Ghost Ship

Something had gotten into Leslie’s eye, rendering him functionally blind. This was an inopportune time for this to happen. Practically speaking, there is no actual opportune time to go blind, but hurdling down a snow covered dirt road in the middle of the night is a particularly inconvenient time to lose the powers of sight.

A brief panic ensued, and in his attempt to clear whatever was stinging his eye, he bumped the control lever of his plow. A number of things happened in rapid succession, none of them good. His plow dropped to the road. This was an ailing piece of equipment that he had gotten fifth or sixth hand, so when it made contact with the road surface it snapped like a twig and made a rapid transition from plow to ramp.

His truck, airborne and not designed for this use case, careened out of control through the blackness of the February night. He became convinced quite suddenly that he was going to die. When faced with this sort of mortal danger, the mind tends to wander unbidden to thoughts of family and friends, mistakes, and lost opportunities. His mind, not yet under the chemical influence of adrenaline, chose to take a brief pitstop on the subject of his mother.

Every mother is a gamble, and in his personal roll of the dice, it had come up snake eyes. This had instilled in him a fierce, pathological independence. In his generational cohort, this was not a rare occurrence, generation omega was tough, they had no other choice.

On a personal level, Leslie had been wary of authority from around the age of three or so. His mother, a chronically online itinerant housekeeper, had noticed in one of her fleeting moments in the real world that Leslie had come down with pneumonia. Having a deep mistrust of the medical establishment, she had resorted to various home remedies to try and cure her son of his ailment. Due to the fact that she had been blindly clicking “I Agree” on end user license agreements since before she could walk, her personal telemetry was available to any number of preternaturally aware social media companies.

A need was anticipated by the algorithms that ran these technologies and relevant information was shunted her way in the form of fifteen second video clips suggesting a course of action. These were bright pieces of AI generated chicanery that focused more on engagement rather than an actual actionable solution. Because of this focus on engagement, the point of the exercise was lost in the noise and her takeaway was that she should treat young Leslie’s pneumonia with bleach.

At first this was a very dilute treatment a la homeopathy, which quickly evolved into a regiment of stronger and stronger doses when the desired results were not achieved. In her mind, she believed that she had the key to a hidden knowledge that was being actively and maliciously denied to her by a secretive global cabal of child murderers. This was not actually true, but in a post truth society it didn’t really matter. She had fallen for a pretty classic dodge, one that had been dusted off and re-branded every decade or so since the 1500’s. It was blood libel pure and simple.

Her mental immune system had never formed the hard candy shell that protected a well adjusted adult from thinking that everything around them was a lie. The type of critical thinking that lets people dismiss outlandish yet attractive ideology. His mother’s life was below average by almost any metric that it could be measured by. She wasn’t exceptional in any way, she was a bit dim and lightly educated, her economic prospects were bleak, she was prone to bouts of depression, and her interpersonal skills were burned from her by a global pandemic during her formative years. Leslie liked to think of her condition as a mental autoimmune disorder, the brain attacking itself and mistaking signal for noise and vice versa, to predictably terrible results.

Because of her below average capacity for introspection, she was unable to accept that her life was banal and unexceptional. When this was paired with her tendency toward narcissism, her susceptibility to viral ideology was perhaps the only above average thing about her. She concocted a narrative that everybody else in the world was stupid, and she was the only person smart enough to see the truth of things. The rest of the world were sheep, blindly believing lies being fed to them by a global cabal of evildoers. This was the inverse of the actual case, because she was in fact a member of a small yet growing subset of people whose minds were being polluted by large corporations in exchange for money.

Luckily, his grandparents had stepped in and gotten child protective services involved. After convalescing in a hospital for a couple of months, and a brief but informative stay in foster care, Leslie had come to live with his grandparents full time. The only permanent damage was to his sense of trust and his left eye, both of which he lost.

His story was not unique among his cohort. Something like seventy percent of generation Omega were raised by their grandparents. These were the same people that totally blew it with generation Alpha. Given a second chance to right the wrongs of their past, they raised a generation of tough, independent, wary individualists. This was actually through no real fault of their own, for the most part, generation Omega raised themselves.

His wheels, free to spin impotently in the air, started acting gyroscopically on the physical system that was his truck. They precessed independently, adding some distinctly eccentric vectors to his uncontrolled flight. Still blind, this was all pieced together from information streaming from his inner ear.

Considering himself a cautious optimist, he briefly wondered what he was going to do if he survived this whole thing. He was way out in Bingo, a sort of redneck enclave of loosely associated shirt tail relatives. Not his relatives, he only had his Grandparents, and his Mother. Not that he really spoke with any of them at this point, he was more of a found family kind of guy. He wished them no ill will, but found their company chaotic and sometimes downright dangerous.

Kingston, where he had grown up, was roughly fifteen miles away to the north. He had been living there most of his thirty five years. He had done some traveling, but always found himself hearing the call of the valley that he called home.
It wasn’t a populous town, having roughly 350 residents at any given time. What it lacked in amenities, it made up for in natural beauty. There was no general store, but if rolling hills and stunning vistas were your thing you were in the right spot. If you were to cut the shape of Vermont out of cardboard and try to balance it on the head of a pin, Kingston would be a touch to the south west of that point. Truly in the heart of the Green Mountains, it was centrally located, and an hour away from anything of note. In Kingston, he found himself in a state of spiritual homeostasis. A place where he was free to be a psychedelic redneck. If he had to classify himself, which he didn’t, that would probably be the closest way to put it.

He liked it that way. The World, capitol W and all was not really his bag. He was under the impression that it had lost its way, and in a lot of ways it truly had. Society had gone through a rather rough economic stratification, and he was solidly on the have not end of things. The haves had a lot. The fiction of trickle down economics had been rammed down the throat of anyone that cared to listen since the early 1980s, and despite some mild protests, capitalism had barreled right into its predicted late stage, where it stagnated.

Vermont had eventually populated itself with wealthy retirees and other people who generally didn’t need to work. As somebody who was born there, this meant that he had to make his living as a tick on the ass of the upper class. He was fine with this. They had money and things that they didn’t feel like doing, i.e. mowing lawns, stacking firewood, plowing driveways, general handy mannery. He wanted money, and was willing to do these things, fair trade as far as he was concerned.
One of the perks of knowing so many well to-do people, and being trusted by them, was access to the wild bits of technology that they took completely for granted for the most part.

He had been experiencing microgravity for what seemed to be about twenty minutes, but he understood that this was just a trick of perception. It ended just as quickly and violently as it began. The truck didn’t come to a dead stop, but the carcass of his plow dug into the road and hindered forward progress significantly. His body, independent from the truck, continued forward as if nothing had happened. His seatbelt, which he diligently used, arrested his motion and kept him from scooting right out the windshield. His head, like the tasseled end of a whip, cracked off the steering wheel and he could finally see. Although it was only stars that he observed.

He breathed for a few minutes, his headlights knifing into the darkness. He hadn’t broken anything. All of his fingers worked. His major joints were all bending the right way. He would definitely have a shiner at some point in the near future, but that would be on his bad eye, and he considered himself lucky to escape so unscathed.

His vehicle was in surprisingly good shape as well. Not including the plow of course. No broken windows, and the vehicle shell hadn’t disengaged from the battery sled that it rode on. He had gotten uncharacteristically lucky. It was roughly four thirty in the morning, and he had been headed back home from his midnight plow run. His obligations had been fulfilled until the next bit of weather.
He briefly considered backing the truck up and snagging the remains of the plow, that much steel would go a long way toward crafting a new one. It probably weighed five hundred pounds. While that was a lot of steel, he was alone and had little chance of wrangling it into the bed of the truck. He settled on backing up to it and nosing it out of the right of way, lest some other poor soul use it to enter low earth orbit.

Once this task had been completed, he pulled out his phone and made an honest to goodness phone call. This simply wasn’t done among his peers, but he was reaching across the gulf of generations. He was calling somebody that recalled a time when phones were attached physically to a place and there was no way to know who was calling. Every ring, a mystery to be solved.

Mr. Drake answered on the second ring. He was roughly seventy five years old, and most of his productive sleep came from prolific afternoon naps.

“Yellow?!” Mr. Drake shouted through the phone. Like the word aloha, this served as a greeting, an interrogation of why somebody would be calling at such an hour, and a humorous apology for the former.

“Mr. Drake,” Leslie said in greeting, “Leslie Brown here,” because of his particular ethical framework he was rather formal on occasions like this, “busted my plow, any chance I could use your printer?”

“Yup,” he said easily, “I’ll fire it right up. How far out are you?”

“‘Round twenty minutes,” Leslie answered.

“How you doing on materials?” Mr. Drake queried.

“Not too good,” Leslie sighed, “won’t be able to bring the plow itself, I have some chain though.”

“I’ll scare something up,” Mr. Drake said, “see you in twenty or so.”

“Thanks, Mr. Drake” Leslie went on.

“No sweat,” Mr. Drake coughed, probably taking a sip of coffee that went down the wrong pipe, “Hey Les, you heard anything about this ghost ship?”

“Not anything worth repeating,” Leslie abhorred hearsay, and tended not to engage in it.

“I’ll fill you in when you get here,” he said.

“You got it,” Leslie said as Mr. Drake hung up his phone.

This Mr. Drake was a member of Leslie’s found family, and acted as de facto father figure in a lot of ways. His own father wasn’t in the picture and even if he had wanted to, it would have been difficult to figure out who he was. If there was a list of people Leslie could call at four thirty in the morning and have somebody pick up, it would be short and Mr. Drake would be at the top of it.

Mr. Drake was a bit of an anomaly among his peers, certainly a retiree, but not wealthy by any means. He had done things the hard way by actually working for a living. He was a native to Kingston like Leslie, and had also done the travel thing in his younger days. He had settled back in town in his forties when he and his wife “lucked into a house” in his own words. Now, in his seventies, he existed to putter and do what he referred to as dicking around, which is really messing around with his computer and his printer.

This printer of his was a rather vast capital expense for the amount of use it got. Costing roughly what he bought his house for back in the 2020s, he used it to print out ideas he had, and help out the occasional handyman in need. This wasn’t a printer in the sense of something that you would see around an office, but a two and a half ton industrial behemoth that occupied the majority of his rather large garage. This enormous machine, all of the gantries, axes, cables as thick as a fat ladies thigh, blinding readouts, manipulator arms, lasers, et cetera were incongruously engineered to manipulate material on a mind bogglingly miniscule scale. Roughly ten cubic yards of bleeding edge technology focused on manipulating an end effector to move individual atoms.

As luck would have it, Leslie’s truck was pointed north toward Mr. Drake’s house, so he popped it into first and carefully started picking his way down the road.
When Leslie had called Mr. Drake, he had been a bit embarrassed to ask for help, but deep down he knew that the old man would make any excuse to fire up the machine. They were both willing to undertake the project, but the one thing that they needed were materials. It being the dead of winter, there was about five and a half feet of snow on the ground so scouting around for ore rich rocks or an unused piece of fencing was out of the question. The broken plow itself was an option, but it was pretty heavy and not only was Mr. Drake pushing eighty, but Leslie didn’t think it would fit in the hopper. They could break it down with a plasma torch, but this was a favor, not an obligation. The plow would be living out the rest of its days on the side of the road in Bingo.

Leslie was pathologically frugal to a certain degree. This was mostly out of necessity because the economy was in the toilet, frankly. Beyond that though, he prided himself on not spending money that he had earned on things that he deemed trivial or frivolous. One thing that he had spent a lot of money on was his truck. To call it a truck was a bit of a misnomer, but it spent most of its time being a truck so the description fit it well enough.

In his twenties he had given into wanderlust and spent a few years in the western territories. When Vermont had called him home, he was destitute, but he had a bit of a plan. He had decided to start offering his services as a handyman, but he lacked a lot of the tools of the trade. No lawnmower, no chainsaw, a lack of clamps and duct tape. So he had convinced prospective clients to hold him on retainer. In exchange for a commitment of two years of general labor, he would get paid up front and basically be at the clients beck and call twenty four hours a day. This had worked spectacularly, but it had been a very hectic two years. This was a trick that would only work once, and he took advantage of the opportunity.

With this seed capitol, he had bought a lot of the items that he would need for his new business venture. He did splurge on the truck though, and he felt a little bit shameful about it, but it was just so unbelievably cool that he couldn’t resist. This “Truck” that he bought, was a kind of meta machine. Technically it was referred to as a vehicle emulator. Basically, it could change its own physical characteristics to pretend to be any vehicle that had ever been manufactured. It could change its wheelbase, center of mass, aerodynamic properties, color, horsepower, handling, et cetera. Any property that a vehicle had, this machine could emulate. This was endlessly useful. If somebody had stuffed their featherweight hyper efficient carbon nanotube EV right in the rhubarb and got it belly hung, he could change his rig into a two and a half ton towing rig and give them the old sky hook treatment. Granted, he needed to add mass to his vehicle to pull this off, but this was easily accomplished with sandbags.

If he had a formal event, which he never did, he could change the vehicle into a 1935 Duesenberg model JN Berline and arrive in an almost painful amount of style. He of course had never done this, but the option was out there.

Naturally, these configurations cost money, so he had roughly five vehicle types that he used on a regular basis. Each car design was a piece of verifiable data that he had downloaded, that was the reason that they actually cost money. Somebody, probably an engineer with a Phd that they needed to pay off, had spent thousands of man hours translating every measurable metric from say, a 1991 Toyota T100 into a string of ones and zeros that when applied to his meta truck would produce valid results. This was what he was actually paying for, valid data. Valid data in this case was the result of actual human expertise.

The most useful configuration, and the one that it spent the most time as was a 1994 Toyota Hilux. This was what Leslie considered to be the platonic ideal of a truck. This was not a passenger vehicle. No extended crew cab to bring the kids to soccer practice. The advent of the crew cab had turned once usable trucks into caricatures of what a truck should be, culminating in the joke that was the Ford Maverick. The Maverick had a bed that could conceivably fit a bag of groceries or two, but seated seven people for some reason. This was not a truck in any way shape or form, rather a representation of free market capitalism not sticking to its lane and mucking about in lexical matters.

The Hilux was a truck though. Not a large one, as it was solidly on the cute end of things, instead of the truck nutted behemoths marketed to suburban fantasy football league victims. It was the reigning champion as the most popular truck in the world.

It was endemic to Africa, Asia, South America, the parts of Europe where you could bribe your way out of traffic violations, and even had a decent foothold in Antarctica. It was never marketed in the USA though, having far too humble of an exhaust system to meet EPA emissions standards back when those were a thing. This was good enough for pretty much the entire rest of the world though. If things were measured in meters, there was probably a Toyota Hilux within spitting distance.

The vehicle emulator skipped all the environmental considerations by being an electric vehicle. When you printed one of these things out, what you really got was a giant carbon nanotube battery with a very complicated suspension system. It looked a lot like a skateboard that somebody twenty feet tall would ride. Onto this skateboard, one would add the shell of the vehicle that they wished to emulate. Leslie kept these in his front yard lined up like redneck lawn ornaments. Changing shells was pretty straight forward, all you needed to do was drive up to the shell you wanted and the vehicle emulator would intuit what you were about to do and take to process from there. It would unhook from the bottom of one shell and drive under the other. Easy as that, the whole process took about two minutes from tip to tail.

Some people really enjoy driving standards. Leslie was one of those people. In the late 2020s and 2030s it was becoming a bit of a lost art. To call it standard was increasingly funny as time moved on, because it wasn’t a standard feature at all. In fact, by the late 2020s it wasn’t even an available option for a new vehicle. For most people this was fine.

Most people lived in cities with paved roads and reasonable climates. For the most part, cities are not located on mountain gaps or class four roads. They were located in flat places where building a strip mall or a condo high rise was a pretty straight forward thing. There was usually access to water in the form of a wide deep channel river, or a convenient ocean port. Cities seemed to condense in these economically viable zones. Vermont, where Leslie chose to live, was none of these things.

Vermont is defined by its mountains. While they don’t make up any of its borders, there isn’t a single acre of land where you can’t see evidence of the continental fender bender that runs due north from Massachusetts to the Canadian Shield. These are the Green Mountains. They are the humble bones of a once mighty range roughly 250 million years old, and they are one of the oldest exposed mountain ranges on the planet. There is a saying Vermonters use when having to describe distance to somebody that comes from a more tamed and urban area. They say “as the crow flies”.

A crow is able to cover distance in a linear fashion, humans in Vermont can’t do this. An urbanite, stumped on how to actually get to their AirB&B will pull out their phone with their maps app fired up and insist that they are two miles from their destination. The Local will have to say “Yeah, as the crow flies,” and then go on to explain how there has been a mountain in the way for a couple of hundred million years and until it fully erodes, they will have to go around.

This means that moving any distance above something like fifteen miles typically involves negotiating some flavor of mountain pass. Especially when moving west to east, and vice versa. Due to the climate, half of the year, these mountain passes (or gaps colloquially) are arctic wind tunnels waiting for their time to shine when the next ice age rolls around. In a mile long section of road you could be subject to: black ice, glare ice, eight foot snow drifts, until quite recently muffler parts, moose, unplowed rights of way, jackknifed semi trucks, bears, the occasional mudslide/avalanche, among other unknown yet adverse conditions.

To be able to reasonably handle these adverse conditions, it behooves a driver to be in complete control of their automobile. This is where the automatic transmission fails as a viable option. In stop and go traffic, they are a wonder to behold, but on a capricious piece of road like the Appalachian Gap it will likely land you in one of two situations. Either you will be deader than dogshit, or looking to figure out what five miles as the crow flies means in twenty below weather. Neither of which are ideal.

This all comes down to being able to actively change the gear ratio between your engine and your tires. Tires do their best work when they are firmly stuck to the pavement. Ice, snow, beaver pelts, slush, antlers, and muffler parts can all change this important connection. When facing one of these all too common road conditions a driver with an automatic transmission would have to use their brakes. No matter how lightly they feather their brakes, there is still a very abrupt change in tire speed as a result. This can break the static friction that the tire is designed to take advantage of and suddenly your vehicle very strictly starts following Newton’s first law, with examples of the second and third quickly to follow.
With a standard transmission, you can affect your vehicle’s speed without drastically affecting tire speed, keeping that precious static friction firmly where it should be. This is done by downshifting, or increasing the gear ratio between the engine and the tires. A true virtuoso on the pedals can negotiate a thirty degree pitch of glare ice and slow down their vehicle with an almost imperceptible maiden’s kiss from the clutch. Done correctly, you can use your engine as a brake and wear out your cylinder heads instead of your brakes. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

With Leslie’s vehicle emulator, this is all handled in software. He is actually driving a standard transmission, it has all of the characteristics emulated with full fidelity, but beyond the stick in his hand there is a very fast computer crunching some very big numbers in real time making sure that his actions on the clutch and gas pedals translate to viable outputs. Instead of relying on backdriving the entire geartrain of the car, resistance is provided from the stator magnets in his hub motors. Leslie chooses to drive a standard all the time to keep in practice, it is also the most satisfying way to drive a car, so he is kind of double dipping on that one.

Leslie shook his head, he had been zoning out for most of the twenty minute drive to Mr. Drake’s place. Now, he found himself in his driveway. A brief look into the rearview mirror confirmed his prediction about having a black eye.