The man from the future arrived on a day of no particular consequence, one of those sweltering July days where you can feel the pressure of heat lightning coat your skin like bright ionized perspiration. I say man, but the debates in the realms of linguistic, biological and reproductive sciences were legion. I personally cast him as a member of the un-fairer sex due to the fact that while he had two vaginas placed evenly on the square of his back, he had three penises of various size and temperament gracing his lower torso. By and away the most disturbing feature of the time-traveler was his face. While the rest of him was ensconced in various and sundry abominations and marvels of technology and biology, his face remained unfathomably human; of a size and scale that seemed illogical for his 15 foot frame. He had four wings of the clearest vibrating gossamer, wings that in their opaque surface would sometimes relay a growing phantasma of strange shapes and colors, and at other times transmit what we could only assume were messages written in a tongue utterly ineffable. The science noveau have classified it as proof positive of the first meta-language, where a letter is not relegated to something so pedestrian as enunciation, but of whole concepts, a world contained within a character.
The first 24 hours of our esteemed Visitor's dalliance with his primitive past did not grace any news screens, nor chatrooms, nor grainy cellphone videos. No, his arrival precipitated a global communications breakdown the likes of which had never been anticipated. Internet, television, am and fm radios, satellite signals all were silent, almost contemplative. The resulting malfeasance and chaos racked up a death toll of just under a million worldwide. Theorists on the wilder end of the scientific spectrum surmised that the visitor attempted to communicate with the only intelligent life he could find, the effort causing a sort of synaptic overload of the world-wide networks we so naively gawk and marvel at. Many remember the instance of his arrival due the anxious and nonsensical dreams they experienced, a staggering number remembering their subconscious casting them through the cold constriction of starry vacuum with wings of the slightest silk. The only human contact our visitor had were a family of seven who made their homes on the far side of the Appalachian mountains. Once a simple family of provincial nature, they at once began to sow their crops with the visitor's liquid waste, built strange and terrifying shrines around his landing site and engaging in sexual antics of a undeniably immoral and aberrant nature. They were arrested shortly after the visitor left, the father accused of bigamy, sodomy and violation of federal zoning regulations (he had been laboriously constructing a zigguarat/interdimensional and intertemporal landing pad in excess of one hundred meters tall, decorated with murals depicting some of the more fetishistic and incestuous orgies and rituals his family had contrived).
I myself must say that though I, like many others, huddled around the news screens for days afterwards, glaring in fear at the awful man-creature and his diabolical body type, I did not feel I gained much by his visit. For six days he flew around some of the larger mountain ranges, gently inspected the tanks and other machines of war that the government had entrenched for global security, and cried out in a fearful digitized imitation of the local bird life. Granted, there was some minor benefit Like many others, I gained the ability to memorize and actualize whole new languages with ease, I suddenly cultivated an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences, I now had a limited range of telepathic/empathic ability, and (to my chagrin), the lump on my left testicle had disappeared. But beyond that, it was business as usual. It wasn't like that steel-winged squawking psychic messiah from the future was going to pay the fucking rent.
The Visitor left in much (I imagine) the way he had came, suddenly and inexplicably gone, making much of the world doubt their already dubious sanity. Life went on in much the same way it had before, with a bit of anger, sadness and joy sprinkled liberally around a growing tide of tedium.
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul