Alice hopped the bike onto the sidewalk, and rolled to a stop near one of the expressway’s huge concrete piers. A taxi hissed past in the sky, and she followed the red taillights as they faded into the sulfurous gloom. The highways were the province of the autonomous trucks, and those vast rigs roared overhead at two hundred miles an hour, their electric whine broken into staccato gunfire as they hurdled expansion joints in the old concrete.