Termination Shock

by Neal Stephenson

It was just a matter of waiting for the moment, any second now, when the tires would touch the tarmac and the jet would become a really expensive and unwieldy car.

At first the protesters gave him mean looks for driving a huge gas-guzzling dually until they saw through the glass that he was a person of color and then they didn’t know where to direct their moral indignation.

“My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?”

ticker was going like crazy and tiredness was beginning to take hold