Poker face card #4: Future tense

This was a very hard one for me. First to figure out what to write about with such a vague prompt (and my last remaining one is "1000 words or less", oh man...), then to actually do it. Future tense isn't very natural to me, it seems, and in fact I had to allow for a couple of present tense verbs that refer to the future to avoid blatant overuse of "will". (Actually, there is still a blatant overuse of it, and it doesn't feel entirely fluent to me.) I could have written much longer about this conversation, but I had to leave out things that would necessarily have been in the wrong tense.

Anyway, what do you do when you need to write about the future but don't want to spoil it for the audience? You just go far enough in the past. So this one is canon Alphabetia, from the times of generation A, when the founders were still alive.

( The dark future )