Forget boring-ass trains. The *real* future, as envisioned by some absolute madman named... I dunno, Phileas Phuck, probably... was the tube. The New York & London Pneumatic Despatch Company promised to get your pasty ass from Wall Street to Piccadilly Circus in under an hour. You just had to climb into a generously lubricated, velvet-lined, person-sized suppository—officially, the “Trav-L-jectile”—and let a few thousand pounds of compressed air have its way with you. Early promotional materials boasted you could “post a letter in Paris and post-nut in Prussia” before your rivals even hitched their horses. The sheer, unadulterated phallic energy of the whole enterprise was, frankly, breathtaking. Entire cities were dominated by enormous brass tubes, glinting in the sun like God’s own unattended dildo collection.

Naturally, the rich went fucking bananas for it. Cornelius Vanderbilt, a man who never saw a monopoly he didn’t want to ride bareback, immediately commissioned the “Suck Streak,” a private tube connecting his various mansions and—according to rumor—his favorite high-class brothels. The interiors were a marvel of drunken engineering: tiny crystal chandeliers (mostly smashed on arrival), a flask holder, and a special port for... well, for relieving pressure. The poors? They were crammed into the steerage tubes, of course. Ten to a canister, no velvet, and a fifty-fifty shot of either arriving at their destination or being turned into a fine pink mist over Ohio. That shitty, patent-thieving prick Thomas Edison tried to get in on it, proposing a DC-powered tube that just electrocuted you into a coma for the trip. Thankfully, he failed, the unoriginal hack.

It all came crashing down—or rather, *splattering out*—around, eh, 1907? The infamous Trans-Siberian Incident. Some horny Grand Duke decided to ship his entire ballet company from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok for a weekend bacchanal. But a cost-cutting engineer—probably on the Tzar’s naughty list—had used shoddy rivets. The main pressure valve failed somewhere over the Urals, causing what historians now refer to as the “Great Ballerina Explosion.” It rained tutus and tiaras for a week. The resulting investigation (a two-page pamphlet titled “Shit’s Broke, Is Sad”) revealed that nearly 40% of all tube passengers arrived with “mild-to-catastrophic biological reassignment.” Skulls were being delivered a full three seconds before the rest of the body.

After that, people kind of went back to boats and trains. Turns out, arriving alive is a bigger selling point than arriving fast. The colossal tubes were too expensive to tear down, so they mostly just rusted in place, serving as impromptu housing, lovers’ lanes, or, in one enterprising case in Chicago, the world’s longest and most disgusting water slide. A few still operate as a novelty, shooting tourists across Niagara Falls and back—mostly back. So next time you get stuck in airport security, just thank god you’re not about to be fired out of a cannon like a rich idiot’s cumshot.