Futurefeedforward

March 8, 2041
WASHINGTON DC–Citing what Northrop Grumman engineers have identified as a flaw in specially designed navigation software, spokespeople for the Presidential Cabinet confirmed late Wednesday that the 53rd President of the United States, the first entirely autonomous, mechanical, airborne leader in the western world, has crashed and is likely unrecoverable. “This is a black day for America,” noted a solemn administration spokeswoman. “But it may also be a day of great courage. The American people took a great leap forward when they elected [the President]; may we not now retreat from that great vision.”

The President, widely known by his Northrop development codename “Skipper,” was reportedly surveilling the former Korean De-Militarized Zone when a software flaw led him to “invert” positioning data he received from a network of satellites and ground-based antennae. “Though specific details of the mishap are certainly classified, we can say that a sudden, systematic mis-transformation of positioning data lead the President to believe that up was down and down was up,” explains an unidentified Northrop engineer. “He lost compass and got locked into a fatal feedback flightpath. The closer he got to the ground, the higher he tried to fly, bringing him closer to the ground until he crashed at an apparently high velocity.”

A controversial figure since his election last year, President Skipper gained the confidence of the American people after taking quick, decisive action against a rogue satellite many feared equipped with legacy nuclear weapons. “Nothing beats a President capable of extra-atmospheric sorties with his own air-to-air missiles,” boasts Admiral Wayne Nubbs, head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs. “He’s got high-powered lasers mounted right on his head. No traditional leader can compete with that.”

Though popular for his daring, low-orbit exploits and courageous penetration of foreign, hostile airspace, the President faced mounting pressure at home to reign in military spending and address perennial domestic problems. “Skipper faced some understandable skepticism when it came to military spending,” opines Katherine Zahone, Executive Director of the non-partisan BudgetScope. “Though he was elected by the American people, he was built by major military contractors. That was a real political liability, no question about it.”

Scheduled to be sworn in over the weekend, the Vice President, codenamed “Little Boy,” though little-used over the past year, is reportedly prepared to assume official Presidential duties. “It’s true he hasn’t seen much action,” noted a Northrop engineer during a January New York Times interview. “To be frank, we’ve basically been using him to make toast and heat up coffee. But he’s got every capability that the Skipper’s got. With 45 minutes’ notice we can scramble the Cabinet and he can be airborne with the latest intelligence and a full payload.”

January 13, 2081
WASHINGTON DC–In the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the Archivist of the United States, a crack team of historians led by Harvard Professor Emeritus Ruth Ascidy announced the conclusion of a sixteen year study of the 43rd U.S. President during which the team determined “to a degree approaching absolute historical certainty” that “the 43rd President of the United States was not, as supposed by some popular conspiracy theories, George W. Bush.”

The study, commissioned jointly by the Office of the Archivist and the Smithsonian Institute’s Committee on Special Inquiries, aims to put to rest decades of speculation about the actual identity of the 43rd President. “Gore’s presidency has been a hotly disputed issue in the popular media,” explains Professor Ascidy. “And, though theories claiming a Bush presidency have not been taken seriously among academic historians, the Committee felt that the ‘Bush question’ should be put to rest once and for all.”

Based on more than 1,300 interviews with surviving eyewitnesses and exhaustive searches of media archives in 23 countries and 48 languages, the study concludes that there is “overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence favoring the majoritarian view” that Gore was the 43rd President. “We found that claims by Bushites concerning the number of extant reports from the period describing or referring to George Bush as the 43rd President are greatly exaggerated,” notes Ascidy. “That is not to say that they do not exist, but simply that the few that do exist can be put down largely to typographical error.”

Claims about an “international, revisionist conspiracy” to “paper over” a Bush Presidency with a “paper figurehead” first surfaced in the work of Hugh Macadam, a self-taught Illinois bookmaker and raconteur whose ‘The First President on the Moon’ is a fundamental text for most Bush theorists. Macadam’s book publicized for the first time the existence of a number of sources, in particular two series of high school history textbooks, describing a history in every way identical to the consensus history save that all references to President Gore were replaced with references to a “President Bush.”

“What can explain this substitution?” asked Macadam. “This is not a ‘Dewey Wins’ situation. These books were published years after Gore’s supposed presidency. I’ll tell you what these texts are, they are crumbs of the truth, evidence that puts the lie to the so called history with which the Establishment has tried to dupe us all these years.”

“The Committee looked in detail at all supposed counter-historical documents, including those emphasized by Mr. Macadam,” explains Professor Ascidy. “In every case, without exception, a much more plausible explanation existed, including simple confusion and occasional misconception among editors and typesetters. If the massive conspiracy hypothesized by Mr. Macadam exists, we could find no evidence of it.”

The study has received a cool reception among Bush theorists. “It’s a sham,” exclaims Brian Secondi, Executive Director of the 43rds, a DC-area group of Bush enthusiasts. “It’s really more notable for what it leaves out than for what it resolves. Sure, they address some of the publications, but they don’t even mention the well-documented meetings between prominent members of the Democratic Party and Redroe Boudaine. This is no regular conspiracy. Something of this scale could only be pulled off through abuse of the revisionist, time-bending technology that Boudaine controls. Ask yourself why the Committee didn’t look into Futurefeedforward and its activities. I’ll tell you why: A Cayman slush fund. A hands-off regulatory policy towards ‘temporal networking.’ You have no idea how deep this goes.”

Ascidy, responding to charges that the study is flawed, dismissed speculation about the possibility of revisionism facilitated by temporal technologies as “naive” and “the product of imaginations that continue to doubt the Apollo landing.”