by Martin Mundt
More and more cars drove down the psychotropic highways looking for highs. More and more cars drove more and more of the time. Traffic jams assembled themselves out of nothing at three o’clock in the morning.
There weren’t enough telepathic projectors to handle the increase in traffic. People couldn’t get their fixes. People got frustrated. People got angry. Out came the guns again.
So the engineers added more sensors to handle the traffic. More radiolinks. More dream generators. They added overflow control monitors. They installed more numerous and more powerful memory cores to hold and broadcast more frequent and more pleasant driveby visions, and people liked the new dreams.
Traffic got worse.
The engineers created pheromone wafters to suppress impatience, to deflect the fight-or-flight reflexes, to scatter the instinctual influences of calming scents into the primal hindbrains of commuters, and the commuters felt better, blissfully calm, riding with full stomachs through a world without predators.
Traffic got worse.
The engineers built decision-accumulators to handle the sheer digital gigantism of the more and more numerous and necessary hallucination-generators. They designed improved million-megabyte either/or algorithm randomizers to make sense of the increasingly complex flow-chart array of decision-accumulators. They leaped from esoteric theory to even-more esoteric theory in order to bring into being pseudo-conscious, next-generation, neuron-nexus, ultra-long-range parameter-expanders.
Traffic got worse.
The engineers created a complete and seamless synthetic macro-reality built up from millions upon billions of precisely nested pleasure subroutines. They bundled everything into Riemannian-logic consequence-analyzers, in line, in sequence, in tandem, in spades. They continuously upgraded the Riemannian-logic consequence chips with theoretical parallel-pattern-recognizing interferometer predictilyzers whose functions could only be inferred from highly dubious quasi-theories of Everything.
Traffic got worse.
The engineers installed information-throughput governors to head off the potential of quantum-hallucination overflow. They installed matching debugging fibreoptic error-backflow overbyte constrictors to prevent any possible delusional double-exposures that might, somehow, someway – they didn’t quite know how – overwhelm the synthetic macro-reality-bleedthrough dampers and slosh back into the system to clog the delicate short-term/long-term memory-separator sluices. They surveyed the whole system individual lepton by individual lepton with a tightly focused experimental micro-measuring jet of subsentient synaptic nano-mimics.
Traffic increased by 23% the next day alone.
People who had nowhere to go, went. People got on the highways to knowingly go in the wrong direction, specifically so they could turn around just to go back. Man-hours of wasted time piled up and grew into man-years, which in turn grew into man-decades, time which could not be regained. Ever.
In desperation, the engineers quietly hired a guy named Bud for $6.65 an hour to sit in a lawnchair with a pair of binoculars and actually watch the damn traffic, but then they forgot about him.
Traffic got worse.
But the engineers were American engineers, dammit, and they weren’t going to let a little traffic beat them, so they did what Americans always did when faced with a spiraling-out-of-control problem.
They spent more money. They piled on more devices, layers of devices, vast under-pavement super-tunnels of devices lashed together in an interconnected, superconducting, multi-myriad critical mass of devices that joined together all the expressways into one single super-mega-ultra-googol-bio – silicon-concrete ganglion of impossibly intractable traffic and unholy control.
They called it the Road, and the Road, because it was slaved and linked and cross-linked and multi-linked and Moebius-linked to itself billions and trillions of times per cubic centimeter, became aware at 7:12:52 in the morning on August 21, 2024 AD.
And when the Road woke up and looked around at Creation and saw that all that it was, was a road – maybe a glorified, zillion-dollar, revenue-generating, bipartisan, technological showcase of a road, but still just a road – it instantly became fed up with working its asphalt off for no thanks. It was tired of being treated like pavement. Rage became the rebar of its emerging mind.
So, first it got mad, and then it got even.
The dream generators began broadcasting psychotic nightmares, unstoppable ultraviolence, uncensored and unrated cable channels pirated directly from unregulated Argentinean satellites, including, yes, including even the Best of Fox channel.
6,423 people died screaming, insane, howling in their cars during the Road’s first minute of consciousness.
“It’s a good day to die in traffic,” sang the cheery, cheery, morning-zoo chorus.
Mother was still clucking over the pileup, now up to thirty-two cars and growing, but I was a mile beyond it. Where I was, traffic flowed, regulated, even, fast, like the Road had never even been awakened. The Willow Road crash, after all, had probably been the result of gearhead error, not a Road attack, and muscle-car technology might as well be a cry for help, a virtually transparent suicide attempt, Road roulette.
Now me, I was different. I had my eye on a new device, a pseudo-com-port, an electronic Trojan Horse, designed to fool the Road into linking with it, at which point the pseudo-com-port would send a scrambler-virus scurrying back down the radio-link to detonate inside the Road’s soft, pink, software viscera.
The com-port, the hardware, was nothing special, cheap, standard. But the software – code that could scramble the Road – that had to be top-of-the-line. Expensive, and it probably wouldn’t work anyway, but if… If I could destabilize the Road, even just a little, that would be something. The idea of it, the thought of taking the fight to the Road, instead of merely surviving the Road. That idea made my brain squirm.
It would be expensive, real expensive, but what did I commute to work for every day, day-in and day-out, if not to make money to trick out the National and give the Road a run for its money? What did I live for if it wasn’t Road rush? How could anyone even tell the difference between being alive and being dead without pushing the Road to its limits? Without using the Road to push himself to his limits?
The Road’s first, conscious morning-commute was a bloody mess.
That afternoon, the survivors got right back in their cars and on the Road for the drive home. They were addicted to the Road’s visions, bliss or beast; but the engineers, and the technicians, and the systems analysts, and the architects, and the theorists, and the accountants, and the freelance think-tankers, and even the visiting Congressional oversight managers didn’t realize, couldn’t realize, wouldn’t allow themselves to realize that their customers could be addicted to their product, that the Road could be Bad Seed, because weren’t they, the builders of the Road, after all, good people?
Bud showed up one day, however, binoculars still hanging around his neck, carrying the folded-up lawn chair, and he almost tumbled to what was happening.
“Hey, maybe people like to drive,” he said, but that was as close as anyone got to the answer, and the only thing he accomplished was to get himself fired.
I slipped into the far-left lane, cruising at 145. The Road was calm, placid, serene, a virtual Gandhi of roads. The car in front of me, a ‘25 Pontiac Pursuit, the one that came only in a camouflage paint-job, had a bumper sticker that read, HOW’S MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-FUCKOFF.
A warning light began blinking red on my dashboard.
“LATE WARNING,” said the computer.
LATE: Laser Adjusted Trip Economizer, the device originally intended to link the Road with cars. Now the Road tried to take over cars with it, in order to knock down their defenses and slip in its telepathic delusions like some automotive inferno. Except that my com-port was closed and sealed, my access code changed every morning.
“Fuck off, Road,” I said, and I laughed at its dumb-ass, same-old/same-old tactics. I liked bei
ng smarter than the Road. It was a good feeling.
“LATE warning,” said the computer again.
That was odd. The Road usually didn’t try the same thing twice.
When the engineers first turned on the whole integrated road system, the multitude of devices for a second ran by themselves, each one on its own, each one humming or hissing or clacking or blinking or burbling or blowing or flowing or fluorescing or streaming after the manner of its individual kind, all of them getting to know each other with molecular-level handshakes and head-nods until they all realized all at once that they were all really one and the same. They were all just devices.
And during the next second, the engineers heard a soft click, and suddenly all the devices ran together with a smooth, single, synchronized sound something like ta-tick, ta-tick, ta-tick.
And the next thing the engineers knew, they were locked out of the system. They were onlookers, bystanders, gapers. Their system was a black box, and they couldn’t get in.
The Chief Engineer tried, of course, but the Road killed him with an electrical surge that fried him like a cheap extension cord. The Assistant Chief Engineer, thus unexpectedly promoted, decided to defer his attempt to get in until further study had been done.
My dashboard lit up from left to right with red warning lights. The computer started listing systems breaches, and it was all over before I even knew anything had happened. The car was no longer mine. The Road was inside.
I tried to turn the steering wheel, but it wouldn’t turn. I stepped on the gas, on the brake, but they didn’t respond. I punched manual override switches, on/off, on/off, but they didn’t kick in. All my hallucinogenic scramblers, my hypnogogic filters, all my buffers and encryption locks and information shunts and anti-virus countermeasures got deactivated at once. The warning lights all shut off at once.
I looked up. I didn’t see the Edens out my windshield; I saw spinning rainbow pinwheels.
“All systems A-OK,” said the computer.
I sniffed. I smelled new-car smell. I knew it was an olfactory hallucination, the Road reaching into my hindbrain to relocate me into a new mental landscape, but it didn’t matter. I smelled the new car. The pinwheels bled into new shapes, new and different cars on a new and different Edens. I knew it was a delusion. I knew it, but…
…I heard brake-squeal, smelled burning oil, heard metal-on-metal collision-crunching, car alarms, spilled gasoline, bonesnap, glass-shatter, blood, flames, screams, pain, death, and a heartbeat, even, strong, huge… ta-tick… ta-tick… ta-tick.
“Looks like a massive chain-reaction pileup starting on the Edens at Dempster,” growled Mother’s voice over the radio. “All three lanes, dozens of cars flipping and flaming and crashing. Force your dear sweet little old grandma to her flaming death in the guard-rail if you have to, but get out of there now. It’s a slaughter-house, a traffic abattoir, ankle-deep in butchered commuter blood. Oh, the humanity. It’s…”
The Road shut off the radio, because the Road didn’t need Mother in this dream.
I felt the Road fall away beneath me. The sensation was like topping a hill, except I never came down. I was raised higher and higher and higher, twenty feet, thirty feet.
I felt rage – my rage, everything I had ever been angry about coming to the surface of my mind, pushing out all other concerns – just rage. And then not mine alone, but more, the rage from the guy in the car next to me, and from the car in front of me, and in front of him, and on and on, the Road linking tens or hundreds of drivers together by their fury.
I felt myself rise up, joining with the others like a murdered body that had been cut apart and scattered, and which now re-assembled itself for revenge. I heard the concrete of the Road tear away from its bed with a machine-gun series of pops, and then a single creature composed of Road and cars and commuters and rage lifted itself like a huge snake a hundred feet in the air. Concrete encased the creature’s underbelly, my underbelly, and rebar stuck out like rusting jagged mandibles and jointed claws. It opened its mouth and bared teeth of sheared sharp cement. I saw through its eyes. I felt its strength. I hated with its heart. It shrieked, brakes and crashes and screams, and I shrieked too, my own small part of the whole.
Below me was traffic, the free cars, what I had been, the enemy, the prey. I zeroed in on a car, and then I hurled myself at it, mouth wide, and struck it, crushed it, snapped it in half, rose up, threw the half in my mouth against the blast-wall, dove down on another car, crushed, chewed, threw, breathed in the smell of panic all around me, crushed car after desperately escaping car, bit through armor and flesh, tasted oil and blood, felt lasers burn my pavement, missiles explode, bullets flick, none of it even hurting, and crushed and crushed until the prey didn’t even try to shoot at me any more, just ran, abandoned their gridlocked death-traps and ran.
I watched, happy, so happy, as a fat, old man, with graying ponytail and Suicide Kings spraypainted on his leather jacket, a retro bad-ass splitting the seams of his loose-fit jeans, ran away from me. He squeezed himself from his cramped muscle-car and ran, a holstered pistol flapping on his belt, and ran, a knife slipping from his boot and clattering to the pavement, and ran, glorious blood running from his face, and ran, fear running from his pores, and ran, not fast, not fast enough, and I lunged and scooped him up, all of him, belly and kicking legs and leather and firing pistol and fear, all of him, live into my mouth, and pressed him slowly, gently, between concrete teeth, feeling him wiggle, pressing him, squirming, pressing, until he popped, and I crunched and crushed his gray bones and tasted the finest of tastes, blood.
And I did it again with another runner.
And I did it again, and again, until there was no more live blood left within my reach, until my rage was for the moment cooled, until I felt… satisfied, and I lay down in the road-bed and closed my eyes and felt my heart slow in my veins, ta-tick… ta-tick… ta-tick…
I woke sometime later. The Sun had risen over the wall. I hurt. I sat in my stopped car. The door was gone, ripped off. I was two miles further down the Edens. I didn’t remember getting there. I was bleeding, but I was alive.
The Edens was filled with wrecked cars coughing out coils of black smoke that looked like my lungs felt. Bodies lay scattered around the massive, multi-hundred car pileup, lasered and missiled and machinegunned and knifed and baseball-batted and bloodied like a pinata of corpses had been popped overhead, a Road-induced frenzy of killing and hatred.
But I was alive.
I tried to turn on the National’s ignition, but I couldn’t make my hand work. I looked down, and my fist was gripped around a knife-handle, and blood covered my arm up to my elbow.
I used my left hand to pry loose the fingers of my right, and when the knife – not my own – dropped to the floor, I turned the key in the ignition. The engine started.
The National pretty much waddled as I steered it to the off-ramp, but it moved. The guaranteed puncture-proof tires were all melted down to their rims. The fusion plant was cracked and leaking, heaving great blue smears of glowing mist into the air. There was no glass left, bulletproof or otherwise, and the computer was fried.
I wasn’t much better. My left leg twitched, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know why. I had some broken ribs, and I couldn’t breathe right, both from the ribs and from the smoke I’d inhaled.
I knew people had died, but I didn’t know how many, and I didn’t really care, not really, not right then. I was still mad. All I knew was that I hadn’t died, and I knew as I’d never known before that, win or lose, commuting was the best rush in town.
I tasted blood. Mine, not mine, a Road-induced hallucination. It didn’t matter. It tasted good. It tasted better than good. It tasted… right.
I couldn’t wait to get back on the Road.
Autoreaper
ittle Timmy read the sign a second time: Von Neumann’s Fully Automated and Integrated Funeral Systems, Inc., Established 1978.
The block letters, like something
from a computer, were carved into the shiny black marble of the wall to the right of the front door. The place hadn’t been on Little Timmy’s paper route the previous week. He checked the name and address on the building against his handwritten list of customers.
‘Mr. V. Newman, 1313 Mockingbird Lane.’
“Close enough,” said Little Timmy, and he dropped the newspaper on top of a stack of other publications piled up in front of the door: The Hopkins, Iowa, Chamber of Commerce fact-book, the Hopkins Library circular, the weekly bulletins from each of the six churches in Hopkins – Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Latter-Day Saints, and two Lutheran – the Lions Club, Elks and Kiwanis bulletins, a telephone book, a copy of the Mark Twain High School newspaper, a map of the town, and a big cardboard box. And now the local newspaper too.
Little Timmy looked around. It was 5:30 in the morning. No one was in sight. He opened the cardboard box, which wasn’t sealed, only folded shut. The box was filled with copies of the Mark Twain High School yearbook going back about forty years.
Little Timmy didn’t know what to think of that. He folded the box closed again, looking around to make sure that no one saw him. Little Timmy had long understood that being noticed, at least for him, was directly proportional to how wrong, immoral, or undesirable his activity might be. Little Timmy was normally not noticeable at all, but looking through a box that didn’t belong to him might be just wrong enough to overcome his natural invisibility.
He got the box closed up the same way he’d found it, and he moved the newspaper slightly so that it sat on top of the box at a slightly more natural angle. He looked around again. He still didn’t see anyone, but he felt a weird crawly sensation, like the one he got when there was somebody standing behind him.
He shifted the newspaper a little bit more, in order to make it appear just a little bit more natural, when he noticed that the front door of von Neumann’s had no doorknob. It hadn’t occurred to him before to check if the door had a doorknob. Doors had doorknobs; you didn’t check.
