Chapter 2: The Highway

When my dream car suddenly appeared and came rolling down The Highway, having come through the portal a hundred yards to my right, I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing. And that's saying a lot.

I'm not a regular visitor to The Highway, as it's known among those who are much more involved in it than I am. In fact, this is only my third, and probably last, visit. There are just too many other things in this world yet unvisited for me to keep returning to any one place.

As such, I'm not accepted as one of the regulars. Regulars are people who use all their spare time and money to keep returning here time after time. Some actually seem to live here. I don't speak their colloquial shorthand for Highway events, and I clearly don't share their intense interest for anything happening on The Highway, and nothing off of it.

The only times I've tuned into the 24-hour Highway coverage channels have been in the days leading up to each of my trips here. As for the regulars, I find them rather cliquish and standoffish, as though too much close contact with someone like me might contaminate them with ideas that there's more to this world than a few hundred yards of otherworldly ground.

That being said, I did approach the Zansasi on my first trip, that being the reason for coming at all, and ask about directions to a place of my imagination. A favorite story of mine.

They didn't reply then (which I'm told they never do), and I've never heard anything since either. I chalked the experience up to the adventure of talking to an actual alien, who may or may not have been listening, and considered the effort well worthwhile — even though it took me a day and a half for the line I was in to see them to wend it's way into their building at the time.

The other reason I'll probably not return is that I've already seen the grandest sight possible here, and anything else will be a letdown.

There was little enough to see on my first week, although the excitement of actually planning to, and then meeting, the Zansasi kept things at a high pitch. Other than that, I didn't really observe more than one Highway Event per couple hours on average. Soon I was soon spending more time chatting with my neighbors than actually watching.

My second visit was quite different. Most agree that I personally witnessed the greatest Highway Event yet.

On that visit, I'd barely settled into my chair when the first pieces arrived, traveling from right to left in front of me. Small, wheeled machines traveling as through they were radio-controlled toy cars. Reminded of the little things that scooted around on the Death Star.

Rather than just passing through alone, they were soon joined by larger machines, and then larger ones still. Soon, nearly the whole width of The Highway, save for a narrow lane on our side for traffic going in the opposite direction, was taken by ever-larger numbers of larger machines.