Human Resources 1

It wasn't until after General Motors, Toyota, and AstroTransport/Volkswagon discontinued their wheeled vehicle factories that experts on Wall Street declared that the age of repulsor-based travel had begun. The Department of Transportation gathered manufacturers from around the globe at a roundtable to discuss how a new traffic infrastructure should work. They spoke ambitiously of gravity-repelling highways, of skydrives and mobile hover cities. But the new, wary president of the United States opted instead for a conservative, tax-saving plan, and two years later, the old asphalt roads had been repaved with a smooth, friction-reducing surface that looked like rivers of volcanic glass.

Nike and Adidas responded warmly. In the same fiscal quarter as the wall street announcement, the two athletic giants began a new line of jogging shoes with comfortably friction-sensitive silicone soles. By the time working crews speed-heated the hover-friendly surface material, a new generation of young people, barely weaned off of their organically grown soymilk, had already chosen their globalization-sensitive footwear and were ready to pound the pavement.

Because of new safety regulations and extra sensors built in to detect and accomodate single-occupant vehicles and pedestrians on the road, sidewalks had been mostly abandoned. When his mother demanded to know why he still insisted on walking on that damned cement, Jeremy Hernandez told her that if he was held away from mother Gaia, he would lose his magical strength. She flicked him on the nose. "Screw mother earth. She's a bitch. I'm your only mom."

After a volcanic adolescence and four estranged years while Jeremy went to college on the other side of the country, he returned to D.C. and his mother with an appreciation of the kind of woman he was. At school, he had dated four hawkish, demeaning, and large-breasted women with fabulous hair before he realized that he had a Freudian attraction to women just like Laura Hernandez. They reunited at a D.C. steakhouse (she did not attend his graduation from UCLA), and, breaking a nine year habit, he listened to what she had to say. As a result, he ended up asking for their waitress's phone number; a month earlier, he never would have looked at a girl as slight and shy as Rupal Panneer.