As Whitman’s colorful cast of campus characters reshuffles with the return and departure of various studiers-abroad, many students are noticing a group of gangling goggle-wearers marveling at the mundane and speaking in unfamiliar lingo. This cohort of visitors is none other than Whitman’s first group of time-traveling study-abroad students, or “travs,” on loan from the year 2066 to learn history firsthand.
While non-time-traveling students (or “chronnies,” short for chronological) are generally favorable to the program, some travs express exasperation with their classmates. “Everywhere I go, people ask me about the election, space travel, who 2049’s Sexiest Man Alive will be,” complains trav Aquamarina Rellinger. “I signed a sprillion forms before coming here, I’m not boinging to disclose all the future’s secrets. Also, they should know it’ll be Milo Manheim.”
Rellinger’s frustration is shared by her contemporary Vermilion Connors, who claims to have been asked by a chronnie who their eventual spouse would be. Connors admits it may have been the culture shock: “After the Legally Binding Marriage Pact Disaster of 2053, almost no Whitties even ponder about getting married anymore,” they explain. “So I was direly braingled.”
To better understand the travs’ study-abroad experience, The Wire sent out a survey asking travs their favorite and least favorite things about life in the past. Common favorites included the weather, the normal-sized squirrels and the clock tower, whose analog display the travs find charmingly quaint. Least favorites were dominated by the fact that the past contains just as many surveys as the future (a bleak glimpse of things to come for the chronnies), but distant second was the feeling of being stared at due to their Implantlers™, synthetic antler implants frequently seen protruding from the heads of 2066’s young adults.
“I can’t believe the revulsion some chronnies have to Implantlers™,” expounds trav Thompsyn Alabaster. “In my time they’re leafy-green popular – sexy, fashionable, great for bushwhacking. Mine even do Bluetooth! But it is striking if you’re not used to them, so I absorb being sporkish about it.”
At press time, Whitman’s Center for Welcoming Research had chalked up the trav-chronnie conflict to 2066’s unprecedentedly high warmth-of-welcome standards resulting from runaway climate change, while the travs were deeming it “plutonic” that faculty in 2024 still use blackboard chalk.
