In the world of tomorrow there was one rebel who maintained the roads connecting workers and hamburgers. See him now, in his raggedy white pick up chugging along the endless freeways with his toolbox, the engine powered by vegetable oil that leaked and stained the asphalt El Dorado gold. He flowed with the stream of cars and trucks, some self driving, others driving the self to places that gave them a little life. Each car a bevy of logos and advertisements and feel good slogans like, “We care about YOU,” and “We’re sorry we did that.”

The freeways were always stopped up. His truck automatically slowed with traffic’s indigestion. He merged into the left lane and rolled past the problem, a pothole. He pulled off into the emergency lane and hugged the divider.

From the toolbox he unpacked his cork machine gun. This was part of the work, bandaging the crumblings from a billion tires. The machine kissed the gravel, blew a load of plastic caulk like jelly into the pothole, a liquid that solidified in fifteen minutes or your money back. Many of his days were like this, he a witness to the oldest story ever told, something wet and slippery hardening into a shape that wasn’t its own.

He yawned out a vape cloud, ketchup flavored with a hint of mustard seed. Truckers honked thank-you-for-your-service while inconvenienced commuters offered gelid stares. Each of them considered the Colt cobra in their glove compartment but always passed just a little too soon to feel the snubnose in their soft, arthritic hands.

He didn’t bother to unclip his own holstered .45, though insurance said it wasn’t their problem if he got hurt. Geico offered complimentary training at the firing range, after all. Instead, he closed his eyes, not too tight, just curtained them so that a sliver of headlight burned beneath his lids, and then repeated the mantra:

Ohmm. Ohmm.

He did it just like the 24/7 Mindful Studio taught him on Saturdays at eleven am, exit 22, next to Gary’s Indoor Skydiving.

Ohmm lovin’ it.

A gong sounded. He was tuned into Oneness with the freeway. The cars, the trucks, the stores and garbage and pools of rainbow-conjuring oil. No, nevermind. That wasn’t a gong but a pickup backfiring as it rolled coal in the fast lane. Still, the mantra fixed his purpose. He had bigger concerns than angry commuters. He worked the roads because what he wanted was the ski slope at the freeway’s edge.

Lunch time. He lifted the hood. A tuft of grease cloud hugged his face. He unzipped his ziplocked hot dogs and dropped the weenies into the engine pool, tossed the bag, closed the hood and squeezed a zit under his eye. His scabrous face a cratered planet, asteroided day after day by his blackened fingernails. He checked his phone. Ten minutes had passed so he unlatched the hood and fork-fished for his dog and bit. Tasted like juicy french fries. Then he heard the ttzzzzttzzzzttzzzz of a drone.

He wasn’t paid for his maintenance. His shirt had his Patreon link and his OnlyFans sharpied on the back: truckers donated, commuters harassed. Nor did he have the proper licensing. He had to hide from the municipal drones, operated by the homeless doing a hard day’s work for a cheeseburger — no fries. He dropped the hood, half a dog jutting out of his mouth, and jumped into the truck. Getting caught was a minimum sentence of ten years, five of those in a consumer re-education camp. He turned the dashboard dial and the refraction index of the truck’s proprietary paint job changed to a deep violet — courtesy of EightyEightBall’s Garage, exit 19. The drone swooped overhead as he cruised in the right lane, his truck one more member of an endless convoy going nowhere fast.

What walled in the freeways were experiences: MDMA ax throwing, eat with your hands Ethiopian, escape your family escape rooms, interactive art exhibit fun houses that promised at least one episode of PTSD. A lifetime of experience awaited between mile marker 52 and the exit for the Flower State Mall. All nestled between overpasses and underpasses, embedded in throughpasses, experiences purchased with a ticket, gift shop exit included.

Experiences made a human being into a person and persons were shaped every day along the freeway, including himself.

He pulled up to a broken billboard. The W in Waffle House was spun clockwise towards ∈. Eaffle House tarnished the harmony of the highway’s advertising stream. “Truckers don’t eat at Eaffle House. They eat at Waffle House,” he said to himself. He unclipped his retractable pole and wound the logo back to advertised precision and admired his work, breathed the smog a little easier.

But there was flooding here, too. Along this stretch of road was one fast food joint after another, every single one crowding for drivers’ attention and saliva. Demand was so high that rivulets of vegetable oil pooled alongside the road dividers. Dangerous to let grease gather in the cracks. Bulged the asphalt soft, slick and unstable — obese.

He situated his traffic cones and took out his rake and dragged the rake back and forth across the sewer grates, kicked away rubbish damming the culvert, the cups and wrappers and extra large chip bags, ghosts of brief fulfillments. A car passed by, threw a Solo of dip juice out the window, vomited tobacco onto his galoshes.

A whirlpool of oil formed. He liked to watch the whirlpools. The guttural sucking sounds as they flushed out into the underground where oil and plastic swirled into a forgotten dream. He checked his phone. The day was late. He stomped a nest of wet wipes through the grate.

The roads cleared. The biggest SportsBall event of the century — until next year — streamed on every screen in every hand. He ignited the engine and bumped down to the freeway’s edge, doing the speed limit for once, where caution tape hung across the last patch of road. The incomplete bridge cliffed to a swamp thirty meters below. Here the state built the last mall of its kind, and it only took a record breaking thirty years of construction to finish American Dream: Definitive Edition. He took the exit and parked.

The ski slope was inside the mall. He swiped up on his OnlyFans and, yes, he had received enough subscribers that day to afford a ticket. He scanned his QR code and one Burgercoin was automatically deducted from his account. He clipped into the skis and then the lift carried him to the top of his world.

On his right was the graveyard of satellites, the hunks of rusted metal and blue wings gathered around an old Apollo rocket that leaned towards the moon in the center of the heap. The dead worshiping the dead.

The left was more interesting.

On a patch of road builders huddled around a bronze beam. They had been expanding this stretch of highway from marker 99 to 100 for three years, averaging new road at the same rate as the shifting of tectonic plates, about four inches by each January. Breakneck speeds. The country needed more roads, he thought. More roads and concrete sinking into the earth and flying towards the sky, connecting the unconnected, girders and burgers reaching for the sun and the stars and the heart at the heart of everything.

He stood at the top of the slope. The old nuclear silos burned gray in the caustics of sunlight. He sucked air into his lungs and held, the thrill before the rush. Out poured his breath, then he pushed.

He shot downhill, riding the groove of those who skied before him, picking up speed faster and faster across the artificial snow and ice. He was sunk deep. There was no way to turn so he closed his eyes. Ohmm, he repeated. Not thinking about potholes or grease or plastic or billboards but feeling himself a part of the glassy road, a clean shot hurtling towards the future at rocketship speeds. Ohmm. He let go of his poles, let go of everything. It was up to the road to decide whether or not he crashed.

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Sean M.F. Sullivan writes from Colorado. His fiction has appeared online and offline. His website is https://seanmfsullivan.com.