strange machine contrib

A Present Without A Future

(cue from Warren Ellis, here)

It used to be that the future was as close to us as finding another meal, but we had moved well past that point long ago. Knowing the future became an obsession for us. We invested millennia in trying to find out what was coming down the line next. We tried mysticism, we tried drugs, and then finally we tried pure, hard science. When we finally cracked it, everything became visible to us at once; the whole future, laid out as plainly as a hand in front of your face. And once we'd cracked it for ourselves, we'd cracked it for everyone. You can't tweak the space-time continuum this much without affecting the entire planet. Some people went insane almost immediately, others just shrugged it off and claimed it was no more than they expected. The shock seems to have tapered off now, along with the suicides and the screaming.

Now there's just an ever-present present, pushing all the next into now.

We've broken the future.

it is now safe to shut down your ATM