Termination Shock

The swarm had begun to shed altitude while tracking gradually northwest. They flew, at an altitude of maybe a hundred meters, up the incredibly wide freeway Saskia had seen from ground level yesterday. It was really a system of freeways at multiple levels, interlaced with ramps and crossed over, or under, by lesser freeways that would have been considered important in the Netherlands. It was bracketed between ground-level frontage roads, each many lanes wide and capable of carrying huge flows of traffic were they not partly underwater. “Interstates 10 and 45 combined is what you’re seeing,” T.R. said. “I-10 connects L.A. to Florida; 45 runs up to Dallas and connects to points north. In the other direction it’s our connection to the Gulf.” Presently those two roads parted ways and T.R. chose the left fork, veering onto a westerly course above 10, or the Katy Freeway as locals called it. “See, just looking at them on a map can’t do these constructs the justice that they are due,” he remarked, then surprised them all by swooping down and taking the swarm for a roller-coaster ride beneath the many lanes of the 10, which marched across sodden ground on reinforced concrete pillars. “And people talk about Rome and what they built,” T.R. muttered.

“T.R., what do you mean ‘the justice that they are due’?” Saskia asked.

“The size of it. The sheer amount of steel in the ground. The engineering. The presence, Your Majesty, the physical mass and reality of it. Every strand of rebar was drawn out in a steel mill. Where’d the heat come from? Burning things. The cement was produced in kilns, biggest things you ever seen. How do we keep the kilns hot? Burning things. We put the steel and the concrete together to make these things, these freeway interchanges, just so cars can run on ’em. How do we keep the cars moving? Burning things.”

“Putting CO₂ into the atmosphere,” Saskia said.

“Oh yes.”

“It is not sustainable.”

“With all due respect, Your Majesty, it is as sustainable, or as unsustainable, as your whole country. Later we can talk about how to sustain what matters to us. Now, hang on a sec, this calls for focus.”

What he focused on next was slaloming his drone through the huge pillars he’d just been describing, cutting under ramps and looping through cloverleafs. Finally he pulled out into the open and swooped them up to an altitude where they could look down on the Katy Freeway skimming beneath them. It had become even wider, if such a thing were possible. “Twenty-six lanes,” T.R. said, as if reading her mind.

Right now those lanes were only spattered with vehicles, as many businesses, schools, and activities had been shut down because of the hurricane. But Saskia noticed the bubble of her drone getting dark again, signaling another AR sequence about to start. “Not much going on today,” T.R. remarked, “so I’m gonna take you on a little trip down memory lane. This is the same day of the year, same stretch of freeway, as it was back in 2019.”

As he said it, the twenty-six lanes of the Katy Freeway suddenly filled up with cars and trucks, countless thousands of them, moving along at moderate speed—not quite a traffic jam, but still with enough brake lights igniting here and there to temper the flow. A motorcycle weaved through, going twice as fast as everyone else, using the bigger vehicles as pylons. The illusion was powerful even though the rendering had been simplified—every semi was a clone of a simple featureless semi model, and the same was true of cars, vans, pickups, and so on. But if anything that simplification made it easier to “read” the data. T.R. was showing them, in a way that was easy to grasp, exactly how much traffic had passed down this freeway at this time of day on this day of the year in 2019.

“2020,” T.R. said, and the display shifted. This time traffic was sparser, and moving faster. “The first pandemic. Now, 2021.” Another shift. More traffic moving more slowly—there was a traffic jam. “2022.” It sped up. “2023. 2024.” The lanes emptied out. “That was a hurricane year, just like this one. 2025. You’ll notice a change taking hold,” T.R. said, as the years ticked upward, “as self-driving cars take over. In heavy traffic, they drive closer together, almost like they join together into a train. So we can fit more vehicles onto the same stretch of pavement and those vehicles are all going faster—much greater throughput! Here, I’ll flip between 2019 and 2029 and that’ll make it easy to see.”

He did so, and it was. The flow depicted in 2019 was gappy and spasmodic. Ten years later the cars were moving the way everyone was accustomed to nowadays, following one another closely, adapting smoothly to lane changes and merges. Saskia had lived through that transformation and was aware that it had happened but had never seen it demonstrated so vividly.