The boundary looked like a wall of fog. On the road ahead, vehicles were driving into and out of it as if it were nothing. As the group drew closer, they could see that it cut across the parking lot at Ed's and a little corner of the building, with the neon lights visible on the other side.
Ed's sign, though, was on this side of the boundary, and it led Leonard to ask, "What do they mean, 'real cooking'?"
"They replicate the ingredients, not the finished dishes," Jon snapped, as he was staring straight ahead. Karyn and Sarah were holding their breath as the car slowed, pulling off the highway into the parking lot, gliding forward into the gray barrier...
"Aaah!" exclaimed Karyn, as the car pierced the boundary, and a steering wheel appeared in front of her.
Leonard reached over and yanked the wheel a bit to keep the car rolling down an aisle way of the lot. "Use the brake," he said. "Pedal."
"What?" Karyn looked down toward her feet.
"It's like that one time we did go-karts," said Sarah.
"That was, like, your 12th birthday party!" exclaimed Karyn, but she managed to pick the right pedal and bring the car to a jerking stop.
"Oh, my God, your horns are gone," Sarah now said, looking wide-eyed at Jon's head.
"Huh," said Jon, who reached up and put his palm against the roof of the car, which was now a few inches lower.
"We're still not actually parked," Leonard pointed out. "Would you like me to --"
"I can figure this out," said Karyn. "I've seen old movies, too." She wrapped her hands carefully around the wheel, pressed her foot carefully down on the accelerator, and managed to make a shallow left turn and ooze into a parking space.
"There we go," she said. "So I guess in this reality --" She started to reach for the car door, let her foot up, and the car rolled forward, hitting the concrete berm at the end of the parking space with a mild jolt.
Leonard quickly instructed her in moving the shift lever to "P" and turning off the ignition, and the group got out of the car. They were facing the highway, and they could hear that the vehicles were suddenly making more noise as they arrived on this side of the boundary.
"So cars here are still using gasoline," Jon observed.
"Yeah, there are some electric cars that have to be recharged, but --" Leonard stopped as, on the other side of the divided highway, a Mariano's Fresh Market truck drove into the boundary and apparently disappeared on the other side. "Huh."
"Can we make observations later?" asked Sarah. "I'm starving."
"Oh, but this is nuts," said Karyn, standing behind the car and looking at the lettering across its rear end. "In this world, this isn't a Falcon, it's a..."
Jon glanced at it and did a double-take. "That doesn't really make sense."
Sarah looked at it and nodded. "Yeah."
Leonard was the last to make it around the car to see what she was talking about. He frowned. "What do you mean?"
"It's obviously not fusion-powered," said Karyn. "Why is it called a 'Fusion'?"
Leonard didn't have an answer for that, so the group just kind of slunk across the parking lot to the diner's entrance.
