Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Alexei Storm-Daii
Race: Halfling – Demon / Human / Strife
Age: 34, physically about 26
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 779 words
Cars aren’t all that common here. We do live in a scattered enough area that certain distances need to be crossed off but considering how few of us are, some do live further off but, for the most part, unless you’re really under the weather, everything can be reached with a bit of walking.
I know what cars are, I know what motorcycles are. I’ve seen the latter in real life—at least what looked like a modified one—and the former, well, I’ve seen those in the virtual reality room, and I’ve seen things that were cars without being cars in the amusement part. I think they call those carts, not cars. The thing they used to use in certain areas or with certain games so people could get from point A to point B a little easier. I honestly think there are a few electric carts around. I might have seen one or two at this point.
The first time I watched a movie with a car in it, I was confused. I had no idea as to what that thing was and how it worked. Even back then, I had a certain fascination with DNA and how it held everything together if you would. I know that this isn’t really the way one should look at DNA but that’s how I look at it most of the time and it is what it is. It is at the core of everything living.
Now, I know very well that cars aren’t alive. Not in the sense that we are. I know that there have been prototypes of cars with an AI implanted in them but I’m pretty sure that whole thing crashed into absolute nothingness when The End for the world out there happened.
It’s been years, but I still remember the ending of that movie, how the man sitting on the front passenger side was asking the driver—the woman whose life he’d essentially just saved—if they had a destination in mind or not. She didn’t answer, though they did pan towards her with the camera and the little smile she had on her lips. I assume that in the movie universe, he saw that smile, even though he was looking outside of the car. The last few words he spoke before the screen went dark, were about how he supposed it didn’t really matter, so long as they were having fun.
As someone who has never really been in a moving vehicle—I know we also have one medical transport vehicle and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it be used considering there can be doorways used anywhere—it feels like such a strange thing to say. Can it really be relaxing to have to keep an eye on everything that surrounds you, including that big vehicle, and consider it having fun? I know I have very little to base myself on, for this, but it really does feel as though it would be stressful to have to drive a car.
I know that those are my own thoughts, probably not echoed at all by anyone in the older two generations. They’ve had plenty of experience with these things but maybe it’s just my nature that makes me this way. I still don’t think I’d want to know how to drive. Then again, I’m also that one person who doesn’t want to make use of the bumper car things. I know they’re meant to be driven mostly recklessly so that you do ram into others, but it doesn’t feel right for me to even use those.
In a way, I feel as though I might really never know. I don’t think it really matters, though, it’s just one of those things and we don’t need wheels, at least, not with a motor attached to it. We do have a wagon for the days we have to buy bigger items than we can easily carry home because the system is also not meant for these heavy things, but that’s just one thing of so many, in the end.
I don’t know why I still think about that movie; I think I’d moved out not long before when I’d watched it and that goes back a decade and then some. Not a whole lifetime ago but still long enough that I don’t think it should stay with me so long. I think it’s been on my mind because I saw the carcass of a car on the last getaway we went to. I think they left it there on purpose; it had been overgrown with nature and it looked nice in its own strange and abandoned way.
Works of JD Beckett 