We wander through the city. It has been a long time since we have seen anyone else. Looking around I see a place I know but at the same time find utterly unfamiliar. She asks me where we are. I reach down and pick up a small round badge from the rubble. I pin it to her coat. It reads 'I have seen the future'. It was a souvenir once given to visitors after their voyage through time on board the General Motors Futurama ride at the 1939 World's Fair. Sitting on an automated conveyor belt, visitors would travel through a model of the city of tomorrow, its skyscrapers, traffic lights and tangles of interchanges and expressways. Where once stood the imagined landscapes of what the 1960s might bring is now a dusty ruin, an archaeology of the social and technological ambitions of the time in which it was made. She tells me she has seen this place before, in vintage YouTube clips, tinged with the quaint nostalgia of retro futurism and archive footage.
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