Now I ask you: Would you like to be yanked into the future against your will?
Okay, let's have the future delivered to your door: an alien species shows up in Boston, just a little old alien species, wandering through the neighborhood. Their space ship breaks down-damn!-and so they check into little old Motel-o Earth-o to see if they can find a new conduction bolt for their night-drive. And the next thing you know, alien technology and ideas are erasing the cultures of Earth forever.
We're trying to keep up with the aliens, keep the aliens in Boston, keep the boom, keep it, keep it, keep it. Oh it was so good back in the eighties; oh it was so bad in the teens; now it's so good again. Oh please don't take it away.
Looking over it all, the emissaries from a dozen worlds, who peer down on us from their positions on high-on our world. Who look like fire plugs and sprays of aluminum siding and willow trees. Who have names like numbers. Who slice clothes from huge salamis and hand them out as souvenirs. Who don't run the place yet-
But we aren't exactly the sole proprietors any more.
Things have disappeared...