Reconfiguring

A short story

Photo by Sérgio Alves Santos on Unsplash

I took a sip of my whiskey — synthetic, of course, nobody could get the real stuff anymore — and leaned back in my chair. The town was moving again, but our replacement suspension had worked its magic and everything was still. The only clue that we weren’t a fixed-place community was the slight hum of the electric motor.

It made sense. We’d been docked against Denver for almost three weeks: there had been more than enough time for repairs and trading. Once the blockers were out of the way, the townspeople voted on where to dock to next, and we began to roll towards the winner.

I flicked up a corneal display. San Francisco; same country, and not too far away. It would take us a little less than a day. This time we wouldn’t need structural repairs, so I figured we’d have the weekend, and then we’d move onto the next location. There was nothing in the destination backlog yet, but voting was already underway.

I flicked the corneal display closed again. Some people loved the convenience, but I hated the graft. It seemed unnatural. Give me those glass screens they had near the turn of the century, antiquated name and all. Gorilla glass. Like something out of an olde-time movie.

I tried to ignore the notification about seven unread messages from her.

One of the problems with living in a small town — particularly a dynamic-location town like Grantsville, with maybe a thousand people living within its limits — was that everyone was in everyone else’s business. You couldn’t avoid them. You had to play nice, and if you should do something stupid like fall in love with one of them, you needed to accept that you’d be living with the consequences of your actions for years to come. Hence the dark room, the whiskey, and the easy chair. Break-ups are the worst.

At its top speed, on the highest-grade routes it’s incorporated for, Grantsville moves between locations at one hundred and thirty-five kilometers per hour. At this speed, it can continue to constantly reconfigure the alignment of homes, service buildings, and transit pods to save energy and reflect the needs of the township at different times of day. There’s no getting off, and there’s no getting around between dynamic zones without using the pods. Which means it’s almost impossible…