From the day
Perspective: The Future Historian · Sight
I lean against the brickwork, watching the first Ford Model T roll past with a silhouette so rigid it feels like the future is being forged in iron right before my eyes. The morning light catches the sheen of a cellophane wrapper—a strange, translucent skin—tossed near a newsstand shouting of buffer strips and new borders. Blimey, to think a single dime, just $0.10, can fill a tank and move a man across a continent. I squint through the haze of coal smoke and progress, realizing these rattling machines are already erasing the very neutral zones we just labored to draw on the map.