Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

It felt easy. We were all surprised by how little we actually needed to drive. But of course the dislocation was staggering.

The impact on Detroit alone was bad enough, as the old factories either closed or painfully retooled for the manufacture of a much reduced volume of smart new hydrogen-economy vehicles like pod buses. A whole slew of supplier industries had to pivot or fold. The oil infrastructure had to be renovated or replaced to handle the new hydrogen and biofuel paradigm. Meanwhile there was a massive relocation of businesses out of the city centers, and of people back in. Some more modern communities, such as whole stretches of Greater Los Angeles, were suddenly rendered impractical, uninhabitable without the car; property values went crazy. Agriculture was an industry as dependent on its distribution networks as any other, and food supplies boomed and crashed as we all tried to adjust.

Of course it was a huge risk. The nation as a whole had grown rich and powerful in a world economy built on hydrocarbon fuels; shifting that fundamental basis posed dangers politically and economically. But we had made it through vast economic transitions before, such as when oil had overtaken coal around 1900. After just a few years things began to get better, and the change became so embedded it seemed odd we hadn’t taken the leap much earlier. In the end it was just a matter of will, which Amin managed to assemble.

I was pursuing my nuclear-engineering career through this whole period, and I had to work my way through it. Despite the boom in VR technology I found myself spending a lot more time than I would have wanted to away from home. Maybe that contributed to the crisis my family faced later. Anyhow, we all got through it. I guess it was a necessary adjustment, whatever the cost.

But Amin’s policies, focusing on domestic issues, had a downside. America had turned inward on itself during a particularly nasty decade. It was the Warming, of course. Access to water was the focus of many battlegrounds, from the Nile to the Amazon and even the Danube, but energy wars were also increasingly a hazard. The changing climate wiped out whole nations — even the Netherlands was depopulated. America wasn’t immune; there were droughts in the corn belt, one-off calamities like the New Orleans hurricane. All over the planet there was famine, disease, and desertification, and drifting flocks of refugees. When the oil economy collapsed the petrostates began to implode with startling rapidity, causing a whole new set of problems.

And in all this America, the only nation with the real power to help, obsessing over losing the automobile, did nothing. Our inwardness ended only with the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing of 2033, a real wake-up call. After that came the launch of the Stewardship under Edith Barnette, once Amin’s veep: America’s “Marshall Plan for a bruised world.” It began by us baling out the petrostates as a few years earlier we had baled out Detroit.

By then President Amin had paid her own price, in her assassination a week after she left office. But she had changed the world.

I used to try to explain all this to Tom. He was ten years old when Amin was assassinated; he remembers that trauma even if the greater geopolitical transformations passed him by at the time.

I thought he would want to know about the lost freedoms of the automobile age, a time when you could go where you wanted as fast as you wanted. It had been part of our birthright, we thought. I still remember how proud I was of my first car, a beat-up 2010 Ford, which I used to polish until it shone in the Florida sun. I missed driving — not just the freedom of it, but driving itself, a social interaction of a unique kind you got as you wrestled your way through heavy traffic on a Friday rush hour. Vanished skills, abandoned pleasures.

But Tom would stare at images of the vast streams of traffic that had flowed along the abandoned roads only a few years before, and at the poison that spread out from those crawling rivers of red lights and shining metal, blackening the land and turning the air over the cities the color of a Martian sky. And he would flick on links to accident statistics: how many died every year? No dream of freedom could possibly have seemed worth the price to Tom, who had never owned his own car, and never would.

I only saw one private car during that ride to the airport. I recognized the model. It was one of the new Jeeps, with six tires as tall as I am and a slick waterproof underside, and a little chimney stack from which it would vent its harmless hydrogen-fuel exhaust, water laced with a few exotic hydrocarbon by-products. Its cabin was perched on top of its body, a bright glass bubble. Some of these models had seats that turned into bunks, and little kitchens and toilets, and windows you could opaque to a silvery blankness. You could live in there. I felt an unwelcome stab of envy.

Its driver must have been seventy at least. Perhaps when the final generation of driver-nostalgics died off, I thought, so would the very last of the private cars. In the meantime, that guy was no doubt paying plenty for his fix.

But I still miss that old Ford of mine.

At the airport the check-in process was thorough, with cheek-swab DNA verification tests, neurological scans, and full-body imaging to make sure I wasn’t carrying a pathogen in my bloodstream or a knife in a hollowed-out rib.

I finally got on the plane. The cabin was wide-bodied and fitted out with big fake-leather couches, around which people fussed and planted their in-flight stuff. There were no windows, but every wall surface was smart, although for now tuned to a drab wallpaper. It was like a lounge in some slightly cramped hotel; only the cabin’s inevitable tubular architecture gave away the fact that we were on board a plane. My couch was smart, too. As I sat down I felt pads move silently into place, fitting my body shape and supporting my back and neck and lumbar region. All very civilized, though that cheap-hotel feeling deepened. I settled in and spread my softscreen over my lap.

The plane filled up quickly. The couches were not set in rows but in subtly randomized patterns, so you had at least the illusion of privacy. But still my neighbor, as he settled in, felt like he crowded into my space.

He was maybe forty, a round-faced man sweating so heavily his thinning hair was plastered to his scalp. His belly strained at his shirt. At one time you wouldn’t have glanced at him twice, but in these days when everybody walked everywhere he was bigger than most. He had a lot of stuff, a pack he crammed under his seat, another he shoved into the locker in front of him, and he spread out a softscreen and a pile of papers on his lap.

He caught me watching him. He stuck out his hand. “Sorry to disturb you. The name’s Jack Joy. Call me Jack.”

I shook his hand, powerful but hot and moist, and introduced myself.

He snapped his fingers to summon the steward — a human, a retro symbol of a vanished age. Jack requested a bourbon, and asked if I wanted the same; a bit uncertainly, but feeling crowded by this guy, I agreed.

Slightly breathless, he gestured at the heap of material on his lap. “Look at this crap. Every trip’s the same.” He winked. “But it costs so much to travel nowadays you have to make it worthwhile, even if somebody else is paying, right?” His accent was strong New York.

“I guess so.”

“You fly a lot?”

“I flew out here, to Florida. Otherwise, not for years.”

“It isn’t the unalloyed delight it once was. Watch this.” Without warning he slammed his fist against the fake leather armrest of his seat, making me jump. Immediately a metal band slid out of nowhere and snapped over his arm, and a blue light flashed over his head.