Лайонел Шрайвер - The Mandibles - A Family, 2029-2047

“Man, the SUV was one of the cruelest American inventions of all time,” Goog said. “I fucking loved my mom’s Jaunt. When it went out of production, I was all set to snag the latest model.”

“Bullying, brutish, and plug-ugly,” Nollie quipped. “Guess people recognize themselves in cars same as they do in dogs.”

On the GW, the metal grates of the surface rattled, the bridge itself lurching with a subtle sway. “I get the willies crossing these things,” Nollie said.

“No kidding,” Goog said. “This rusted contraption hasn’t had any serious maintenance since the 1990s.”

“According to Avery, the federal buildings in DC are just as dilapidated,” Willing said. “She said the ‘White House’ is a misnomer. Congress, the Lincoln Memorial—they’re all a dingy yellow dripping with black streaks. She said chunks of the Washington Monument keep falling off. After a girl was killed by one, you can’t get within a hundred yards.”

“My mom is biggin’ exaggerating,” Goog sneered. “I looked up pics of the Mall online. Pristine.”

“That’s because it’s cheaper to post old photographs than to pay for steam cleaning,” Willing said.

They curved on I-95 and bumped onto I-80 in Teaneck. Willing’s mood began to lift. He’d only been to New Jersey a handful of times, mostly with Jarred to plow rapidly inflating profits into hard-asset farm equipment. Besides New York, this was the only state of the union in which he’d set foot. As soon as they hit Pennsylvania, it was a brave new world. If these truly were the last days of his life, they’d be interesting days.

Nollie plugged her fleX into the sound system, cranking up the harmonies of her youth: “Hotel California,” “The Weight,” and some of the yunkest lyrics Willing had ever heard in a song called “A Horse with No Name.” She played Don McLean, JJ Cale, and Fleetwood Mac, until Goog exclaimed, “Christ, Nollie! This is like Tunes of Cro-Magnon Man . What’s next, Vivaldi?”

“I’m bankrolling this operation. This is my car, and my road trip,” she declared. “Ergo, my music. You’re a hostage, remember? Act like one.”

In truth, the moldy soundtrack grew on them. By the time they’d hit Stroudsburg on the Pennsylvania state line, both Willing and Goog were driving their Chevies to the levy at the top of their lungs.

With the late start, the first day was short. Nollie drove manfully—and pointlessly, since the Myourea could have done the job by itself—until 9 p.m., when they pulled into a rundown motel in Dubois. The proprietor was none too happy about Nollie’s being unchipped—since a chip would have automatically covered him for losses if his ninety-year-old guest went berserk on Jack Daniel’s and trashed the room. But he accepted a fleX payment because his operation was clearly hard up.

Nollie sent Willing across the way to fetch takeout. Goog lobbied for a proper restaurant meal, but they didn’t want to have to explain a taste for bondage in a diner banquette. He wheedled for them to please cut the duct tape so he could eat without making a mess, and it took discipline to resist his imprecations. Likewise, Willing took no pleasure in binding his ankles to the bedstead in the room they all shared.

For Goog had so entered into the spirit of the adventure that it was hard to remember he was being coerced. Only that afternoon, he’d threatened to restrict Willing’s movements to the tri-state area with militarized Scab drones and menaced Nollie with compulsory surgery. Granted, he often made cheerful allusions to the doom awaiting at their destination. So perhaps he’d decided to enjoy the ride, confident that he’d have the last laugh: Willing’s brain would fry; Nollie would be picked off by a border-guard sharpshooter. At the least, the duo would be drably arrested, and Goog would figure out how to take the credit.

Be that as it may, Goog’s travel history was also provincial. He claimed to have attended a Bureau conference in Cleveland, but being on the outs with Avery, he hadn’t even returned to Washington since his parents moved back in ’44. Alone of the cousins, he could have afforded to explore beyond his tight New York orbit. But theirs was a crimped, wary, stinting generation, and travel is an acquired appetite. Maybe it never occurs to you to go anywhere in particular on a given weekend when you don’t ever feel you’re going anywhere in a larger sense.

So with the promise of wider horizons farther west, even Goog the ultimate T-bill seemed energized. His work must have been boring—totals, percentages, and occasional deviations from the norm. He was powerful, but wielded only the clenched power to ruin people’s lives, as opposed to the looser, open-palmed power to improve them. Everybody with whom he came in contact hated him, and had to pretend they didn’t. A few days’ unofficial vacation from being an asshole must have been welcome.

As they rolled through the Alleghenies and entered Ohio the following day, Willing continued to be astonished that this journey was possible. No drone descended and fastened itself to the roof of their car with gecko-like suction cups because he hadn’t reported to work at Elysian that morning to do his fair share . The chip at the base of his neck didn’t glow and heat as it sensed his growing geographical distance from the means of making a social contribution .

While the wooded hills rolled past his window and Nollie played the contented la-la-laah-laah of “Our House,” Willing considered all that data pouring into federal supercomputers. He had previously conceived of the central network as an omniscient, all-seeing overlord, which sorted and stored every minute detail to perfectly reconstruct the smallest infringements of each American citizen. But perhaps instead the data fed a bloated, overloaded behemoth choking on its own information excess and suffering from a sort of digital obesity. Woozy from gorging on a smorgasbord of similar tidbits, maybe the monster was helpless to know where to stuff the fact that Willing Mandible nee Darkly of East Flatbush, NY, had bought a packet of soda crackers for 2.95.

In any event, nothing and no one seemed to care that Willing and Enola Mandible, and even Goog Stackhouse—who might not be as important at the Bureau as he pretended—had gone AWOL. It was exhilarating.

Nollie’s having plotted their course with her fleX GPS turned out to be unnecessary. The directions all the way to the Nevada border at Wendover, Utah, came down to: “cross George Washington Bridge, then turn right.” To Willing’s amazement, I-80 stretched in a virtual straight line across the continent from Teaneck to San Francisco. Granted, the tarmac was degraded, and he felt wistful about those apocryphal days when one could smooth along this route at 85 mph, in which case they might have made this whole trip in a mere three days instead of five. Willing was a fairly proficient economics autodidact, but knew soberingly little else about the country.

Because Nollie claimed that “children in the backseat need toys,” they disabled the personal communications on Willing’s maXfleX, password-protected the settings, and let Goog play with it. Big on showing off his general knowledge as a kid, he enjoyed pitching out factoids: “The interstate highway system was initiated in 1956. I-80 took thirty years to complete. It closely approximated the route of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America, and also duplicates much of the Oregon Trail and the Transcontinental Railroad.” Clearly, this uncompromising streak of roadway gouged remorselessly through boulders and mountain ranges was a staggering feat of engineering. Willing had harbored a variety of emotions about the United States over his short life: disappointment; anxiety, even fear; incomprehension; a whole lot of nothing. Pride was new. It was nice.