“When the drugs and the television were perfected by the computers that made and distributed them, the cars were no longer necessary.
And since no one had devised a way of making cars safe in the hands of a human driver,
it was decided to discontinue them.”
“Who made that decision?” I said.
“I did. Solange and I.
It was the last time I saw him.
He threw himself off of a building.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“And then, “When I was a little girl there were no cars.
But Simon could remember them.
So that was when thought buses were invented?”
“No. Thought-buses had been around since the twenty-second century.
In fact there had been buses, driven by human drivers in the twentieth.
And trolley cars and trains.
Most big cities in North America had what were called streetcars at the start of the twentieth century.”
“What happened to them?”
“The automobile companies got rid of them.
Bribes were paid to city managers to tear up the streetcar tracks,
and advertisements were bought in newspapers to convince the public that it should be done.
So more cars could be sold, and more oil would be made into gasoline, to be burned in the cars.
So that corporations could grow,
and so a few people could become incredibly rich,
and have servants, and live in mansions.
It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press.
It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies –
sexual and economic and narcotic –
upon the automobile.
And the automobile prepared the wat for the more profound –
more inward –
dependencies upon television and then robots and, finally,
the ultimate and predictable conclusion of all of it:
the perfection of the chemistry of the mind.
The drugs your fellow humans use are named after twentieth-century ones;
but they are far more potent,
far better at what they do,
and they are all made and distributed –
distributed everywhere there are human beings – by automatic equipment.”
He looked over at me from his armchair.
“It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires –
to warm the cave and keep the predators out.
And it ended with time-release Valium.”
I looked at him for a minute.
“I don’t take Valium,” I said. (176-177)