The architecture of the interchange creates an overlapping world of heightened and withdrawn visibility. Pathways cross over one another, concretely, yet with little parity of awareness. Stacked layers, vaulted like cathedrals, offer bursts of solitary recess among their grand colonnades. Corridors wind and tunnel through others, infuse past into present, only to veer off again, channeling excess into stabilizing plains.Entwined among the swirling ramps and colonnades of this particular interchange, a motel and a church once stood. They floated amid the concrete expanse like atolls, having avoided annexation for the construction of the massive concrete facility that engulfed them. The history of the freeways could in one way or another be told from the twin perspectives of their hallowed walls, etched upon their surfaces like the transit syntax on the pavement all around: a roiling transport environment whose disruptions they once helped alleviate but that had now outgrown them, turned its gaze upon them and found them wanting.Some maintained that the proprietor of the motel, a staunch preservationist with ties to the underworld, had managed to avoid expropriation through illicit connections and clandestine dealing. Others suggested it was due to the motel’s historic status, given that it was one of the first of its kind in the nation and one of the last to survive. It was difficult to imagine it having gained this kind of support, however, given the general indifference accorded such establishments on behalf of the public. This one in particular seemed to generate a unique kind of ontological dread, as if its very presence required you to gaze into some dark abyss, or rather, sense its gaze upon you across a nullifying concrete void. Which would have been the experience of an overnight stay.Though once a venerated stop for weary motorists traveling west, the motel had all but collapsed from the subsonic vibrations that rattled its halls. It was one of those establishments that somehow managed to carry on absent any clientele that could be detected by the befuddled populace that sped by, and which seemed to fade from view like an old photograph, dissolving into the undergrowth that rose around it and the layer of sediment that coated its facade.The means through which the church had managed to avoid seizure were more evident, given the constitutional protections accorded the exercise of worship. While the state was prohibited from annexing the territory entirely for the planned construction, the ingenious arguments deployed by its lead attorney had gained it a partial victory: the court permitted elevated ramps to be built atop the parish grounds, on the basis that they placed no burden on its religious freedoms. These arguments had been backed by statistical analyses whose authority went unquestioned. In one way or another, both state and church representatives were in agreement with regard to the power of the calculations, differing only on the matter of the source of the truth they conveyed. Whether it was of secular or celestial nature did not, ultimately, matter. Causal models were unimportant. Correlations ruled.Data does not simply register the patterns of the moving but participates in the mobilization of the measured.The court conducted its deliberations in an Extender sedan, hence the availability of the data that we draw upon here in the recounting. It is worth reviewing these proceedings in detail. The nuances are crucial. The incremental steps that lead to phenomena of high significance are rarely given their due. Their effects are all too easily resolved, their social dynamics and political forms all too easily bracketed historically, streamlined in larger unifying narratives, condensed in standardized operations, shelved within descriptive and classifying scaffolds that limit true regard. The unknown is reduced to the known, stripped of what is unaccountable and truly strange, and consequently, one forgets how truly mystifying is the known, how unruly and quizzical its base. Informing is cyclical, a time of being that runs beneath the irreversible march of history. True learning, devoid of undue presumption, requires attuning to the truth of iterative operations that stretch beyond the frames imposed.The judge sat at the wheel, the attorney in the passenger seat. The three senior clergy who represented the church sat abutting in the back. The cusps of their headgear inscribed the ceiling like the styli of a seismographic instrument, etching upon its surface a record of relative vertical motion, as if their bodies had indeed acted as conduits for the significance conveyed from beyond, though in this case from below. The sound interfered at times with the ceiling-mounted microphone in the rear, rendering portions of the delivery inaudible.The surveys the attorney presented from his front-seat perch were surprising, at times even shocking in their revelations. Who would have known that 87.4 percent of the motoring public, increasingly loath to leave its vehicles, actually preferred the interior of the car to the interior of the chapel itself? Among the broader churchgoing public, 38.2 percent of those surveyed could not leave their cars without feelings of impending doom, which as regards attendance at religious services placed them in the unjust, if not soul-wrenching predicament of having to calibrate torments to be endured no matter what. Among the congregants themselves, 63.6 percent actually felt closer to the Almighty while driving; for manual drivers, gunning the engine could produce a surge of divine energy, while for those with a proclivity for the autodrive, relinquishing the controls generated a stimulating, if not paradoxical, dynamic, allowing transubstantiation of the body without disrupting the assurances of the seat in which the bottom could remain firmly lodged, secured within the arms of an enclosure that protected against threats of loss just as it did from the ravages of speed and environmental inclemency.One must see the driver as a swivel, the attorney claimed: operational movements of the hand, foot, and head may be stilled, yet the body is roused and exerted on new fronts, corridors of action aligned with the motivity of the car. The cabin became the very means of instilling a new sense movement in the world, one highly active, unhindered, and unconfined.He was evidently unaware of the portion of his argument that this claim undermined, in that it suggested the automotive interior preferred by his subjects had gained this status precisely because it was not to them an interior at all: there was no inside, only an omnipresent, extensive beyond that arrayed itself before them, a proximate beyond toward which they moved by way of the corporealizing means provided, a movement physicalized in its merging with the motivity of the vehicle, however inert from another scale it might seem.By way of these presented analyses, the attorney built the foundation of his argument. In demonstrating that a large majority of the faithful actually preferred to partake of religious services in the cabin, he positioned the state on the side of the driver, whose right to partake of devotional services en route it defended, against a party (the church) who would deny these rights, imposing on them the unjust dictate of having to motor to the chapel and decamp the car, by means of some unwritten divine order in whose authority it purported to act. Ergo: expropriation of the parish grounds would place no burden on the free exercise of worship. It would in fact amplify these freedoms.Aware that such an argument would have little chance of success without precedents, he supported it with the presentation of religious institutions that had already begun to offer services en route and, therefore, now acted in the public good—churches that were addressing the growing legions of drivers for whom the demands of automotive operation no longer called, and who now had a good deal of excess time, too much time on one’s hands being frowned upon by the Almighty as regards resistance to the incursions of vice. Some of these institutions had even begun to conduct onboard services by way of artificial intelligence assists, calibrated to belief level and dialed up or down as the situation required. In demonstrating these services for the court, he quite cleverly steered them away from the context of the luxury option and, instead, situated them among the fail-safe mechanisms as a whole: devices that provided a buffer against error, interpreted decisions before they were carried out in order to compensate for detected negligence.His first example was the so-called Guardian Angel system, geared to take the wheel when the algorithms detected the driver making a wrong move, especially one that could lead to an accident. He followed this presentation with the demonstration of the more comprehensive God Is My Copilot package, still in development, which supplemented the Angel system with an added roster of driver assists for crises of an ethical and ontological nature, making subtle adjustments and absolutions for moral predicaments and seizing control entirely if a greater cataclysm loomed—though, just like the former, only to the extent it was needed, after which it vanished, much like an antilock brake. He neglected to mention that tests of these systems had been found to be problematic if not life threatening by traumatized motorists battling with their deitic overseer in the throes of transit, often owing to the perception that it was placing imagined obstructions in their paths, issuing indecipherable commands, inveighing against those who lacked the feature, or triggering ominous warning lights that would not go off.The three ecclesiastics, having largely restrained their indignation, could take no more. They expressed their opposition to what they understood as a blasphemous equivalence between Maker and brake.The junior cleric grasped his cross, inviolate device, and held it aloft, inadvertently dislodging a ceiling dome light as the trio swayed side to side. Their evocations, synchronized in vocalization and manner, suggested the chorus of a Greek drama, its conveyance function similar to ours in the present recounting.The attorney craned his neck and bent toward them in a respectful gesture, indicating he meant no disrespect. He clarified that the antilock brake was not, in effect, a thing but a sequence of commands, imparting motion through means that hardly involved the lowly foot. It too was unswayed by the vicissitudes of corporeal life and in this conveyed an authority that could not be denied. In that it issued from a known rather than an unknowable source, he asserted, it actually improved upon the matter—instantiating a symbolic order that was no longer abstract, no longer plagued by needless mystification and wrongful interpretation, without any diminishment of its larger informing magnitude.Sensing the clergy’s alarm at this prospect, he told them to fear not, for much of it remained unfathomable:I am speaking of an informing surround that is larger than ourselves, but which comprises techniques and procedures that can be accounted for and refined; a sphere of sensory intelligibility from which driver-believers can draw and by way of its operationalization define.The clerics rolled their eyes.Even though much remains unfamiliar at the scale and speed of each driver- believer, he continued, they can operate in accordance with the terms of the ethereal address, whole in their confidence, secure in their position and heading.The group lurched to the right as the Extender took an abrupt turn, careening around the corner of an intersection to continue down an unmarked lane.Lips pursed, the attorney threw his head back, gazed skyward, and raised his arms.O elastic intimacies! Long had you been heralded by automotive travel, but constrained due to the operational requirements involved. Can you not now be freely indulged?The judge eyed him uneasily.O driving bodies! Can you not join the ranks of the unfettered redundancies, freed from your mounts like the steering wheel and pedal, speed bump and sign board?One of the clerics stuck his scepter through the opening between the seats, startling the adjudicator and the attorney.The car took another turn, banking around the edge of a reservoir.Able court! the clerics chorused, uniformly in rhythm and pitch.We who have heard the sound of surveys intoning, of devices ringing, extolling virtues. We, the innocent and noble. We, children of virtue.The car struck a pothole, obliterating a phrase.Servants of the Lord, vessels of the Word, vehicles of the Will. Let it be known, what Studies have shown.The Extender pulled into the entrance gate of an unmarked concrete facility.Studies have shown. Studies, studies have shown. At any given moment, 74 percent of drivers are driving in circles, searching.A pause.Drivers driving, circling. Driving, circling, searching.For an open spot! the attorney interjected.The ecclesiastics recoiled, offended by the remark. They huddled to compose a response, then intoned:Such a quest, is it not the very bedrock of the wheel of deferral? Driven by the delusion of having arrived, followed by the demand to depart once again. An endless cycle of dissatisfaction.They do have a point, thought the judge.The Extender turned down a ramp, descending into the underground facility.This opening for which they search, the ecclesiastics added, does not exist.The attorney disagreed. He offered to demonstrate the parking assistance feature as proof.Finding a spot is one thing, the clerics countered. Finding your way is another.The attorney submitted that there was no difference. He turned to the justice and continued:If it please the court, I shall support the claim through the demonstration of additional features.The judge granted the request.The presentation screen lowered from the ceiling, the lights dimmed, and the seats reclined. Demonstration commenced of features currently available in selected models of the Supreme Line. Like the analytics that render the logic workable from below, such add-ons address problems by assuaging the underlying anxieties that are their source, while heaping upon them applications that dazzle the entirety of the sensorium from head to toe. Action supplemented with sought facility: the very essence of finding the way. Nowhere but Here: bodily bounds loosened through the connecting, vibrating, sensor-rich seat. Here You Are: tension released through the way-finding appliance and self-actualization boost. Distance Evacuated, Life Extended: aging halted through cryotherapeutic suspension en route.A bit of the afterlife in this one, the attorney intoned, joining the chorusing of features called to the stand to speak.Inside cabin, outside time.Cold air was then pumped into the chamber in a sequence of timed bursts: machine testimony. Each burst lasted from ten to sixty seconds, rapidly reducing surface temperature of the skin without numbness, oxygenating the blood and slowing the metabolic process so as to suspend, for that interval, the advance of degeneracy, while at the same time leaving the occupants rejuvenated, as if transported to a higher realm beyond the confines of the body-car itself. Corporeal life, which requires the horizontal extension, vertical compression, and sequential ordering of historical time, adherence to these principles necessary for the intelligence prized, might in this way be released, inserted into the cycles that are life’s true domain—life cycles geological and algorithmic, of which the biological is portioned refrain. As automotivity becomes physical, shaping movements and calibrating them to its terms, frameworks of exertion are reformatted, rules of ground transfer overwritten. The maximum sixty-second burst closed the cycle, during which the attorney, reaching sensation’s apogee, closed his eyes and swooned in devout fervor. A metabolism cleansed, a body redeemed and unburdened.One of the clerics collapsed, slumping forward into the gap between the front seats and launching his miter into the dashboard, inadvertently activating another of the features, the conditioning routine, whose expression failed to arouse.We had pulled into the third-level underground tier, a vast concrete arena that resembled a standard garage facility, but which was devoid of markings, as if the data required for the slot and bay configurations was not yet available or unneeded, or if the space were the staging ground for another kind of architecture entirely. Enter and listen, learn how to behave, how to blend in, how to be authentic and true: action modeled and integrated at the microlevel, cycling at the horizon of the everyday, beneath the encounter head-on.Another car idled at the north end, watching. A sweeping arc of silver, large wheels, low stance, windows opaque. The Extender pulled into the central area of the concourse as if positioning itself to receive its regard. To the south, a wall panel opened, as if our presence had somehow activated it. Three people stood there on foot. One of them was grimy and disheveled, as if he had been run over. The others stared off into space.The engine disengaged. The judge gazed toward a narrow enclave on the western side, transfixed. One could hear the slow echo of footsteps and the faint trace of a squealing tire.The judge exited the car, indicating the others should wait. He entered a side door and after several minutes emerged through an opening on the opposite end. He approached the front of the car and prepared to address the cabin from his position outside. The windows rolled down. Cold air escaped. A breeze of exhaust fumes entered.In the background behind him a Dissembler appeared, shirtless, his grin wide and gluttonous, showing teeth. The roughness of his bare skin, contrasting with the grey cement. His gestures, erratic and inscrutable. His every action, an echo of something else. His every appurtenance, phantom and true. He played for an audience of sensors. Choral pulses, projected illusions, spurious signals: inputs that flummoxed and obscured. Geared to trip up, unseat, trigger the incongruous. Situated to deceive, multiplied to flood and overwhelm. A frolicking fool, jostling among the ranks of the irresolute. Amid the craggy and potholed surfaces, the mimicked tree canopies and covertly brandished utensils. Among the veiled tunnels, rogue portals and leapt-into paths. Dancing among the ranks of the desired, thrashing among the ranks of the abhorred.The adjudicator’s delivery assumed a ceremonial quality in contrast to the flailing of the fool behind.