It’s harder to find the middle of the road when the cat’s eyes are being actively jammed. Scrambling them is trivial, and helps keep the disco lights out of your mirrors, but it means you have to actually watch the road, and that your car constantly thinks you’re off-roading, so every time you skip a puddle, the dash pulsates “Terrain Change – Find Nearest Road?” at you. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me awake.
It’s been three days and I still shudder when I catch my reflection in the mirror. I can’t get used to the complete lack of data stream in my eyes. Just me in there. Ghostly, tired, burnt.
Just me.
Heard another voice as I was checking out. Before I bumped the link, I could hear the Other Party. Dead air, but there. Like I could hear them breathing inside their own head, but within mine, too. The sound of earplugs. Noise cancellation turned up too high. Wonder if they could hear me, too?
I’ll have to find out later, when I hit the bunkers. They’d built them to be out of earthquake zones and tsunami range, but when everything went proximity, we didn’t need data bunkers any more. Yay Cloud. All fixed. Perfect. Ubiquity realized. Took us too long to notice that things were being tampered with. No backups that we had control over. If someone wanted it changed, it was changed back to the beginning of the document. Sure, it could hold every piece of data you ever wanted to store in your lifetime, but it’d also go away in a blink. Leave you feeling crazy. Leave you paranoid. Leave you alone.
Lights on the horizon, the cat’s eyes reaching toward me. Autopilot transport truck for a big box. I reached for my modified dashboard to hail the onboard on low band to see what it would ack back to, but remember, barely, that I’m not sure what it would do if it “saw” a vehicle-shaped non-entity on the road. Probably call home and batmobile in front of me. EMP if I got too close. I don’t know about freeway piracy rules, but I’m pretty sure tie goes to the defendant in cases like that.
Might also just call in a Bird, and I can’t outrun a airdrone, no matter what I do to the onboard. Just because my car has no idea where it is, doesn’t mean the satellites can’t watch for my infrared headlights.
Stars sure are pretty, though.