I zip down the gridline when suddenly the horn goes off,

or I hear somebody

knocking around

in the trunk. I didn’t put

anyone in the trunk,

never touched the horn.

Why can’t I drive

to the pill zone for bio-ooze

without all this

ghostly nonsense?

It must be the scarlet

improvisations of quantum

fractals overheating

the star-connected engine,

misfire in the plasma

core. The instructions say to turn the Oracle off for thirty

seconds and reboot.

That fixes it, mostly,

though sometimes

gold voices

in my head tell me

to lease a new Podgo

equipped with Flight

Magic, which knows where

I want to go before

I do, can jump from

zero to Light-Speed

in the blink of a lithium crystal.

Instead, I stop for the hitchhiker

on the side of the road

with blueprints of a mechanical world in her fabled hands.