All of the cars behind him have also gone quiet; their programming is such that any extended wait causes them to sleep. In the mirror, the drivers shift uncomfortably behind the steering consoles. Cramped legs get a brief respite in their new positions. Expensive shoes get scuffed on the underside of the dash as they hunt for a more ergonomic angle. Their passengers have run out of reading materials, having even gone so far as to rummage through the glove box in their desperation. They fall back into their own daydreams of productive work, productive consumerism and productive breeding. Children sleep in the back seats, having tired of their games. Comfortable, but restless, lacking constant input and running low on mood stabilizing chemicals in their blood.

Having long since run out of cigarettes (available only from Canadian prescription drug companies), the old man has picked a hole in the cracked flesh of the antiquated steering wheel in front of him. The exposed rotting foam disintegrates into a fine carcinogenic dust that hangs in the air. It floats out the open window, past the arm leaning out, long sleeves rolled up.

The air hardly moves, this far up the ramp. It’s long empty path leads down onto the blur of the hi-way, where the wind is ripped from the tunnel and dragged along. It is hard at times to tell where one car ends and the next begins, persistence of vision merges them into a constant stream of metal, plastic, glass and light.

Hardly recognizing the aged face staring back at him in the mirror, the old man fishes into his front shirt pocket for the pack of cigarettes he knows is empty. He wonders how it has been so long, here at the stoplight and here in general, inside this worn body. A wink of light brings his eyes back forward. A tiny LED in the array of the stoplight has gone out, an unlikely event, but only a sustained wait this long could have brought it about. Brain cells, he thinks, must be like that. One minute they’re on, a puff of a cigarette or a sip of beer later and one goes out. Here and there its no big thing, but after all this time. His idly searching hands have found a crumpled but still intact cigarette wedged in the back of the seat.

With a quick calculation on his remaining brain cells he lights the stale cigarette with his battered lighter. All cigarettes are stale now, so it doesn’t matter. Huge warehouses of stock that only a few old men who don’t want to live forever slowly deplete the last of the inventory left over from factories that have since been demolished to make way for condos stacked tightly in hip reconditioned neighborhoods.

Silent smoke alarms alert one of the many AI to a possible problem in the hi-way system. Today it has been assigned to this section of road. Modern AI have to be rotated on job schedules, because unlike us, they won’t put up with the possibility of another shitty day at the office. Like our dosed children, they need constant change. Otherwise they stop working, they shut down. Annoyed by the fact that there seems to be a vehicle waiting at the light in order to merge onto the hi-way but there is no performance data for either the car or the driver, the AI has chosen to rise to the challenge. It has, despite its need for change, decided to ignore the problem and to wait the problem out.

The normal functions of the hi-way are usually controlled by lower computer functions. Information about the car and driver are tracked via extended RFID. When a car comes to the on ramp, the system finds an appropriate hole in the traffic flow based on the car’s capabilities and the drivers tendencies and will hold it at the on ramp’s light until the optimal time.

When an error occurs functionality is passed to the higher functions and the AI. Normally it is a routine matter for the AI to make a judgment call based on a wider range of inputs and tracking data. However, there is always input. There is always data.

The car and the man waiting at the light, trying to merge onto the busy road is a ghost as far as the AI is concerned. And it’s superstitiality, which was originally programmed in as a preservation device has made it regard this situation as something it wants nothing to do with and has decided to pretend not to notice it, optimizing traffic flow elsewhere in the system.

It can’t ignore, the growing line of cars that are getting mired behind the ghost. It can’t hide form the fire, chemical, and physical hazard alarms that have been steadily flashing in its minds eye. It can’t keep dodging questions from the interconnected systems, from its governing daemons and it human supervisors. They grow louder and more persistent, but the AI does its best to stay busy but away from the problem.

Even now, at the light, it is silent. It is red.

what do you do when six meatheads cross the street in front of you?

well, i wouldn’t know about you, but he sped up.

anger, shouts and incredulousness passed between them and the inches that kept them from the danger of one ton of pain. hey man, i’m just along for the ride. their heads are made of meat so they don’t understand the position i’m in. i smiled, not at their inconvenience nor their near death at the hands of my belligerent friend behind the wheel, but at my own nervousness.

i’ve looked into their eyes. i saw the adrenaline. the beer. the excuse. we turn right at the corner and the situation is abated. again we turn right at the corner. and i see them. we’ve been out flanked, its a classic move. i think these meat heads might have a college education.

eye contact again, pink meat dripping blood, dilated cornea blood vessels. my window was open and it was too late. a dull thud and a tingle as his body hit the car and his fist hit my neck and shoulder. it was a sloppy punch, but what do you expect from a guy throwing a punch at a car.

luckily the spit missed.

we go straight through the light and the tingle turns to warmth. i felt disappointed, in a way, that it won’t leave a bruise. we turn left at the corner. i know what might happen. driver boy is laughing, but they weren’t on his side. left at the light.

halfway down the block i make eye contact. i smile. he doesn’t like my apology. his arm went through the open back window missing the one ducked back there. a shout. a missed punch. and a fine mist of spittle, i wonder where he’s been.

by now this light is red. i look in the side mirror back down the street from whence we came. silhouettes come towards us. quietly i say turn on red. we don’t move. turn on red. what now? yes. we crept forward a few inches. right now? yes. by now he’s running. yes, on red, right now. we go, but not before we wait for him to get close enough so that he thinks he needs to keep on running after us.

the game is over by now. our intrepid captain has had enough fun at their, and our, expense. he laughs, we grimace. some bravado is shown but in the end we are the ones who had the armour.

later on i tell of my own botched attemts on grabbing the arm of the one who actually hit me. of wanting to hold on to his arm as we drag him down the street. of rolling the window up. and i realize i’m no better than the rest of them.

i make eye contact in the vanity mirror. i see my own pupil. dialated. dripping fresh, red meat blood out of a gaping severed vessel.

it started as a means to cover up what was going on. her roommate would be home and we would need something more than a closed door to make our privacy complete. most people would have turned on the stereo to some mood music, but i guess we’re not most people. that and we don’t have a stereo in the bedroom. go figure. so, i turned on the television.

as i’m flipping through the chanels to find the perfect broadcast to fuck to i was daunted by the complexities of the problem. she just wanted to get off, but i need the satisfaction of being apropriate. no kids shows and no news, that would have just made it rubbery. no hot chicks, i didn’t want to be caught peeking over her shoulder when one of them is on the screen. thats as good as cheating. in general, i wanted no real distraction that would put a damper on my love making.

i was looking for the tv equivelant of muzak.

finding the right station happend quicker that i had expected, lucky for her. the rabbit ears severly inhibit our media rich age. click. click. click. and here we have this lovely pendant. you can see by the size of this stone we are giving you an amazing deal. oh, and the craftsmanship is exquisite. with our ezpay you can have this sent to your door for only three payments of $25.95.

the home shopping network. a channel for dead people. and apperintly the perfect fuck show. nothing of interest, no pretty girls, no fast cuts, and no pertinent information. yet still loud enough with the door closed to keep the roomate from complaining about how often we have sex.

this lovely pant suit set was designed exclusivly for us by some nobody who is pretending to be from europe but is actually living with his mom in west virginia. for the next five minutes the sales personality made up bullshit about the same ugly buisiness atire while we went at it. then a fake silk sundress. then a rhinestone broach. a purse. a toolset. a rotary grinder.

after we had finished, i lay there and the person on the tv told me how perfect a food processor would go with the moment. fellas, she will love you forever if you were to buy her this amazing piece of equipment for her kitchen. it would go great with olive pitter, item number 425-668 we had earlier in the hour. i’ll tell you what, i have one of these at home and i use it every day! every single day. i can make my own peanut butter and gazpacho and meat pudding. eazy a pie. hell, you can make pie too!

she almost had me convinced to buy the damn thing when i drifted off to sleep and had sex tainted tv shopping dreams. home shopping pornography is something i don’t want to think about too often. especially when it involves kitchen equipment.

we use that trick and even that station when we need that little extra privacy. to this day i still get horny when i flip past the home shopping network.

pavlov would have loved me.

i’m awake and no one cares. so, i’ll get up. i’ll take my shower, brush my teeth and scratch my ass. three little blue and white gelcaps, two more than i should have, and a sip of yesterdays coffee. i think about brushing my teeth again, but i worry about my gums bleeding. up for fifteen minutes and i already have morbid thoughts about my teeth.

teeth. it’s not like i’ve ever had perfect teeth in my life, but i dream about them each night. each night they get looser and looser. they move more and more in my head as i tongue them. each one turns a different color as i have a putrid rainbow of a smile. diseaseing my gums and the rest of my mouth while my tounge looses the abuility to taste all but my own blood and rotting bacteria making cheese out of my enamel.

past the images of rotting teeth falling out of my head i look out the window as the shadows shrink and see that my day hasn’t ended yet. slacks, shirt, tie and socks. my mirror shows me a picture i can only be happy with if i squint enough not to recognize my self. my tie and my socks don’t match. my teeth hurt. if i leave now, i will get to work two hours early. however, if i don’t go i’ll get depressed and never go again.

the bus ride just might be the best part of my day. everyone tells me that they see the craziest people on the bus every day. they tell me the best stories of fanatical passangers barking maddness at the driver, pissing on other riders, sleeping in their own vomit and fucking on the bench seats in the back while others watch on in thier own sick way as they masturbate to sooth whats left of thier soul. that is some crazy shit. then they look to me for my own twisted stories of bus life. but i have none. not even a miffed buisinessman who missed his stop.

not that i mind. it’s the only time i have to actually relax during my day. for me its even safer than my own apartment. my ride is soothing. i share a nice silence with my fellow journeyers. i realize that it is strange, my calm bus is an aborition in the city. even on different times this bus will get rough again. but exclusivly during my ride everything becomes serene. even the bus driver lossens his grip in the revolver underneath his bulletproof parka. the bus slows and stops bringing my serenity to an end. as the confused looking people file off of the bus and into the grey city rain, i am full of dread at the prospects of the coming day. this is the part i hate the most. its like getting out frome under those cumfy fluffy warm blankets in the morning and putting your feet down onto a floor of ice cold broken glass. i find that it has no real motivational value. this bus is my mothers womb. the street only leads me to pain and agony call career. my boss who can’t remember my name, my officemates who act less human than our own corperate ceo and me self-exiled to a corner cube back where no one can find me. these are the exact points that my bus is protecting me from. its warm air, with a scent of bodies and disel, could be my bubble. i stand at the door with my hand on the rail i take a deep breath, filling my lungs with a last helping of its nutrisious vapor and run.

with my cheeks puffed out turning red, i flail through the crowd. jostling the besuited men and women of the upper-middle class, i throw off a wake of angry and confused looks. after a block my cheeks begin to burn and i still have three to go. desperatly i charge even faster through the crowd. with a strange detached duplicate self floating beside me, coaching me, i remember the divers aid to let a few bubble of the now used air out fom between my lips jest to make it last a bit longer. just a block and a half. someone yells from behind me, his briefcase i knocked open as i rush past. i imagine the strewn papers soaking up the gray water of the walkway as a bitter reminder why i refuse to breath this air. blue faced and sweating i pass through the revolving door to my office building.

on one of the benches in the over decorated lobby, i take a huge gulping breath and immediatly begin to choke. this canned air isn’t much better.

slowly, i once again become acustomed to the dead refrigorator air of the building and move towards the line for the golden elevator. i muse, standing in this line with face i recognize but people i don’t know, that the architect must have hated me. why would someone build this several thousand occupant structure and only put one elevator to service it. granted there are three other elevators besides this one. the freight elevator in the rear of the building and the service elevator in the back corner are somewhat understandable in a unioneers sort of way. its the executive elivator that gets me. three years ago, the company moved it’s executive offices to the more posh section of the city, abandoning it’s office in this building. since then, the offices have been empty and the elivators inert both of which could be greatfully used by the remaining workers.

i remember going onto one of those floors a few months ago on my way to an executive meeting without executives. everything was polished and dusted. clean, like a shrine to our corperate tiki idols. i swore i could even smell the incense hanging in the air. a ghost town without any real ghosts.

amazingly enough i made it to the head of this line without any morbid thoughts. japanese subway ride up to the twenty second floor. cube all the way in the back. joe is such a nice guy, he brought me over a cup of coffee. ten minutes later, haveing stared blankly at the dark monitor and exchanged plesentries with my neighbor, joe, i begin my work day.

suprisingly on not, i am paid quite well to do nothing. no, not goof off, that would be against company policy, but the complete absence of productivity. i can’t play video games of surf for porn because the cube design puts my back and the screen prone towards the door. any head shots or cum shots noticed on my screen spotted by an errant manager would add another demerit to my growing pile. no, my trick is to find ways to engage in the most difficult computational task leaving dialog boxes with excrutiatingly slow fuel bars. this frees me up to fall back into my own mind for minutes if not hours at a time. for a while, finding these kind of complex tasks proved to be more work than my actual work. fortunatly, i found a program that does the most amazing thing. all it can do is create fuel bar laden dialog boxes with cosotmizable text and times.

superglue

“he had to have come out back here.”

“but did he go up or down?”

“i doubt he’d go up, not like he could get off the roof with us down here,” and he stepped around the corner, his bulk casting even more darkness into the already black alley. while i was burying myself deeper into the trash pile, i could tell… i could tell… oh shit, what could i tell? all i knew is that i really didn’t want them to find me. i mean hell, they were worse than the mormans. that little voice in my head told me that these guys were up to no good. the first one, the large one with the fat face and the uni-brow struck me as the purse snatching sort. while the other one was the most absurdly calm and normal person i had ever met.

“shh… i think i hear him,” said normal guy as he sowly worked his way through the shadows of the alley with his flashlight. “if he came out of the windows up there, he would have fallen straight down. he’s probably out cold.”

lucky for me i wasn’t but i knew i was stuck back here until they left. as deep as i could go without making any more noise all that was uncovered was half of my right eye. i hoped that the flashlight wouldn’t shine too brightly off of it.

so, they tell me i’m the lucky one. all that i have from them is enough credit to get a transport and an id card. the cerdits slide into the trasport and i begin to weave in and out of traffic, the computer controled flow coreoghraphed by a distant computer always keeping above it’s i centimeter proximity tolernace level. i pass through an intersection without even slowing as a car coming from the right and i cringe. my yesterday didn’t alow for such things. the id has already been tossed in the disposal, i know that it meant to comfort the old ones from a bygone era as i finger the insicion healing on the back of my arm.

now before you condemn me, know that i am the good guy. all this time, i’ve been accused of dragging the rest of you down. bullshit! i’ve been trying to to raise you above the rest. i know what’s going on and i’m not willing to ignore it. those funking angles point their fingers at me. they say its all my fault. trite bastards. they bask in thier own glory while he plots the end. they would be pleased as shit should it all end.

oh, i’m sorry, this all just gets me so depressed. afterall, i care.