Jerry Lassiter had circled the top fifteen floors of the Deck twice in his new Ford Slipstream SL without finding a single space to park. He glanced at the holo-clock floating in the right-hand corner of his spectacles. 7:54 a.m. He had six minutes to find a place to leave his ultracompact car and get to the tubes so they could whisk him through the nineteen blocks to his job at Accounttaxtech. He wasn't going to make it.
An ancient Ford Escort LX, probably a '92 or '93 model, took up one five-foot-by-six-foot space and half of another, jutting out into the narrow driving lane. The car had four doors, for crying out loud. Jerry considered doing a little bump and go on the space-eating automobile, but then he remembered Strickland. He kept driving.
At 8:01, sixty seconds late and counting, Jerry began making up excuses for his manager at A-tech. He flipped through the possibilities in his head: a stray child had run in front of his wheels, his ultracompact had lost its charge, his mother had had some sort of medical emergency back home. Frazier would glare at him, then make some slashing marks on that silver touchboard he carried with him everywhere.
A white one-door Chevy Champion CT cut in front of him from a side passage and popped into an empty space Jerry hadn't seen until that moment. He hit the brakes to avoid rear-ending it, filling the air with the screech of rubber on concrete followed by the popping sound of the preemptive airbag from above his head.
"Damn spacebiter," Jerry whispered as he stuffed the quickly-deflating airbag back above his head. He drove on, hands clenched to the wheel, wishing he had a light-weapons permit.
At 8:10, still cruising the Deck, contemplating unemployment and starvation, Jerry cut through the cavernous main parking section of the ground floor and drove down a smooth, brightly-lit incline. He was in the reserved section, where luxurious twelve-by-twelve spaces were saved for the wealthiest of commuters. Ever since the ban on telecommuting back in 2020, when MicrosoftTime bought out all the communications companies and President Wheaton shut everyone down, real commuting had made a nightmare resurgence. On Jerry's first day of work last week, Frazier had made sure to inform Jerry of his exclusive, expensive spot near the tubes.
Cruising slowly past three-hundred-thousand-dollar driving machines, Jerry hit the brakes when he found, at last, an empty space. A rectangle of black concrete never looked more inviting. He could park here for just a bit, he figured, then come back on his first break to move his ultra up to the regular section.
"Three strikes and you're out," he whispered. Jerry had never received a parking ticket in his two months in the consolidated city of Raleigh-Durham, but that didn't stop his hands from shaking as he pulled his coat and handheld from under his seat. He jogged toward the glowing neon entrance to the tubes, his small body bent over slightly as if waiting for the heavy hand of authority to fall, at any moment, onto his shoulder.
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