The cars, the embodiment of a selfish and isolationist era, sat on the greyed tarmac, each of them one time the product of some factory to be advertised and sold on cold polished tiles. Each of them at one point was a chain of money leading to the person who sat behind the wheel on their way to some hellish job. I guess I'm still a kid at heart because I keep on asking, "Why?" to every reason I ever hear for this madness. Because at the bottom of it, the ugly root of this pollution and waste of lives, appears to be this man-invented system called money. And if I take that out of my "Why?" because we could change it all... then there are no answers at all... it's all madness. And so these machines are madness too, sleek and engineered craziness so we can all have this fake-productive business we invented to get money and then advertised, convincing everyone else it was somehow a thing we couldn't live without.
The traffic snaked up the hill, two lines of steel and tire, each capable of over two hundred kilometres per hour and each averaging about five in their stop-start fashion. Bathed in their own putrid fumes a hundred hands reached forwards in unison to turn their air-flow to internal circulation only. In each self contained world a radio told stories, sung or sold products to the citizens, some talked on cell phones or texted. In the upscale minivans the children gaped at movies barely noticing the scream of sirens from behind and the ambulance driving rapidly into the oncoming traffic which veered to the curb. It was just another day in the city. One person's misfortune became the inconvenience of the many in their hermetically sealed indifference.
The cars litter the streets, empty husks. Tens of thousands of dollars each now only good for the gas in their tank and the battery. One day perhaps they will be melted for their metal. Already many have the electronics cannibalized. At best they are a place to duck out the rain when it falls in sheets so dense the buildings are just hazy grey blurs. At worst they are places for the scum of the city to lie in wait, unseen, until the situation is most favourable for whatever they have in mind.
Found in Darwin's Ghost - first draft, authored by .
The cars were dilapidated and rusting. Not one of them had under 200K on the clock and most of the tires were bald. Honey sighed. She had stolen so many great cars in her time and now she was reduced to hot-wiring some old banger. With closed eyes she gave thanks that her father could not see her now. What would he say if he knew she was stealing a car worth less than seventy thousand? She stared at them like they had her last writes scrawled in the flaking paint-work. Any one of them could die before she got to the brow of the hill. She felt for warmth through her gloved hand, a sign of recent use would be a good thing. After several that were as cold as the frozen tarmac underfoot she felt some heat from an old Chevy muscle car. Damn it. She might was well paint it neon and send up flares. That thing would be about as hard to trace as a high-schooler's prank phone call.
The cars moved past as exactly one hundred kilometres per hour, exactly three meters apart. At the junctions they weaved in as seamlessly as a shuffled deck of cards. There were up to six passengers in each, no driver. They were all computer navigated, electrically powered, able to collect enough energy in one hour of sunshine to ride all day. All your movements for the year ahead were planned and pre-programmed into the system. You could not just pop over to a mates house or go grab a coffee, unless you booked that twelve months ago and got the necessary permissions from the "Government" - an artificial intelligence computer that was programmed to be a wise and beneficent ruler.