Timothy Gets a Speeding Ticket

The dreaded chime reverberated around the car’s interior, heralding the peppy announcement: "You are driving one mile per hour over the speed limit, and have incurred a fifty-dollar ticket. Tired of watching the speedometer? Subscribe to our Safe Driving Management Service, brought to you by ReCo Enterprise, and we'll ensure your vehicle never violates the law! Only one hundred dollars per month! See your ReCo Account for details."

"Oh...dear," Timothy groaned, remembering that the ReCo app was inclined to put a temporary hold on a hefty portion of your checking account if it heard you using what it deemed 'Insubordinate Language'. He sighed as a ping! from his phone confirmed that fifty-dollars-plus-service-charge-and-tax had been automatically taken from his account. True, he couldn't afford to keep losing money every time he committed a minor infraction; but he could even less afford to pay ReCo Enterprise to remotely control his car from their office uptown.

Now he was trying to navigate the city's car-choked streets, constantly keeping one eye locked on the speedometer and the other on pedestrians who seemed to operate under the motto, 'Don't Worry, They'll Stop For You'. Timothy did not blame them. This was Friday night; Monday morning was half the world away.

 In front of him, a parallel-parked van signaled that it would like to rejoin the throng on the road. Timothy waved it ahead, having a flash of inspiration: he could park in the van's vacated spot and just walk, same as everyone else seemed to be doing, perhaps for hours. He could put off going home, which, to him, had always felt like giving up on the rest of the night. But it was only a flash, here one instant, gone the next. He had to go home. He had to find something for supper. He had to text his mother, like he'd promised he would do every night, and he had kept that promise for too long to break it now without worrying her.

He was a little worried about that.

Last night, she’d asked him where he’d been all day. Apparently, she had entirely forgotten that he had moved out nearly a year ago.

Timothy knew that people forgot things all the time, especially in times of stress, which these certainly were. But that’s how it had started with his grandmother.

A short time after she’d started having trouble recalling her daughter’s name, Grandma, as Timothy had always called her, moved into his mother's apartment where she’d lived up until this past year, spiraling through various amounts of lucidity like a doomed airplane. The first few years, Timothy had taken care of her while his mother tried to earn enough to feed them all; as soon as he’d gotten old enough to work, they’d switched roles, but it was only ever them. There was a time when there might have been some hope of help: nurses, care homes, even benefits, for seniors; but the government had declared that since ‘elderly people could not be cured by medicine’, it was not worth bothering hospitals, nurses, or government funding with 'those suffering from old age'.

Timothy's mother had been sad, of course, when Grandma died last year, but she hadn't cried; Timothy reckoned that was because she had wept plenty over the years. Now she was sixty-one, and the past five years of her life had largely been spent in the same two rooms, always caring for her mother...or, as Timothy knew she'd often felt, the shell of a person who had once been her mother. He also knew she now felt she had been freed from a task. In a way, he felt the same. Once he no longer needed to spend all his time working to support his mother and Grandma, he had saved enough money to move out and start going to school again in the neighboring city. He worked afternoons, and sent whatever money he could spare to his mother.

Timothy came to a halt under the forbidding red glare of a stoplight. He watched perpendicular traffic's light turn yellow, then red; but when his own light turned green something told him that it would be unwise to move just yet.

Then it happened: from his right a green car charged through the intersection, going all of seventy miles an hour. Behind it immediately followed six pale blue vehicles, their sides marked with the RCE logo. Timothy fancied he could actually see the signal emitted from their antennas as they sped after the green car. In an instant they caught up with it: the car skidded out of sight as the signal took control of its brakes. Timothy heard the crash, and several screams, before the blare of sirens overwhelmed all other noise.

In RCE's early days, the public's refusal to install the ReCo app in their vehicles had been accompanied by such statements as, 'They could pull me over any time they liked, even if I wasn't doing anything wrong!' That had been back when RCE devices were still optional. These days, it was possible to pay to make the app somewhat useful for the user, but at any time, RCE could take control of anyone's, or indeed everyone's, vehicle.

RCE cars, police vehicles, and ambulances were already swarming the intersection, and the cars behind Timothy were packed in too closely to allow for movement. His car was stuck where it was, but as he stared at the spot where carnage had blossomed, he was overcome with distaste for it. He prodded the engine off, scrabbled at his seatbelt, and then yanked desperately on the doorhandle. Once out, he threw the door closed without a backward glance and began striding quickly down the nearest sidewalk, abandoning the car in front of the stoplight, which had reverted to red.

This was Skyline Street; the house whose small upper room he rented was around twenty minutes away on foot. But he found he was in no hurry to return. The monotonous routine of 'drive, school, drive, work, drive, home' had been broken. Anything was now possible.

Glancing upward, he saw the lit sign above the public house ahead. Perhaps he might go in, and...

And what? Buy a drink with what scant amount of funds he had left? Listen to whatever new concoction ReCo Music was forcing through the speakers? Get thrown out after ten minutes for not spending enough money? He didn't even look in the window as he passed by.

Timothy could not be a functioning member of society until his next paycheck. Being in a store or restaurant without intent to make a purchase was loitering, and punishable by fines. Even a half-hour ticket to the library cost between five and ten dollars. He knew all these fines and fees were intended to pay for the war damage, the crop loss, and the Hummerhouses, but it was as if there was some fire that needed feeding, and with every flush of cash thrown into its heart, it grew and demanded more.

When he reached the corner, he found himself turning down the sidewalk instead of crossing the street as he ought to have done; he knew he could not really walk home, leaving his car to anyone in need of mechanical components. He decided instead to see if the jam had cleared up by the time he'd made a full circuit around the block.

As the soles of his shoes were worn away bit by bit on the pavement, he came to two conclusions: one, that he had to go back home; two, that he really did not want to go back home. He did not want to go to school in the morning, work in the afternoon; he did not want to text his mother who might not, tonight or ten years from tonight, know who he was.

At the third corner, he slowed, unsure if he was even going to go back to the car.

What else was there to do? He couldn’t just leave.

Then again, he also couldn’t just keep losing half his paycheck to fines he couldn’t avoid. He couldn’t just drive a car that might crash him into a brick wall if he somehow got on RCE’s nerves. And although there was probably nothing wrong with his mother – maybe she’d just woken up from a dream, maybe she’d been distracted – he couldn’t just afford to take care of her the way they had taken care of his grandmother if it turned out she really was sick. In short, he couldn’t just live like this.

But he would have to find a way to.

Then again, he thought, if he could find a way to do all that, he could find a way to leave.

That would take more thinking than could be done on one side of a city block. To be recognized by society in this age, one needed a phone, and all phones were created, leased out, and monitored by ReCo Enterprise, which had offices in every city in the country. Besides having access to bank accounts, RCE was also the sole source of social security numbers, birth certificates, and other identification documents. Furthermore, if Timothy wanted to quit his job, move, even if he wanted to sell his car, RCE would not only need to be informed of his plans, they would need to approve them, lest they shut down his account because of ‘suspicious activity’. That would mean losing his money, his job, and his identity. And if you lost your ReCo account, it was impossible to get it back, or even to get another one. He realized that if he was really going to leave, he might as well run as far away as possible.

As he had this thought, Timothy looked up to see that he was back where he had started. The devastation had only gotten worse. A crowd had gathered in the street to stare at the fire. It must have started when the green car had been crashed; it was now devouring the newest building on the block, the one that lurked over the surrounding city like a person who shoves their way into a crowd and dares anyone to object. Under ordinary circumstances, a pale blue light would be emanating from the top, pulsing faintly as it called out to every piece of technology created in the past five years.

But there was no blue light now; the light tonight was red, and it was frothing at the base of the RCE office.

Those in the crowd tapped their phones, trying to prod them awake. Timothy took out his own phone. It lit up in the characteristic RCE logo, with a message across the bottom: SERVICE ERROR.

Right now, Timothy's phone did not exist. There was a feeling of freedom he had never experienced before, and he could not stand to lose it. He made up his mind right there and then.

He'd had a knack for planning ever since the age of nine. ("Just get two cans of soup for me, Mom; that'll be plenty for me until next week if I add water – you and Granma should use the other ten dollars..." – she'd taken him up on it, although the remaining money had been split eighty-twenty between herself and her mother.) In a minute of furious thought, he had an idea, albeit one that hinged on luck: there was an airport in this city, and though flights would undoubtedly be grounded until ReCo service was restored, there might be enough chaos that he could sneak onto a plane going outside the country before the deviance from his usual schedule was noted by some ReCo Monitoring Bot and an officer was sent to question him, then likely as not detain him. It would mean Timothy had to go now, with the lint in his pockets and the clothes on his back.

And he wouldn't say goodbye to his mother in person.

Of course, he thought, she was probably fine. And if she was upset by his leaving, it would mostly be because no one would be sending her money anymore. He got in his car and pushed the start button.

Due to the temporary loss of ReCo Maps, it took Timothy nearly twice the usual half-hour to reach the airport. He arrived after the pilots, staff, security, and the would-be passengers had realized that RCE was down, but before a system could be implemented to deal with the fallout. The boards overhead that ordinarily would have listed incoming and outgoing flights, and how delayed they were, simply read 'ERROR'. Echoing voices inquired all around:

"What's the plan now?"

"How am I going to make my flight?"

"I paid a thousand dollars for that ticket, and you're telling me it's just gone?"

Close to Timothy's ear, someone said, "Sir, were you going on Flight 101?"

He turned to see a man with greying hair all around his face. He thought for a moment, then said, "I thought the planes would be out of commission as long as ReCo's down?"

The man looked confused for an instant, but then responded, "The ones made by ReCo Air are, but we have a few older ones, and we're going to try to get one or two flights out in the meantime.”

Timothy thought that sounded very good; indeed, probably too good to be true. "I can't show you my ticket. I can't even show you my driver's license, let alone my passport…"

"No one's got any of that stuff as long as ReCo's down, but it's getting a little crazy here. ReCo Air wants all their planes out of the sky until service is back up, but we don't have enough room to take them all on, so they told us to make room." The man spoke in a mutter that sounded almost conspiratorial, and as he finished his explanation, he turned and motioned for Timothy to follow him.

Trailing along through the crowd, Timothy eventually found himself inside a small jet. Some three quarters of the seats were occupied. There was very little bustle amongst any of the passengers; Timothy began to wonder about this. Suddenly it came to him: no overhead bags were being stowed. Looking around, he noted that no one had much luggage, if any. And everyone looked just as nervous as he felt.

He jumped in his seat as his phone chimed. The woman next to him, likely in her early seventies, had been gazing idly ahead; she whirled around and asked, "You took it with you?"

Timothy gave her a blank stare as he tried to dig his phone out of his pocket. "My phone? Of course; you can't travel without it—"

The woman snorted. "I left mine under the wheel of my car." In response to Timothy's quizzical expression, she added, "I don't need it anymore. I was trying to get away from it, anyway – isn't that why you're on this flight?"

"I don't really know where we're headed—"

"You didn't know where the plane was going, but you still got on. That reads to me like you don't care where you end up, as long as you get away. Well, you’re in luck – a lot of it, if you really ended up here by accident. We don’t know exactly where we’ll end up, but I’m hoping for France, myself. I’ve always wanted to see Paris."

"France?"

"Well, the plane will land wherever it can. This isn't really 'official', you understand. I only heard about it from my cousin in Wales; he was watching the news – the rest of the world’s news is different from ours, apparently – and he said there was some organization that provides transport for American refugees. He did some digging for me, and found that there was a flight at this airport scheduled for this evening, but he didn’t know which plane. Luckily, the guys flying are good at spotting who’s trying to leave, and they help you out. Rumor has it we’re supposed to land somewhere in Europe, so I guess I’ve got a shot at France.”

The view outside the small window was of nothing but a black sky, but Timothy stared nonetheless. "I should call my mom when we land. I should have earlier, but there was a car accident, and then..." His weak voice trailed away completely for a moment. “What I mean is, two hours ago, I didn’t know I was getting on a plane.”

"Yeah, I know what you mean. I managed to tell my sister what was going on, but I didn't cancel anything. I guess I didn't need to, though. Nothing can follow me. No RCE where we’re going.”

Timothy considered this. His own phone was still in his hand. He finally opened it, and read a notice proudly bearing the RCE logo; it began, 'Dear User', but had a threatening tone as it informed him that his account had been deactivated and his car would be taken to the nearest ReCo Wheels facility because, essentially, he was on a plane instead of at home.

"I'd get rid of it, if I were you," the woman said, reading over Timothy’s shoulder. “It’ll only give you grief.”

"How am I supposed to get rid of it? I'm on a plane."

"Get it off the plane, then. Throw it out the window!"

Timothy laughed, but stopped when he realized the woman wasn't joking. "I can't, it's not allowed. And anyways, what if I get sucked out?"

"You won't. I'll keep ahold of your arm." She glanced around quickly to ensure no one was paying attention, then grabbed Timothy's shirtsleeve and nodded at the window.

Timothy shrugged. Then he opened the window. His phone was ripped right out of his hand.

Back at the RCE office, there were triumphant shouts around the monitor. They thought the plane had crashed.