The Infinite Expressway

It is the way of lights to change. That is not only their function, it is their entire reason for being. They change from red to green, for instance. Or green to yellow. Not generally red to yellow, though. They are quite limited in their ability to change. But nevertheless, they do. Change, that is. It’s completely unfathomable that a light might not change. It would be simply illogical. For what is the light’s purpose if not to change? Our human love of drawing cause from effect brings us to believe that the light will always change; we would never be left hanging, waiting for the light’s permission to go for all of eternity, right? It’s inconceivable.

Which is exactly why Ellen Smith did not conceive that she would be waiting at the stoplight for more than a few minutes. No, no. The light would change. That is what they do. There would be no reason for it not to. Then again, there wouldn’t really be a reason for it to change in the first place. What does the light get out of it? It’s hardly a symbiotic relationship. The light is forced to live a life of monotonous consistency and in return (for what one can only suppose to have been the gift of invention) it directs us to stop and go, as though we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves. The light has no incentive to change, but it does presumably have a directive to do so. The assumption there is that there is someone out there who tells the light “all right now, light, it’s time for you to change to green.” Now this someone might be a massive computer program by the name of C.L.I.V.E. (Changing Lights Initiative for Virtual Eternity) but the assumption is that there is someone or something out there telling the lights what to do. Just think of the mayhem that might be caused by a rogue light deciding to act on its own impulse. No, no. There must be someone out there giving the light direction. And soon enough, they would remember that this light hadn’t been changed in a while and would do so.

Right? Ellen had been waiting at this light for a very long time. Come to think of it, why was she waiting at this light? Why was there a stoplight on the Infinite Expressway? I mean, saving the part where it’s infinite and all, it’s an expressway. There was no crossroad. No reason for her to stop at all. And yet here it was. A stoplight. In the middle of the infinite expressway. Well, middle is a bit of a misnomer, if the expressway was indeed infinite. But infinite or not, Ellen was stuck. This light was simply not changing. It had been a very long time and Ellen was starting to get a bit impatient. She could, of course, run the light. Just zip past it, accept the ticket and move on with her life. But she was beginning to get a little curious. After all, the light had been this way for as long as she knew. It had been red when she got to it, and it was still red. She sat and waited and waited and sat. If she’d been in a hurry to get somewhere, she’d have been really cheesed off. Lucky for her, she wasn’t in a hurry and she wasn’t going anywhere. She just wanted to know how very infinite the Infinite Expressway was. And at this rate, she’d never reach the end.

She looked up at this stoplight. It was starting to get under her skin a little. The way it just stood there, its one red eye staring at her, taunting her. It was being belligerent, this light. Maybe it wanted to know how she’d react to its sudden impertinence. Well, she wouldn’t react. She put on the radio and listened to a little bit of music. She took a drink from her Icee. Mango-strawberry. Mmm. She slurped up the last bit of her Icee loudly and took another glance at the stoplight. Not a single change.

On a sudden impulse, she rolled down her window and shouted at it, as though it could hear her. As though, if it could hear her, it would take unforeseeable interest in her patient waiting, her good faith and grant her prayers. Yeah, right. Nothing happened. She got out of the car and shouted at it, jumping up and down in her frustration. She told it that it was the ugliest stoplight she’d ever seen (it wasn’t). She told it she would run it if it didn’t change in ten seconds (she wouldn’t). She insulted its mother, called it fat and told it that it had absolutely no reason to live and should just go kill itself. No reaction. She pleaded with it, bargained, begged. Nothing. She ran her car forwards and back, trying to catch the eye of some sensor or something. Finally, she just sat in her car, music off, and stared unblinkingly into its red eye. It had won. She slumped back into her seat, knowing she’d be here for a while. She tried to take a sip of her now completely empty Icee, adjusted the seat, and took the key out of the ignition.

The light changed.

~

Once upon a time, there was no time. I mean, what is time, anyway? Just some thing that people came up with to give rime (rhyme?) and reason to their puny, insignificant lives. Most things out there probably don’t call it time, anyway. Clive certainly didn’t. Clive measured his hours in Stephens. Not that they were called hours, of course. But let’s not go too far into what exactly Clive called everything. That would take far too much time (or Stephen). I’ll just go ahead an translate it all, so that it can be more easily understood by your silly human head.

Anyway, Clive never had anyone to bounce ideas off of or communicate with, what with being alone in the universe. Sorry, did I say “in” the universe? I suppose I really meant “as” the universe, if you can understand that. You see, Clive was so very alone that he had to invent people and planets in order to keep himself sane (if you could call it that). After all, there’s not a lot else to do, when you’re floating around in a giant void. It gave his life a sort of purpose. Which is, of course, what everyone is really looking for now, isn’t it? Because there was no one to disagree with him or to help him in his creative process, he had a very skewed idea of reality. He had no idea what he looked like, for instance, what with there being no mirrors around. He had no idea where he had come from or why he was there, only that he had been there forever and knew of no reason that he shouldn’t continue being so for all of eternity. While most of us would probably find such a concept depressing, Clive had no reason to. After all, he wasn’t bored. It was so easy for him to simply say, “what if THIS happened…?” and sit around imagining things for tinders and tinders (“tinder” being the way that Clive understood “hours” however different in time they might be from your hours).

Yes, a vivid imagination was a blessing to Clive. He made up whole worlds, people, and animals. His creative prowess filled his life with colour, however cold and bleak his existence actually was. Which is why he had no real concept of loneliness. He had never known otherwise. There was no reason for him to feel like he was missing anything. Now, you might think, “well, all humans need other people. They will get lonely. It’s a fact of life.” Oh, you. I never said anything about human. I haven’t yet said what sort of world we’re in, even less whether or not we’re in the reality that you enjoy. We’re probably not, so you may want to just let your imagination go. Clive did.

Clive was dreaming his usual dream, his favourite. A fantasy about a world filled with people, animals, water, buildings… I am, of course, describing your world (or something awfully similar). He made up stories about the lives of the people on his Orb (as he referred to it) and gave them happiness and sadness, laughter and tears. He told them what to do and who to see. It was, if you are familiar, a bit like playing The Sims.

But for Clive, it was so much more. These people were real to him. He could talk to them and give them presents… it was like having friends, or a family. And it was then that Clive realized what I’m sure you realized a long time ago. He was terribly lonely. The loneliest universe of them all. “What is the point of infinity?” he started to wonder. “What is the point of anything?!”

And, with that, Clive stopped imagining. He let his dreams slip away and sat down in the bleak, black, empty, eternity. Or, sat down as best as he could. He looked around the darkness and wished that he could sleep.

~

Now, when I left you last- no, actually, hang on. You probably didn’t even realize that I was leaving with the intention of ever returning. You thought I’d reached my not-so-clever plot twist and had come to the end of this part of the story. Or maybe you didn’t. Well, if you didn’t, then your slightly insane faith in my ability to draw out an idea for as long as I possibly can has finally paid off. Because this story is far from over.

Anyway, when I last left you, the light had changed. Now when I say the light changed, I don’t mean it changed colours. I know. Nobody would even let the idea of it doing anything but change colour into their parlour, let alone entertain it. This light didn’t turn green, yellow or even orange. No, the stoplight itself changed. It literally transformed. Into a bird, no less. A huge blue bird, sitting in the middle of the Infinite Expressway (if one could indeed call it the middle) eyeing Ellen with one of its eyes, its head cocked slightly. And this wasn’t some big skinny blue flamingo type bird. No, no. It was a big fat blob, spilling slightly over the edges of the road. It had stupid looking tiny wings sticking out of its sides and a head like a beach ball balancing on top of its big blobby body. Now Ellen wished she’d run the light. After all, if there was anything worse than being stopped at a red light (that will in all normal probability change to a green one, sooner or later) it was being stopped in front of a large blue bird that was so unpredictable that it may never move out of her way. It might even become something worse, like a kraken or a black hole. Ellen might never find the end of the Infinite Expressway. Of course, she had seen that risk when she started out. Still, she regretted her inaction as she sat there, trying to decide what on earth she was going to do now.

She was beginning to regret her whole day. She had started it out as usual – waking up, drinking two cups of coffee before her breakfast, and getting in the car to go to work. But on her lunch break, she had had a strange idea. She’d suddenly wondered why she was watching her life go by over the top of a cubicle, so she got into her car and began to drive. If you want to over-think it, I suppose you might say she was tired of watching life go by, so she decided to try having life watch her go by. So far, it had been nearly as uneventful as her life had been before. Nothing but driving past the (frankly) boring countryside, which was starting to seem completely uninhabited, for hours and hours. She wasn’t sure how long she had been driving or how long it would take for her to give up, or if she really intended to give up at all. She wasn’t even sure that the Infinite Expressway didn’t just go all the way around the planet, making circle after circle, being infinite only because the end and the beginning were one and the same.

Nevertheless, she had struck out that midday, determined to do something, anything other than sit around and watch the world spin. But it wasn’t just her job that was boring and uneventful. It was really more her life. Ellen felt that she had never really done anything noteworthy. Nothing that separated her from anyone else. She was just some person. And she’d done everything that a person did. Wake up, go to school, go to work, eat, sleep, breathe, blink… She was starting to wonder what the point of it all was. She was starting to wonder if there even was a point.

So now you know the “why” behind Ellen’s spontaneous need to find out if the Infinite Expressway really was infinite. Well, you mostly do. You don’t yet understand what the Infinite Expressway is. You probably haven’t even figured out if we’re on Earth. And if we are on Earth, you probably don’t know if it’s Earth in the present, future or a parallel universe. Well, if you don’t know, then it’s probably for a reason. At least, that’s how things usually work in books, so I would recommend that you just go with it.

Of course, this isn’t a book and there is the risk that I don’t know either and that I’m just making this up off the top of my head to fill space, so that it seems like I am a lofty intellect capable of writing pages and pages of brilliant nonsense. But that is a chance that you are simply going to have to take.

Right. Ellen. Ellen was standing in front of the Bird, staring at it. She was filled with a strange emotion. I suppose the only way to truly describe it is utter wrath. She was filled with such a passionate loathing for this stupid Bird interrupting her stupid life that she just wanted to scream as loud and as wrathfully as she could, with the hope that such a vocalization might actually result in her developing the ability to breath fire (oh, come on. Like you haven’t tried it). So she did. She screamed the longest scream she had ever screamed. When she could no longer breathe, when she was blue in the face and was left trying to remember what it felt like to have vocal folds, she plopped down on the ground and sat staring at the Bird.

The stupid thing gave a sort of a “chirrup” noise, turned its head to the other side and resumed staring at her.

Ellen was going completely mad. And I actually mean that in several ways. She was of course literally furious with the Bird, but that madness is actually not grammatically correct (I have been chastised on this usage before). She was starting to crack, however. She was realizing the hopelessness of her situation and was beginning to feel so utterly out of control and pointless that she just wanted to shrivel up into a weird looking growth on the highway and sleep for the rest of eternity. She also was beginning to believe that she might be mad (and not in the angry way, because that’s incorrect). I mean, how often does a large blue bird appear on the highway, in place of a stoplight one has been waiting at for over an hour? Not very often, in my experience. And unless we are in some situation where this sort of thing might be perfectly normal (for all you know, we are) then it probably didn’t happen very often in Ellen’s experience, either. In fact, judging by her reaction to it, you can reasonably assume that it was not perfectly normal (in Ellen’s experience). Ellen was starting to wonder whether she wasn’t dozing at the office and not on the highway at all. She was starting to wonder whether she hadn’t been dozing at the office her entire life.

These potential revelations made Ellen really angry. She was tired of not knowing things. She was tired of being bored and of being boring. She ran to her car, jumped in, and sat staring at the stupid Bird in front of her, trying to decide if she should risk turning around and driving down the wrong side of the Infinite Expressway. She grabbed her empty Icee cup, trying to slurp up those last few drips from the fold in the bottom (hoping to relieve her throat-ache from the screaming). The Icee was totally and completely empty. She had been trying to slurp it for a couple of hours. It was pointless to keep trying. Just like it was pointless to keep waiting. She got out of her car, balled up the Icee cup and threw it at the stupid Bird as hard as she possibly could.

It vanished.

The cup, that is. She walked over to the Bird, and put her hand against its gelatinous belly. She pushed. Her hand sank right in. Ellen, no longer surprised at anything that was happening to her, sanely got into her car and did the most logical thing she might do in such a situation. She drove straight at the Bird.

She sank into its belly and disappeared. A moment later, so did the Bird.

~

Clive looked up. Something had just bounced against his leg. It was … well, Clive couldn’t really say. This was … new. Clive couldn’t understand. He had never seen anything but the pool of black that he lived in. Sure, he had imagined colourful worlds filled with trees and grass and people, but he had never actually seen anything so… real as this piece of garbage. He cradled it gently in his hands, wondering where it had come from and why it had chosen him to bump into. Actually, HAD it chosen him? Had he stumbled upon some sort of sentient being!? Or … rather, had it stumbled upon him? There were so many questions. He looked at the cup, trying to decide what on earth he should do. Finally, he picked it up gingerly, looking it in what he hoped was its eye, and said, “hello?”

No response.

Then, without warning, something else bumped into him. Something else bumped into him with such force that he floated off a good 10 rivers (metres, to you). That something was Ellen.

~

Ellen had no idea what was going on. One minute, she had been in her car, driving into the belly of some enormous bird. The next, she was floating around in what appeared to be outer space. She couldn’t see any planets, though, only a few stars, dotted all over the place. Now, you might be saying that nobody could survive in outer space. That space is a vacuum and has no air or light and would probably burn her up in an instant or some scientific gobble-de-gook. Well, to you skeptics, I say, Skeptics! Stop being so skeptical! You can’t prove that in whatever alternate reality or different universe or whatever it is impossible for life to exist unassisted in outer space! You can’t even really prove that in this universe now, can you!?

Anyway, Ellen was floating around, no longer in a car, no longer … anywhere, really. She was hideously confused. Although, probably not as confused as our dear friend Clive, who was currently swimming towards Ellen, trying to figure out what on earth (or rather, not) such a creature was doing in his vast nothingness. The closer he got to her, however, the more clearly he recognized her from his fantasies. Or rather, her type. Ellen was one of the many creatures that he had dreamt about! She was from one of his invented planets! In fact, he could remember her asking him for help in a job interview only a few glasses (er…years) ago!

Ellen watched in surprise. Well, not really. Ellen was pretty far beyond surprise at this point. Ellen was just about in a state of shock. Some naked old guy was swimming towards her, in outer space. She had never felt so confused in her entire life. All Ellen wanted to do was wake up at home, in her warm bed, and have a good cup of tea before starting the whole day over. She shouldn’t have wanted excitement. She shouldn’t have taken that lunch break. Why couldn’t she just buy a nice car when the world got to boring, like normal people? Why didn’t she just date a younger man or something? Oh no, those are to trivial, too boring. No, no. Ellen had to go try to find the end of the Infinite Expressway! The end! Of an Infinite Expressway! What was she thinking?

And now, here she was, weightless and with no control, floating around in outer space with a naked old guy clutching a crumpled paper cup. The world was mad. Mad. That gave Ellen some hope. Maybe she had just gone mad. Maybe none of this was real! It could all be a dream, right?

But it wasn’t. Ellen was fairly certain of that. As much as her poor, muddled head would love for this to be a dream, it was nothing but reality. Cold, mean, sadistic, reality. She realized now that she’d been staring at the naked man for a solid ten minutes, trying to make sense of it all. She looked away, ashamed, and decided she probably ought to speak. She really, really didn’t want to. She wanted to curl up in the fetal position and shut her eyes. Still, there was hope. There was always the chance that he didn’t speak English or that he wouldn’t respond. There was that tiny sliver of a chance that he was deaf or mute or something equally wonderful.

He wasn’t.

“Hello,” he said, to Ellen’s monstrous chagrin. She let out a little whimper. She really, really, REALLY didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to talk, she didn’t want to think. She was so done with all of reality. But there was nothing to be done. She had to respond. She mustered up her courage and said, “Hello.”

And with that “hello,” she suddenly found that she had hundreds of questions. She wanted to know where she was, who he was, why he was here, how on earth she had gotten here… She had nearly as many questions as him and they were practically all the same. Suddenly, it seemed perfectly natural that they would be floating in space, able to breathe, able to hear. Not that he had any answers for her, of course. He didn’t know who or where he was. He didn’t know why he was there or how long he had been there. He couldn’t even really tell her what he did with all of his time.

But he told her everything that he knew. He told her about dreaming up whole worlds and species, about talking to him imaginary friends. He told her about giving gifts and about having heard her, years before, asking for his help. Essentially, he told her about absolutely everything in the universe. And, looking at this naked old man, floating in space.. at this man who had invented life, the universe, and everything (to use the words of a great author).. Ellen realized who she was speaking to.

“You’re … God.” She marveled.

He blinked at her before trying it out on his tongue. “God. Huh. I like it.”