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“Diagnosis: the future is a disease that infects the present. [Pause. Hiss of steam.] Biological terminology is deliberate. We do not employ metaphor. The future is a terminal infection. There is no cure. Regrettable. [Whirrr.] The indicated solution is therefore: amputation.” –-one of the Great Machines of Singapore

“We’ll see about that!” -–Doktor Zumm

At the World Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, Frederick Jackson Tesla? unveiled his epoch-making invention, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Constructed by Hiram Manning and Sons?, and employing a tremendous 1000-horsepower hypothesis, Tesla’s Frontier Thesis? declared the presence of open vacuum in the West and the corresponding diffusion of American particles to be crucial factors in the transmission of democracy and the American character. But Tesla also noted darkly the closing of the frontier in his time and said that with it, the current of American history had been drained of its power.

Eleven years later, an older, madder Tesla unleashed the terrible sequel to his original invention at the Kansas City Exposition of 1904*. Even more massive than the Frontier Thesis, “The Significance of the Future in American History” was designed to enlist the unoccupied “vacuum” of the future as America’s new frontier. Just as the induction coil of the Old West had agitated nineteenth-century American particles with high-frequency individualism, so the forward-sweeping Future Thesis would transmit American pioneer spirit into the twentieth century and beyond. (Although overshadowed the following year by Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis of 1905, Tesla’s time-eating invention can be seen as a forerunner of the Dead History movement and ultimately the monstrous Lebenszeit Putsch? of the 22nd century.)

But just as the Western vacuum of the Frontier Thesis ignored the Indians living on the land, Tesla’s plans for accelerating time falsely assumed the future was uninhabited. And unlike the Indians of the 19th century frontier, the indigenous inhabitants of the future were well equipped to defend their temporal sovereignty.

Woe to those who try to sneak up on the future from the past! Tesla had barely spun the dynamos that would bring the Future Thesis roaring to coherence in 1904* when the counterstrike hit in 1969*. In their great seven-hulled canoes the Astilans came, paddling furiously against the current of the timestream, firing volleys of sentient Yistolf? arrows and slinging symbiotes infected with reality pox? backwards into the past.

The dogs burned in 1969*?, as everyone knows, and Tesla’s Future Thesis was smashed to bits. Its salvageable parts would be sold to Singapore for scrap. By then, of course, Tesla would be long dead. But not, ironically, for long.

See also: Astilan Cooperative, Lebenszeit Putsch?, Realitypox?

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This is an F entry in the Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years.