Way back in 1958, the Mickelson Steel Company created a life-size display of what the 2008 should look like if, in their estimation, people continued to invest Mickelson Steel for all their construction needs. This display looks a great deal like the usual fifties-era guess: bubble glass, flying cars, and a great deal of chrome. The display is big- a façade the size of a city block. Old mannequins lean against the steering wheels of their hover-vehicles. Robots speak on video phones that are still anchored to the wall by a cord. It’s all pretty well done, in my opinion, and it’s all pretty hopeful except, I suppose, that all the families are nuclear and all the mannequins are white.
A display like this makes a great side-of-the-road attraction. It’s quick, it’s bigger than you expect, and it’s aging in a way that makes it just a little nostalgic.
What makes it a Wayside attraction is that Mickelson Steel did it again a fews years later. And again a few years after that.
They got pretty good.
‘They got REALLY good. By the time 2019 rolled around, the sixties-era displays were looking a little uncanny. Modern cellphones and sedans the shape of melted butter. Media that appeared both angry and joyfully pornographic. A man in a crowd with a gun in his hand. A latter display even included some hygienic social distancing, meaning that they were still going just a little too far in their imaginings. Mickelson got some government side-eye for that prediction, but the Mickelsons had given up on steel and business before the turn of the century and were happy to stand before committees and explain to the men in black that showed up at their houses that they were only ever extrapolating from informational trends and that the information necessary became more abundant each year.
They said a lot more than that, actually, indicating that the gift of foresight might also have been handed to their bloodline by some vague divinity while also fending off allegations that the old Mickelson Steel Mill had been converted into residences for a cult that continued to create these displays.
The practical result of all this is that a traveler in central Texas might stop off at ‘The Mickelson’s Future,’ a catch-all for the dozens of completed displays that now make up a quilted sort of city block in the middle of nothing else. The author recommends taking the tour backwards.
It’s happier that way.’
The Mickelson’s artists have gotten pretty good with realistic wounds over the years, I’ll say that much. They’re due for a new display later this year, from what I understand, and that’s putting us within a stone’s throw of 2100. I’m hoping for more bubble glass but if their predictions for 2050 are anything to go by, humans won’t have the sort of eyes that necessitate transparent windshields.
And, hey: they’ve diversified the mannequins.
-traveler
