Are You A Weena?

Back in the early Bronze Age, when I was a kid, I was absolutely enthralled with George Pal's original film adaptation of "The Time Machine".  My teenaged heart melted for Weena and I reviled the cannibalistic Morlocks, with their blue skin and glowing eyes.

My heart raced as the hero frantically tried to save Weena from the Morlock dinner bell.  I was reviled when the dead Morlock decayed before our eyes as the hero raced through time to escape a horrible fate.  I was on the edge of my seat when Filby and the housemaid examine the tracks in the study floor and surmise that the Traveller had drug the machine inside to be outside the future Morlock cave.

I was so enthralled, I ran out and bought the box set of H. G. Well's novels.  All the greats, like First Men in the Moon, In the Days of the Comet and The Invisible Man.  Of them all, The Time Machine was my favorite.

I was comforted by the fact that none of that could ever happen.  Humans would not move underground and eventually evolve into cannibalistic beasts who preyed on the innocents of the outside world.  Humans would retain, I though, their innate desire to fight for a better world...to create a real paradise, where we all live in harmony and peace.

Until...

White House finishes mysterious underground project

Over the past couple of decades, there seems to have been a massive effort on the part of certain self-proclaimed elites to build massive underground refuges...from what we are not allowed to know, apparently.

All across the globe, governments are undertaking unknown subterranean construction projects.  They are installing enormous subway systems, bunkers in the hearts of mountains, long-rumored cities under major airports, and seed and DNA banks (often called 'arks') deep in the Arctic tundra.

As I watch with growing apprehension, it seems that Well's nightmare future is coming to life before our eyes.  The predatory elites are driving themselves underground, for whatever mysterious reason, while the ancestors of Weena...us...frolic like spring lambs in the fields, unaware and uncaring that some part of the human race is burying itself, using our money and labor, in anticipation of...what?

In 2,000 years, would we emerge from our sparkling, Victorian era time machine to find that the elites have now become slave-driving cannibals who herd us Eloi like so much cattle, until we are fattened enough to grace the dinner table with a little gravy and potatoes?

There are a multitude of stories of these elite building underground cities.  There is ample evidence that they consider us to be mindless cattle.  There's whispered rumors that they enjoy our flesh as a succulent main course.  And a visit to any elementary school will convince us that we are being trained for pavlovian response to their 'dinner bells'.  Even the title of 'blue bloods' implies an overall blue cast to their skin at some point in the hazy realm of the future.

Perhaps its time we should heed Wells' warning and begin to fight this horrible fate while we still have our wits about us.  Being forewarned by such a brilliant writer, we can act now to ensure that our future generations do not fall prey to man-eating troglodytes who are even now moving themselves underground.  We should resist with all our strength the trained responses we have been installed with to fatten our carcasses and deliver them to the elite dinner tables.

Wells' Traveller went back to the future to be with his beloved Weena and to fight the evil Morlocks head-on.  However, it might have been more effective to stay in his own time and fight the weed when it is only a seed.

Yet, as Wells points out, the people of the Traveller's own time were incredulous and thought it a wild fantasy spun by a half-crazed and overworked inventor.  But if we become the Filbys, finding solid proof that the Traveller's story was true in the tracks scratched into the laboratory floor, and the missing books from the shelf, and finally believing the wild tale spun at dinner, then maybe we can join the Traveller's efforts by working in our own time to stop the decay into such a horrific future.

When Mary (Percy) Shelley penned Frankenstein, did anyone seriously think that just a short century later, we would be battling patented life-forms and GMO crops?

Science fiction, especially the high-quality variety by such geniuses as Wells, often point the way to our actual future.  After all, 50 years ago, who could have imagined the Orwellian dystopia currently unfolding before our eyes?  Who would have thought 40 years ago that Star Trek communicators and phasers would become commonplace?  Which of us marveled at Kubrick's Floyd sitting on a space station having a video chat with his daughter?  How many people scoffed 100 years ago at Jules Verne's vision that men would climb into rockets, in Florida no less, and step out on the surface of the Moon?

It would be unwise to dismiss the musings of great minds.  Not only do they often perceive real trends and possibilities, their musings frequently become the inspiration for future generations to make real the stuff of dreams...and nightmares.

It's easy for us to be thrilled by these cautionary tales from the quaint past, and to just as easily dismiss them as fantasies and fictional adventures.  But when we see them start to take form around us, can we toss them aside as fanciful musings from an unenlightened time?

Take heed, World, fiction is often truer than reality.