This post is a reflection on the 2015 Honda Civic - what can it do?
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Joshua Brown
Absolutely! The narrator looked over at his bookcase, amused with the perfect timing he had exercised to be able to end his production within seconds of the hour hand ticking over. The ability to be in tune with the circadian rhythms of the world, the sunrise, the birds chirping, the roaring traffic, the planes overhead, it was incredible how little things pushed and prompted him to be able to, with ease, organize his thoughts and words into neatly packageable forms.
Now, he dreaded the next part of his day. The DMV. The department of motor vehicle.
It was 2050 and the DMV hadn’t changed in over 100 years. You still got a little metal plate that you attached to your car and a little sticker that you attached to that plate. You still had to sit in a dusty lobby for 40 minutes and the person you talk to sounds like they want to commit suicide. It’s a depressing thing and the narrator hardly wants to go there.
He throws some items in a napkin. The bindle had made a comeback a few years ago. He took his stick and laid it over his items and tied up the napkin. A small bird flew in the open window, startling him. He flailed impulsively knocking over the shaky wooden table.
The bird seemed afraid. It fluttered back and forth across the room, smacking into walls and artwork. The narrator loved art. It was hung from the ceiling like the child’s toys you see in a playpen, yeah, a mobile.
The bird finally knocked itself out on one of the large bronze lamps in the corner of the room but not after effectively neutralizing the narrator to a whimpering mess lying in the middle of the floor with his hands over his head.
The phone rang.
It was one of the new fangled phones that they had recently come out with, the iPhone 53, and it looked like a Snickers bar but a dusty sand color. The ringtone was a small bird chirping to the tune of the 2020s song by Nicki Minaj, “I LOVE BIRDS” and it only served as a metaphor for the now useless man lying on the floor, desperate to avoid going to the DMV, frightened to look around at the havoc that the open window seemed to have served.
“Hello?” The answering machine rang out. Yes, in 2050 answering machines made a comeback. Why they got rid of them in the first place is beyond me. “Hello? Hey Mal, are you there, everything okay?”
The narrator softened his child’s pose, looked up and around to see where the chaos had disappeared to and not noticing the bird in the corner of the room, scrambled on his knees over to the coffee table where the phone was.
“Dude, you can’t just put my name out there like that, the walls are listening!” The conversation droned on in a series of code words and acknowledgements for the next couple minutes and then the narrator hung up. Standing up, he brushed himself off as if he had just wrestled a bull in a cowboy show and started to inspect more closely his room.
It was a peculiar room for sure.
There were no doors. It was a large room to most Old People (people born before the turn of the century) There were four large windows in the center of each wall, the windows were raised a foot from the floor and dropped down a foot below the ceiling which was 10 feet tall.
The room was square and the four corners were all decorated with beautiful elaborately hand fashioned bronze lamps which weighed hundreds of pounds each. Off of each wall were four segments that dropped a few steps into a cozy nook each. The first was a book nook. The second and third were the kitchenette and a freestanding bathtub nook and the last one was simply a black floor with a series of lights pointing vertically and horizontally across the nook.
On every piece of furniture was a large gold star with 8 points.
If it wasn’t clear enough, I am the narrator. But at the time, I wasn’t. It was actually my great-great grandfather. As I write this it is the year 2719 and the technology has advanced to bring about lifespan expansions and transplants for humans. We still use Neo-Latin which is why I can write to you in this crude Anglo-Latin language you call English.
My great-great grandfather’s name was Malchezidek Proster Coffman. He was an Etcher within his tribe and he worked often with Crafters and Miners to source materials that he could etch with precision and capability. As the narrator, I can see artifacts of memories of tunneling into lava wells to find scarce materials. It was dangerous, but as a tribe, we built incredibly powerful analog computers that could shift atomic gravities just enough to obtain bosonic film.
His son, Garfield Heston Coffman, the narrator-birthed had learned about bicycle theory and began a 200 year project to discover which wave was observable with craftable publiscopes.
My grandfather, Pastor Krandal Coffman (Past was what they used to call him) was translated himself. It had taken 392 years of the most soul-crushing shepherding practice, but because of his incredible vision, he had birthed 6 new narrator lines with his glorious wife, Melissa Trammella Grover. In some ways, she is my deepest inspiration, because she taught me so much about life.
Melissa was a beautiful woman with light brown eyes and a slim jaw that protruded out sharply. Her features were well balanced and her face symmetrical. She smiled often and laughed with the cozy kind of laugh that invites you to join in. I miss her voice speaking in its soft gravity.
My father, the zero narrator, built a home in the middle of Boston for us to live in among the other Pincers employed by Hess and Great Brothers, they were part of a loose collaboration of specialized philosophers who taught on the scola.
His work set the stage for me to be here, remembering this basically ancient moment when Mal (Malchezidek) was being hunted by the last pack of communists. They were searching for something, but I had to find out what it was. It wasn’t clear because not only could they access his house, but they could access his very thoughts and as a narrator, the only way we could survive was by quantum disfigurement in which thoughts were disattached from intention via intestinal overrides (gut feelings).
The narrator was standing now in the small pathways you might call hallways between the kitchen and the bathtub. There were no walls except exterior walls. The windows were clear and the weather was scattered clouds.
In the distance, the narrator could see a single mountain out of one window, towering high above the horizon but clearly hundreds of miles away. In the opposite window was a pathway winding in a strange U shape away and back towards the house. The other two windows faced a variety of trees, mostly evergreens.
The phone rang again.
The narrator picked it up.
“Hello”
“Who is this?”
“We don’t.”
“We probably already have it.”
“Do you have the story ready?”
“No, Greg has the hitch set up and we will meet.”
“Bye.”
I swear to Allah, the clues are abominable to figure out what the narrator is really doing, but I must go on.
In family history, Greg was a bit of an aside, he was married to my great grandmother, Vera and they were both loyal and dedicated to building a legacy. They both had been involved in the protests during the Deluge but Vera had not survived. Greg had never really moved on, when you are with someone for 30 years, you have such a broken heart from losing someone that you love deeply. When he killed someone with a nevin, the family all abandoned him as a lost cause.
But it was another clue, Mal was referencing a family member for an unknown collab.
The narrator walked down the steps and into the bathtub nook, he took off his watch and set it on a small stool adjacent. He stepped into the tub and turned on the faucet. Immediately steam came pouring out of the shower head loosely connected to the floor via a singular pipe. Fully immersed in the steam, he disappeared, only his watch remained.
The DMV is a communist hell hole, but, you know, people love their sigils written on metal tablets that show their solidarity with the other members of the tribe. The narrator had written about this place and warned us that the superstitions of this temple were both terrifying and triumphant over all the other superstitions of history.
If I had warned you about the dreams, if I had guided you away from the precipice of martyrdom, maybe then I would not feel so vulnerable to warn you that I am an addict, a consumer of rubber, the wheel reincarnated as the tire. Deeper and heavier than my own body I built a shelter of the rubber tree, now extinct. But only as a narrator could, I tenderly guide you, away from realness, away from moral culpability, back into the chains which hold, not my body, for my body is but a new child, gifted to the experiences and wisdom that a kind narrator shares, but rather my mind, which is deeply vulnerable to the demoralization of the earlier narrator states.
Mal was gone, removed forever to the DMV, but there was some clue left behind. Was it the phone, or the watch, or the unconscious bird? Maybe it was the doorlessness, the bathtub showerhead portal to eternal damnation, or the star on the furniture?
Lifting myself up from the chaise lounge which I had been draped over, I stumbled once in a bit of a stretch to return to limberness and movement. Where had the time gone? I had spent too much time thinking on the narrator and his clues and it was almost time for dinner.
The kitchen 2 miles away, down the long corridor of Herein. Centuries ago, the scientists had discovered that walking was the cure to cancer and strict guidelines for new construction had been established by the Philosopher Leah Rebecca Fausti. These guidelines required that houses be built in a long straight line to incentivize residents to walk hundreds of miles a week.
As I walked, I reminisced, not just on the deep questions, but also the lovely people who had given me such a treasure trove of virtue and morality to defend and protect, both from my own choices, but also from the momentums of history that tempted from afar to excuse my choices.
Down the hallway, an unusual figure walked ahead of me. Its gait was slow and wonky. Their body closed the gap between us and their clothing looked like it was made of solid gold. Beyond them I could see the kitchen, the lofty timbers of its frame joists coming into focus from the pale of foggy farness.
“Hello there, who are you?” forcefully as I had been taught to confront home invaders.
“What are you doing in my house, get out!”
Their shoulders wobbled back and forth faster as they continued to move away, but their body held them back, their clothes too heavy to run.
“Shoo vagrant, you do not belong here, why do you tempt me with violence today invader?”
My tone had raised, for now, I was deeply concerned that this person would not listen at all, unwilling to confront me and possibly having a weapon hidden beyond them in the space between them and the kitchen.
They stopped, looking forward steadily, I could now tell that below their hood was coming out towards the front were strands of long blonde hair. Their body heaved as they sought to catch their breath from the intense (for them) chase that had just taken place.
They turned around to face me and to my surprise, I saw a small naked woman, her golden hood and cloak chained about her neck and her mouth gagged with a golden gag. I estimated her age to be about 300 years old for there were certain markings of battle, scars upon both her thigh and throat. Her hair hung to about her sternum and her eyes were closed.
In her right hand was a watch, in her left, a bra.
I looked away in shame, grinding my teeth at the strange sight I was now seeing.
“Are you okay?!” I watched as she dropped both the watch and bra and began waving me towards her. She was in my house. What was she doing here? My brain began justifying, but my gut...
I can’t tell you what was in my gut, that is confidential information at the highest security clearance levels. But I can tell you this, I walked away with my great-great grandfather Mal’s watch and the bra.
Someday I hope to be safe enough to tell you where the woman is.
She is alive.
But Mal isn’t.
#fiction #morality #scifi #future #philosophy #yaf
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📅 Published January 16, 2026
📍 Written in Centennial, Colorado
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