July 8
If it’s forbidden to interfere in your own past, then travelling too far back into time means that, on some level, you necessarily have to be altering someone in your deep ancestral tree. Let’s peg that number at about two hundred fifty years, on the order of about a hundred generations. That’s probably wildly inaccurate, but it’s good enough to scare the pants off of me. Literally.
The only reason that people from the far distant future could feel completely free to interact with me, to tell me stuff that they knew had the potential to affect someone’s future, particularly their own, would be if they knew that my actions could not, on a long enough scale, have such an effect. Put simply, if they knew exactly how my genes exit the pool.
I’m going to die, I think. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just have no kids. The line ends with me. There won’t be a Fransdottir, or Fransson. I’m just guessing here on that one. Usually it’s a patronym, but there’s the extremely heavy implication that I never get hitched.
Oh my God, I’m not sure what scares me more. Dying, or dying a virgin.
When a person is faced with death, a death that is inevitable, there’s basically two things that happen. The first is defiance. People, as a general rule, don’t want to die. Doesn’t stop them. But they generally prefer to keep, as the adage goes, body and soul together for as long as possible, like they’re expecting Saint Peter to be one of the Guinness Book men. So, if there’s a chance, even the slimmest chance, of getting out of a situation alive, then a person will fight like hell to take it. Even if there isn’t actually a chance, if the person sufficiently deludes themselves that there’s a chance, they’re gonna go down swinging.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment