Dystopian Taco Joint

* * *

Beside the screaming freeway, you see him. Fire for hair. Flaming eyes. Fire for a mouth. Fire for everything.

Fire is fitting for this stretch of sun-scorched freeway, a stretch that goes on for miles north of town. The road gets split up ahead, with one side being a toll road. That’s because there’s too many people driving on it. People who lived here years ago say, what the heck, this used to be out in the country. It was, but now it’s a suburb.

They try to get people to live downtown, and some of them buy into that. Move into a giant apartment building conveniently close to work. But a lot of people prefer houses. To own your own place. And of course, if you have kids, you want them to be safe and have room to play. Oh, well, look—we put a park downtown. Everybody likes parks, right? Take your kid to the park.

But still, they move to the suburbs. And the suburbanites drive into town in the morning, back out in the evening, getting zapped by lights and waves from the ray gun-looking things on the fearsome-looking metal freeway signs overhead, and getting their bank accounts charged through the little stickers on their windshields.

Toll those proles. They can afford it. It’s actually very difficult to nickel and dime somebody to death. What you do is nickel and dime them into submission. People are agreeable; they let stuff slide. If you pay the toll, you get to drive fast, like you want to.

And it’s not just money. It’s ideas, too. Think about it: you probably take some ideas for granted now that you would have found laughable years ago. You let stuff slide. If you pay the lip service, you get along with people.

This freeway uses the lighter colored, more rigid pavement. It lasts longer. It makes more noise, though. So you can crank up the radio or something if you don’t like it. There’s no end of diverse choices on the radio, or on audio apps. I would have liked some easy listening, but you have to crank it so loud to hear it over the road noise, it isn’t easy anymore. So we had it on a sports channel.

Everybody likes sports. Well, not everybody. Sports brings people together. At least, it used to.

We made it off the freeway onto the access road. The access road is like the freeway, except everybody is trying to get from one side to the other. It’s a great test of your collision avoidance systems.

I was going to lunch with a friend from work. We drove a while, took the turnaround, and drove back the other way a while, the merciless sun beating down on our shiny metal car, with its plastic bumpers, for safety. With the echoes of the high-pitched pavement still blasting our brains, we again saw the demonic icon. It was a sign on the fire-colored wall of a taco restaurant. It was a promising lunch place, got good online reviews. I was a little off-put by the fiery demon, but I said, “Eh, let’s give ’em a try.”

We pulled in and parked. I turned to my friend and said, “They’ll like us. We’re from here.” Yeah, but they’re probably not, he reminded me.

Ok, they call it authentic Mexican street tacos. Sure, I got one of those once in Tijuana. I can’t say I liked it. I remember… the guy there had a little cart with a hand-painted sign: “Taco Bell.” Well. We looked up at the menu. Chicken and avocado sounded good. Some of the other stuff seemed a little chichi. They have vegan choices, of course. You know, like in authentic old Mexico. But we didn’t want that stuff. We were meat-eating sports fans. Sure.

Sports media around here used to be mostly football, baseball, basketball. There are a lot more choices now. Some people like this sport; some people like that sport. Some sports you might get into once every four years or so. Of course, football, baseball and basketball still rule the ratings. But the other stuff has an audience. They have marketing. The media promotes them and people say they like them, if you ask.

We ordered our food and they started cooking it. I asked the guy where’s the restroom. The guy pointed to a little alcove on the other side of the room. As I started to head over, he grabbed my arm. He said, “Be careful, señor. It is a portal to hell.” I mean, that can’t really be what he said, but it kind of sounded like it. I thought it was funny, probably a joke about the smell.

I kind of expected two demons—one with pants and one with a skirt. But apparently it was unisex. Thankfully, they didn’t try to depict that with an image. But they may be forced to, soon. It smelled like any public restroom, really… a contest between nature and chemicals. It may just be nature, soon.

I washed my hands and splashed some cool water on my heat-oppressed head. I looked in the mirror. I hardly recognize that guy anymore.

We sat down. Thin metal tables and chairs… kind of a minimalist industrial design. Or maybe just cheap. There are some wooden benches outside, if you want to listen to the freeway.

The guy brought the food out. He seemed like an authentic enough street guy.

Plastic trays, paper plates. Over by the drink fountain, a big squeeze bottle of salsa sitting in a tub with some ice. You take the communal squeeze bottle and apportion yourself some salsa into the little individual cups. They’re so small, they’re hard to pick up and hold onto. You could just squeeze out your salsa onto your tacos on the plate, if you wanted to make a scene, and defeat the purpose of the microscopic containers. The other customers use those, you know. They’re watching you.

Well, the chicken and avocado was ok. The other one was a little weird. I’d get just the chicken and avocado next time. But there won’t be a next time.

* * *

It was Friday. We talked about weekend plans. I didn’t have any, really… watch some Ancient Aliens, some football. My buddy is married with kids, so he’s always got something planned for the weekend.

Halloween was about a month away. Maybe I’d dress up and join the festivities. I had a thought that they might do something at this place for Day of the Dead.

Suddenly the lights went out. Not just inside. A giant shadow crept over the land. We looked up and saw what appeared to be an enormous, slow-moving craft with thousands of rows of metal rails and trusses, with some kind of lights attached to them, flickering or sparking intermittently. The thing looked like it covered the whole city. I looked closer. The rails looked like overhead freeway signs. The lights looked like the ray gun things that zap the proles with tolls.

In Ancient Aliens, they have done segments on Von Neumann machines—devices that are programmed to replicate themselves. It could be the most logical, efficient way to explore the universe. It was apparent that the day had arrived. The toll signs had replicated themselves, joined together, and grown to unfathomable size. But why? How? A rogue programmer?

Of course, any artificial intelligence—that we know of—starts with code from humans. The planners had envisioned a vast array of toll signs covering the state. Shimmering, slavering, sun-scorched leviathans of revenue. So they built them, in a giant facility outside of the city. But the workers had terrible attendance problems, in part because they didn’t want to pay the tolls to get to work, so they took the slower roads and were late, or else they gave up and called in sick and went back home. The more industrious ones just paid the tolls and went to work. And they got modest raises for merit. This led to a controversy about unequal treatment.

So the state planners started using robots to build the signs. From there, it was just a logical progression. Soon, they made them build themselves.

But it was apparent that something had gone wrong.

The gargantuan beast overhead stopped moving. Winds whipped the vegetation around. All around the craft, groups of the ray guns fired brilliant white lights that converged and formed three-dimensional blocks of fantastic brightness on the roads below. The blocks were about 11 feet high… say 11¼… and 1¼ by 5 feet in cross-section. One formed on the access road in front of the taco joint.

On the freeway, cars crashed into each other, in part from the drivers trying to avoid the brilliant blocks of light. But some of them drove into the lights. They disappeared.

I watched this with amazement, and got an idea. I fixed my eyes on the light block near the restaurant. I stood up and told my friend, “I have to go.”

The restaurant guy grabbed my arm. “Be careful, señor,” he said, “Is it a portal to heaven or to hell?” Actually, I don’t know what the hell he said, but that sounds about right. Then he let go of me, and, with wild, demonic eyes, he said, “Are you prepared to pay the ultimate toll?” Or, it sounded kind of like that. Maybe he was just asking me to take care of the check.

I knew I had to go. I wanted the hell out of there.

* * *

* * *

All the roads are smooth and quiet and wide open. It’s sunny, but it’s not scorching. It’s twilight, the best time of the day. I’m heading out to my house.

I don’t pay tolls anymore. My car is a finely tuned piece of machinery, moving effortlessly, its surface like liquid reflecting the dappled light. I’m tuned to Simply Beautiful 91.2. Hey, it’s The 5th Dimension. I’ll turn it up a little. There.

I am alone. The truth has made me free.