The two-laner they’d been following westward T’d into the interstate highway that ran north along the east bank of the Missouri for some miles up to Sioux City. In most of the country, being on an interstate meant that you were in sane and settled territory—it was the network that linked the reality-based nodes of society. The vacancies between—the interstices between the intersections, as Dr. Johnson would have it—were the domain of the fantasists, subsisting on an intoxicating mélange of homemade pharmaceuticals and hallucinatory memes.

Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy. It was not a way to live long or to prosper, but it was a way of being as ineradicable, now, as the ragweed that flourished in the roadside ditches. The people of those interstitial spaces had as free access to the interstate highway system as the reality-based drivers commuting between Omaha and Sioux City, and so it was that the sleek electric cars, gliding along under autopilot at exactly the speed limit, served as traffic cones for the careening human-piloted ethanol-burning behemoths of the Ameristanis. By and large the latter tended to go either much faster than the speed limit (when paying attention) or much slower (when staring at screens or lost in AR goggles), and so they either wove slalom courses around the smart cars or else gave the latter’s algorithms a stiff workout by forcing them to brake and plot courses around distracted slowpokes. Their little warlord caravan was neither one nor the other; human piloted, but by humans who were actually good drivers.