things Unobliterated and Few People Unmaimed, most countries don’t exist anymore, but Switzerland does, which is also why teenagers do “Swiss kissing” on MySpace, which has become a thing again.]
Jaykob: No, it’s mine. [Jaykob was part of the first cohort of children to be implanted with telbows, with glitches known to turn regular children into jerk children, but sharing is also considered to be a quaint relic of artisanal school.]
A fight ensues. Brayden grabs the tape from the table, but he ends up sticking his own hands together since he, like most of his generation, has never learned to use adhesives. Jaykob punches Brayden with the unselfconscious abandon of a grown man who was never threatened with the time-out corner in preschool, but he stops when his telbow starts to hum. Juliana regards the general direction of the sound, whose source is difficult for her to establish due to a poor connection. Emilee is still on mute, as she has been since the second grade.
Josh Benjamin is a humor and education writer from the Boston area. His humor writing has appeared in Points in Case. Education writing credits include The Boston Globe, The Hechinger Report, Education Week, and TES (UK-based magazine). When Josh is not writing, he can be found teaching at an elementary school in Boston.
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