Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. Night brings a peculiar hush with it,
but it never truly silence. Is the city under sodium
washed rain, There are always souls in motion, destinations flickering
like low wap bults against the darkness. I think this
is why people imagine the late Shift it empty than
it is, because you only see fragments passing tail lights
and umbrella twirling under a ragged awning. I would draw
a twenty four irt M. I spend more IROs than
I'd care to count watching these fragments, stirring my DENTI
sedan down the arteries connecting neighborhood's most folks try not
to think about. After sunset to night feels different, though.
I record a short voiced note, balancing the phone in
its dask cradle as water beads on the glass. Test
Log two thirty six, A M entering them MI in
his thirdy tree interchange, four pick ups. So far, nothing weird,
my words take through the static. It's more for me
than any one else. I have it. I started after
my second straight week of lost sleep and half remembered rides.
It helps at least as much as caffeine or the radio.
Each night contains moments that slip away. If I don't
catch them, I ease off. The may nottery wind into
the rain, gloss under pass worre exit ramps tangle like
fine cracks in a windshield. Other drivers avoid this stretch,
half superstition, half practical. The lightning's bad. The coats are rotted,
and the interchange itself was botched in the initial build.
People gribe about every time you mention the area. Driver
meet ups speaking in the past, tens about routes that
technically still exist. The phone pings one ride request, just
inside the triangle of ramps where the old overpass meets
the new. The location is strange, no building, no mark lot,
just a sliver of concrete flant by a graffiti guardrill
and a bramble of frag mightes. I glance at the
rear view, only my own eyes, dark and sharp, framed
by the muted pulse of the desk woor. I scan
the clock two forty seven, a m space between each
drop of rain, stretching out, delineating a world only illuminated
when lightning cracks behind a cloud mass. There's a hunch
figurehead half out of sight unto a warped green road
sign that's been half eaten by vines. I pull over,
wipe us, squealing in a familiar and necessary rhythm. The
right clins in one sharp, anxious movement. I catch a
flash of pale skin, hollow cheeks, and a battered satchel.
Gripped close. They say nothing. Air follows them in cold,
carrying the chemical tang of highway runoff. The phone screen
shows the expected destination, a spot on the outskirts near
an abandoned fuel station. The icon for a passenger on
board blinks with the strange hestons. Before settling, I check
the mirror, my new fair of voids I contact tucks
themselves into shadow and glances over their shoulder with a
kind of haunted urgency. Odd, maybe there is trouble, a fight,
a stalker, something I should care about as the supposed
responsible party. Still, the silence is impermeable. We wind through
looping ramps, the pavements slick enough to require extra caution.
Each bolt of lightning briefly animates the creased map of
their features. No scars, just the strain of vigilance. The
only sounds of their tents ex hail, the vinyl on vinyl,
friction of the satchel strap, and distant thunder rolling over
steel trusses. I try to make it normal. You're right
back there, knead the heat up. They don't answer, just
watch the mirror, not me, but the space behind my head,
as if waiting for some confirmation I can provide. We
crest onto the access road. Ahead, the hollow shell of
what used to be a station house sit shuttered, its
yellowed windows covered by sheets of plout. At the curb.
Before I can say we're here, the rider opens the door.
The shoes hit the pavement with a muted slap in
a quick flick. At thereout hunched low across the glistening tarmac,
vanishing behind the dirilict gas pumps. I blink. They're gone,
impossibly swift, leaving only the residual echo of the presents
air displaced, a vague send of machine, all mixed with mildew.
I glance at the seat behind me, expecting nothing, but
there it is a folded, rain blotched mat, thick paper
riddled with creases. Lions trained in pent and marker symbols
sketched were rows into cycleet nervousistant diagrams. I scoop it,
U poled it beneath the glow of the overhead dome.
Street names, some familiar, some off by a letter or two,
or are those even names? Planes that curve when no
street does. I cans that resemble eyes or camera shutters
Before I can react, before calling out to the darkness,
my phone buzzes shrill in the sudden hush. Another ride.
I check the apslog shows nothing. The most recent ride
of this furry one is absent. Sand was between a
generic fast Fodron and a red eyed Norse on the
night shift. The map is the only sign of what
just happened. I listen again, the his rattle of the
heavy rain, the steady idol of my car, nothing else.
I wait, half convinced the rider will double back, needing
rescue r explanation. They do not. The only mark left
on my world is the strange batted map and a ride.
Neither of us ever officially took mornings blur into afternoons,
stand back to twilight. I tell myself, I'm not superstitious,
but some places take on a heaviness after iron stores
that breathe in the shadows left by brooke and halogen lights.
For years, the night shift made sense to me. It
paid the bills and left the crowded for a netted
parts of daylight for other people, those whose sleep schedules
didn't tangle with garbage trucks and closing time bouncers. My
normal up bisex routines on Tuesdays, I ferry air cashier
from the late night market who always sits up front,
recounting which produce pallets went bad Fridays its bar runs
twenty somethings riding silent while clutching shoes, men in suits
boasting about tips they'll never see again. Some go nowhere,
fancy just the transit center or a halfway house past
the strip malls. Others ride as far as they pulled
cash lasts, never looking back as I pull away. There
are patterns people want to be let off at the
same spots under the glow of the yellow lid blocking
mar beside the faded mural of a fish that used
to advertise five fruit at the edge of parking garages,
always with one where he glanced at the tangle where
the interchange broods. Some part of those miles are stitched
together by ritual, the same hotels, the same bordered up
diners with neon the hums worse than the HVAC. Still
something changed after the map. A place seeps in tea
like rain into wool if you travel at nightly. Other
drivers have rules. Don't linger at the old shell after too,
avoid pickups mid decked on the ramp. There's nervous chatter
about the middle lanes at the interchange, especially the one
flanked by concrete barriers, were run of poles and black streaks.
People worn about dead spots for self service, claim the
road shift turbe and legend staff, or so I thought.
I hear stores three months ago. One girl and snow
dusty jacket gets out at her stop, walks away, and
no one's seen her since. Another guy from Despatch, faced
like a weak old bruise, tells me about a time
he accepted a ride near the big clover leaf and
found the pin was actually set under an overpast Drival's car.
Nobody to be found. Some one always has an uncle
or a cousin who rode through that stretch. Then stop
driving without saying why I make a point of small talk,
canlines questions that give people a chance to vent diffuse
the overnight age, quiet shift to night, the long way home,
or just passing through. Some passengers answer telling me about
the town's past, how development got old roads in half,
squeezed up mom and pop stores and left them to
rock between rubens of concrete. Only once do they mention
anything close towards in my head and nurse Tai from
a twelve iroshift size wouldn't catch me out here after three.
Too many people go missing lately, or so they say,
like parts of the map just swallow you up. I
keep the bats of map tucked into a cliffs leap
into my wart house next to it, clippings from local papers,
snatchots of the people we are searching for, bulletin at
the central library, marked up printers of wird fares and
apt discrepancies. The jumble of faces and symbols is starting
to look less like a conspiracy, the amtiousliest version of
a muder wall, and more like a diary of things
I can't prove but can't shake. My nightly ritual has
a rhythm. Home is a small guest suite above someone
else's garage always a little too chilly, with lemon scented
cleaners to mass the creeping smell of carpholstery. After a shift,
I went down by replaying the night's rides in my head,
then transcribing cuick audio notes before memory can strip them
to bones. Sometimes I find myself narrating small details, reciting
plate numbers i'll never check, describing the flicker of digital
displays as if they held secrets. My fingers which to
cross reference each log to entangle what doesn't align. Recently,
I double check the ferries, especially those flapped in my mind.
A bob drop offs and correct addresses a trip that's
log but never actually reached its end point. On GPS,
what should be monotonous is now marked by an edge
and onnease that clings to my routines like static. When
I fall asleep, I dream not effaces, but of the interchanges,
lipping com uncrete, endless ramps doubling back into themselves, like
a city built for ghosts. I'm starting to believe that
isn't all metaphor. There's something unfinished in that place, something
knowing on the border of what's real and what's just
coded into the app. The missing ride look from the
nervous passenger is a present I feel every time I
flick in the dome light or pass through the brain
soak section where by bus lanes overlap like the folds
of an old a red letter. By the time the
week cycles back to my next night drive, I'm convinced
the map isn't just clutter. It's a key whether to
someone's secret or do something darker, sluggish. Iire's drag five
fares an evening, then six, then seven as the city
grows restless with the coming heat wave. During one lull,
heavy traffic around the stadium, most bars close for a storm,
I find myself parked under an overpass hazard light, sticking
in time. The bruised paper map lies on my passenger's
heat open to the section near the trangle of how
we nobody likes. The mockings grow sharper in the harsh dome,
bolt names, half faded lines in raiding, truck looping exits,
closed off ramps, hand drawn symbols, layer over and dis
section points. A knock with the dot, a jagged a
case shape, something like a spiral that cuts through the grid.
I flip between the real map app on my phone
and this rakid document some of the lanes it marks on.
On current GP, I see the missing, entirely missamed, or
drawn with peculiar flourishes that don't match public infrastructure. I
notice one cluster of icons, a nest to triangle with
a circle at its core, set right at the midprint
of the interchange. As I compare the lines, the strange
true settles in the crude sketches, a line with certain
service rotes long since closed were swallowed by new construction.
The symbols seem to denote passages ro RUPs, impossible to
follow on foot now, yet map with obsessive care, torn
between amusement and curiosity. A snap photos hoping some pattern
will emerge. In the daylight, the rain drums harder, blurring
the windshield. As I refocus my phone vibrates a late
night request flight for nearly the same pickup spot as
the nervous rider, only now labeled by GPS's old mb rap.
I hesitate then, except the pickup repeats the same eere choreography.
A thin, edgy young man in a reflective jacket stands waiting,
shoulders hunched, as if awaiting more than a ride. He
oscillates between glances back into the gloom and staring into
the glow of his phone. Once inside, he offers clip's thanks,
asking twice if I'm sure I am taking the actual
mart rode to, not the one the app shows. He
memors the real exit, you know, the way it used
to be. His presence sharpens my focus. The soldn silence
feels weighty, but he tries to break it, tapping at
his phone, asking if my logs ever get a weird
entries if my app glitches out near the bridges. I
feign ignorance, watching his face in the limina light, a
face that's alert, searching for assurance, not companionship. He tracks
a trip through his phone, anxious for confirmation at each intersection.
Turn here, no use, the second ramp not the first.
The ride ends at a narrow pull off near a
fencetran's former yard, the sort sprawled the publics never meant
to visit. I stop a glance at the clock three fifteen.
He's up before the car's fully stopped, melts into darkness
like before, no signature, no tip, nothing but a feigned
electronic eye marking the end of the rye. Immediately I
reach for my phone to rate the fer scan the record. Nothing.
This trip, just like the last, is simply gone. No fare,
no details, a vanished passenger, only the wetton print of
their elbow in the seat beside me. There's a crackle
in my chest, a sense of something slipping out from
beneath the skin of ordinary life. Too many details aligned,
the oddity of the meticulous hand drawn map picked from nowhere,
drop offs or dead zones, the repeated vanishing act. Only
I seem to notice the wheels in my head spin,
piecing together what's missing from the black top. I stare
at the dashboard, feeling the pulse of nerves through the
tips of my fingers. There's a pattern here, If I'm honest,
I'm not sure I want to know where it leads.
The next day, sunlight glances off my windows. With both
the map and my phones spread out across the passenger seat,
I troll through the digital flotsam of the previous weak ride, locks,
time stamps, GPS co ordinates. I've first passed the lawspheres
don't exist. The apse. Beckin skips over the iOS in question,
as if those portions of my nights simply unraveled. While
I drove in a rare burst of focus. I plug
my dash comb into the old laptop balanced on my knees.
The footage from last night a race ride is jittery,
rain streaked, But as the frames progress, I spot something strange.
Every so often, the background seems to flicker, almost as
if the landscape behind my car shifts. For a few frames,
exits when none should be. Street lights glimpsed only for
an instant. On three separate occasions, through the rear window,
I see a blowry vehicle trailing at a careful distance
and nondescript sa'dan headlights dim play and readable in the
blur my ears burn, I rewind and replay their raid
is again frames in which my own car seems mirrored.
Goes thee in the side glass, as if the dark
and is capturing a parallel circuit. A second rund trip
running on a hidden loop through the same ramps and tunnels.
I cross reference science stemps, fun slight descriptants is an
extra fifteen second at one light, a missing minute as
a Covanto connector that on official maps no longer exists. Determined,
I dig further, pulling ride locks from my can dashboard,
that stutters, straining to load rides that by all logic
shouldn't be there. Blank spaces appear where rides should be,
spishu scaps that don't match my memory. In desperation, I
scroll back to last week's rides, comparing them to the
Dakam's chronology. Several fays, always near thos or triangles and
mark points on the batter map simply vanish from his
head he once delivered. It's maddening, the sense of pushing
at a membrane between reel and not each era's transaction.
Each pixel blow background as a nail in the theory
I don't want to name. If I've driven these routes
in real time, they should exist. If the rise happened,
someone should remember them. Yet the evident slips liking down
a storm drain, a restless meet France's nose at mine sides.
I text a few fellow night drivers, reaching out with
juxon innuendo at first, then bearing more earnest questions. Ever
notice the logs glitching out near the ramps. One, a
stork woman named Miko, who's worked the same corridors for years, replies,
let's talk in person, better than text. We meet at dawn,
and the Dinuta clings to the edge of the city,
stubborn as a barnacle. Miko shows up in an old
mechanic's jacket shop, eyed as she pours sugar into bottomless
black coffee. She smells faintly of engine oil and peppermint.
We exchange pleasantries, share news of construction deters. Before I
get to the point, you ever lose affair from your logs?
Like vanish after a sketch, you run through the interchange,
I say, quietly, feeling foolish, my mouth tightens. You see
a sedan in your rear view too. Her hands gripped
the cap, knuckles white. Happen to me, I dropped some
one off patchy beard dress shirt, never said his name
right as he left a guping again for the same
pick up, same drop minutes later at buck I thought,
But when I checked my entire log from that night, wipe.
Mikol lowers her voice further. Hugh heard about ghost lanes.
Maybe it's local myth, maybe not. All I know is
some fares if you take them through the center after midnight,
sometimes they don't even make it to your memory, and
those that do are best left alone, the regular stick
to the service roads. Now one friend kept pushing it
ended bad. I'd let this go if I were you.
She glances around the empty diner, her eyes suddenly hard,
then slaps a pack of cum on the counter with
a finality that brooks no argument. Our talks eires into silence.
The only sound the distant clutter of someone's dropped cutlery.
The warning lingers after she leaps, heavy as the emidedy,
rising off the wet parking lot. Back in Makhar, wading
out the growing gray of dawn, I weigh her words
against my growing stack of oddities. It chill drags its
way through me, a sense of being observed by something networked, predatory, impatient.
The ride requests slow. After that barren stretch of storm,
I carry on smaller tips and of vent afares, but
the city keeps its secrets close. One night the phone rings,
the riyjer a line, but this time it flashes my
own number as the collar the hackles on my neck stand.
I answer, expecting a glitch or maybe a row number. Silence,
then a scrapistatic ridmic, almost like the drag of fingers
on a plastic dashboard. I press the phone to my ear,
where in the background, faintly some one whispers my name
again and again, each instance offbeat, never quite matching my own.
Timber coal prickles race down my spine. When I check
the coal log, there's nothing. The app refuses to relaunch,
locked up in a blank gray screen for exactly three minutes.
By the time the system resets, my hands are trembling
with a dread, A cant articulate The next ride is
and not keep us a fast food run ferns on
the next student. But my mind is elsewhere, caught in
the lag between what's scene and what isn't. Days pass
in a blur of half nights in fitful sleep. Eventually
the restlessness wins. I revisit my wall trace in Pinbrick's
in the batted map, searching for some order to the
chaos I chart rides. I remember, overlaying the town's missing
persons listings with each marked triangle and off ramp. It's tedious, obsessive,
but gradually something emerges. All the eurst rides, both mine
and Miko's, cluster around the same phantom passageways, the detritus
of a city's developmental dead ends. Compelled by a need
for closure. I attempt to contact one passenger from the
flat rides, a women who'd insisted I turn off to
navigation as we skirted the ghost interchange. The app delivers
a profile not found warning our previous ride history strip
from the archival queue. I try to reach support, but
the inquiry bounces back site an a data integrity mismatch.
It's as if she never existed. The next move's reflex,
I load the city's missing presons database, feeling my stomach
not as I enter a keyword. The nervous rider. His
picture pops up next to a case number missing since
the night I picked him up, last seen standing by
the exact highway ramp where the storm first drove me
to shadow it all there, last scene details, family appeals,
grainy surveillance stills that could be anyone until you look
close enough. A slow, terrible recognition blooms passengers who vanish
from the ride, locks whose names, faces, and payment information
disappear from ever having existed in the system. Out up
perfectly with the symbols and the battered map. Each drop
or flag is now a fragment of an unseen logic.
A city within the city hungry for the lost and
the overlooked. Overlaying all the data, GPS points, missing persons, images,
and those drawn spirals and triangles aligns the heartbreakingly simple
truth theories of being routed remarked perhaps in the interchange,
like cattle herded byan seeing hands to a hidden system.
It doesn't some aimless string of tech bugs or a
user error, someone or something as guiding these disappearances, piggybacking
on the fretmented infrastructure and digital detriterus from a ride
show were all built for convenience and speed, but indifferent
to what's lost in the margins. A jolt of clarity
pulses through every vein the urban inchlands. All the overlook
loops are more than dark corners their feeding points. I
see now that the road and platforms are only carrying
They're carrying something else. Ghost logs, missing passengers, and a
hunger that lives not in the dark itself, but in
the gaps left behind by vanished rides raise from all
but the fragile memory of one night driver with too
much curiosity. I stare at my own reflection, barely visible
in the rain streak glass, No matter what the other
drivers say, No matter how sensible forgetting would be, there's
no way to walk away. Now. I'm in it, as
surely as the map is marked with those repeating, spiraling symbols,
and something at the center of all those loops is waiting.
I sit in the driver's seat, with the weight of
everything pressing into my chest, knuckles whitening on the wheel.
Traffic from early commuters glimmers distantly, but here at the
city's fringe, the outside world might as well be twenty
miles off. The rain has dwindled to a mist, beads
collecting lazily on the windshield, but inside the cabin the
air as thick as ever, static, restless, like after a
circuit's trip. But before the lights go out, I force
myself to pull away from the coat, back onto the
main drag, wheels humming with each subtle turn. My phone
sits muted in its mount for once. I let it
stay dark, resisting the urge to fill the hush with
music or pots, fearing my own voice might crack the
unseen logic holding the night together. There's a pressure building
in my sinus, is a sense that the route, the workout,
once considered dull, unpredictable is circling into water tight ail
is not bound to snat. But routine is a comfort,
and so I return to it. I drive. The next
few rides are ordinary. A couple staggering from a closing bar,
still leaning into each other's arms with ut loose, fragile
affection born of gin and shared escape for warehouse shift
worker exhausted and silent, but grateful, his as red rimmed,
his duffel sacking in his lap. Each one confirms the
universe hasn't slipped entirely off its axis. Yet in each face,
each voice, I search for something else in awareness I saw,
I nat they too might slip through the cracks at
any moment without warning that home. As the sun splits
night from day, I stare at the evidence wall as
if I'm minding it for a secret code. The battered
map is the centerpiece ex's clustering around the interchanges, loops,
columns of overlapping names and addresses, most now gone from
any public record. There's a strangeness to the handwriting, a
pressure that's deepened over time. The ink ragged or s buttered,
sometimes replaced with pencil when the pen is run dry.
I find myself, wondering whose hand created it, and if
they too became one of the vanished. I dig for more, searching, replaying,
expanding my net. I dig into the right Share apt
help section, seeking records they say, or archive, but which
flickor in and out of existence. I even try to
contact corporate, submitting a request to restore missing enterers, but
the replies are all automated, coldly polite, insistent that no
such records exist within our system. Twice I almost call
the police, not that I could explain what's really wrong,
or showed them anything that wouldn't evaporate under the harsh
light of official procedure. A missing ride lock, a passenger
who left, no trays, a map no one's owned up
to drawing. These are barely musical notes against the city's
constant durn of actual emergencies. Gnawing at me is a
certainty that there are others, other drivers may be more
obsessive than me, or maybe just as frightened scrubbing the
routes each night for unwanted passengers, or the lingering presence
of something that doesn't belong in the ordinary map. Well,
I tried the only form. I trast a small closed
group of Lanta night shift drivers exchanging rumors about where fairs,
strange events, and unexplainable absences. Predictably, most of the chatter
is teasing, baiting, venting. Some unpost the blood dash and
shot of a kyrote wandering across a highway median caption
Urban wildlife strikes again but buried in the thread, or
a couple of accounts too close to mind to be ignored.
Locks disappearing after midnight, Ferris flat does no show even
when the passenger got in the car, and even time
stamps all near the same cluster of ramps and forbidden lanes.
One message stands out, written by someone who uses the
handle Subway ghost. They claim years ago the city plan
to expound the interchange, carving new passages under the river bank,
but ran out of money before the project was finished.
They just bricked up the new lanes, unpaved over the beginnings,
the post reads, but sometimes the act still routes you there.
System doesn't know the difference between what's built and what's planned.
Only you do, and sometimes not Even then, I sit
back shivering. It's not just me, whether legend or fact.
This sense of the city is and finished as holding
snakes under the concrete feels truer with every day. I
see me go again, almost by accident, pulled into the
same convenience store, parking a lot at four a m.
She's there, window down, cigarette poise between two fingers and faceschion, fatigue,
colorless in the vapor of neon and exhaust. I risk
a wave. She nods, mostly about the car shared kinship
to night, I think, rather than anything personal. The truth is,
she says, through the haze, I keep meaning to quit
every night. Guests darker in the pays, and worth the headache.
Right still, there's always another asshole needing a ride. I
offer a strained laugh, but my voice fails. Instead. I
fish in my pocket, fingers trembling slightly. Do you ever
feel like him missing something important? Like the city's not
I pause, unable to find the word. We're not quite map, right,
She stares at me, recognition in her silence. You still
dreaming about the loops, she asks quietly, I not called
off guard. Yeah, but lately I'm not sure of their dreams.
She doesn't smile, just stubbed out her cigarette, speaking quietly.
Try not to follow the strange fares, not if you
can help it. There's a reason some drivers disappear from
the chat for good. She turns the key, engine rumbling
back to life, and leaves before I can say anything else.
I sleep fitfully. My routine becomes a pendulum, work, dig repeat.
I start hearing odd things, noticing movements in the rear
view where none should be. Sometimes to red light, I
sense another vehicle slowing behind me, nothing but a pair
of headlights closely in the rain and fog, never quite
catching up before peel enough. Then comes the night of
the next disruption. I'm idling at the edge of the interchange,
reading notes, deep in thought when the phone rings, this
time not the APP but my personal number. The screen
displays my own contact photo, old and a bit grainy.
My thumb poles is Before I answer the instant I
pick up. There's no voice, just the faint rasp of
something moving across plastic, like a seat belt being dragged,
or maybe nails skittering over vinyl. In the background. The
sound of traffic just slightly warped like a tape plate
at the rong speed. No breathing, no speech. After thirty
agonizing seconds, I narrowly hang up, then unmistakably. I hear it,
my own name whispered by a voice that is close
sput off, not quite my tone nor my ceddants, but
undeniably meant to echo mine one, then twice, then again,
each repetition so lower as if the speaker is losing
strength or interest. I try to record, fumble with the app,
but the cold drops away before I can do anything.
I sit stune, staring at the phone. When I check,
there is of course no record of the call. My
app is frozen, refusing to reopen for minutes, I'm left
adroof the dark, pressing him from all sides. Once the
phone restarts, my exhaustion weighs heavier. Each passing ire tells
me less about the city and more about myself, about
how little I comprehend the system I walk in, and
how easily an ordinary night mapped in straight lines can
slip into something jagged and hungry. I take a week
off driving, blaming fatigue and a vague onness. My head aches,
and I can't forget that whisper more, the gentle assertion
from Meeker that no shift is worth this kind of unease.
Yet each day off I find myself pacing unable to
escape the magnetic pull of the battered map and the
wall of unsolved emptiness. It now defines the day's slip,
and soon I am pulled back to the night the
wheel the patterns. A new notification pops up a ride
requested at one of the flagged half imaginary ramstiff name,
same nervous wording in the request notes, please confirm using
service route, not the GPS suggestion. The same odd phrasing
as the others, though the list did pick up is
even more impossible directly atop a statement long since divided
by a median. On instinct, I accept, pausing before heading out,
I double check the route as always doesn't exist on
any live map, only on the faded hand drawn one
tape to my wall. When I arrive, headlights illuminate nothing
but an inlet fence by temporary barriers. Yet thou bade
by the flickering too yellow light from a security floodlump
stands a woman in a rain slick jacket, shoulder square, phone,
and glowing like a lantern. She slides into the back seat,
casting a single searching glance at me before tucking herself
away just straight through. Please, she says, eyes dancing between
her phone and the window of the tension in her
voice sharp a snat wire. There's no conversation this time,
owing the silent code of two people in a transaction
near the wants to name. At the drop off sight,
a narrow pull out adjacent to a locked utility compound.
She snaps open the door and vanishes as quickly as
she had appeared. How last footprint lost in the grime.
Mabot leaves again, no fare, no log entry. The system
meets her up, leaving nothing but a faint shiver along
my spine and an echo pressed against the vinyl worse
she sat. Something inside me breaks free, the fear of
tilting toward a certainty that's both terror and acceptance. The
batter map is full now, their traps and symbols mapping
perfectly against the names I've matched from the missing person's lists.
Lions blurred with nervous graphite cluster around alvis corridors of disappearance. Still,
it is the next night that transforms conjecture into conviction.
I piece together. All I can is spreadsheet, a hasty
scroll on the wall, screenshots of every use of profile
and write detail I can dig up before each vanishes again.
Each date points strengthens the invisible hand guiding certain passengers
to certain death spots, never spoken about, never pursued by
the police or the outsupport algorithms. I try to share
this with other drivers, but the forum's moderators to leap
my post a private message follows curt and formal conspiracy.
Howcom's community trusts please refrain, It is as if I
am alone in the realization, an unwilling, lone witness will
process much larger, much colder than I could have once believed.
The questions crought in, who marks the map, who first
trace these lines? Who are what built these traps into
the bones of the city, or is this just what
happens when infrastructure intent an indifferent spurrow out, abandoned and
left to rot. A late night search brings one lost
confirmation at overlay decades worth of regional development plans found
in online archaves over my battered, ink riddled map. The
ghost ramps draw tied around one origin, a stretch of
road never completed, sealed off midway and never formerly cut
from the city's plans. The last contractor's road of one
usually on stable soil Sinkholl's hazardous ground. There it sits
a void on every digital and paper map and acknowledged,
quietly infecting the data share between riders, drivers, and the
all seeing system. The lights in my room flicker as
I leaned back, elbows pressed to my knees. I am
staring at an absence, the negative space left by city's mistakes,
greet and forgetfulness. And in that absence, something moves, refracted
by the lines and date appoints no one should see,
but which once seen, cannot be unseen. Sleep, calmbs and easy,
darting through nervy, restless dreams, head lights, swerving through rain,
on to ramps, the andd abruptly in shadow forces fragmenting
as the cities gate splits apart and closes, in, stranding
me at its center. About a map pulses up from
my desk like a beacon somewhere below, beside behind the city.
I think I know if there is a network of
roads meant for nobody, made navigable only by error and
by ghosts, and someone or something is watching, nudging riders
and drivers elect toward mouth that does not always let go.
I rise early, resolve, hardening as the first first light
finds my window. Enough of rumors, enough of mapping from
a distance. If there is a system at play, someone's
written it, someone maintains it. It is time to go
deeper past the analog into the digital thicket, were routes, logs,
and signals do not obey the surface rules. I'll need help,
someone who knows the city's digital blood as well as
its physical veins. And in this search, I know who
to call, because if I'm not the only one to
have seen the system shadow, there is a chance one
of us might yet call out again and tell the story.
I just hope as I dial that the network will
let me find the exit home. Except it isn't, not
in any concrete sense. I sit in the small upstairs room,
blinds half drawn against a flat, overcast morning. The battered
maps spread out on my knees on the wall. Yesterday's
new print at stangle from pushpins, headshots of the Vanish Ride,
details redacted by system errors, public appeals copied from old
news arcoves. Each windowpane vibrates with the passing of trucks
in the main row, but here all motion is em
spiraling from the map sinc black lines the confirmation stands undeniable.
The nervous passenger's photo of the missing database entries, the
repeated traps. When overlaid, the pattern glows with Ruth's certainty,
all the warnings Meeka's guarded device, the erased requests, even
the impossible for and cold threads that have drawn so
tight I can almost hear the snap coming. My hands
have stopped trembling, replaced by something more dangerous, and I
see methodical resolve. I swallow the last of a two
cold coffee in pocket, my phone from hesitating over the
Rychier app. Every new ride, every blip of an unexpected road,
feels like one step deeper into the hollow architecture growing
somewhere just out of sight. But turning back means living
with an unfinished story, not by uncertainty forever, one during
which night the systems hunger might set its sights on
me or some one else I care about. Something has
to give. The platforms help chat is useless. The city's
police tips line theoretical at best. I can't solve this alone,
but some one will know how to lift the city's
digital skin, lay bare what hides and flickering logs and
old development files, say knows me a few minor favors,
and if anyone loves chasing anomalies more than I do,
it's him. I text saying I need your help, not
a drill. His reply comes almost instantly, what's the job?
No pleasantries, no waffling. We meet in his workroom at
crump semi basement, set under our mildy triplets in the
edge of industrial blocks. Everything about Sane is coiled energy,
buttoned down, shirt, shewed thumb, nail, I sharp and I'm
blinking behind thicker and glasses. Our ado costs two batter
tables are three laptops, a tangle of chargers, a soldering iron,
and a bronze statuette of some comic but fill and
holding up o'clock. He barely glances at me as I enter.
He sounds rough. He mutters not unkindly, say it night
shift or something else? Ills the folded map on the desk.
My last ride logs already open on my phone. Ever
heard of ghost fares erase rides passengers who disappear and
not just in it and tip and ran off way?
He grins, slow and sharp urban legend. Every writer cher
group has one at bugs, ghost drivers, all that most
our user error were data drift. He pauses, peering closer
as he spreads the map flat. But you're not a tourist.
What's this? I lay out the facts, tap by tap,
the nervous writers, the vanished logs, the symbols and the map,
the matching miss in persons records, even the oddities in
my dash him Sayin's face at first dismissive, grows tot.
He clicks through my screen shirts, skims the apps, air screens,
and finally settles on the list of ride requests that
never registered. A fair give me your login, he says, quietly,
and a copy of every scrap you've got time for
a proper Curt Saye moves fast, deploying scripts across of
right chair platforms, roe data fees while extracting GPS histories
from my account. His brow furrows as he leans into
a terminal window, layers of coatscrolling faster than I can pass.
He loops me in voice calm, as ever, here's what's word.
The platform isn't just missing entries. The back end is
actively rewriting write histories. You see these request hashes. He
spins his laptop my way, pointing at a column of numbers.
These shouldn't repeat except for corporate test to cancel deb bots,
but here they do, and always at the same routes.
Cost it around deprecated ramps looks like old street I
d from a failed extension project. He starts dragging overlay's
city development plans, archived highway layouts and the right j
API ghost logs or a twance on to satellite view.
The patterns coalesce. See that Dane asks every race arriety flagged.
They all pasted for segments that aren't in the main
system map, but the day to be still recognizes them.
I'd bet the platform inherited some ancient route in tables
kept them in a blind zone, maybe because a dev
didn't want to delete anything critical. But now for certain rides,
at certain times, the system routes people through places that
officially don't exist. It's not just a code bug or
a local legend. The city's digital backbone, grown haphazard over decades,
scaffolds something ferrol beneath the sanction commute. I feel swept
to be despite the rooms chill. I take out the
map again, tracing each mark. Each secrets of highways that
do not quite match reality. So if someone in the
system or on purpose, wants to disappear someone or make
a passenger or a driver vanish, I say, this would
be where it happens. The routing itself is a trap,
saying Nod's voice dropping lure. Whoever wrote these tables left
the door open, and now the ghosts call them what
you like, croll out through the code. I don't know
if it's sabotage, horned a tech or bureaucratic grot. I
do know your account's been processing shadow rise map to nowhere,
and you're not the only one. He scrolls to a
list mark to recent activity among the customers and drivers,
A handful repeat, always for erased or vanished drides, always
logging a clone of my own route. Somebody its ain
says or something to still inside the system, playing both sides.
If you want to know how deep the rock goes,
we'll need to break into the administrative view. That's not
easy and it's not legal, and ye'll only drinks real
ones knock an I agree, knowing what little hesitation I
have left is now poisoned by curiosity and fear. By nightfall,
our eyes are roar from blue light, but we are closer.
Saint Grin's tight lipped as his final script cracks the
admin shell. Here we go, he whispers, and my wall
changes again. In a brief, silent stutter of dread, that
script and Zayne's tireless drilling uncovers something more. There are
of shadow requests farther every few days, often after two
way m pigabacking ordinary rides. The requests originate from deep
in the interchange, using device ID that do not match
any registered phone or network, just old anonymized hardware pangs
one's nor hacker could spoof unless they stop last tech
back to the priest smartphone air rids linked by these
requests always vanish lug's white payments, flagged pending passengers in
contactable only the underlying data remains were outed to use
our idea that have long since been deactivated or scrub
from the system. Meanwhile, the city's missing persons, board lodges,
lawn names and faces floating by there, lost known locations,
always somewhere near the faded heart of the interchange, never
quite overlapping on any official record, but tracing out the
same occult pattern when napped onto our spectral valeys Sane
leans back, whistling softly. There's more, he says, but we'll
need to see it like I've meet me on shift tomorrow.
I'll ride with you. Bring every device you own. No Bluetooth,
no Wifa, just pure local logs and a lot of
power banks. I do not sleep well. Each hour, I
rise to check the door locks, glare at the sodium
he's pulling at the foot of the street, then slink
back into the covers, each limb waited with dread. My
dreams are jittery, rouping the tunnel under passes and the
looping ramps, ratcheting my anxiety each time a horn echoes
too loudly, or distant engine coughs in the still air.
The next night, we meet at the curb by my building,
Saying tosses a dafful bag of gay into the back seat.
I starting, we need to map the system from the inside.
If the platform routs us into the ghost's sounds, I'll
record everything, packets, pings, sell to our handshakes. If it
goes sideways, get off the main grit. If it targets you,
it'll target me to his certainty does nothing to relieve
the tension in my chest. I run through my checkist phones,
HAPs secondary dack am, the battered map folded out in
my jacket, and a new flashed drift is in to
back up. The system locks as we go. I start
my car. The engine throms. Every vibration, every flickering warning
on the instrument panel feels like a heartbeat counting down.
It is a slow shift at first, modane almost relief
fares are routine. A hospital visitor, a Sioux chift flagging
for an early breakfast, a yawning construction work of finishing
up a graveyard shift, saint Lock's GPS tracks AND's island bursts,
entering time stamps at every drop off. By midnight, the
storm lines return, trickles of rain, blavry light pulling along
gutters when shifting, the debris that collects at the feet
of medians. I check my phone. Still nothing out of
the ordinary. Then ten minutes after two, the ride request
slides in, flagged for the lost ramp at the heart
of the interchange. The pickapin wabbles uncertain, as if the
system can barely anchor it. The instructions from the passenger
are weirdly specific arrive using old westboun bypass. Do not
use current eater. The usinane is generic but familiar. Say
nervous wording, samee clip punctuation, saint gestures, take it, don't
break from broadcoll The car is islent. As we glide
toward the old arteries of the city. Every turn feels preordained.
We merge onto the semi abandoned slip the battered map
in the dashcon's perspective almost power aligning for the first
time in memory. As we approach the ramp, I see
a figure waiting under the flickering remnants of a traffic camera,
housing the lens lost to time, bare wires, twisted light claws.
This passenger is indistinct, tall but hunched, face wrapped in
scarf despite the muggy air, saying, grips the device in
his lap, knuckles white. The passenger enters without a word,
sliding into the back seat, cold air, following where to
I keep my tone flat, stirring at the rear view mirror.
The rider only nods once, eyes never lifting from the
satchel press between their knees, saying in the passenger seat
taps as fun he is a script running, logging every
rock query, cellular handshache and system notification. The rider sits
absolutely still. The app flash is a rod one that
doubles back impossibly through closed access ramps allegedly locked down
since nineteen ninety six. I flick off navigation and backtracked
to manual, counting the lanes, watching for any trailing headlights
in the mirror. The rider's gaze flicker is not at me,
but the rear glass, scanning for something outside the car.
We complete the requested loop, winding through the interchanges abandoned veins.
The ride should take eight minutes, but stretches to twenty
is cut throughs that do not exist on any no
map yon open before US emergencies, merged lines blurring on
both physical and digital displays. Each time I glance at
the navigation, the mapwarp, street names half legible, an overlay
of old coves flickering underneath the current uye as if
both realities are superimposed, refusing to cereal as into one
world and one version of truth. My phone buzzes without notifications,
but when I check the ride lock, there's nothing. Meanwhile,
Seine's phone begins to heat up against his palm. Led
flickering like a heartbeat. He mutters under his breath. Something's
tunneling through the never cop and connections that shouldn't be possible.
Its running deacer rides in the back end. We're being trailed.
I check my mirrors. The sedan is there again, low boxy,
a model from another era, headlights dim plit and readable,
only this time it paces us exactly, matching every turn
and stop, never overtaking or dropping back more than a
car light. When we cross the faded glass walls of
the old maintenance tunnel, cell signals die, the radioises into
a muddy wash. Then shop and snaw voices not static,
but a layered sandscape, likeacities worth a vaps chirping over
each other in a symphony no commuter should ever hear.
Emerging from the tunnel, the world seems slightly wrong. Landmarks
are blurred, Signage reads as if in a foreign's gripped
or the wrong time period. A diagnosally unproclaims itself as
all night Eat, but the logo is a sty lawn.
Retired street lights pulse in consistently, as if running off
broken timers. My own sense of direction wats severy landmark
seems offset by a block or two, every turn, repeating
back on itself. A dizziness builds, sharp and persistent. Sane's
hands shaked. Now we're off the grid, he says. The
systems faking GPS. See this data says we're at three
locations at once miles apart. He attempts to call out,
but a screen locks up, goes black, then reboots, rebooting again.
Before the logo fully loads, all digital trace is gone,
just like the raced rides. We slow it a light
if it is a light, casting long shadows over the
cracked intersection. The sedan glides to a halt beside us,
both vehicles idling on the border of the lost and
present city. I look a cross the other cause windows
are so dark they might as well be panes of obsidian.
Still at the beep of an incoming ride request my
own notification soundings to my open window, so loud and
close it makes me flinch. Every screen in the vehicle
surges and blinks the night air shells even as sweat
beads down my back. The sedan's driver door opens with
stiff mechanical precision. The familiar nervous rider pale and glassy
eyed steps out. In this ambient shadow, they look even
more in real skin, almost translucent, lips moving but giving
no sound. Against every instinct, I unlock my door and
step out. Saint's voice comes like a plea, don't it,
But already I am following a nervous rider, drawn not
by logic but by a compulsion that is almost physical.
Saints protests fade behind me, replaced by the low digital
hump from both cars. The sedans were a door opens
boning wide darkness within, illuminated only by a thick tide
of blue white ElCD screens set and rausal on the
seats and sealing a rave like shrines to vanished connections.
As soon as I crossed the threshold, the door snap
shut behind me. The sedan's interiors should be small, tight,
almost claustrophobic. Put inside, the physical geometry warps, the walls recede.
The passenger compartment is impossibly deep lined with bank after
bank of flickering screens and monitors displaying and sordid ride requests,
lost payment attempt lists of vanished names and id numbers
arranged in impenetrable grids. Overlays grow rapidly snaptrous of faces
midway through yond words, stilled in the act of entering
or exiting the car, their expressions neutral or glazed. I
feel the car begin to move, but there is no vibration,
no engine, no outside through windows fog with condensation. The
city blows even further as they transported through the tune television.
My own reflection spits and scatters into the pixel feels
on every screen you me multiplied a hundred times. A
driver's badge floating over each version of my face, but
each badge marked by small and congruities and a spelled name,
an altered photo dates impossible for any real human life span.
The nervous rider stands at the far end of the
impossible interior, framed by old route mapscrolling in a steady
downward scade. They raise a hand, not greeting but warning.
As they gaze locks with mine. I see their face
morph cycling through the mouth huts and promotional headshots have
been pinning to my wall, every missing rider, every ear
raised passenger. I have re searched. Their eyes, huge and
dark pulse with a blinking notification light. A buzzer sounds,
and something in the CAB's logic fractures, a wall of
screens surge is to static before blurting out a single
ride chair completed, journey to home, warped and stretched into
a low mechanical groan. My phone shakes in my pocket
and notification I cannot read. Each boy blurt strung between alphabets.
Then the arch has spirals past logic. I glimpse photographs
of myself, varing, featureless passengers, through impossible sit escapes, lipping highways,
landscapes I have never seen yet cannot help but recognize.
Each green blows to a time stamps set weeks ahead,
then years behind. For a moment. My memories and these
images tangle until I cannot tell where my ride log ends,
and the archez begins. Much as titans, the visual dissonance
induces NARSA. I reach for the door, but it's as
distant now as the far wall ten twenty fifty seats away,
the instance of previous rides flickering by on every monitored,
every pixel of freeze frame of the city's hit edge.
I call out, why me, why any of us? The
nervous rider's lips move in silent response, but what emerges
is not words. Only a brief mechanical echo of the
notification time, the finality of a ride in progress but
never completed. Suddenly the coal flarer is pressing with tangible
force against my throat. My mind fractures, again, contorted by
the cow's impossible geometry, buffeted by ride requests that pass
through meat like digits in a coat I can't break.
Each green shows a variant to myself, sometimes driving, sometimes
waiting at midnight for a passenger who never arrives, sometimes
picking up a clone of me, face dull, absent, raised.
The sedan's interior is not a place. It is an accumulation,
a holding pen for all that the sisterem errors cannot
clear out, a vertical oarcif packed with the half lives
of everyone to have inferredd request. All my effort is
spent trying to stay within myself, clutching at some central
thread of memory. But I am fading, dissolving into composite
faces and in complete transactions. Then, as quickly as the
experience builds to fever pitch, it collapses. My eyes snap
open to grainy windshilled light, don rising feebly over cracked pavement.
The interior is my own, just the battered Sudan seat,
stained by last night's coffee. My right shoe was caked
and dried black crime Zain is gone. There is no sign,
not even a discarded device or the vague burn of
his after shave, just the empty passenger seat and the
faint digital hum from the dashboard. My phone. When I
lift it is warm and slick with condensation. The right
cha app is open, but the log is implausibly full.
When I check the actual rides, I find only one
untraceable trip marked with the cord in as string that
doesn't resolve to any real address. Just to point. Hovering
in the center of the interchange, A system notification sits
at the top, vibrating against the glass. Further inquiry discouraged monitoring.
In effect, the message includes my home address, the names
of Miko and Zane, my current cause, make, model, and
license plate. I skull shakerly through images, A new silent
video appears in my inbox time stunt for ires I
cannot recollect. The dash commes field of view is whiped,
showing me driving alone, face blind, cascoat, a passenger with
new features through a sit escaping cannily familiar yet wrong highways.
It's freight like a player piano's keys, neon signage, blinking
errors and immutable scrits. The will reduced to as comatic
outside the reach of language. I close my phone, hand
trembling in the fluorescent half dawn. The ride log will
not let me delete the entry. For the first time,
I realize what it means to be watched not just
by people, assistants or stray drivers, but by something in
the network itself, sentioned only in the negative space of
missing data and overwritten roads. The day outside is flat,
the main avenue bustling as always, but where Verseane has gone,
he is not reachable by any channel. I know, no messages,
no pings, just a cold, automated warning at the top
of my screen. Ey is bleed away. I do not
call Miko. Do you not answer the group threads? I
sit up my window, watching the city drowse under reeling daylight, wandering.
At what point simple curiosity bloomed into complicity below traffic streams,
unaware of the ghost wrote shadow in each commuter's path,
connecting no true beginnings or endings. That evening I drive,
I tell myself it is to check the system not
to tempt fate, but is always the lines blur. I
keep to the familiar arteries, avoiding the interchange itself. But
each life, each passenger, each ping from the app is
underscored by the same impossible from the sense that the
world is layered knotting, and were knotting beneath my tires.
There is no sign of saying. I run diagnostics on
every piece of hard where I find nothing out of place,
Yet each device feels subtly wrong, slower rougher on the touch.
That night, after returning home, I played a new dash
cam file three four, five times. The city in the
video builds itself from fragments, re arranges its bones, always
returning to the central knot in the highway's heart. Midnight comes,
I cannot sleep. Instead, pulled by compulsion, I return to
the old forum the professional driver's chat. A new Fred appears.
Did ye get the ghosts fair last night? The poster's
handle is a string of random letters, but the syntax
in the message clipped and smatches the nervous writers I
ferried and perhaps become. The loop does not close. The
participants keep increasing. A new voice peers in every list.
I sound at my door, faint and insistent. I checked
through that I held no one except a batted Manila
envelope pinned beneath a heavy stone on the step side.
A screen shot of the city's transit control system, all
current highway routes shone in green, overlaid in red hand
annotated a lattice of invisible anes branching from the interchange,
marked with the impossible triangles cycling endlessly to nowhere. There's
a note now you see, don't try to map your
way back. I snap off the porch light. My phone,
for once, is silent. The neighborhood is mute under heavy humidity.
The only motion a single tay light tracing past the
end of the blocks of dan Shat, indistinct, precise in
its hesitation. For days, I avoid ride flagged anywhere near
the interchange. The money draws up. The background hum of
my phone grows warped, notification stretching out like Tenant's echoing
in my chest. I text me, kup, stop driving the loops.
There's no reply. I count calls Aine. I avoid my
own voice memos, afraid I'll hear something other than myself
waiting on the tape. Each night or ride request pingsen
at the same time, stamp, pick up at old and
be Ramsey map. I decline. I decline again. Then on
the third night, a new message appears, already in progress. Faintly. Now,
every ambient silence holds the edges of a chime. I
cannot conjure a voice repeating my name without vocabulary, and
despite everything warnings, evidence, fear, it is as if the
droves are not over. The interchange is still feeding, still
building its arcaft won erased request at a time, hungry
for the next to loose direction and circle back. I
drive the city and the iurs before dawn, blue daut
board light reflecting in my eyes, the battered maps still
tucked above the viso where I can reach it. A
part of me wonders if I am visible to others,
if my head lets code a signal to the secret
network below pavement and data. When my shift ends, I
park at the city's edge, engine ticking in a cooling air,
I record a voice memo describing the shift without inflection.
Each word lands flat, heavy as the humidity weighing down
the windshield beyond my car. The interchange pulses with ordinary
traffic unaware of the layer of shrinking and slipping underneath
an invisible churn cord, and never end incurred. I glimpse
movement in the side mirror, a familiar figure on the
dockned off ramp, always standing just beyond reach. I close
the voice memo, knowing I will not replay it. A
new ride request appears on my phone. It's from my
own account of photograph of me stirring back. Pick a
point marked over the lost section. The rider's already in progress.
I shut off the engine and let the silence settle in,
hoping it will hold. I keep my hands on the wheel,
knuckles blanching beneath the soft dashboard glow. All I can
hear is the faint electric bus sweeping up from the
instrument cloths to the kind of feet back he convince
yourself as just old wiring, but deeped I know is
something waiting. The new ride requests dares back my own name,
my own picture, A destination pinlinking did center in the interchanges,
coasted otteries already in progress, no option to cancel, no
decline button, nothing but a thin career progress bar creeping
along beneath my face, as if the system's waiting for
some final signal only I can provide. I look up
at the rear view. There's nothing behind me but a
washed out lane reflecting the wand blush of sodium street lights.
But the sensation of being watched is ferocious. The memory
of the nervous rider flickers, always just out of reach,
always retreating into deeper shadow. I flick the visor, and
the battered hand marked map's lips nearly tumbling into my lap.
Against all logic, I reach for the phone. Maybe if
I pour it off, Maybe if I have reset, I
can break the loop. The phone vibrates hot in my
fingers before I even touch the button, once twice, then
pulsing a frantic moss that maps on to the same
notification chime from the sedan's impossible interior. I drop it,
breath snared in my throat. On the windshield, a new
message crawls across the glass in COSI overlay proceed to
assign pick up the display. Pigmentation, more like a memory
than actual pixels, bleeds at the edges of my vision.
A highway sign blinks in the near distance, its error
pointing resolutely toward the heart of the interchange I consider
just leaving drive off. Answer no requests disappear from the
system and all its digital scaffolds. But my hands move
almost mechanically. I shift gears, roll out of the pull off,
and let the cosmoment and pull me toward the heated intersection.
The main road seem empty, the usual, no police, no
late night freight, only the odd shimmer of passing tay
lights in the distance. Each light lasts tou long. Every
ramp of pass is half hidden beneath new layers of construction, fencing,
orange mesh fluttering but never completely burrowing away. It starts
to rain, the dropless menacence swirling more like mys and
real precipitation. Each drop betch is winding tracks in the glass,
warping the glow of the street lights. In this aze,
every land makdoubles itself, shadow city layered atop the visible one.
The phone chimes again. Approaching pickup, I am half a
block from a curb, barely more than a memory, a
stretch of road not resurfaced in decades, lined by the
relics of projects never finished. I maintenance gate gapes, its
lock snap clean, the concrete be unfractured, and spilled with grit.
I slow headlights washing over a figure at the edge
of the median, indistinct but familiar, the nervous rider, motionless,
face wrapped against recognition. For a moment, I nearly keep going,
footlight on the accelerator, will fighting the ingrained urge to
stop for anyone, anything, in this dead time. But the
momentum of weeks of months presses in. I break. The
door un locks without me touching it. The figure slides
into the back seat. It grow in, cold and damp,
The engines low, idle, impossibly loud. In the hush, Neither
of us speaks. The phone remains pinned to the dashboard,
its locks green, gone, the ride into face stuck on
that single cryptiprogress bar. The map is gone, replaced with
a static lay screen that cycles coordinates so fast they
blow into unreadability. I check the rear view. The passenger
air is straight ahead, satchel clutch tight every ten, and
visible through his pear knuckles. Something about the way he sits,
the angle of his shoulders, the tilt of his head,
makes me realize he's not seeing the car at all,
perhaps not even me, but something forever, just one lane
removed from my reality. I pull away and the world
strips itself further of sense. The rose tryst the signage warps,
and the city outside falls away in choppy and stitch
glances at building fronts and closed lots that should not
be contiguous. Traffic um vanishes. The only noise is the
song of the car, my own breath cracking in the
stilled climate. The navigation on my phone blossoms into an
amenable snarl or web of routs colliding every path, weaving
through broken lines, error messages, blossoming like digital rot. When
I glance sideways, the structures outside the window reform familiar
soilo which removed from it angles. Lit windows re arranged
into repeating a curse of corridor as that track my
car's movement like eyes. At some point, the rain on
the glass turns oily, each bead refracting ghostly images, tail
lights and lanes that should not exist, street signs painted
over in languages I almost remember but cannot translate. The
rye progresses with no direction, no prompt. Only the progress
bar creeps onward in minuscule increments. Minutes pass then ires,
the sense of tngue crumpled by repetition. We double back
trace the same cur always avoiding the interchange's true center.
My passengers breeding is the only measure, as it quickens
the world at side, distorts further, until all I see
immense leaping underpasses and ramps, the snake upward, disappearing into
a definite starless sky without command. The cast flows and
stalls beneath the last functioning flowed lamp. The interface freezes
on the word processing. My limbs feel far away. I
can barely keep my focus. The rear door opens. I flinch,
but the passenger is already gone, slipping into the maze
of cement and scaffolding without so much as a glance back.
I want to call out, to demand he answer for
any of this, but my mouth is dry, voice lost.
A static something shifts at my side. A new device,
impossibly old and batter sits on the passenger seat, or rdcheerphone,
the kind of company retired before I have a started
working on its cracks green. My own ID flashes between
in progress and unavailable. A notification blinks return to origin
for Nicksphare I pick up the device. My fingerprint unlocks it,
even though I know I have never registered the hardware.
The app interface is alien coated in an older style.
Under a coming rides A name sits in pale, low
rest type, saying my heart hammers. I swivel, scanning the curb,
the unfinished lanes, But there is no sign of him,
no duffel, no gear, no living presence, just the endless
repetition of broken off ramps feeding into themselves, an iron
brows of concrete, always cycling, never closing. My own phone
dings in the center console, complete rye to unlock funds.
The app ovolais a gray scale portrait of me, livid
with exhaustion, eyes too dark, background and distinguishable. The caption
cycles passenger are known Route knull. The car's dash light
pulse then flicker. I can smell ozone, taste coal, fear
at the back my throat. For a moment, I think
I see movement down the ramp in other sedan shape,
almost identical to mine, its head lights flickering out and
back with every blink. I listen hard, but all that
comes is the sounds of the aircon interchange, each harm,
each moment of wet concrete answering itself in infinite lips.
I try to start the engine. Nothing only alow vibrating
alarm that does not belong to any car I've ever known.
On the mirrored foam screen, the AP's chat window opens itself.
Do not attempt to leave network. Your ride is still
in progress. My hand shake, I type what do you want?
The response is instantaneous, each word appearing with a clinical certainty.
Archive must be maintained, map must remain open. You are essential.
Sweatshows along my spine. I fumble the auxiliary phone, opening
its ride lock. All destinations are now rendered as points
on the end to change. No city, no cross streets,
only the recursive entrance slash exit nodes. Each entry is
stamped with obsolete duteasy time, sometimes years out of order,
sometimes duplicated. I watch the screen cycle name some familiar,
some strangers, all now lost, each tide in complete undercolumn
labeled the disposition. This is a new photo. At the
top of the manifest, my own face shortened. The uncertain
half flight of the car below the same recuss If
I come that haunted to batted paper. Map digital is
stylized and repeating in alas panic lurch. I get out
into the wet air, trembling likes, barely supporting me. The
city feels further away than ever. Traffic on the upper
level murmurs, lights, trailing often to avoid I cannot pierce
behind me. The sedan's tailight switch on, autonomously, pulsing once twice,
return to origin, complete journey. The car whispers, either in
my head or vibrating up from the system itself, the
old variety of fundings one last time, showing a new
ride request from my own number and photograph destination set
as r kev's central loop. I stand on the empty
median rain, streaking down in reverse every drop at Racing upward,
the wall blows into endless gray cycling road was feeding
back upon themselves, every lane a tongue leading only deeper.
The car door clicks open, beckoning for me, for whoever
comes next. I get back behind the wheel, hands trembling mature.
As the dashboard lights flare, I see the familiar ghost
in the rear view, always just out of reach, always
waiting on the edge. The ride is forever in progress,
the route always resetting somewhere within the city's endless shifting code.
My journey spins on. The car merges into invisible traffic,
in the console's reflection. My eyes blink a second too late.
A silent request pings marked looped. There is no option
to decline. The roads beef me and spool, lined with faint,
flickering faces. Each seat fills until the data shirts. The
ride continues, destination forever receding, pick up, always beginning again,
each return the start of another unresolved fair and the city,
busy with its living, never knows. And that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.