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(On a grand stage set up in front of the tenshukaku-style Kyuushuu Futuro-Historical Train Station's main gates, an announcer taps on a microphone. Amassed in front of the stage are station staff and various members of the Kyuushuu Futurist Association, dressed variably in suit jackets, dresses, kimono, and official uniforms.)
Everyone, please gather around – this will be the final briefing for the staff of the Kyuushuu Futuro-Historical Train Station prior to its official re-commissioning. Thank you very much for your kind attention.
First of all, thank you all for your many years of service. There is no other station in Yamato that is of as great importance as Kyuushuu, here on the edge of the world: our interchange has served both Honshuu via the Kanmon Tunnel and the future via the Korai Suidou; both tunnels were the first of their kinds in our vector of the timeline. The Kanmon Tunnel was the first undersea tunnel, a pioneering Remembrance that helped preserve an unbroken view of our southwestern shorelines and bridges. The Korai Undersea Route is, of course, the first section of the All-Japan Railway system to have been purpose-built for travel from the future, and has served as the primary port of call for Past-Future expeditions since the retirement of Nihonbashi Station in 1749. We have welcomed seventeen of the twenty-one quadranscentennial expeditions since 1750, and will conclude Past-Future Shinkansen service with the arrival of the final twenty-second expedition tomorrow.
(Applause. The speaker waits for it to abate, then continues.)
Many of you who have served here as Past-Future staff come from long and storied lineages of futurists, historians, and onmyoji: Kyuushuu Railway, the AJR, and the central government would like to recognise today the contributions of the Shimazu, Akizuki and Hizen-Arima families as well as the Kato, Kuroda and Konishi. Thanks to you, Kyuushuu Station has not only provided the highest level of service for our guests, but served as a centre for futurist scholarship which has helped lead the nation on through the minefields of the past-future with grace and dignity.
When the First Expedition arrived in Edo in 1650, we were completely unaware of what the future had brought us. Though it is inconceivable to us now, futurism was not invented until that day. It is hard to imagine a past that did not know its own future history, isn't it? But that is what the First Expedition changed with its message of what could – and would – happen in 550 years' time. Fortunately for us all, the first emissaries succeeded in becoming the tutors to young Tokugawa Ietsuna, and the rest is now past-history.
We here at Kyuushuu Station have being amongst the most privileged when it comes to witnessing first-hand the benefits of the Temporal System. Besides the Kanmon Tunnel – opened in 1750 with aid from the 3rd and 4th Expeditions a full 186 years before its future-time – we were also the first station to introduce free-to-use denki-uma charging stations in 1723, the first station to debut Travelling Castles in 1752, the pioneers of the nationally-beloved Red Cars in 1801. We were the third port of call of the first Saikaidou Cruise-bune in 1889, the country's second fully-solar train mall in 1921, and the third in the nation to connect Aerodrome customers to the rail network when the Kyuushuu Aerodrome Express Line opened in 1972. The list goes on.
(Applause.)
In the last two centuries, we – alongside the rest of the country – have finally settled down into a more sedate pace of change as our vector reaches the middle point of the timeline. The archives are full of records of the first frantic efforts of the first futurist onmyoji, who had to learn many things from our future predecessors very quickly. During the time of the Edo Revolution, they asked the first Expeditions many questions. Why did the future kagakusha choose, of all times, to go back all the way to the Edo instead of what they called the Meiji? How were we supposed to learn from the vast amounts of new information that was being brought to us from past-future Japan without inheriting all of the concomitant tragedies that had made the years 2200 and beyond (presumably) unliveable to the point that the First Expedition braved their lives and future timeline to come backwards? How does multi-directional linear time – a concept so native to us now that MDLT is taught in the earliest years of temple-school – even work?
Even after coming to understand the basics of relativity and transpositional chronology, we still had many questions left over – questions about the heart and soul of the country. The wisdom of the First Expedition did not lie in the solar arrays or solid state drives or great thick encyclopaedia that they brought with them: today's futurists recognise that it lay in their selection of people. The fifteen members of the First Expedition were not all kagakusha "scientists" or keizaigakusha "economists" or even engineers – fully half of them were artists and artisans. Our chronological predecessors understood that the way to the heart and soul of a place and a people is through aesthetics, not equations.
How was the shogunate in 1650 to understand the theory of all the ways the future had learned to self-destruct? Formulae and physics are meaningless to the uneducated – in our case, the uneducable: it was impossible for them to teach us from paper when we had no shared scientific frame of reference the same way it was impossible for them to have learned unwritten heikyoku when biwa-houshi had died out in their vector. The songs of the Heike were as inaccessible to them as the atomic bomb was inconceivable to us.
The reason why we have never had to conceive nuclear physics is that the First Expedition was wise enough not to try to tell, but instead showed: our Edo painters were given screenings of their moving pictures; our musicians were played their recordings. Most famous of the early-future artists is the renowned Yamaguchi A —-san, from whose blended painting style we came to learn about the future through our own lens.
The First Expedition showed us what would be if we did not take action. But in spite of teaching us the language of fear, they also spoke the language of hope: they showed us what could be, especially if the future does carry on the way it had in the past. The First Expedition, some may say, came from a place of profound despair – the ukiyo, or sorrowful world of death and rebirth from which we all seek escape. Maybe that is the answer for why they came to Edo: to our ukiyo, the floating, transient post-Sekigahara world, which was capable of understanding them in spirit even if not in word.
From 1750 until today, we the members and staff of the Kyuushuu Station have helped usher forward our side of the timeline vector by incorporating the future-past into the present. Every day our customers are delighted by the things we have-not-lost and will never lose! Just as the Japanese language evolved to have not only mizenkei and kakkokei – future and past tenses – but the koraikei, the future-past tense as well, the Kyuushuu Division of the AJR has strived to bring our past-future forwards towards tomorrow's future-past.
(Here, the announcer gestures at the two grand banners hung vertically down from either side of the stage: they read from our past-future to tomorrow's future-past.)
Once every twenty-five years, the fixed future-past point of our timeline in 2200 – the prime-set irrevocably altered by the First Expedition's arrival – sends an Expedition backwards to us. 2200' went to 1650, 2200'' to 1675 and so on until 25 years go, when the 21st Prime of 2200 visited in 2175. They were very close to who we would and will become in that last Expedition: not a few of you here were present for their arrival and bore witness to this. We looked and spoke very nearly the same language, both in word as well as in art, natural sciences, and in the character of our national spirit. What they could tell us of the future – of our today – we were already well equipped to guess at.
It is difficult thing to consider the futuristic record of the world of 2200 Prime. It is very sad to think of the generations that were forever cut off not only because humanity as a whole was at an ecological terminus, but because they could neither go backwards to escape nor see forwards to prevent. We are very lucky now, in the inflection year of 2200, to be at the timeline's Middle Point – this year is the first year in which MDTL will be broken, the year in which we are finally ourselves. Today, it is the honour of Kyuushuu to announce the selections of the National Past-Future Committee for the First Future-Past Expedition, which will return to 1650 via the Korai Suidou and beget the start of Multidirectional Circular Time. The formal beginning of Year 1 of the Korai Era will begin upon the departure of their train at 12:00 in twenty days' time.
Before proceeding with the announcement, a poem shall be recited in commemoration of the occasion.
(A scroll is handed to the announcer, who clears their throat and then, in singing-tone, reads a poem from the Ise Monogatari.)
Because they fall we love them – the cherry blossoms.
In this floating world, does anything endure?
(Loud, vigorous applause as the announcer bows deeply, in multiple directions, to the audience.)
Thank you very much. The committee will now announce its final selections: first and foremost, Yamaguchi A'—-san...