TUBE STEAKS

Few eras in human history combined breathtaking genius with fuck-stupid bravado quite like the 19th century. These were people who looked at a metric shit-ton of boiling water and thought, “Yes, let’s weaponize this against the concept of distance itself.” So when some bright spark named—I dunno, let’s blame the French—Antoine de Fou-Fou proposed expanding Paris’s pneumatic mail network to carry actual, breathing humans, the world’s engineers collectively popped a boner so stiff it could’ve been used as a railway tie.

The logic was flawless, if you were a coked-up industrialist with a monacle screwed into your eye socket a little too tight. If a tube can shoot a letter across town, a bigger tube can shoot a *person* across the country. Duh. The Inter-Continental Pneumatic Transit Corporation (or ICPTC, which sounds suspiciously like a venereal disease) was born. The plan: cram people into luxurious, felt-lined canisters—glorified spitballs of human meat—and fire them through continent-spanning brass tubes using nothing but the raw, terrifying power of compressed air. Initial tests were…mixed. While the trip from London to Dover was reduced to twelve minutes, the passenger, a certain Lord Ashworth, arrived as a gibbering, jellied wreck who had aged thirty years and spoke only in tongues. His first words upon being scraped from the capsule were reportedly, “The velocity…it has un-seen my sins.”

Of course, because humans are fundamentally horny, depraved apes, the second question after “Will it kill me?” was “Can I fuck in it?” The answer was a resounding, G-force-slurred “*Yessssssh*.” The so-called “Mile-High Club” was for amateurs; true connoisseurs of velocity-based fornication joined the “Subterranean 60-Second Slam.” Wealthy degenerates commissioned custom “pleasure pods,” complete with restraints and strategically placed padding, turning a simple commute into a high-speed game of “will the rivets hold before I do?” One apocryphal account from a supposed “Tube Attendant’s Diary” describes a Bavarian Duke and his mistress attempting a particularly ambitious tryst, only for the emergency braking system to engage unexpectedly, flash-fusing them into a single, horrified, and very nude sculpture later displayed at the 1888 Exposition as “An Allegory on Hubris.”

Naturally, the ambitions grew. Why stop at people? Let’s move *cities*. A consortium of American robber barons, ever the masters of subtlety, drew up plans for the “Pneumatic Trans-Location of Boston,” a project to literally shoot the entire goddamn city of Boston into Upstate New York via a 200-foot-wide tube, ostensibly for “summering.” It was the kind of plan that makes perfect sense after three straight days of sniffing ether and yelling at schematics. The project was championed by that whispering-grifter Thomas Edison, who claimed he could make it electric and twice as deadly—bless his black little heart.

The whole enterprise came to a screeching, fart-noise halt during the infamous “Great Brussels Sprout Incident of 1905.” A massive shipment of the wretched little cabbages, sent via the agricultural tube network, catastrophically depressurized over northern France. The resulting shockwave leveled three villages and resulted in a vegetative bombardment not seen since Creation itself. It rained sprouts for four days. The entire continent smelled like a fart. Everyone sort of looked at each other, covered in tiny green bits, and agreed to go back to trains. And that was that.