"There's no steering wheel!" Leonard exclaimed.
"Of course not," retorted Karyn. "This car's only five years old."
Leonard could see her typing "Ed's Diner" into a large touchscreen that was right in front of her, in the space where the speedometer and other displays should have been, and he finally realized, "Ohh, this is a self-driving car."
"I thought you said you looked at Wikipedia," Jon said.
"I researched fusion power extensively, but did not want to, as you might say, fall into a Wiki hole, before switching to work on my paper." Leonard reached behind his right shoulder, reached again, and finally turned to look. "Um, I take it there is no seatbelt?"
"This isn't a rollercoaster, babe," Sarah said from the back seat with a bit of a chortle.
In fact, the car silently and gently started moving, pulling away from the curb, quickly picking up speed. Leonard couldn't help but gasp as the car went straight through the intersection at Meadow Lane.
"Now what?" asked Karyn.
"Just -- that's always been a 4-way stop," said Leonard, looking back to see that there were no stop signs at the intersection.
"Leonard, relax," ordered Jon. "All cars have been self-driving since we were little kids."
"What about, um, pedestrians?" Leonard was looking around nervously.
"Cars can detect them," answered Jon. "It's not a problem, I swear. Maybe you should keep your eyes closed."
"No, I-I'll be fine," said Leonard. "This is just a lot to experience, and -- oh, my." The car was passing an abandoned supermarket, with only the outline of the "Jewel-Osco" lettering remaining on its front, the parking lot fenced off.
"Yeah, they're finally supposed to demolish that next month and build another apartment building," said Karyn.
"All the bankruptcy situations are weird these days because of how the economy is," Jon tried to explain.
"Oh, of course they went bankrupt," Leonard realized. "Food replicators. But the economy, you say --"
"We've probably heard it thousands of times in school," said Karyn, imitating a male teacher's voice to say, "'As we transition to a post-scarcity economy...'"
In spite of his attempts to be dispassionate, Leonard gasped as he saw the glass-and-chrome towers that now lined the street. Looking up at them, fortunately, distracted him as the car made a left turn onto the major thoroughfare that was Lake Street, a.k.a. U.S. Highway 20, seemingly missing other cars by mere centimeters as it arranged itself within the flow of traffic.
"These appear to all be apartment buildings," Leonard observed. "Lake Point needs housing this dense?"
"Well, yeah," said Karyn. "I mean, hardly anyone lives downstate anymore, except in, like, Urbana-Champaign and Carbondale."
"And the St. Louis suburbs," pointed out Jon. "But, yeah, and especially right here -- people want to live near the train station."
Leonard recognized where they were, noting the tracks to the right of the car, on the south side of the street, and the familiar red-brick and masonry building with the distinct octagonal turret on one corner. "It looks like they've turned it into a restaurant or something, though."
"Huh? No, that's the old train station," said Karyn. "This is the train station now."
The car was now passing a marble-and-glass temple that the tracks apparently ran through, helpfully signed "NORTHWEST REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION CENTER." As it got to the other side of the building, Leonard realized that he'd been looking at not only the conventional train tracks, but an elevated structure paralleling them, upon which a westbound bullet train was gliding into the station.
Jon must have noticed him gaping, because he said, "Yeah, that's Amtrak to Madison, Minneapolis... Seattle..."
Karyn interjected, "So, um, we're about 800 meters from Ed's."
"And the boundary," said Leonard, staring ahead as the cars with their silent fusion engines performed an ongoing computer-controlled ballet.
It was dusk, but there was still enough light to see...
