Welcome to Maine in the year 2019.
You visitors from 2009 will be amazed at the technological advances that have taken place in a mere decade.
We've got flying cars.
We've got cyborgs that shoot laser beams from their eyes.
We've got a Rudy Vallee revival. Literally. He's doing that zombie thing. We're working on reanimating Michael Jackson and Elvis, too. We're thinking trio.
Swine flu? We discovered the cure for that in 2010, when a vial of H1N1 germs was accidentally left near the podium where Republican gubernatorial candidate Peter Mills was speaking. By the time he finished explaining his 12-point program for prosperity, the poor little boogers had shriveled up and died of boredom. Today, a member of the Mills family (thanks to cloning, there are now about 14,000 of them — and that's only counting the ones in state government) visits every school district in the state (due to the failure of consolidation, there are now about 14,000 of them) to give a lecture. After just two hours, all the students are disease-free, although we let the Mills-zoids ramble on for another 30 minutes just to be safe.
Some things are much the same as they were in 2009. Maine still doesn't have a casino, although there's been a proposal to legalize gambling on every ballot for the last decade. Everybody thought it was going to pass last year, but CasinosNO! spokesman Dennis Bailey (yes, he's still around, but he's mostly a cyborg now — not as much of a change as you might think) showed up at the polls on election day and used his laser-beam vision to evaporate voters who looked like slot-machine addicts.
Tax reform? According to Democratic state Representative John Piotti Version 3.0, this is the year it will finally pass. Piotti 3's compromise measure calls for extending the sales tax to laser-beam vision (according to state estimates, only Dennis Bailey will pay more) and using the extra money to lower the income tax. It's being opposed by Republican Party state chairman Charlie Webster, who was recently designated as a National Historic Landmark for preserving opinions thought to have been extinct since the Middle Ages. Webster claims taxing lasers will have a disproportionate impact on low-income cyborgs, since they won't have the extra cash to pay for zapping each other out of existence, thereby making it more difficult to decrease the welfare rolls.
Maine's economy is still heavily dependent on tourism, although thanks to flying cars, we no longer have to worry about highway congestion keeping people away. And since we built a dome over the entire state, weather's not an issue, either. The shopping mall covering the area where the North Woods used to be also helps in attracting travelers from regions more prosperous than Maine, such as Somalia, North Korea, and Detroit (flying-car sales are so strong that General Motors may be able to pay back the government for its bailout in another 10 years or so).
