Chapter i

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Fiction

Möbius is barely noticeable sitting on the gentle slope above the truck stop, his long dirty coat blending in to the brown prairie grass.

His duffel bag serving as a backrest, he leans back to stare at the evening sky. In the east the firmament is darkening to purple and the first few stars are visible. In the west the sun has disappeared behind the Rockies, and red ladders of its last light are projecting through scattered clouds just at the horizon. A gibbous moon hangs overhead. It is the fall of his fortieth year. He has little on his mind, just habitual patterns of behavior, idle thoughts about food, the urge to wander. He crosses his arms and lets the sunset scroll across his field of vision. Fresh air. Once every few days he likes to get a breath of it, to scrub his lungs of the smell of plastic, dust, and ozone.
    Soon the sun is fully departed. The clouds evaporate into darkness and the sky is a perfect planetarium of stars. Overhead and to the south are flowing, twinkling constellations of white, red, and green motes: air traffic routes. Möbius sighs. Even when he was a teenager, it was hard to find a view of the heavens without some product of human engineering screaming onto the scene and rudely flashing its lights, but now it is utterly impossible, with the endless flow of vehicles across every corner of the Earth, on land, air and space. Möbius himself is more to blame for that then most.
    He is getting chilly in the night breeze, and the glare of sodium lamps from the truck stop is ruining his night vision. If he were a few miles away from the road, he'd see the Milky Way, orbiting spacecraft, galaxies. But when did he ever leave the road these days?
    Stretching, somewhat refreshed, he rises, shoulders his bag, and carefully walks down the hill, following the trail of trampled grass he made on the way up. The Great Kansas truck stop is an enormous expanse of concrete divided into row after row of parking slots with charging stations, and a small square service building in the center. Möbius trudges across the concrete, ignoring the pedestrian lanes painted on the concrete. Dozens of trucks sit in rows quietly recharging, like a pod of whales sleeping in ranks. The service center is the usual generic glass-enclosed franchise unit, with bathrooms on one end and an open area with tables and vending machines on the other. Möbius walks inside, buys a prepackaged protein sandwich and vitamin water from a machine, and sits in a booth. Someone has carved "Maria + Ben" in the plastic tabletop.
    He unwraps the sandwich and takes a bite. It is stale. Resolutely, he chews. From an inner pocket of his coat he removes a battered black oblong, which he unfolds and places on the table. It extrudes a small screen and lights up. Möbius glances around. The lounge is empty except for a tired-looking woman with a couple of chattering kids sitting at the far end. Möbius begins mumbling commands. The node flashes lists of information: timetables, slot numbers, destinations. He peruses them. A twelve hour leg would be good; get some sleep, watch the flow, hide from reality. There are plenty of options. He could shoot northwest, southwest, straight east. Eastward he'd hit a tedious border crossing, due to squabbles between Nebraskansas and Greater Mississippi. There's a ride that catches his eye. A Mack heading for LA, hauling organic hops, slot 816. He spoofs the terminal's controller and pops open the status board. No problem. In seconds he has the truck's control codes. All it takes is a master's knowledge of the road protocols and a little unauthorized use of company access.
    Möbius takes a leak in the restroom, buys a bottle of water and a couple of energy bars, and walks over to slot 816. His ride is a recent model bulk cargo hauler, a bright red lacquered lipstick tube, twelve meters long. He steps up to the cab and says "open sesame!" into his node. The door swings out pneumatically and he climbs up into the cabin. The interior appears almost unused; probably a human rides in it only a few times a year, when it's being inspected or serviced. It's completely undecorated, just a basic flat bench seat facing a blank console with an unlit control screen in the center. It smells faintly of mildew, but he is thankful that it's clean. Möbius settles onto the seat, closes the door, and stuffs his duffel into the space behind the seat. He doesn't touch the truck's control panel, instead calling up the status display on his node. The truck is almost done charging and will resume its route in minutes. Nothing else he needs to do.
    The truck has a small windshield above the console offering a limited view to the front. He sits and patiently gazes at a mundane slice of parking lot. The truck's control system emits a happy chime as its capacitors top off. He can't feel it, but he knows the charging plug is retracting from the truck's body and its motors are awakening. Silently, it is in motion and rolling towards the truck stop's exit. It glides down the access ramp and merges into the flow on the road. In the moonlight, the road is a featureless line of grey receding into infinity, bordered by the anonymous darkness of cornfields, the flat horizon line broken by nothing but the occasional grain elevator. Soon the truck is cruising at an even speed, moving with the traffic. He turns his face away from the window and lies down on the bench, wrapping his coat around him. For a while he uses his node to tap into the road's invisible data stream, watching the symbols representing traffic and road events, reading the messages passed between vehicles, casually spying on the occupants of nearby cars. But he is just playing, and feeling tired, and after a while he puts the node back in his pocket, and closes his eyes.
    The road surface is smooth and flat with machine-groomed precision. The truck rides magnetically suspended on eighteen low resistance wheels. It glides through the still midwestern night at a perfectly constant velocity, its aerodynamic carapace barely disturbing the atmosphere. Inside the cab, the only sound is the faint hiss of air flowing over its skin and the distant subliminal hum of the wheel motors. The quiet subtle motion is soothing, as if he is a fetus floating weightless inside the womb. Fading into sleep, Möbius feels that his body is floating in a ethereal river, his ride and the passing vehicles silver fish swimming in the stream, all perpetually moving through space and time, yet his soul is motionless, frozen, untouched by anyone or anything.
    For a time, he sleeps deeply, his lizard brain ruminating. Then some neuron fires, beginning a cascade of recall, of the unfettered subconscious. The dream forms, following a familiar path which he has relived many times, although now the sharp edges of actual memory are being dulled and replaced with fuzzier frames of fantasy and pathos. Now Möbius is a different man, many years younger, confident and driven, completely wrapped up in life and work. He stands on the podium in bright summer sunlight, speaking to the crowd. Once he remembered his actual words, but now he recalls only concepts, muffled as if shouted through cotton. "Success! The new road opening... Celebrate! First time... the future... Thank you all." On the stage with him is Suzanne, of course, and some others. Tacitus, Sarab, Jester, a politician or two, random dignitaries. Their faces are indistinct, shadowed. But Suzanne is glowing, her long brown hair worn up, a blue jacket over a white blouse. As the crowd applauds he glances at her, and she smiles warmly. That smile, it pains him to see it. How he misses her smile! Then the happy part of the dream ends.
    He wishes he could end the vision now, but it's all pre-programmed. The speeches end, they file off the stage, she stands close to him. They board the buses for the inaugural ride, the first trip of the general public on the new road. Möbius sits in the driver's seat at the front of the second bus, the better to see the scenery, since the first bus is packed with VIPs. Suzanne is beside him. The buses start moving. There is excitement, chatter, the satisfaction of a job well done. His memories are indistinct now, erased by trauma. The column of vehicles accelerates, driving autonomously. Möbius watches the controls, but is distracted by the engineers behind him making champagne toasts. "Speech, speech!" they shout to him. He stands, holding his glass in in one hand, his other arm around Suzanne's waist. He can feel her slightly enlarged belly. She is four months into the pregnancy. Words begin to emerge from his mouth. "Today-"
    The crash is completely without warning, an overwhelming shock of noise and chaos. There are long moments of trying to move his broken body, hearing moans and shouts, feeling sharp fragments of metal and glass cut his skin. A glimpse of Suzanne's pale legs nearby, crossed awkwardly, unmoving, bloody. Then vision fades to nothingness, the nightmare ending as he awakens with a cry.
    He never dreams about waking up in the hospital and hearing that she is gone.