The door opened with a harsh pneumatic pop. Oscar and Norman stepped outside their bus for the first time in four states. After hundreds of hours inside their vehicle, stepping onto earth was like decamping onto another planet. Oscar noted with vague surprise that the highway’s patchy shoulders were paved with tons of crunchy oyster shells.

The tall roadside ditchweed was wind-flattened and brownish green. The wind came from the east, bearing the reek of distant Sulphur — a bioindustrial reek. A stink like a monster gene-spliced brewery: like rabid bread yeasts eating new-mowed grass. A white V of departing egrets stenciled the cloudy sky overhead. It was late November 2044, and southwest Louisiana was making halfhearted preparations for winter. Clearly this wasn’t the kind of winter that anyone from Massachusetts would recognize.

Norman alertly fetched a motorbike from the rack on the back of the bus. The bikes were designed and sold in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and were covered with union labels, antilitigation safety warnings, and software cheatsheet stickers. It was very typical of Bambakias to buy motor bicycles with more onboard smarts than a transcontinental airliner.

Norman hooked up the sidecar, and checked the battery. “No hotdogging,” Oscar warned him, clambering into the sidecar and placing his hat in his lap. They tugged on dainty foam helmets, then pulled onto the highway behind a passing electric flatbed.

Norman, as always, drove like a maniac. Norman was young. He had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems. He rode the motorbike with intense lack of physical grace, as if trying to do algebra with his legs.

Dusk began to settle gently over the pines. Traffic was backed up for two kilometers on the east side of the Sabine River bridge. Oscar and Norman buzzed up along the road shoulder, the smart bike and sidecar scrunching over the oyster shells with oozy cybernetic ease. The people trapped within the stalled traffic looked stoic and resigned. The big road professionals — eerie-looking biochemical tankers and big, grimy, malodorous seafood trucks — were already turning and leaving. Roadblocks were a sadly common business these days.