“If the automobile industry had progressed as quickly as the computer industry has, we’d all be flying around outer space by now.”
— some idiot, late twentieth century

It’s a beautiful late summer day. The first day of your vacation. You’re sitting at the wheel of your brand new car, which looks vaguely like something out of Back to the Future. Ignoring a nagging suspicion that life really imitates art, you settle down to enjoy the drive.

It’s good to be away from the job, the daily commute through the crowded skies over downtown, the live-in contractual conjugal mate, and the test-tube rug rat. It’s also good to be avoiding the holiday crowds back on Earth. The last time you went to the Rockies, there were so many vehicles flying about that you hardly even dared to glance down at the mountains below.

No, outer space is the place, and there’s nothing better than being there in your own car.

One hand on the wheel, you reach out with the other, deftly removing a beer from the back-seat cooler. Holding the wheel between your knees — from habit more than anything else, because it’s not likely you’ll veer off the side of the road — you pop off the cap. No littering, though; opening the window would be a big mistake. You sip the cool, brown liquid, give out a subtle belch that is lost in the void, and relax, relax, relax.

Keeping one eye on the radar for cops — though there aren’t many around in this neck of the woods — you glance around with the other. Ahead of you, a field of stars — brilliant white points, unblinking, unchanging, in a sea of black. Among them, distinguishable by its soft, reddish glow, Mars, where you have booked a condo for the weekend. Back on the left, the moon — cold, shining, white. Further behind, still visible in the rear-view mirror, that lovely ball you call home, a rich blue and green, swathed in the clouds and greenhouse gases that keep us alive, even though they are slowly killing us.

“Ah,” you say to yourself, “but life is good, and only made better by technology.”

And then, a warning sound from the speaker on the dashboard. You glance at the screen and a message comes up: “Stack dump. Internal conflict at vector 11998-222-8763537. If you did not have Soft Landing™ installed, you would have been blown to bits. But thanks to Soft Landing™ , all life-support systems have been shut down safely. Do not reboot your vehicle. Please contact your vendor.”

As the oxygen slowly dwindles, and the stars become fainter and fainter, you wish you’d sent in the registration card.