“Oh, those guys? They don’t exist.”

That’s typically the sort of answer you’ll get if you ask anyone within the government about The Future. For all intents and purposes, I suppose there really is no Future, seeing as you’d really have to ask the right people, just to realize that even they don’t truly know if we exist or not. People like to have their conspiracies and stories of government secrets; the shock, however, probably comes from the fact that despite their wildest flights of fancy, they’re probably not too far off with some of them. Shadow organizations have been a part of this nation since day one. And can you really blame the powers that be for wanting to keep a lid on all of this? It kind of defeats the purpose of having a secret organization if the whole freaking world knows exactly who you are. People need an outlet, and speculation (in small doses) can be healthy, or at least less dangerous. Let’s take Area 51, for example. Every weirdo living in a fallout shelter crafted in his own backyard seems to think that it’s the hidden location of all kinds secret experiments and alien goodies. The fact of the matter is that Area 51 is actually a pretty mundane place once you get down to it. You’ve got your scientists, and you’ve got your tests, but it’s still not exactly the military hotbed most toilet-paper-and-shotgun-stockpiling fanatics think it is. They don’t seem to realize that the REALLY weird stuff gets shipped over to Area 52 across the way. Never heard of Area 52? That’s because it doesn’t exist, silly.

But I digress. You asked about The Future. Which, of course, doesn’t exist. But if it did exist, the story would probably go something like this.

Do you remember all of those tests that you had to take back in elementary school? It seemed like there was a new one every other month or so. What was the purpose behind those tests? Let us theorize for a moment, that there was perhaps an ulterior motive behind it all. Rather than just giving you bragging rights among the rest of your geeky friends, what if scoring above a certain percentile put you on a list of sorts? And let’s say that certain figures in the government kept an eye on the brightest of these individuals as they progressed through high school as well, just to see how the student continues to develop over the years? And here’s the key- what if the brightest amongst that lot were recruited by a government-sponsored organization whose very purpose was to preserve the freedom of the free world? It doesn’t sound very feasible, once you get down to it. Hey, we’ve come this far with the story. If I stop now, I’m going to have to kill you.

I’m kidding. A little government-sponsored organization humor, that’s all. We’ve got another branch that handles that sort of thing.

But that brings us back to The Future, or, as the more verbose types like to call it, Federal Underground Tactical Unit for Rapid Threat Eradication. Yes, we wanted to work that extra ‘T’ into the acronym as well, but FUTURTE doesn’t roll off of the tongue quite as nicely. And heck, it doesn’t even make sense. Missing ‘T’ aside, it’s still an apt summery of what The FUTURE is all about. Beneath the facade of what we hear on the news and see on TV, there’s a whole lot of freaky going on. We’re not the MiB’s, mind you. Those guys are in another division totally, and their dealings are a bit more, shall I say, Area 52-ish than our own. Trust me when I say that there’s enough weirdness on this planet to keep us more than busy. Who do you think handles all of the mad scientists, psychotic billionaires, and generally naughty bunch that like to try and take over the world on a daily basis? You say you’ve never heard of anything like that happening? That’s good, because if you did, that means that we were slacking that day. We worry about the little catastrophes so that you won’t have to. We are the first to know about a problem, and we’ll probably be the first ones to know when humanity as a whole is totally screwed.

We are The FUTURE. And without us, you don’t have one.