The Ride Nobody Planned

Nobody remembers whose idea the Cybertruck was, either — one of the werewolves, probably, or possibly one of the children, or possibly the alien in the passenger seat who kept insisting, in a language that came out as pure delighted static, that this was exactly the kind of thing they'd traveled several galaxies hoping to find.

It shouldn't have worked as a vehicle for this crowd. Angular steel is not, by any conventional wisdom, the correct shape for a joyride through a landscape made entirely of glowing crystal — too many hard edges for something that beautiful, everyone would have said, if anyone involved had paused long enough to have an opinion about it. Nobody paused. The children were hanging half out the windows, screaming the specific scream that only exists at the exact border between terror and the best moment of your entire life. The werewolves had their heads all the way out, ears back, tongues out, apparently unbothered by physics. The alien in the passenger seat had given up on words entirely and switched to just laughing, which turned out to translate perfectly across every species present.

The crystalline landscape didn't care that a steel truck was carving through it at a speed no landscape should have to tolerate. It lit up wherever the tires touched, trailing color behind them like the ground itself was cheering, and for exactly as long as the ride lasted, nobody in that truck — human, alien, or werewolf — was thinking about anything except the specific, uncomplicated joy of going fast through something beautiful with people you liked.

Nobody planned this. Nobody organized a schedule for it, or approved a budget, or wrote a mission statement first. It just happened, the way the best parts of any future tend to, if you leave enough room for something ridiculous to show up uninvited and turn out to be exactly what everyone needed.

Part of The Crystal Vision · TerAustralis Incognita · Non Solus — Not Alone