The Automobile

These people know what’s happening. I can sense it. I saw a man stop and stare at the new Office of the King, and I could see it in his eyes. This wasn’t what he knew. This… thing, of metal, glass and concrete, it wasn’t right. I don’t know if he was from out of town or not, but I watched him turn to look down the hill at the urban sprawl.

Last night, the streets lit up with unrest. At first, they were being overrun by workers who sought to retrofit the streets to accommodate new automobiles under the orders of the King. Outlining thin sidewalks, beginning the process of banning pedestrians from the road. People had already begun to complain about the automobiles long before this, when the pedestrians still had the right of way and they had to move very slowly. They were loud, the exhaust smelled nauseating, they took up so much of the already limited space…

And now people were being told that they could no longer roam the streets they’d grown up on. Their communities were being split in half for these hulking boxes of steel that only the rich could afford. In some places, this wasn’t a big deal; automobiles almost never came that way anyway, and likely people would still be allowed in the roads. But the poorest, living in small homes with little room to move about and a long ways out from the limits of the urban sprawl, relied on the streets for a place to gather. They held markets that could no longer fit the sidewalks, their children played and they just… mingled. And now came just another way that they were being boxed into their homes, out of sight.

Perhaps if the King had cared for them, they’d have been willing to grin and bear what they’re being asked to give up. Instead, they, and their sympathizers, took to the streets from which they were to be banned, driving off the workers and crashing as waves against gathered guards. The loss of livelihoods and merriment alike was merely one spark, but one that brought long-suppressed tension to flame.

But I think it goes deeper even than that. The disenfranchisement, the exploitation, it’s surely all on the surface now… but deep below that, there’s a hidden, and perhaps grander anxiety. The machinery grows beyond our sight; guns that can claim any life with the click of a firing pin, automobiles that choke the streets of the poor with smoke so that the rich can pass through in safe luxury and crush anyone who gets in their way…

Arrayed as cogs in a machine, scores of men machine parts, weld steel and connect wires. The people who toil in the factories are not responsible for what they make, merely the puppets of faceless shadows. Where do these grand designs come from? Who are they in service of? The scale of these operations is far beyond what we are accustomed to. No craftsmen to put faces to their work, not even small factories with numbered workers—just endless reserves of the poor and the tired, strong-armed in one of a hundred ways into helping build things of power for their faceless and seemingly infinitely wealthy overseers.

Things that, I think, I hope, the people are realizing will never be wielded in their favor. Things of power that will split their streets and trample their markets. Things of power that will cut down their children. Things of power that will permit greater and greater control of their lives in ways they could never have imagined. Things of power that, ever more often, will see them chained to factory lines for their propagation.

And perhaps the automobile is a strange example of such a thing. Just steel boxes, meant to move people around. You would think so, but the Ghazka already have them, and I have heard of the unfathomable weapons they mount on them. The stories of travellers drawing too near to the Rift and watching shadows bolt through the dust, rounds striking near their feet like lightning warning them away… I shiver to imagine Starpeak’s nobility wielding this power.

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy to see technological progress move along, where it helps all of us. But I fear that’s not the kind of progress that our overseers are most interested in.