PORTLAND, OR—Jacob Schneider was a devoted progressive activist, fighting for all the marginalized groups he thought were worth fighting for. He was certain he was on the “right side of history” — up until he accidentally fell into a lake during a climate change protest and was frozen solid. When he was thawed out and revived hundreds of years later, he was horrified to find out that in the future they think sucking the brains out of a child is a bad thing.
“It really was surprising to think they’d fixate on such a thing,” said Schneider to a journo-bot. “I mean, in my time, all the right-thinking people never worried about sucking the brains out of a child at all.”
It was a bit of a culture shock for Schneider for not being thought of as enlightened but instead as primitive and barbaric, as he further explained. “People of the future kept saying to me, ‘You really didn’t find anything wrong about taking a child out of a woman and sucking the child’s brains out?’ And then I’d try to correct them to say, ‘womb-owner’ and to not assume only women get pregnant, and they’d look at me like I was some bizarre monster.”
Schneider purchased a history book and found people like himself smack dab in the “Wrong Side of History” section next to slave owners and Nazis. “That seems a little extreme,” Schneider commented. “I mean, I guess a few hundred years separated, I can see how maybe sucking the brains out of children is a little bit wrong. But that’s not like slavery. That’s not like being a Nazi. I’m not for gassing people. I’m just for taking small children and sucking their brains out.” He thought about it some more. “Yeah, I guess that does sound... But it was okay because no one cared about them so we didn’t need to treat them as fellow humans!” He again thought about what he'd just said. “Okay, maybe I’m seeing it a little bit.”
