THE
FUTURE HISTORY
OF TRAVEL
A road trip in a world on empty
Tim Gingrich
Go Too Far East
THE FUTURE HISTORY OF TRAVEL
Copyright © 2011 by Tim Gingrich
Some rights reserved.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
Cover photography by Adam Gingrich
Smashwords edition
This book was originally syndicated on the author’s blog one week, one chapter at a time from January to July 2011, and it incorporates input and improvements from readers.
For more information:
Dedicated in memory of
Eugene Johns
for introducing me to poetry and
alternative energy.
Popular archeology depicts a grizzly cave dweller hewing history’s first wheel from an unwieldy chunk of stone. Thus was born the primordial ancestor of all transportation. Probably no more than a push cart, the wheel-driven device was a tool, purely utilitarian and perfectly innocent. Its inventor, no doubt satisfied by ensuing efficiency gains in moving heavy objects and perhaps interested in its agricultural application, improved upon the design. Unwittingly, this person set in motion an evolutionary process that resulted in an entire race of technology. Wheels grew rounder, lighter. Paired with propulsion, carts became chariots. And the cave dweller changed too as humankind’s horizons rolled off steadily into the distance. Symbiotically matched, machine and man progressed in parallel. The cylindrical creation become transportation; its creator, the traveler.
Fifty, fifty-five, sixty … the needle raced ahead, relentless and clockwise.
My foot wrestled with the accelerator, pinning the pedal between the floorboard and the sole of my shoe. I veered back and forth, following the contour of the cliffside. Beneath us, far beneath us, waves were striking the rocky shore. The tide was changing.
Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five…
Outside our wrap-around windshield, the scenery swirled by in tunnel vision. Trees knelt at our arrival, fallen leaves flew off the ground in the whirlwind of our wake. The car performed well around corners, holding tightly to the road, pressing us deeper into our seats.
Eighty, eighty-five, ninety…
“The rush you’re feeling now is called a power trip. It’s the sensation of sitting behind the steering wheel,” said Mercedes from the back seat. Then he leaned over my shoulder and whispered in my ear. “If you like the test drive, I can hook you up with one of your own.”
I turned to Rusty who was seated beside me, his hands gripping the dashboard, his face full of energy.
“It’s addictive, isn’t it?” he screamed over the squeal of the engine.
He was right.
I slammed on the brakes and sent the car spinning out of control. The vehicle continued along its original trajectory, top and bottom trading places like an undecided hourglass until finally we tumbled to a stop.
“What did you do that for?” said Rusty as we peeled ourselves out of the seats.
“I have to go to class today.”
“What’s the rush? You can get there in ten minutes.”
“I’ve still got two hours,” said Mercedes, taking my place in the cockpit. “Pacific Daylight Time, remember?”
Removing our VeyesARs, the cool coast evaporated and Rusty and I found ourselves back at the abandoned gas station on another sweltering Dallas day. Leaving the protective awning of our usual hang-out, I started across the empty parking lot toward where my Bik-E lay charging.
“Come on Max, what did you think?”
“I think that you have a distorted sense of time and that I’m going to be late for class.”
“What if I told you that we could take a real road trip, not just an eyeTrip, in an actual internal combustion engine automobile?”
I responded with a doubtful expression.
“I heard that once a year China relaxes the travel quota so that people can return to their ancestral homes for the Chinese New Year. Just imagine what it would be like to take a real road trip in a genuine gas guzzler the way people used to back in the good old days. If only we had the carbon rations.”
“Couldn’t you just take a road trip here in an EV?”
“Battery burners don’t have the range for a true cross-country road trip. I want to get out there on the open road, way off the plug, where you can go as fast and as far as you want.”
I picked up my Bik-E from the ground. That’s when I realized that I had neglected to plug in the portable solar charger. The battery was drained.
“It seems like a long way to go for something you can experience whenever you want in virtual reality.”
“Let’s face it. The people who program those things have never been on a real road trip themselves. How do we know it’s realistic?”
“You could try reading about it in a book. There are loads of stories about road trips.”
“Come on, you just don’t want to go anywhere because of that girl.”
“That’s not true. Why do you think I’m going to class?” I said, peddling away.
• • •
“In literature, a premise begins in the author’s mind as a dream. He or she believes it is actually happening until waking up and wondering how it could have seemed so real. So the writer starts writing and soon finds that words are not capable of fully containing the feelings, the sensations, the little details—an entire life beneath the eyelid. It is up to the author to sift through our rudimentary vocabulary, words that are imprecise measures of the human experience, to recreate the lost life. If a dream could be downloaded in all its clarity and shared with perfect fidelity, the writer’s work would be finished. Which brings us to…” The professor paused and turned to read from the wall-length display, which I took as my cue to slip quietly into the back of the classroom.
“…my point: literature thrives on the resistance put up against the writer by an imperfect medium.” The professor turned back around and scanned the panorama of students just as I found my seat.
“For your assignment, I want us to switch gears,” the professor said. But his words echoed empty off a wall of blank stares.
“It’s a figure of speech. It means to do something different. So far, we’ve been reading other people’s stories. Downloading other people’s dreams. But next semester is going to be an independent study practicum. You will have to write your own story.”
As the students realized what was required of them, the whole classroom erupted into a chorus of sighs and groans. The professor tried reasoning with the pupils, but his pleas were drowned out by a tone signaling the end of class. Suddenly large swaths of students began to vanish. Fast-growing empty patches enveloped the classroom’s stadium seating.
“This assignment should be easy,” said Calvin. “I’ve got an unbelievable internship planned for next semester. I’ll just write about that. Do you want to join me?”
“Thanks for the offer, but there’s someone else who I’m planning to spend time with,” I said, bidding him farewell as his figure faded away. Pulling off my own VeyesAR, I awakened to the cramped classroom. Most of the seats were empty, and everyone else was already headed for the door—everyone except me and her.
“I always forget how many virtual ed students there are on campus until the semester ends and everyone disappears,” she said.
“We’re both here,” I observed. “Why don’t we connect outside of class sometime?”
“I just got accepted for an international internship. I’m going to be really busy.”
“Yeah, a lot of people are doing internships,” I said, trying to mask my disappointment. “Why don’t we get together after your internship one night?”
“Actually, the timezones are really inconvenient. I have to work all night and sleep all day. I just couldn’t pass up such a good opportunity to work in China.”
“Did you say China?”
“It’s a virtual internship,” she said, seductively running her fingers around the frames of the folded-up VeyesAR hanging from my shirt collar. “Maybe you should pay me a visit one night … in virtual reality. There’s an eyeTrip for that.”
As I walked Tracy to her Bik-E, I was only faintly aware as she described the internship and all that it entailed. My mind had already switched gears. A vision of the road stretched out before and behind me, the pathway from the past to the future, the ultimate archetype of time and space all spread out in an asphalt slab. I thought about Virgil and Dante, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Huck and Tom, Dean and Sal. One person driving, the other riding. One person eager, the other reluctant. Rusty and I were no different. We were the kind of friends whose differences drove us together—Rusty always longing to escape, eager to get away, but never having the chance; me satisfied with my surroundings, content with the close-by, but forced forward by a twist of fate.
I waved to Tracy as she rode away and then, after a moment’s hesitation, activated my VeyesAR to send Rusty a MindMail.
I know where we can get those carbon rations, I thought. Send.
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VeyesAR, VReality and the eyeTrip Store are all brought to you by WP, the world pioneer in experiential technology.
VeyesAR: Go eyeVRwhere.
Chapter 4: Artifact or Fiction
Clumsily I thumbed through the book’s cracked, dog-earned pages. A pattern of creases radiated out from the spine, blanketing the worn-out cover with a web of wrinkles. But beneath the fingerprints of time a faded image was still faintly discernible, like cave drawings in flickering torch light—a column of classic cars half-buried in the ground, a primitive but powerful portrayal of the beasts that once roamed the earth.
The other book had a black leather cover that was clear of creases. It displayed no obvious signs of wear and tear, but I knew it was just as old. It had to be. Though the pages clung together at the corner, I managed to pry open the first page and the second and the third. I tore through one page after another searching for clues, but there were none. The book was blank. So I turned my attention to the scenery.
Activating the augmented-reality overlay on my VeyesAR revealed a new dimension of detail, transforming the desert into a stream of data. Clusters of bold-faced three-dimensional letters loomed large in the distance, virtual road signs announcing the names and populations of the towns behind and the cities ahead. Far away, mountains barely visible floated on a shallow sea of heat. Through the magnifying glass that seared the sand, my mind filled in the gap between sky and surface. California, the coast, and across the ocean, China. The sea of shimmering rooftops rising from the desert was just as I had always imagined. Brighter, closer, I could almost reach out and touch it, soaring above the desert on an invisible electromagnetic field.
“When the Carbon Age was at its peak, you could drive from one end of this country to the other,” said Rusty. “There’s a vast network of roads and interstates out there, buried beneath the electric infrastructure. That’s the way people were meant to travel. Instead of maglevs, they had gas stations and rest stops and roadside cafes—everything they needed to make their own path, to set their own pace, to decide their own destination. Those were the days.”
“Too bad it wasn’t sustainable.”
“That’s just what they want you to think. It ended because they don’t want us to really experience the world.”
“Who’s they?”
“The environmental establishment, man. The enemies of internal combustion.” Then something caught Rusty’s eye. “Hold on, we’re almost there.”
He leaned over my seat to get close to the window, pressing my face against the glass. Shimmering on the horizon was neither shoreline nor skyline but an airplane graveyard. The crystalline pattern of parked aircraft, their fuselages alternately facing forward and backward to squeeze in the maximum number of swept wings, methodically repeated itself row after row—like one plane parked in a maze of mirrors—stretching on for miles. At one point it appeared as though the maglev had stopped and the isles between the aircraft were momentarily fixed in space. The rows of retired airplanes enlarged and contracted before our eyes, growing and shrinking independently of each other with aluminum rhythm. There were more planes than one could count in as many different shapes and sizes. Only by moving my eyes quickly from left to right was I able to be sure that it was we who were moving. And then, as quickly as it appeared, the airplane graveyard hurried off into the past. The protruding vertical tail wings that had glimmered in the sun like the tops of cresting waves now etched dark silhouettes in the dusk.
Settling back into my seat, I thought about the threshold to other worlds, the room where this all began. Its four walls were plastered with windows to far away times and places. Through the panes, I saw sun worshipers soaking up the rays on white sand beaches, couples kissing in front of famous landmarks, smiling passengers peering back at me through their airplane windows…
• • •
“Excuse me, can I help you?”
“I’m looking for the passport office.”
The man acted surprised and, reaching into a compartment beneath his desk, extracted a pile of yellowed papers, slapped an old-fashioned ink-based writing devise on top and pushed the whole stack across the desk toward me.
“It takes a lot of carbon rations to go anywhere far away enough to need a passport. Where is it that you’re going?”
I pointed to the carton of half-eaten Chinese food on his desk.
“That’s a long way away. What is it, a girl?” I just responded by telling him that I was going on a road trip.
“A road trip? Are you one of those carbon punks? You don’t dress like one.”
I shrugged it off and continued filling out the forms, scratching letters into the paper like a caveman. The man continued watching me from across the desk—apparently he really did not get many visitors.
“Well mister … let’s see, Versland,” he said, peering over the point of my pen. “I think I have something you might be interested in.” He swiveled around in his chair and began rummaging through the disorganized collection of junky antiques piled up behind him.
“When I was your age I wanted to go to China, too. I wanted to see the world from a different point of view, and I figured China was as far as I could go without starting to come back again. But then I got married, and we had kids, and carbon rationing started—and there were so many reasons to not go. That’s what you do when you get old, you start to reason. But when you’re young, you do unreasonable things. My kids think this sounds so silly. ‘There’s an eyeTrip for that, dad,’ they always say. But for me, it’s just not the same.”
When he turned back around the man presented me with a book—the one with the creased cover, the crumbling pages and the classic cars.
“It’s called Empty World. It’s a travel book. It used to be very famous.”
“What’s in it?”
“Places to go and places to stay, reviews and reflections—on travel.” He opened the time-worn tome to a particular section, which he marked with his finger, and placed the book in my hands. “Here, there’s even a section on China.”
“Are you sure I can borrow this? It looks like an antique.”
“Keep it. It may come in handy one day if you ever get lost.”
• • •
“…if you ever get lost.” Already I was farther away from home than I had ever been before. But as darkness descended over the desert, I caught a glimpse of something familiar. It appeared in flashes through the blurry desert foliage, weaving in and out of the shadow cast by the elevated track. Like a prophet calling from the wilderness, aged beyond its years by neglect and entropy, the road—the original route—remained as a rugged reminder of the history of travel.
I nudged Rusty, but he had fallen asleep. So I picked up the last edition of Empty World, allowing its creased pages to crash open, its forbidden words to leak out.
I was awakened by the distinct feeling of deceleration. Outside my window, millions of shining, swarming signs of life coalesced into a city. From the impersonal vantage point of the elevated track, the world below behaved like a scale model, it moved like a simulation. I was eager to be immersed in the hustle and bustle. I longed for street level. It was only the first leg of our journey, but already I could feel a long lost, deeply buried, wholly under-developed sense wiggling its toes. Like a severed limb reattached, it belonged and I knew that I had never been complete without it. Even after the maglev had come to a firm magnetic stop, the something inside me kept moving. A newly quickened sense of momentum was stirring. For the first time I felt distance. It was more than an idea. It had mass, a tangible presence. I did not need a VeyesAR to tell me how many miles we had traveled. I could sense time and space expanding and contracting, pushing us along, and I was hungry for more.
But setting foot on the platform of the hollow, dimly lit terminal, I sensed that something was missing. The air was more humid, the temperature was cooler, the news that appeared on my overlay pertained to Pacific Daylight Time. We had arrived in Los Angeles. But the maglev had robbed us of something important and irreplaceable—we had no story to tell. As advertised, the train had given us the destination, but it came at the expense of the experience.
Though there were not many people in line, we had to wait a long time for a Tax-E. The Department of Homeland Sustainability officer explained that California’s strict carpool requirements mandated no less than three passengers per vehicle. But since no one else seemed to be headed our direction, he finally let the two of us take a cab by ourselves. I loaded our bags inside the empty compartment under the hood, and Rusty loaded the address into the DriVR interface.
“It’s getting late. I hope Mercedes is still awake when we get there.”
“Don’t worry,” Rusty assured me. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
• • •
By the time we reached Mercedes’ street, it was well after midnight. The solar street lamps, having depleted their worn-out batteries, began to flicker and fade away. But in the beams of the Tax-E’s headlights I could see that it was an older part of town. The yards were bigger, the homes were farther apart and each unit had been built with its very own garage.
“He never mentioned having a girlfriend,” said Rusty, pointing to a female figure reclining on the porch of Mercedes’ home. Pulling over to the side of the street, the Tax-E released our seat belts, opened the doors and powered down, using the last of its battery to deploy a solar array in expectation of the dawn.
“I was expecting you guys to bring something better than these old bags,” said the girl as we reached the front door. She snatched the tattered rucksacks out of our hands and slung them over her shoulder, carrying them into the house. “Don’t worry, I think my parents have some real suitcases somewhere that you can use.”
“So you’re Mercedes’ sister?” asked Rusty, an air of hope evident in his voice. The girl looked at him with a big smirk.
“I’m Mercedes.”
Eyes bulging, mouth wide open, Rusty was speechless. I just burst out laughing. Once she said it, it was obvious. The facial expressions and mannerisms, the attitude, the metallic tristar hood ornament dangling around her neck—all bore an uncanny resemblance to the virtual male Mercedes we were used to.
“I bet Mercedes isn’t even your real name!” said Rusty.
Warning us to keep our voices down, Mercedes led us into a pitch black room. Only a few beams of moonlight made it through the row of narrow windows. In the darkness I heard a door slowly screeching shut. Then Mercedes turned on the lights, revealing floor-to-ceiling shelves that showcased an assortment of dust-caked tools and greasy spare parts. I realized that this had once been the garage. Now it was a catacomb for the scattered skeletal remains of internal combustion engines long gone.
“Is this where you live?” said Rusty, clearly expressing envy rather than insult.
“No, this is where you’re going to live. I work here.” Mercedes pointed to a sophisticated suite of technology set up on the workbench, which was no less impressive for appearing to have been cobbled together from mismatched components and powerful aftermarket modifications.
“So this is where you design VRaces. They’re way better than anything in the eyeTrip store.” Rusty’s words oozed with admiration.
“I’m inspired by the art of travel.” Mercedes took one of the antique auto parts off the shelf. It was metal but not shiny. Frayed wiring spilled out from both ends. “These are not flat paintings; they’re sculptures, they’re three-dimensional. You can hold them in your hands, look at them from a different angle. You can experience them. I create experiences, not simulations.”
“Why racing around in out-of-date automobiles though? Why not swimming in the ocean or landing on the moon?” Rusty and Mercedes traded glances as if debating how they should answer my question and who should go first.
“The world’s not just out of oil, Max, it’s empty of inspiration. Since the war on carbon began, civilization has been stuck in neutral. Today’s literature and music and fashion are all left over from the Carbon Age. And if you think about it, there haven’t been any major scientific breakthroughs since that time either. The greatest invention of the Carbon Age was the internal combustion engine because it made travel possible on scale not seen before or since. That, in turn, made everything else possible. The world today says ‘go everywhere,’ but they haven’t been anywhere. That’s why we race out-of-date automobiles—it’s the emptiness that drives us.” Rusty rambled on as if reading from a manifesto. That’s when I noticed that he and Mercedes were wearing the same dark gray T-shirt imprinted with a large letter C and a small numeral six inside a charcoal-black square.
“It’s more than just VRacing,” Mercedes added. “Being a carbon punk is about conserving the Carbon Age, preventing the extinction of endangered modes of transportation and trying to roll back the end of the road and everything that goes with it. Now wait here while I go get those suitcases.”
“Max, we have to bring her with us. Those cars are five-seaters, so there’ll be plenty of room. Besides, she knows a lot about road trips. She’ll be able to help.”
“But how can we all get there? We barely have enough carbon rations for two airplane tickets.”
“Max, we both know there’s another way. It may take a little longer, but—”
Just then Mercedes reappeared in the doorway, the handles of two hard-sided brown leather trunks in her hands. They were covered with a spectrum of brightly colored stickers, which read like pages torn from an atlas. Rusty looked at me, and I looked back at him. Then I turned back toward Mercedes—and the suitcases.
“Do you have another one?”
“What’s the password?” barked the voice belonging to the solitary eye on the other side.
“Mahayana,” Mercedes replied.
The eye squinted suspiciously.
“Switch off your VeyesARs,” the bouncer snapped back, slamming shut the door within a door. As he manually ratcheted up the corroded hatch, plumes of smoke spilled through the narrow opening on to the street. He hoisted the garage door just high enough for us to duck underneath, the swirls of escaping smoke cloaking our disappearance into the unmarked entrance.
“What’s this place called again?”
“The Fume. It’s a landmark on the local carbon punk scene,” Mercedes explained.
As we descended deeper into the haze, the shadow of a bygone era came into focus. It appeared to have once been an auto shop. Crowds of patrons crouched around the lift pits, where a crew of bartenders kept everyone’s glasses topped off with amber liquid. In the corner, a DJ dressed in grease-stained overalls composed a mechanical medley of revving engines, screeching tires and other room-rattling audio archives. A pair of pole dancers clung to two vintage traffic lights, which scattered their green, yellow and red beams through the cloud of smoke.
“Check out the booths,” Rusty exclaimed, pointing to the skeletal remains of several automobiles that littered the floor. With tops torn off, doors ripped from the hinges and wheels replaced with concrete blocks, the long undriven vehicles were hardly recognizable. Their interiors had also been reconfigured, the two front seats having been welded on backward to create a seating area. On the hood of each car danced a waitress wearing a halfway-unzipped mechanic’s jumpsuit embroidered with The Fume.
As we settled into one of the cars, the waitress—an Asian girl—climbed down from the hood to take our order.
“Welcome to The Fume. I’m Toyota. What can I get for you guys tonight?”
“Actually, we’re here to see the Grease Monkey King,” I said.
“You have to order something first,” Toyota retorted, cocking her head to one side and planting one hand on her hip.
“We’ll have one of the high-octane brews, an unleaded ale and a diesel whiskey,” Rusty jumped in, reading from the drink menu.