The team at AOL's intrepid startup newsroom never shies away from thinly rewritten press releases—don't mess with a good formula. But today, TechCrunch reaches new heights/depths in the art: the press release as corporate fan fiction, imagining a cool new world in which Google replaces humans.

"Dispatch From The Future: Uber To Purchase 2,500 Driverless Cars From Google," the post reads, cheekily set in 2023. Synergy is alive and well, as are the companies TechCrunch makes its livelihood covering:

Uber has committed to invest up to $375 million for a fleet of Google’s GX3200 vehicles, which are the company’s third generation of autonomous driving cars, but the first to be approved for commercial use in the U.S. The deal marks the largest single capital investment that Uber has made to date, and is also the first enterprise deal that Google has struck for its new line of driverless vehicles.

Of course it's a riff on last week's news that Google Ventures poured a huge bin of cash into Uber—and who knows, maybe something like this will come to pass, somewhere, sometime in the future, as with any other techbiz contingency. But it's more thrilling as part of Silicon Valley's lustful vision of a labor-free future. We can only pray that by 2023 we can start getting rid of those gross, stale cab drivers, those obsolete blobs:

The idea is that those cities could finally do away with their outdated taxi systems and move to a more fully automated fleet of on-demand vehicles...The move to more on-demand transportation has also been a shock to the traditional auto manufacturers. Drastically reduced demand for cars in urban and even some suburban areas where Uber operates has sent shares in companies like Ford and General Motors to five-year lows. With auto sales lagging, those companies have introduced their own on-demand rental and transportation services, but consumer interest has been lackluster so far.

Shares in Uber, meanwhile, continue to soar.

This is bubble erotica, hard-on fiction for those who might not actually believe their favorite startups will make it far into the next decade. But why wait for the future when you make-believe cover it right now?

Image via Paleofuture