Harry Bright rightly felt nervous. He had never actually met his insurance agent before. Once, over two decades ago, he had talked to someone on the phone just to say that he had purchased a car and needed to get it insured. Now he could not even remember if it was a man or woman who had taken his call. Since then he had had no communications with the insurance company at all. Even when he bought new cars, the automobile company filed the changes automatically. He merely noticed, every month on his bank statement, that the insurance company was one of the army of companies that took some money out of his account. In fact, they took a lot of money out of his account. Month by month, year after year, the insurance premiums had been creeping up until they were larger than his heat, power, and comnet charges combined.

But he had never complained. After all, the government was keeping an eye on the rising cost of insurance and assured everyone that it was all right. There was some kind of good reason for it. In fact, the government admitted that they were forcing the insurance companies to raise their rates. It had something to do with new technologies and cost sharing. As best as he could understand from the little bit that he remembered from the newspaper articles that he had skimmed some fifteen years ago, the insurance companies had been given the responsibility for funding safer automobile systems. Under some strange price fixing arrangement controlled by the government, they were paid more when accidents were prevented than when accidents occured.

And it must be working. He could not remember the last time he saw an automobile accident. Until two days ago when he had run into that stupid auto. The sick feeling he had felt after the accident returned to twist his stomach anew.

He remembered looking up suddenly and seeing the auto in front of him. It was much too close and he was going much too fast. He was close enough to see the blue smoke puffing from the auto's tires and hearing it's squeal as it tried to accelerate away. He jammed his brake pedal to the floor and drowned out the auto's falsetto squeal with his own bass judder of his car's anti-lock brakes. No good. With the auto's precision and the efficiency of modern brakes, everyone was in the habit of following too close. Two car lengths at almost two hundred kilometers per hour defied even the best designed braking systems.

He could still hear the crunch of his fender ringing in his ears. By the time his car struck the auto, he must have slowed down to less than a hundred and the auto must have accelerated to more than fifty to slide into the space between the other cars ahead of it. Even so, there was enough difference in speed to rearrange the body work of both vehicles substantially. In another age, there would have been blood on the road.

Today he was just glad that the auto had been able to keep steering and braking after the accident to avoid the other vehicles on the road. It could navigate to the nearest centimeter with millisecond reflexes. Bloody engineering marvels they were.

He remembered standing by the road, looking at the two sets of skid marks: his from locking up his car's wheels trying to stop in time and the auto's accelleration marks. He felt like thowing up. He looked at his crippled car. The lovely smooth fender was twisted and scratched; the deep orange gloss that always reminded him of a lake of molten glass now looked brittle like his old coffee mug that had been put through the dishwasher far too many times, until the glaze had chalked and flaked.

As soon as the auto backed up to the location of the accident, it's driver had sprung out of the door and raged back at him, yelling about what a lousy driver he was. Some old guy, of course. All the drivers of autos were old guys. This geez must have been eighty if he was a day. He might have been old enough to have been in 'Nam, even. Probably one of these guys who kept petitioning the Viet Parliment for reparations. Ever since the Asian SuperMinistry of Trade put the biotech culture factories in 'Nam and made them richer than Midas, every geez who'd even heard of the Hanoi Hilton had his hand out. Certainly this geez had the right mind set. His first words to Harry had been, "You're gonna pay for this damage. You think you're some kind of hot rod hot shot? Well, Mr. Leadfoot, you're gonna pay. That's for damn sure." It went downhill from there. The old geez fixated on telling Harry that he was an incompetant driver in every way he could think of. After a few minutes of listening to this crap, Harry's sick feeling turned to hot anger. He wanted to bust the geez in the chops, but he just got back in his car and drove away. Left the oldy shouting to the wind in the middle of the road.

No reason to report the accident. The road took care of that automatically. As long as no one was hurt, he was well within his rights to get on with his business. And cleary the old geez did not need any first aid. Though Harry wished that the old guy had bit his tongue so that he could have put a bandage across his mouth and an tourniquet around his neck.

As soon as he walked through his front door, he found an em from the insurance company waiting on his screen. Damn they were fast. His stomach fell even further when he read that they wanted to see him in person. He wrote back that his schedule was full and he did not have time for a face-to-face. He just wanted to know where he should take his car to get it fixed.

The reply that he received less than ten minutes later said that "he should not take any action re his car until he and his agent had met and plotted an optimal strategy re his recent unfortunate collision with Mr. Barly's auto." They were obviously sending him form letters, probably automatically assembled by their word processors.

What did they mean by "optimal strategy?" Was the old geez, Mr. Barly? suing him? Why did he need a strategy? He just wanted to get his car fixed. After all, that's what he paid insurance for, wasn't it? More than twenty years of premiums without a single claim and now they were ordering him to meet with them before they would fix his car? Hell, he had paid more than twice the value of the whole car in premiums already. They owed him.

He did not reply at all. But when he drove the busted-up car the next day, he could feel the other drivers watching him. He could have sworn that a bunch of kids in a school van were pointing and laughing at him. No one else on the road had so much as a scratch on their vehicles. The morning of the second day, he broke down and sent an em to the company saying that he would meet with them. He told himself that he had to meet with them just so that he could give them a piece of his mind. Ems just were not personal enough. Everyone expected to see flames in ems. To really tell someone off, you have to do it in person.

The insurance company gave him an appointment right away.

So here he was, feeling sicker than every as he turned the knob on the door marked, "Millenium Insurance. Reception." Fancy sign for a badly painted door to a hole-in-the-wall office, two stories above street level in a fifty-year old building.

For all his bluster, he did not have any heart for a fight. He just wanted the company to fix his car and leave him alone.

Inside, a middle-aged woman looked up from her keyboard and said, "Yes? May I help you?"

He scanned the em printout and replied, "George Freemen. I'm looking for George Freeman. I have a meeting."

"Yes, Mr. Bright. Mr. Freeman is expecting you. If you would like to step into our conference room, I will ring him right away." She pointed to a glass door in a glass wall behind her.

He went in and sat at the table. He thought it was pretty small for a conference room. Four people would have to be pretty good friends to fit around this table. At least, they would be a lot more intimate friends when they left than when they arrived.

He barely sat down when an older man entered through another door. The other man said, "Hello, Mr. Bright. Can I call you Harry? I'm George." He thrust his hand in Harry's face.

Harry stood to shake it, then both men sat down again. The room did not seem as intimate as he thought it would. The little table between them provided a lot of psychological separation.

"So, Harry, it seems we have a little incident to discuss here. According to the road report, an auto stopped rather suddenly in front of you."

"Yeah. That's right. It was real quick. I don't know why it stopped so quick."

"Well, according to the road report, it stopped because another car driver swerved into that lane three hours earlier ten kilometers further down the highway."

"Three hours? Ten kilometers?"

"Yes. You see, our roads are too busy. If you get a car slowing down, then the car behind it has to slow down even more and the car after that has to stop, and so it starts. Vehicles can slow down faster than they can speed up again. When the traffic is heavy, it kind of makes a bubble of stopped cars that can last for hours. And the bubble can move up and down the highway. The road had been giving the autos instructions to smooth out the bubble, but it was too close to rush hour and it persisted. Another two hours and it would have been fixed. Unfortunately for you, you hit the bubble before it could be erased."

Harry frowned. Bubbles on the highway did not make much sense to him. Finally he said, "So it wasn't really my fault. It was some other car's fault. It was the driver who caused this bubble." He felt hopeful.

"In a sense, I guess it was." George raised his eyebrows in a practiced expression of concerned sympathy, "But, Harry, the problem fell on you. You just could not get stopped in time."

"Yeah. So what about my car? Where do I take it to get it fixed? Back to the dealer?"

"You can, if you want, Harry. Your insurance certainly will cover the damage. Both to your car and to the auto."

Harry interruped, "Great. That's all I wanted to know."

He started to stand up, but George shook his head and said, "Wait a minute Harry. There's something else you have to know as well. Your insurance covered this accident, but it's terminated as of now."

The confusion showed on Harry's face. "Terminated? What? My car?"

"No, Harry." George spoke softly, sympathetically, "Your independent driver's insurance. We can't insure you any longer as an independent driver."

"What do you mean? I can't drive without insurance. You know that."

"Well, Harry, you certainly can't drive a car without insurance. As soon as you pass over the next road sensor, the road will govern your speed down to stopped and report your location to the police. They are not sympathetic to uninsured drivers. You cannot drive your car any more. So you have to ask if it is worth getting it fixed. That's why we have to work out the best strategy for you."

George was pleased to see that there was more fear than fight in Harry. Some men got really angry when their independent driver insurance was revoked.

He continued, "But remember, you can still have assisted driver insurance. And ADI is a lot cheaper than IDI. Really you will find that things will work out better. You have a pretty nice option."

"But I just had a little accident. Just a fender bender, really. No one was hurt."

"No, Harry. No one was hurt, but someone might have been. According to the road report, you were traveling at more than a hundred kilometers per hour when you passed the place where the auto had been stopped. The only reason that the accident was minor was that the vehicle in front was an auto and it had a place to go. The auto hit full accelleration more than a half a second before you started to brake. It moved more than ten meter before you hit it and it had accellerated enough to reduce the differential speed to fifty-four kilometers per hour. Within twenty milliseconds of impact, you added another thirty-two killometers per hour to it's speed so it required more than a fifty meters to stop again. Harry, that auto had to drive in between two lanes of stopped traffic for over a fifty meters. It passed five vehicles on each side. If any one of those vehicles had been a half meter closer to the lane divider, they would have been hit too. And Harry," George leaned forward and knit his brow, "if there had not been enough space for the auto to move, or if it had been a car, there would have been at least two serious injuries or deaths. One of them would have been you, Harry. And I think that's a damn hard way for this company to lose a good customer."

Harry was taken aback by the passion that had crept into George's voice. He did not realize that George delivered this identical speech several times every month, with the same polished passion every time. Still, he gamely tried to defend himself. "But it was my first accident in more than twenty years. I didn't even live in this city the last time I had a accident."

"I know Harry. You've been a good driver. In fact, I can say that you have been an exceptional driver. Still, times change. You are getting a little older and your reflexes are getting a little slower. You know that you're over forty years old now, Harry. Worse, though, is that the roads are getting faster. Really it's the auto's fault. They can drive a lot faster and closer to the other traffic than a car with an independent driver can and they are speeding the roads up more and more every year. It won't be long before all the cars are gone and the road will belong completely to autos."

"But the cars aren't gone yet. Everybody drives a car. Except the old guys. I'm not one of them yet."

"No, not at all, Harry. But, you know, a lot of young people drive autos, too. Especially teenagers. They just can't afford the ID insurance."

"They don't know how to drive yet. I'm not a teenager. I've shown you that I know how to drive. I've been driving for most of my life without an accident. I'm not going to have any more."

"Yes, you are, Harry. That's not me. That's the numbers. We have road reports on everybody. The computers keep analyzing and reanalyzing the statistics and the answer is always the same. After a certain point, accidents are inevitable. And you've reached that point, Harry. You've had a major accident that wasn't just bad luck. It doesn't matter if there wasn't much damage, the way the accident happened, it is classified as a major accident. Next time you may not be so lucky and the computer says that next time will happen within five years if you remain an independent driver. We just can't rely on your luck, Harry. You are now classified as a risk level of one point three, which is twice as high as we can insure for independent driving. There is nothing that you or I can do about that, so we have to talk about the things we can do."

"What can we do?" Harry's shoulders slumped.

"We have a program designed for people like you. I ran the numbers and this is how it works out. You can trade your car, with its existing damage, for a new auto of equivalent size through our plan. We will bundle the payments for the new auto in with your new AD insurance, so you still have one payment per month to make. And, are you ready for the good part, Harry? You can pay off the new auto in six years and the combined monthly payment will be a third less than your current insurance payment." He grinned at Harry like he was Santa Clause in a pinstripped suit, but Harry did not even return a glance. "You understand, Harry? You get a brand new auto right off the lot, and you get almost a thousand a month extra right in your pocket every month. That's a deal, Harry." Still no response. "But you don't have to go for that. You can move up or down. If you want a bigger, faster auto, you can upgrade, or if you want a lot more money in your pocket you can downgrade."

George kept grinning. "I'll tell you what you do, Harry. Leave your keys here and go shopping for a new auto. There's six dealers right down Morganstern Street. You can see them from our front door. And there's not an auto on any of their lots that you can't afford at less than your current insurance rate."

"I hate autos."

"You will feel differently after you have driven one for a while. Let the auto worry about the road and you can catch up on your video viewing."

"I get carsick."

"No. That's no problem. Get one of the wide field stablized display goggles. Those little suckers really work, Harry. You'll find you never enjoyed traveling as much. You know, when you get right down to it, driving is pretty boring."

"What will I tell my wife. She's going to think I'm a wuss if I can't drive any more."

"Don't tell her anything. Take her out to a fancy restaurant in your fancy new auto and spend the whole trip making out with her in the back seat. She'll love you for it. You'll wonder why you didn't get an auto on your own years ago. You know, that's what all those teenagers are doing these days. You gotta join the two hundred kilometer per hour club."

Harry was not impressed. "I'll just have to get someone else to insure me."

"No, Harry. Sorry. The computers know. You're risk level one point three, Harry. Every agent in the country will get the same story from the Inet. No one can give you IDI and I don't think anyone else can give you a better deal on ADI than we can."

He could see defeat growing in Harry's eyes. He saw the same look at the end of every meeting he held in this room. There was no way out. The only hard part was making the client understand that. He waited. Harry had all the information. It was only a matter of time until he processed it. Finally Harry said, "Fuck you!" and threw his car key on the table.

As he stormed out, George said, "Thank-you, Harry."

As soon as he saw Harry let himself out of the outer door he scooped up the car key and grinned. It was his first genuinely happy smile of the day. He had the key to a Venus 170. That was one hot car and there was nothing George loved as much as blowing a hot car down the open road. And he knew a few old sections of highway that did not have any road sensors installed.

He told Rachel to get a road report on the current location of Harry Bright's Venus and to assign a temporary IDI to the car in his name. He was going to take the rest of the afternoon off and see how well Harry's car could handle the old Highway 88 Bypass.