Photo by: Daniel Clinton
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, performed the first successful time jump in a manned craft at 10:04 p.m. last Saturday. Head researcher of the Time Management division at CERN, Dr. Emmett Temps, began his announcement speech by trumpeting the vast new opportunities presented by the technology, but also confirming that, among other things, hover boards were still not invented in the future.
CERN’s report describes the feat as “a middle finger to theoretical physicists everywhere, but ultimately a thumbs-down for everyone else.” Dr. Emmett Temps elaborated in his announcement speech. “This whole shindig started because brilliant men and women were told that time travel was impossible. But by golly gee were we able to prove those dense physicists wrong. What matters here is that we can time travel, not how lame the future is.” Immediately following his speech, Temps was asked how “lame” the future was, and Temps quickly replied, “Pretty fucking lame.”
Once reaching the farthest forward point that the technology can currently handle, Time Pilot Marty Oras penned in his field notes, “I hoped for the future to look like the utopias out of science fiction novels, but everything just looks the same as it does today. Yeah, sure, it’s about the journey, not the destination, but what’s the point in the journey if the destination sucks so much?”
After the future was determined to be a “massive letdown,” funding for the Time Management division at CERN was immediately slashed. With the budget cut down from its original 88 million euros to 30 million euros, the faculty was left scrambling for methods to increase interest in the now-antiquated field of time travel.
The technology was rumored to have been marketed to the superpowers of the world, though once again this venture yielded unsatisfactory results. The failure was exemplified by Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, in his press release about the technology. “The first thing I did was find the future version of myself, but future me was not as cool as I expected. He was just a sadder, older version of me. Why would I want to see that? The Russian Federation denounces this machine and those who support it.”
Left with few options, CERN now plans to map out what present issues that will still be disappointingly persistent in the future, in an attempt to harness the technology’s seemingly-endless potential for disappointment. Topping the list currently is global hunger, global poverty, large scale violence, and lack of croutons at the salad bar.
While numerous humanitarian organizations have begun to shut down in recognition that their efforts are in vain, CERN asserted that they “remain committed to changing the future for the better” and pledged their best engineers to the first convention of the World Crouton Initiative next month. However, insider leaks from within CERN have cautioned to “not get one’s hopes up about the croutons” and recommended to “douse that bitch in salad dressing instead.”
