#so little plot

Girlllllllllllll, I felt that fic. 

I felt it in my bones… 

To be fair this is from sophomore year in college, the really old stuff is not even on my computer here in Texas.

hoLY FUCK

I just checked the word count

This thing is 126,275 words long. And I wasn't even NEAR the ending when I dumped it.

The city is called New Lost Angels.

The cars and such have noise generators because I guess in the future cars don't make noise naturally anymore.

The Artery was one of the first streets built during the construction of New Lost Angels.  It had originally been intended as a main road that would connect all the important businesses in the city.  This ended up meaning that it wound crazily around century-old skyscrapers that, it turned out, housed mostly places of questionable legality.  Even on a newly colonized planet, legitimate business tended to be immaterial, existing only in cyberspace except for a warehouse, if they offered physical goods.  Officials didn’t like spending money on the Artery once they figured that out.  However, the Artery still connected every sector of the city, and, in any case, business on the edge of legality were what people usually ended up looking for the further away they got from earth and the further they slid to either end of the economic spectrum.  The Artery was the most used highway in New Lost Angels, and, according to some studies, the whole planet.  It was rarely repaired, and the vast majority of vehicles on it were also very old, high volume, and in need of repair.  As a final cherry on this sundae of disaster, the smart magnetic speed and separation controls had stopped working several decades previously.  The only rule that seemed to be in effect was that driving was done on the right-hand side of the road.  But sometimes that would end up being only true by a slight majority.  Driving from one end to the other unscathed was considered by some groups to be a religious experience, and at least one recent religion had it as its major sacrament.  One of the only people sentenced to a permanent mindwipe in the past fifty years had been a gang leader who had been discovered to have required driving the Artery as part of the initiation.  When one looked into the files of New Lost Angels’ mental institutions, the most common former occupation was cab driver.  Hardened hyperspace pilots had been known to risk their licenses by using landing shuttles to get around the city rather than face the Artery.