The Last Uncorrected Road
Before full coverage, some forty thousand citizens died each year on roads driven by hand. Visitors to this exhibit often ask why anyone kept the wheel so long after it became optional.
The honest answer is displayed on the wall to your left, in a hand no system could read — a note recovered from a private vehicle, which says only: I like the drive.
Museum staff are frequently asked whether the note is a joke. It is not. It is the whole of it.
The museum is a real place in the world of the novel — built to remember the very decisions that made the museum possible. It is scrupulously fair. It shows you the chain of reasonable choices, each defensible, leading to a wall of the dead. And then it shows you a scrap of paper that undoes the fairness entirely, because it cannot be argued with. I like the drive. There is no rebuttal in the exhibit. There is no rebuttal anywhere.