The Impossible Thing

W hat is it?,” Sierra Rodriguez asked her older brother. “You’ll have to guess,” Billy answered. Sierra looked up at the object that was hanging —almost as if levitating —from two crisscrossed cables in the barn. “Does it y?” she asked. “Nope. It lights up.” “So you mean it’s just a light,” she said, glaring at her brother. “What’s so special about—” “It’s not just a light.” Billy began moving in wide circles beneath the object. “It’s a kind of light. There used to be billions and billions of them everywhere. No one’s seen this one work but me and Doc Peterson. He rigged it up on a switch and everything.” Sierra walked over to the workbench that Billy was pointing at. “No!” Billy jumped in front of her. “Don’t touch it! Doc will see the barn light up.” “Fine.” Sierra turned around and looked back up at the object. “What did it do?” As Billy turned away to answer her question, Sierra lunged at the switch on the workbench, ipping it to the “on” position. The object came to life. Each disk began to light up: green, yellow, red. The once-dark barn now exploded with color. “Wow! Cool!” Sierra couldn’t believe her eyes. The light show captivated Billy too; he’d never seen it working in the dark. “There were billions of these?” Sierra asked. “Yeah, it’s a stoplight. They used to be at the intersections of roads.” “Why?” “So people would know when to stop their cars,” Billy explained. “Why would people need to know when to stop their cars?” The idea seemed as fabulous and foreign to Sierra as the ashing thing. “Because people used to drive cars,” Billy replied triumphantly. That was the real discovery he wanted to reveal to his sister. “But that’s impossible!” Sierra exclaimed. The siblings continued to gaze at the stop light suspended in the center of the barn, its lights becoming rst green, then yellow, then red. In a future where cars drive themselves, there’ll be generations of people who’ve never handled a steering wheel. The cultural and physical changes that will occur as a result of driverless vehicles are likely to be both fascinating and unexpected. I purposely set this science ction prototype—a story grounded in science fact that serves as a steppingstone for people to explore potential futures—in a barn to remind us of a previous transportation system that’s receded into history. Horse-based travel was a complex support network of devices and a robust ecosystem of jobs that have disappeared. The real impossible thing in the story isn’t the death of the stoplight. It’s the characters’ inability to imagine humans ever having driven cars— similar to kids’ wonder today when they learn that we once rode horses as our primary mode of transportation. What other objects surrounding us today will recede into history’s murky depths? FROM THE EDITOR