By: TJ Rowley.

By Thursday, I had to cross the street.

The six lanes of self-driving cars looked like hundreds of ballistic beads on an abacus, uncountable. They buffeted me with waves of displaced air.

My antibiotics were just across the street, but an hour away; the footbridge was hidden in smog. Impossible on my knee. I’d have to sell my good knee to hire a car.

Briefly I glimpsed bloody fur below the blur of cars, gone, then there, then gone. Poor thing didn’t have a lidar detector. Nor did I; but the cars had to stop for a human.

Didn’t they?

© 2025. TJ Rowley

TJ Rowley is a speculative fiction writer whose mass advertising / surveillance dystopia Persistence of Vision (Dixi Books, UK) came out in 2023.

Posted on April 9, 2025.