Traffic Jam
BREAKING NEWS—Associated Press, 10:03am. Early reports of several multi-vehicle pile-ups began to surface at 9:45am Tuesday morning. Car accidents—all occurring near-simultaneously at 9:45—have so far been reported on highways near New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston.
More information as the story develops.
Potential Mobileye Bug? Stay Off The Road: More Auto-Crash Reports
BREAKING NEWS—The New York Times, 11:10am. As of 11am Tuesday morning the New York Times has confirmed reports of at least 26 multi-vehicle car accidents occurring around 9:45am Tuesday morning, Eastern Time. The crashes are being reported on major highways all across the country, and initial casualty assessments indicate at least 5 deaths and as many as 60 are injured.
Additional crashes are being reported by users on Flutter and are still under investigation.
Technology correspondents with the Times are speculating the root cause to be a software bug in an update to Saferide—the full self-driving software package by the Israeli tech company Mobileye—that was released last Friday.
Mobileye is a subsidiary of Intel Corporation. Its Saferide self-driving technology is deployed on approximately 70 million cars in the US, or on about 1 in 5 motor vehicles. Saferide owes its popularity to the platform’s ease-of-installation. The platform was the first to integrate fully with the AutoSmarter digital programming interface that became the de jure standard for interfacing programmatically with automobiles in the US after the passage of the SECURE Act in 2020. AutoSmarter has been mandatory on all cars in the US purchased after 2025, and Saferide’s tight integration with the system has made it possible for consumers to add self-driving capabilities to their cars as an aftermarket modification for as little as $2,000.
Most major auto manufacturers in the United States offer their own proprietary self-driving solutions—and indeed about one-half of cars driven today operate with at least Level 4 autonomy, with one-in-three operating at Level 5—but per-vehicle software licenses often start at $7,500 or more, making these platforms more cost-prohibitive.
The comparatively cheaper and more popular Saferide is no stranger to controversy. Several accidents during a limited beta test roll-out in 2021 famously led the National Highway Safety Administration to temporarily revoke Mobileye’s approval to run its self-driving software on public US roads, but the rights were restored in 2024 after an equivalent of fifteen trillion miles were driven in simulations to prove that the system had since been made safer.
The most recent Saferide scandal was ten years ago, in April 2028, when a Ford Excelsior running an outdated version of the software drove into a construction zone, killing several workers and seriously injuring the driver.
Technology experts say a programming error involving the handling of time in software may be at fault. According to them, today—January 19, 2038—marks the end of “32-bit time” which means computer systems storing time in a specific format may have errors because programmers did not expect that format to still be in use today. The last time this happened was at the beginning of the year 2000 when some software did indeed crash as a result of the year rolling over into a new millennium, but most experts expect that engineers learned their lesson then and that most software should be unaffected by these kinds of bugs today.
Nevertheless, this may be the start of a new such scandal, this time starring Mobileye.
More information as it becomes available.
Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested 1/19/2038 was the end of 64-bit time. It is actually the end of 32-bit time, and the article has been updated to reflect that.
EMERGENCY ALERTS
Presidential Alert—Potential terrorist action on highways across the United States. All are recommended to remain off roads, exit vehicles, and seek shelter immediately. Tune into your local news station for more information.
Terrorist Attack Strikes American Highways, Stoplight Protocol Invoked
By Grace Rossi || 12:57pm ET, January 19, 2038 || The New York Times
US officials now believe that the numerous auto-accidents occurring at 9:45am Tuesday morning—previously thought to be the result of a software bug in a popular self-driving platform—are part of a coordinated cyber-attack.
So far, there have been 207 confirmed incidents. At least 87 people are confirmed dead. Exact figures are unknown, but over a hundred people are currently injured in various hospitals across the country.
Officials warn that everyone should get off the roads immediately. All cars—especially those with self-driving capabilities—should be vacated as soon as it is possible to safely do so. Individuals should take shelter indoors, or otherwise away from any streets and motor vehicles.
The source of the vulnerability is still unclear. As a result, experts are uncertain how many vehicles might be affected by what appears to be a computer virus. It is unclear if the attacks have ceased or if they will continue to occur.
In response, the White House has ordered the activation of the Stoplight protocol. This power, granted by the SECURE Act from 2020, enables the President to remotely deactivate all AutoSmarter chips in cars across the country. An AutoSmarter chip, via hardware constraints required by law, is the only way software can interface digitally with a car’s drive system.
Provided the vulnerability that enabled the attack has not compromised the AS chips themselves, their deactivation should prevent any further incidents. That said, Stoplight also disables all self-driving capabilities in all cars across the country purchased after 2025. As a result, such cars will only be able to be driven manually.
As part of that protocol, commercial cars with no manual drive capability (such as robo-trucks and -taxis) as well as manual-capable cars currently chauffeuring minors, elders, or other individuals unable to legally operate a motor vehicle, will automatically pull over and turn off at the next available opportunity.
Auto-Terror Continues, Vulnerability Confirmed In AutoSmarter Chip
By Grace Rossi || 2:50pm ET, January 19, 2038 || The New York Times
The confirmed death count from Tuesday morning’s series of auto-accidents has risen to 846, as the number of confirmed crashes quickly passes 2,000. Several more accidents have been reported to have occurred after the 9:45-9:47am time window of the original attacks, though it’s still unclear if these incidents are at all related.
Analysts are estimating—based on an analysis of Fleets from microblogging platform Flutter—an accident count as high as 10,000. The estimated death count could reach 5,000, with many more thousands potentially injured. If true, that would make this the deadliest terror attack on US soil in history.
Further developments and on-site crash investigation have revealed that the hacked vehicles include those by every major auto manufacturer and those running every major distribution of self-driving software. And, in three confirmed cases so far, the hacked vehicle was not installed with any form of self-driving software whatsoever.
This, in conjunction with a recent press release from an ongoing security investigation by the NSA, has confirmed that the vulnerability that made the attack possible exists on the AutoSmarter chip that’s in almost 90% of cars in the US today.
As such, even cars without self-driving capabilities—and all cars purchased since 2025 since the SECURE Act took effect—are vulnerable to the same attack.
The press release by the NSA has likewise confirmed that a computer virus is responsible for coordinating the 9:45am attacks, though it’s still unclear how widespread that virus is. In the meantime, the National Guard has been deployed to highways across the country to assist with the recovery of injured individuals and to monitor for any signs of further attacks.
Fortunately, no further accidents have been reported since the White House invoked the Stoplight protocol at 12:30pm Eastern Time, leading officials to tentatively conclude that the attack has since ceased.
Terror Attacks Continue on BART
By Nazim Naylor || 5:30pm PT, January 19, 2038 || San Francisco Chronicles
The San Francisco County Transportation Authority lost control of five trains Tuesday evening, in what appears to be a continuation of the cyber-terrorism attacks from this morning. The trains were some of the first in the country to be equipped with the same AutoSmarter chips required on all US automobiles as part of a federal plan to automate the remainder of America’s infrastructure.
The chips run on a modified, more secure, architecture from those in cars, and the Stoplight protocol invoked by the President earlier today left these new chips active in what pundits are calling a massive oversight by the administration. Indeed, shortly after the accidents, the vulnerability was confirmed in these chips as well.
Of the five trains that had been hacked, four were shut down and stopped before any damage could be done, but one red line train is confirmed to have derailed near 16th St. Mission Station and first responders were last reported still assisting at the scene.
More information as the story develops.
Transportation Lock-Down Across US in Aftermath of Terror Attacks
By Grace Rossi || 9:00pm ET, January 19 || The New York Times
At 5:15pm Pacific Time on Tuesday, a San Francisco subway train derailed, killing 4 and leaving 23 victims hospitalized. The crash was part of a coordinated cyber-attack on US transportation infrastructure using a software vulnerability in the AutoSmarter chips that regulate digital interface for controlling automobiles and other transit systems in the United States.
That attack began Tuesday morning at 9:45am Eastern Time when approximately 8,500 cars on American highways were remotely hijacked and driven into oncoming traffic. At current counts, 3,100 individuals have perished as a result of the crash, and many more are hospitalized with injuries ranging from mild to life-threatening.
This appears to be the deadliest cyber-attack ever, and also the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil in history.
In response to the hacking of the San Francisco trains, US officials—citing public safety—have grounded all flights across the country. In addition, all trains and subways are being held at their next station. All public buses are likewise out of service. Many highways have been shut down, and open highways are being monitored carefully by the National Guard. All people residing within the United States are heavily advised to stay put where they are and refrain from traveling to the degree that that’s possible.
Meanwhile, the NSA—in cooperation with the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland security, and the automation teams at various US automotive companies—is leading an emergency investigation into the now-isolated virus that appears to have caused the attacks. Officials say the first priority is to determine the extent of the attack and to fix the vulnerability so that normal transportation services can be resumed throughout the country. Secondarily, they aim to identify the attacker in order to help guide US military response.
As of Thursday evening, over a dozen different known terrorist and hacker organizations have claimed responsibility for the attack. Several of these claims have been debunked, according to officials, and the real culprit remains unidentified.
For now, the attacks seem to have subsided, though readers are advised to remain stationary and to continue to follow for new developments as they occur.
A Thundering Horror
By Sarah Connors || 1:45pm ET, January 20 || The New York Times
It was scary not knowing who did it.
It was scarier not knowing if it would happen again.
For Clifford Owens—a high school math teacher in Elk Grove, California—the fear began during an otherwise ordinary morning commute, at 6:45am. Three miles from his exit off CA-99, headed southbound in a 2028 Honda Enlight, a Tesla Model Q in the opposite lane crashed over the divider and directly into oncoming traffic.
“The only thing going through my head was… Was ‘this is how I die.'”
Owens swerved off the highway moments before the Model Q passed and brought his car to a screeching halt. Behind him, the hacked car collided with one SUV and was pushed sideways into the path of another oncoming Sedan. Cars began to skid—rubber wheels against asphalt—but a semi-truck without enough room to stop powered through in a rippling wave of destruction.
“It was like something ripped from Fast and Furious. The smaller car flipped head over tail and then crashed and skidded on its roof maybe fifty feet from where I’d stopped. Then the truck came… And it just plowed cars aside. That’s when I got hit—not directly by the truck thank God—but by some of the cars getting pushed out of the way.”
Owens’ car skidded ten feet further before coming to another stop. He was later admitted to a local hospital and released a few hours later with no major injuries.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off it until the paramedics came to get me out of the car. The other cars. Some were on fire. And the smell… Of the burning rubber. It suffocated the air and the smoke burned in my eyes. I couldn’t stop crying.”
Sonia Manuel—a New York City investment banker—felt a different kind of fear at 9:45am.
“All of a sudden my car veered sideways. I was on my laptop at the time—I was late to work and reading my chats—but I noticed right away. And I went to grab the steering wheel but it was locked and wouldn’t let me override. I had no control.”
The divider stopped Ms. Manuel’s car from crossing into oncoming traffic, and the hacked vehicle opted instead to speed up in its own lane until it crashed into a a small coupe a few car-lengths ahead.
“The car in front of me braked—I don’t think it knew what was happening—and my car just continued to accelerate. I somehow slid right under it. I don’t know. I swear I watched the car fly over my head as I sped ahead. In my rearview mirror I watched it skid out and collide with several other cars behind.”
Her car would spin-out shortly after, skidding to a halt ahead of all the other wreckage. Investigators suspect the initial collision clipped some electrical cabling in the battery compartment and triggered an emergency shut-off which ended the incident.
“There was nothing I could do. Even my e-brake button did nothing. I felt so helpless. And at the same time… All those other cars. Those other people… Somehow it feels like my fault. Because it was my car that did this.”
Other witnesses at the scene of the crash report seeing a line of some dozen overturned and crumpled cars stretching back about 200 feet from Ms. Manuel’s car. More cars were pulled off to the side of the road—having either been pushed off by the accident or in order to make way for paramedics responding to the crash. Shortly after a lithium fire erupted in the battery bay of an older EV, but emergency responders were able to clear and stabilize the scene before anyone could be harmed by the potential explosion.
“As soon as I could, I called my husband. I let him know I was alright, and he told me that the same thing was happening all over the place. He said they thought it was a software bug. I knew right then it wasn’t a bug. I was in my car when it happened. I knew it was actively trying to do damage—that it didn’t just break. I knew it had to be some kind of attack, and I told him that and I told him he had to get inside and stay inside and that I would do the same. I’m just so fortunate to be alive.”
The streets were silent the following morning. Across the country, most businesses shut down. Every public school was closed by executive order. Roads were closed and even if someone had somewhere to be, they couldn’t get there. Hotels across the country were booked past capacity as a truly driverless America found itself stranded unexpectedly along vast stretches of highway and in crowded, lonely rest stops and in small towns that’d previously just been placeholders on maps.
The roads were littered with cars that didn’t drive and scattered people who walked down highways.
“It feels like a zombie movie,” said two boys from a small town in Pennsylvania, “our dad walked with us to the highway and we just walked on the street. None of the cars were moving. Like in Waking Night when Jack first wakes up after the zombie apocalypse happens and he finds all the streets abandoned with the cars still on them. And back home it’s quiet too. No one else is allowed outside near the roads so we mostly just played Xbox today.”
Cities across the country were eerily quiet. No morning commute honking in New York or Chicago or LA. No taxi-cabs and just a few very cautious pedestrians.
“It’s a little scary to be out here, sure,” says Daniel Thorn, a photography student at NYU, “but it’s sort of a once in a lifetime opportunity to catch New York like this.”
For some, a silent New York is, of course, not a once in a lifetime opportunity. And many remember a similar silence 37 years ago on September 11, 2001. 60 year old Janice Gold spent the day watching the city from her Manhattan high rise.
“It was a different kind of quiet, for sure. 2001 was a dusty kind of quiet. The dust from the towers seemed to linger on the air and collect in the streets and on people. And the fear was localized—because it was 4 planes and everyone was just thinking about the 2 that hit here. And the fear was directed, because we quickly figured out who did the attack. And the fear was contained, because all of the planes were grounded and we knew the attack was over. The quiet was a thick layer of dust that blanketed the city and suffocated us. But in spite of that suffocation and all that tragedy, we knew we could clean up the dust—responders were already cleaning up the dust—and we saw the path forward. And when President Bush gave his speech, and I don’t know whether or not that was the right course of action, but it was a course of action. And we knew clearly what had happened and what we were going to do.”
“Yesterday and today have been a different kind of quiet. An aimless kind of quiet. There is no clear dust, just empty cars. There is no localization, just national tragedy. And there’s no containment: we don’t know who did this and we don’t know if it’s going to happen again tomorrow. And the President is right… We can’t let that stop us from ever driving again. We can’t let that fear stop the whole country cold. But there’s also no direction. It’s not clear what happens now. So, yes, this silence is a different kind. This is the silence of a nation of 400 million people who don’t know what to do.”
Big Tech Hubris To Blame For Thousands Of Deaths… Again!
By Jim Rigg || 6:00pm, January 21 || Fox News (Opinion)
The self-driving future was killed on Tuesday. And, with it, the final stake was hammered into the coffin of the plague of over-automation.
For decades now, man has thought he could outdo man, and that has been his great hubris and his greater folly.
We were sold lies. We were told that self-driving cars would be safer. And then, in one morning, more Americans died because of self-driving cars than have died in automobile accidents in the last decade. That is not safer.
We’ve been told this lie before. We were told when we automated our farms that we could re-specialize and re-employ our farmers. And yet now most of those farmers are working for minimum wage, if it all.
We were told the same when Burger King created the first automated waitress, and again when Microsoft automated the secretary. Supposedly these “innovations” which liberate the lower classes from the harsh labors of menial minimum wage work. And yet now unemployment in the United States is higher than it has been in 20 years. All it really did was liberate Americans from being employed.
And yet they kept going. Until even the engineers themselves couldn’t escape the wave. At one time, programming was the fastest growing profession in the United States. Then Arxis—later bought by Alphabet and rebranded Encoder—automated an estimated three-quarters of all programming tasks and now a job category—which required years of intensive specialization for many—has dried up almost entirely in just a few years. In 2033 there were almost 10 million software professionals in the US. And now all that remains are the some 500,000 jobs for PhD level AI scientists and Automation Architects and so on. That’s just 5% of the jobs left, after just 5 years.
You’d think at that point, when the programmers lost their jobs, they’d finally see how ridiculous it’d all been. And yet now we’re here. Just a few weeks ago Congress was debating a bill that would ban all cars without an AutoSmarter chip. This would’ve been part of a long-term strategy by the Democrats to take the steering wheels out of cars entirely. To literally ban driving. The claim was that we’ve come this far with our self-driving tech… Level 5 for everyone would get our yearly auto-deaths to zero!
Well, look at just how far we’ve come!
It could’ve been so much worse too. We were completely at the mercy of these terrorists, and have only them to thank that more people weren’t killed. Officials are estimating over 300,000 automobiles had been infected with DriverLess. Imagine if they’d waited a little longer to infect a few more, or if they activated all of them instead of just a few thousand.
The death toll could easily have been over a million.
It’s time we wake up. It’s time we realize this “dream” of automation for what it really is: a nightmare.
Big tech has long held this incredibly absurd belief that through automation it could build a utopia. Yet, through automation, all we’ve gotten has been misery.
Some people are going to criticize me for trying to jump on this issue too early. They’ll claim that I’m trying to politicize a tragedy. Well, guess what? I am!
We need to politicize this tragedy. It’s the only way we can see it for what it really is: An attack by the tech elite on the very foundation of this country. Everyone is busy saying we need to find out who’s to blame for this attack, asking what terrorist organization did this.
I’ll tell you who did it: Alphabet and Amazon and Arxis and all of the political monkeys who are holding up the sham by passing laws that let these companies continue to exploit us for their own benefit.
Hell yeah it’s time we fight back. But I don’t want to see another pointless war in the Middle East. I want to see a war that brings down the big tech monsters that got us here in the first place.
The Road Back
By Dan Wu || 11:15am, January 21 || Personal Blog, via HackerNews
We will recover.
Typing that, right now, is incredibly difficult. Believing it even more so. But it’s important that we believe it, because belief is the only thing that’s going to defeat this incredible fear.
And the fear—if unchecked—is going to destroy us.
That fear is calling for the reversal of so much incredible human progress. Look: I don’t approve of people politicizing tragedy and trying to take advantage of this crisis to pass shortsighted laws. I understand why people are doing that, but I think it’s too soon and too little is known and anything we decide to do now isn’t going to really understand the big picture. And if we can’t step back and really see the big picture when we’re crafting policy, then we’re going to craft shitty policy.
There are calls right now to abolish SECURE, keep Stoplight going forever, and basically end self-driving cars. To show that self-driving cars are unsafe (and thus need to be banned), a stat keeps getting thrown around that shows the casualties from Tuesday’s attack are greater than those in the last 10 years of automobile operation in the United States.
This stat is true, but the bigger picture is much more complicated.
The reason the number of deaths is so devastating is because we have grown used to lower rates of auto fatalities. Yes, more people died on Tuesday than have died in cars in the last 10 years, but that’s only because Saferide and platforms like it have made the road so much safer. In 2018—just 20 years ago—3,280 people on average would die per day globally in automobile accidents. In America, the same number of people who died on Tuesday—about 3,800 people at last count—would die every month and a half from accidents relating to the manual operation of automobiles.
But in the last 10 years, we’ve taken the daily American auto-fatality rate from over 100 to nearly 0. Last year 106 people died on our roads—less than 0.3 deaths per day. In 2018, that number was 39,463.
The numbers are clear. Even in the face of a horrifying act of cyber-terrorism, driving today is safer than it has ever been.
We need to be careful to not pass policies today that we will come to regret tomorrow. The numbers are clear, and they show how much better technology is making our lives.
So instead of thinking about how we can roll back into the past—when tens of thousands of Americans died on the roads every year—we need to shift our focus. We need to shift our focus to the technologies we need to develop into the future (instead of rolling back into the past) in order to keep the beautiful society we’ve built, prevent tragedies like this from ever happening again, and eventually build an even greater tomorrow.
This is the road back. And it leads right to the road forward.
There are technological developments in the pipeline today that render these kinds of attacks mathematically impossible. It’s speculated—and at this point pretty widely accepted—that the attackers used some kind of man-in-the-middle approach to capture the keys they needed to impersonate the Government Update Authority Server and load the initial payload of malicious code. But just last year a paper on quantum encryption out of Stanford demonstrated a new algorithm that shaves several polynomial factors off the number of qubits needed to maintain effective quantum one-time pad encryption schemes. Coupled with Alphabet’s paper from around the same time that halves (or even thirds, depending on your level of optimism) the number of physical qubits needed for each logical qubit in consumer-grade electronics, and you find we are on the verge of being able to fit a Quantum Encoder/Decoder module on every AutoSmarter chip.
In layman’s terms, this would make it pretty much impossible to get unapproved code onto a car without literally hacking the government’s supercomputers.
Of course, even that wouldn’t be enough for this attack. After loading the malicious code, they had to fool the crash-avoidance hardware on the AS chip. This required a multilayer bypass of the chip’s on-board branch predictor, which involved some serious voodoo with the lower level caches. (it’s these kinds of details that make a lot of us security folk pretty sure there had to be state actors at play here, but that’s a post for another time). Anyway a lot of us have been spending serious overtime trying to understand this problem and what exactly they did—we can do this of course because, by law, the whole specs for the AS chip are on GitHub. Brief background: Hardware verification is currently in a bit of a renaissance period, and the most recent state-of-the-art tool is Hoq which comes out of this super neat collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and Inria in France. The verification suite for the AS chips was written in Resolute, which is getting to be about 15 years old at this point, so we ported the suite over to Hoq and ran it again. And sure enough, it failed its own tests.
What we found were fundamental flaws in the chip architecture that were missed because of bugs in the old software they were using to test the designs. And when you fixed those design errors, the whole method the attackers used to run the unsafe code was fixed as well.
So modern technology pretty quickly disables this entire type of attack from ever happening again. We shouldn’t fear the tech that got us here. We should look forward to all the incredible things that are happening in research labs around the country and rejoice in all that’s on the horizon.
And, yeah, there are still people who denounce automation for automations sake. And they usually cite unemployment stats and farmers and things like that. And look, this post is getting a bit too long for me to go on another Universal Basic Income rant (you can follow the link to my Flutter if you want to see those arguments). And, to be honest, Tuesday’s attack reminded us again of the old truism: It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
But the point I really want to get across is one I firmly believe.
Utopia is ahead of us. Not behind us. If we don’t keep moving forward we are never going to make it there. So let’s try our best to not get caught up in the fear. To look at these things clearly and objectively. To understand the scope of this tragedy and empathize with its victims. But also to take the pain, not to hide from it, and to use it to forge a brighter future.
The Aftermath
By Grace Rossi || 8:00am, January 25 || The New York Times
On January 19, 2038, as-of-yet unidentified terrorists launched the deadliest cyber-attack in history.
The AutoSmarter chip was designed as a response to an increasingly Internet-connected transportation infrastructure. As cars became smarter, and fears arose about the potential of an attack that hacked cars while they drove, Congress passed the SECURE Act to establish standards and protocols—which eventually lead to the AutoSmarter chip being installed in every new car in America—that would help prevent such an attack and, in the event of it happening anyway, mitigate the damage.
Through an exploit in that very same chip, hackers installed a computer virus on five San Francisco subway trains and on around 350,000 US automobiles. The exact number of cars affected is unknown.
At 9:45am Eastern Time, or 6:45am Pacific Time, or otherwise when the attackers thought the largest number of cars were likely to be on their morning commute across the country, the attack triggered.
The virus was designed to act independent of internet connectivity, so no communication with any central server took place (a fact which has made it ever-so-impossible to trace the source of the virus). Instead, each active car at the time of the attack—and there were about 50,000 infected cars on the road at that moment—rolled a die and, with a one-in-six chance, activated its crash protocol. In the end, 8,417 cars activated. This number is known exactly.
The activation protocol lead these 8,417 cars to immediately swerve into oncoming traffic. The maneuver was arranged to cause as much damage as possible. Activated cars would swerve back and forth in the oncoming lane, aiming to create multi-car pileups and distract other drivers into their own dangerous situations.
As a result, there were 8,417 car accidents between 9:45 and 9:46am on January 19, 2038. 4,271 individuals perished either in the accidents or afterwards. Some 3,400 people remain in the hospital, most in stable conditions, and even more have been released having been injured but otherwise declared safe.
The cost to our country in the wake of this attack is not in vehicles, or dollars, or missed days of work. The cost is in lives lost, families torn apart, and broken Americans.
Since Tuesday, the vulnerability in the AutoSmarter chip has been patched. The Stoplight protocol is still in effect, and so all autonomous vehicles are still disabled, but planes have returned to the air and trains to the tracks. As part of a Presidential promise to power through an unthinkable tragedy and return to “normalcy,” all major highways have been reopened and car traffic has resumed. For the time being all major car companies have released over-the-air software updates disabling internet connectivity and the clocks on their cars. Instructions will be made available on how to re-enable connectivity when it becomes appropriate to do so.
More work has been done to recall and inspect many consumer cars for further exploitation, and experts near-unanimously believe the proper steps have been taken to prevent a follow-up attack. They conclude it is safe now to drive and return to “business as usual.”
In President Cliff’s now widely broadcast “Return to Normalcy” speech, he declared that “we cannot let this attack drive us apart, but rather we must come together—now more than ever—fearlessly and bravely, as is our American way, in pursuit of the bright sun that lies at the far end of this dark cloud of tragedy.” That we must “let go of the fear of today, to face the hope of tomorrow.”
To this reporter, it is unclear when normalcy will return, if it ever will. This is, certainly, one of those points in history which are discontinuous. Which can never be reversed or returned from. We still don’t know who was responsible for this attack, and we may never find out. The world is vastly scarier than it was one week ago. I do not know what to trust, or who to trust, or how to trust.
But I agree with the President that this feeling cannot be allowed to last forever.
I do not have many answers, if I have any at all. For now, I will seek refuge and comfort in my family and friends. I know not everyone is able to do that right now, and as such I am thankful that I can. I will search for my own next steps, and I will find them. Not because I know, but because I must.