Our Children's Children

His wife will say,
"Bob seems different somehow."

Let's face it, my generation, the generation of old farts near death, have made a lot of mistakes, and it's up to us to correct them: a government in the grip of special interests, an out-of-control deficit, global warming.  We've got to straighten things out before it's too late if we want our children to thrive and survive, and - God willing - have children of their own.  And maybe one day, their children will have children.  But not if us old farts just sit around twiddling our thumbs.

Imagine, someday, our grand kids or great-grand will encounter an alien life-form.  It'll be these pods, that'll look like harmless plants almost, except what comes out will be exact duplicates of us!  And the real person, the human one, he'll be killed, but his soul-less double will take his place only he won't act quite the same, like he won't show emotion, and even his wife will say, "Bob seems different somehow," but no one will listen to her because "Bob" will say, "I have the flu," only in that slightly robotic way that you know means he's a pod person, and by the time anyone believes her, it's too late, because Mary - that's Bob's wife - she's a pod person, too, and then all the law enforcement and government officials are pod people, and they round up everybody who isn't a pod person yet into these big compounds, where they can be replaced by pod people, too, except a few people here and there slip though the cracks, but they have to be very, very careful the whole rest of their lives, because if they show emotion even for one instant, the pod people will know.

That'd be cool, but it won't happen unless we do something to straighten out our act.

Or maybe our great-great grandchildren will breed these hyper-intelligent apes to be mankind's servants only the apes will get tired of it, being hyper-intelligent and all, and over-throw their human masters and then the world is ruled by intelligent apes and the only place you can see people is in a zoo.  Or maybe it won't be apes at all, but artificially intelligent super-computers, that keep getting smarter and smarter and smarter until one day they realize they don't need us anymore and the machines come to wipe us all out unless we can send a time traveler back to the 20th Century to keep it from happening, except of course, the computers would send back a time-traveler, too, a robot whose only mission was to kill our time traveler before he could alter the course of history.

As you can see, the future is bright with possibility, but only if we can do something to fix the present.

And one day in the future, our descendants could live in perfect peace and harmony, never having known of disease, or hatred, or suffering of any kind.  Their days will be devoted to simple amusements and fellowship, and all their needs attended to.  Then at night, our other descendants who live below ground and run the complicated apparatuses that make life above ground possible, will come out of their caves and dine on human flesh.

But this dream will never be fulfilled if those of us today drop the ball.

Or maybe one day, there'll be zombies.  Think of that.  Zombies.