‘From Baloney to Poloney’: A Time Travel Tale

I am or “was” a journalist – I was tasked with documenting and reporting advancements in technology. Recently a form of time travel was discovered. It was used to send audio messages but it was still early (only one way).

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Also the messages were jumbled but what was discovered was that if organic matter (like food) was passed through, it had the probability to mutate and self replicate but only in the past and most times it would be one half of the machine – then production – then sending the food. Nine times out of 10 the resulting mass would be unusable scraps – but that’s when the true product came in.

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“From Baloney to Poloney” was their slogan, a not for profit meat company/producer. “Uncle Sams ‘Hams’, because obviously the Americans would be the first to mass produce cheap meat. The principle was: one cow (alive) fed into the machine, then several years of cheap canned spam sent to third world countries.

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I was ecstatic documenting the process, and since you only needed the “bi-product” end they could claim it was “100 per cent ethical” and cruelty-free. But the more I researched the more I found, this meat from out of time would stretch the cow over a dozen wormholes. The only reason the meat would be fresh is because the cow would be alive.

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It wasn’t long before animal rights activists learned and meat production continued, but as if one’s actions could imprint on future events, production halted several years early. The corporate figureheads figured that the protesters may have somehow cracked real time travel and saved the cow. The only move now was to build the second half of the machine; feed the cow into it and see how they saved it. An army of animal rights activists stormed the building before the cow was due to arrive.

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Without a floor plan, who was to guess they’d entered the beginning of the meat process.

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Who’d have guessed salvation would taste so…human.