Terminal Highway

First part of a series of short stories on protocols

This short story is part of the Because Its Protocol series. You can find more information on it here.

Harris woke up feeling inspired. His hands instinctively searched for the gun under his pillow - the one mother had got for him because Harris could not be talked down from his paranoia about their neighbors. It was a BB gun and this was unknown to its handler. He paced around the room, gun in hand and completely oblivious to the futility of the weapon. He knew he had to do something special that day but did not know what. A force had descended from the heavens during the night and inhabited him while he was asleep. There was nothing Harris could do about his predicament, his fate had already been determined. The only thing left to do was to wait for the moment of action. He stopped pacing, stood by the window and stared at the blue hibiscus in the yard. His temples tingled with this sudden burst of purpose that he knew had to be channeled somewhere. The hibiscus flowers slowly lulled him into a gentle trance and his mind began to drift away from whatever had blessed him. He was pulled back into the throes of unknown inspiration by a hummingbird fluttering its wings in front of his window. It seemed to Harris that the bird was mocking him. He watched it closely and as it fluttered away, he saw his mom's car, a cobalt blue Spectra 3, pull up at the curb. Harris knew what needed to be done.

***

A shriek jolted Ray out of his slumber on the park bench and he watched helplessly as his hand knocked down his hard earned coffee and croissant onto the street. The shriek had come from a homeless man who Ray now spotted at a distance. The coffee and croissant had been stolen from the hotel breakfast three blocks away. Ray had made a habit of walking into hotel breakfasts around the city. This kept his burn rate low. He welcomed the variety the bawling homeless man provided - a pleasing contrast with the perpetual gray of the city. The fog that rolled in from the Pacific painted the city gray every day. He didn't understand why the buildings and the people in this part of town had to double down on that effect.

Still contemplating the lost breakfast, Ray slowly walked up the hill to his apartment. He had less than two months before his savings ran out. Actually, that's just what he thought, in reality he had 35 days before his bank account drew a blank - just like several other areas of his life already had. It had been several years since his last relationship and there was no one he could call a friend. But, he had got intimate with the finer things in a brief period of relative wealth. His palms grazed the Dries Van Notten pants that he bought on the day that he shut down his business. They cost a month's rent. He did not regret it. They were great pants that made his life breezier and worth living. The decision to buy them was not made in haste either. It was something that he deliberated over months - wearing them at the store several times, inspecting the seams, watching videos about how to care for them and dreaming about the texture of the twill. He took pride in having a great eye, while being frustrated that he could not acquire all the impeccable objects he found. Around the same time, it became quite apparent to Ray that he would soon lose his business.

Ray’s stomach began grumbling by the time he made it up to his 450 sq foot apartment. He rummaged around to see if there was a banana that had hid itself from him or a tangerine that had rolled to an escape under the refrigerator, but no luck. He chugged water straight from the Britta jug and decided to put his life together, at least for a little bit. The protocols for a good life never seemed to stick with him long enough.

Ray was willing to do almost anything for a reasonable amount of money and certain comforts . He was relieved that his present misery had company. Several people he knew had been affected by new regulatory restrictions on advertising using the Calm Commute Protocol. He thought that with increasing regulation around CCP, perhaps there was a bureaucratic gig somewhere - one that would probably not afford him the finer pleasures but would pay the bills so that he does not have to scavenge at Hotel Trio or whatever. He knew Lorenzo worked on implementing the Calm Commute Protocol but Ray was reluctant to reach out to him. Unlike Lorenzo, Ray did not have ambitions for more political power. He just wanted a gig that paid, without a lot of leg work. On top of all that, Lorenzo’s feeble attempts at being Machivellian embarrassed Ray. But, he knew Lorenzo was well connected enough to give him a few leads. Ray sent him a text.

Ray’s life had been rosy for a while. Revenue at his erection pill company pointed upward. The product was nothing new - just the same pills from India, packaged in a box designed by a new design school grad whom Ray paid very little. The alpha lay in his customer acquisition. Ray had been early to target his customers through the Calm Commute Protocol. Implemented with reckless rush in the final days of the left wing government, the protocol was designed to test people for sanity every time they got in an automobile to drive.

Car accidents had gone up exponentially in the five years since the Scissor Event. In the initial years, everyone assumed that this sudden spike was a temporary break from the norm. People had been traumatized by the Scissor Event and it was understandable that the state of their minds were frayed. The cars that held their fragile minds broke across medians and slammed into seventy miles per hour oncoming traffic on a regular basis - leaving mangled metal, lithium ion batteries and human body parts melded together in hot molten flames visible from a mile away. Things kept getting worse until the CCP was introduced.

The CCP required that every car dashboard be equipped with a thematic appreciation test. The driver takes the test every time they get in the car. It takes 30 seconds. They are shown a single image on the dashboard - a sheep standing beside a pond, a man ascending a spiral staircase, an airplane taking off etc. The driver has to tell a coherent story about the image - how did the sheep get there, what is the man ascending the staircase thinking about, where is the plane headed to. You can tell a surprising amount about a person's sanity with 30 seconds and a single image. The driver could say "the sheep ran away from the herd and now it's thirsty" and the start button on the car came alive. On the other hand, "the plane is about to have a door blown off, sucking out every passenger one after another into thin air", meant that the driver had to take the test again. You have three tries, if you fail all three, you are evaluated by a psychiatrist before you drive again. The wait times for psychiatrists are so long these days that there are unofficial protocols to get around the queue.

The government did not implement the CCP out of a largess of mind. It was a final parting shot aimed at the southern right wing base whose rise to power seemed inevitable. The protocol was a humiliation ritual for every driver of an F150 in Texas. Every driver whose identity of liberty was wrapped up in 2000 pounds of solid metal now felt like a muslim getting on a plane after 9/11.

Of course, the data from the CCP thematic tests were supposed to be private, secure and encrypted.There used to be ways around this during the good old days. If your credit score was lower than 700 and you needed better interest rates on a new car purchase - you could sign up to give away the personal data from the Calm Commute Protocol for targeted advertising across devices. Ray was early to this technology. With the original CCP, you were getting access to the mental state of a person - what better way to identify who was suffering from erectile dysfunction. Ray fancied himself as a hyper modern Sigmund Freud, but while Freud was limited by human capacity in the number of people he could consult, Ray could see through the unmet desires of hundreds of thousands of men on a daily basis. He was using high technology to return to Freudian psychiatric traditions. He called the pills Ego (viagra) and Id (cialis).

Ray was sinking deeper into his thoughts and the leather of his couch when he got Lorenzo's reply: "I might have something for you. We need a third party to write a report on a few vehicle collisions." Vehicle accidents were unheard of in the city. Fully autonomous driving reduced them. CCP eliminated suicides and accidents caused by unstable individuals taking over the steering. The roads were the most peaceful they had been in decades.

Lorenzo came from money. His father was the first to start selling microchips to the Chinese after the end of the Chips war. Ray could never figure out why Lorenzo wanted this bureaucratic gig so bad - was he a spy for the Chinese? Did his father put him up to this to reclaim the reputation that their family had lost because of the Chinese relations? Ray knew the most uninteresting and likely answer was that Lorenzo really craved the power of political office, the other factors were mere side effects.

Ray got in his car and the thematic appreciation test came alive.

Driver: Ray Thackeray

***

Ego and Id came crashing down when the government passed new regulation on advertisement targeting using CCP. This development was not surprising even though Ray was not financially prepared. Most forms of advertising take a natural course - there is a new under advertised medium that advertisers can take advantage of. The cost of customer acquisition is initially low, leading to a new category of consumer products which now have direct distribution to the customer. Eventually, the market catches on. Everyone and their mother is suddenly advertising on the medium. At this point there is an inciting incident - some bozo buys guns off a targeted ad and shoots up a school, a democracy gets toppled 10,000 miles away, things like that. The government steps in and stops the parade and your golden goose is dead. Ray had read of these cycles before but now he had lived it. There were winners and losers in every cycle. They wrote books about the winners and, “the losers steal breakfast from where the winners eat”, Ray said out loud on his drive.

Ray and Lorenzo met in Lorezo's gray office. Lorenzo, in gray pants and white shirt, dressed to fit in with bureaucrats and not give away that his father was a billionaire. Ray donned his fine pants and a linen shirt, a fragile facade that hid his precarious finances.

Lorenzo spoke, deliberating on each word as he weighed the table down with his elbows, "We have had a series of collisions in the last month, probably nothing to panic, but we want to make sure that we are following protocol. We want to bring you as an independent consultant to look into this for us"

It came as a surprise to Ray that Lorenzo had mastered the art of tactful bureaucratic speak - this differed from the strong, polarizing statements that his CEO dad regularly made. Had bureaucracy bludgeoned his vocabulary into a series of equivocal sentences that said things without saying things?

"It should be pretty straightforward, write a report in a week, we get it reviewed and you get paid," Lorenzo continued.

Lorenzo knew that he was exploiting Ray’s predicament with the precision of a bureaucrat from a Kafka tale. He thought of Ray as a person of weak values and character, who could be easily swayed by the finer things in life or tasks that required some verbal ju-jitsu. Tasks that were not grounded in the real world that Lorenzo operated in and navigated expertly. But, Ray knew all of this about himself. He had accepted his fate as a hedonistic drifter. The only thing that got the better of him from time to time was a propensity to enquire into subjects that were obscured, either by design or because someone had refused to look at it more closely. Lorenzo's proposal had sparked this instinct in Ray.

"Sure, that seems like something that I could knock out in a few days, do you have any initial hypothesis?" asked Ray.

"Probably a malfunctional autonomous driving unit or perhaps these are bozos who are using the Freedom protocol" replied Lorenzo.

“Ah you guys at implementation still struggle with that southern trash” replied Ray.

The Freedom protocol, built by a set of dissenters, was a series of steps that a user could take to override the CCP. The most prevalent method involved plugging a device into the car’s on board diagnostics port. The southern governments who had opposed the CCP looked the other way at the growing market for the Freedom protocol devices. When the demand began to peak, the federal government and CCP implementers sent cease and desist notices to several companies. To work around this, the companies shutdown their operations and then reopened under different names - this time the device was marketed as something that helped maintain the health of a vehicle, something like a fitness watch for cars. Overriding the CCP was Trojan horsed in there along with several other cursory features.

Ray took the assignment. On the drive back he kept telling himself, “it's a simple report, just focus on the bugs in the autonomous driving unit.”, but the more he told himself this, the gloomier he became. Ray knew his counterwill was kicking in - the same instinctual response to authority that had prevented him from having a steady job ever in his life.

When he got back to the apartment, Ray poured himself a large whiskey and sank into his couch with his iPad. It was rather alarming to him how much work he got done laying on the couch. Often he would lay there with his legs outstretched - until his hamstrings got stiff and his hips got tired. He imagined that all his thinking happened at the hips. Today when they were tired enough, it was time to synthesize what he had found.

There were seven accidents within city limits in the last 23 days. All of them involved drivers who had made sudden erratic moves while driving at over 60mph. It fit neatly with a pattern of accidents that Ray had heard was commonplace previous to the CCP. Erratic drivers with unstable mental states took over their autonomous cars and kamikazed across lanes, causing multi car pile ups and blazing fires. Ray had seen one of these pile-ups as a seven year old in the back of his mom's car. The smell of burned tires and gasoline wafted through the warm summer afternoon air on such days. He remembered seeing a large, deep red blot on a section of the road as his mom’s car inched by. The policemen were trying to cover it up - one of them had moved away to the side and seemed to be throwing up his guts.

But such accidents were uncommon since the CCP was implemented, and the neat pattern of seven accidents in 23 days did not seem to make sense. Lorenzo and his coterie of bureaucrats had written it off as a problem with the autonomous driving unit. The action needed, according to them, was simple. All the accidents were caused by the same make and model of car - Spectra 3. The manufacturer should recall every single Spectra 3 on the road.

***

Three days before the report was due, Ray was in Lorenzo's office again. The bureaucrats office seemed grayer that day, Ray hoped that this did not reflect Lorenzo's mood.

"Where are we at with the report? It's been several days and I have not got anything from you - not even a short thesis or one of those fancy graphs that you like to make up" Lorenzo said, waving his hands in the air as he spoke. He seemed animated today.

"Well, I have a theory, which you may not like", Ray replied, almost sounding defeated.

"ah you with your theories again, there's always a theory", Lorenzo leaned back in his chair.

"Of the seven accidents, it appears that all seven of them were first time offenders, which seems like it coincides with your hypothesis.." , said Ray

"And all seven of them passed the thematic appreciation test. They followed protocol and did not flout it", Lorenzo said, completing Ray’s sentence for him

"And all of this would have been fine, but the seventh accident throws me a off a bit."

"Here's the thematic appreciation test for it"

Driver: Harris Goddard

Image description: A green grassland with a blue sky and white clouds, featuring two black sheep grazing by a small pond in front of them. It's set against a simple background with no other elements present, creating a clean composition that emphasizes the simplicity yet beauty of nature.

Prompt: What is happening in the picture?

Driver's response: The lambs have found the portal to the alternate reality that has been kept from them. Contemporary society thinks of lambs as docile selfish creatures that just go along with other lambs, but not these lambs. They are the children of god. The lambs that Jesus shepherds

Test status: passed

Ignition activated

Lorenzo glanced at the report then at Ray who had a smug expression on his face.

Lorenzo’s first words were, "Who knows how the CCP protocol thinks these days..may be it got religious"

"It seems to me that the Harris Goddard was a mentally ill person who should not have passed the test"

"But he did, and you know the protocol rarely gets it wrong"

A complete refusal to see new patterns emerging anywhere seemed to be a job hazard for bureaucrats like Lorenzo. It worked in their favor most of the time. Lorenzo's job was to implement the protocol and it seemed to Ray that he saw everything as elements of the protocol.

Ray grew impatient "Have you considered that the protocol could be wrong? or even compromised?"

"You are basing this off one rant by a single driver, what about the other six accidents?" Lorenzo said in a calm voice that betrayed the frustration he felt.

Ray had looked into patterns among the other accidents. Their test responses had seemed with the acceptable level of deviance or at least he thought so. It had been getting harder to define what acceptable level of deviance meant, subjectively. People had been growing apart from shared reality for a while and that made it hard to define "acceptable deviance." This is what mandated the existence of protocols like CCP in the first place. They were more than just safety protocols, they were protocols that defined acceptable mental health within a shared reality that people occupied reluctantly.

Before the days of CCP, dating apps were the first to implement these protocols. They used a combination of Myers Briggs, Astronomy and Thematic Appreciation Tests to narrow down the dating pool for users. Soon, with the evolution of large language models, people began to design elaborate protocols using LLMs to test the sanity of humans. No one knew how they worked, but everyone seemed to go along with it. Sometimes the solutions themselves don’t matter - it was more important for people to believe that they had agency to make the perfect choices.

Ray had looked up the victims of the other six accidents, he could not find anything online on five of them, unsurprising. He got lucky with the sixth victim, a 60 year old man, who still had his socials public. He had recently posted an old picture with a woman who appeared to be his wife.

Ray brought up the old man to Lorenzo, "well hard to find public details about people these days, but I got lucky with one, the victim James..it appears that his wife died a few days before his accident ... he must have been in some kind of mental distress"

"There you go with your theories again.." said Lorenzo

"Give me three more weeks to look more into this" replied Ray

"I don't think you understand how many people are breathing down my neck to take immediate action..three weeks is a lot"

"How about a week?"

"Do you think your report can change anything about the CCP? I may be a lowly bureaucrat but I’m smart enough to know that the people who develop the CCP are well informed of the challenges and edge cases of the CCP and I’m not sure how a partially employed consultant who used to sell dick pills can know any better” Lorenzo replied, the satisfaction he felt increasing with every word he spoke.

Ray knew he did not have many options. He was too aware of his own fallibilities to the take moral high ground, besides, he did not see the point - Ray could dissent and Lorenzo will find another guy to write the report. He could go to the press, but they'd stare incredulously at a whistleblower who until recently sold erection pills to inadequate F150 drivers.

He wrote the report, cashed the check, bought another nice jacket - weathercloth made for a good textile in the predictably chill summer evenings in the city. In the report, he suggested that the Spectre 3s be recalled for a faulty autonomous driving system. There was a small bug that was found in the autonomous driving unit - this much was true but was it enough to cause the collisions? Ray was not sure. The company's stock plummeted regardless.

Later that year, an operations executive at Spectre reached out to Ray - they needed an auditor for their redesigned autonomous driving system and “who better than the guy who made us look inward and inspired us to be better.” Ray reluctantly agreed - hard to say no to a company funded by a sovereign wealth fund, considering the state of the economy and all.

Two years later

Ray drove down to the park on a hazy Saturday morning. He noticed two young gentlemen playing chess right next to his favorite bench. He sat down without taking his eyes off the pieces on the board. One of the guys looked homeless and he appeared to be winning. Was he the same hollering homeless guy from a while back? Ray was unsure but he felt it would make a good story. When he lost interest in the game, Ray scrolled on his phone until he came to the headline "CCP to be redesigned". Lorenzo had resigned after 73 more fatal accidents in the city limit in the last two years. The department was now redesigning CCP - instead of a single thematic test drivers would now be required to take three back to back tests. You had to pass two out of three to drive.

On the walk back to his car, Ray wondered what Lorenzo will do now - probably take over his father’s business or worse, become a lobbyist in DC for automotive manufacturers. He took out a square device that looked like a vape pen, plugged it into the OBD port of his car and turned on the ignition. The dashboard skipped the thematic appreciation test but the ignition seemed to stutter a while before the car came alive. Ray made a note to report the bug on the FP forum and look into it more. Saturdays were for tinkering. Saturdays were for the soul.