Armageddon 2419 AD

Elsewhere I have set down, for whatever interest they have in this,
the 25th Century, my personal recollections of the 20th Century.

Now it occurs to me that my memories of the 25th Century may have an
equal interest 500 years from now--particularly in view of that unique
perspective from which I have seen the 25th Century, entering it as I
did, in one leap across a gap of 492 years.

This statement requires elucidation. There are still many in the world
who are not familiar with my unique experience. I should state
therefore, that I, Anthony Rogers, am, so far as I know the only man
alive whose normal span of life has been spread over a period of 573
years. To be precise, I lived the first twenty-nine years of my life
between 1898 and 1927; the rest since 2419. The gap between these two,
a period of nearly a five hundred years, I spent in a state of
suspended animation, free from the ravages of catabolic processes, and
without any apparent effect on my physical or mental faculties.

When I began my long sleep, man had just begun his real conquest of
the air in a sudden series of transoceanic flights in airplanes driven
by internal combustion motors. He had barely begun to speculate on the
possibilities of harnessing sub-atomic forces, and had made no further
practical penetration into the field of ethereal pulsations than the
primitive radio and television of that day. The United States of
America was the most powerful nation in the world, its political,
financial, industrial and scientific influence being supreme.

I awoke to find the America I knew a total wreck--to find Americans a
hunted race in their own land, hiding in the dense forests that
covered the shattered and leveled ruins of their once magnificent
cities, desperately preserving, and struggling to develop in their
secret retreats, the remnants of their culture and science and their
independence.

World domination was in the hands of Mongolians, and the center of
world power lay in inland China, with Americans one of the few races
of mankind unsubdued--and it must be admitted in fairness to the
truth, not worth the trouble of subduing in the eyes of the Han
Airlords who ruled North America as titular tributaries of the Most
Magnificent.