Danton Wells, named after the French revolutionary Georges Danton, was the son of a high school history teacher and a homemaker in Youngstown, Ohio. Despite coming from an educated background and being extensively taught at home, Wells was a mediocre student at best and quickly amassed a reputation as a feckless, unreliable daydreamer. After graduation, the only work he was able to find was as a janitor and part-time mechanic at a Chevrolet dealership. It was there that he noticed, over the course of a few years, the startling increase in sophistication of the cars on the lot, from the initial postwar models in 1946 (Wells had been too young to be drafted into the war). He began to wonder when cars would be sophisticated enough to talk, and this became the basis for the Acolytes of the Future cult, better known as the Futuros.

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