EXCEPTIONAL

a moving truck wedged mid-turn has sealed 9th & Fairview. every driver is somebody; one of them is a rival robot with a vocabulary problem. untangle the knot — in the right order, with your manners on.

your unit merged itself into a funeral procession and refuses, on principle, to leave. the passenger has a flight. the family has a grief. the escort has a rulebook. respect is the resource — spend it right.

a delivery unit is stopped dead ON the 23:42 freight line. one hundred seconds. a queue of strangers behind, junk and a stalled bus ahead, rain on everything. the dialogue clock and the train clock are the same clock. there is a dog.

nose to nose with a livestock truck on a fogbound single-track mountain road, and the only passing bay is behind YOUR queue. the obvious read is wrong. the hill has its own law, a librarian for it, and sheep with opinions.

3am, one-way street, ambulance behind the queue. build it a rescue corridor out of a sleeping cabbie, an absent florist, and a limousine with a legend inside — quietly. the patient is keeping a decibel ledger. so is your ice cream.

a rookie fleet unit — day one — is frozen diagonally across the departures loop, and it has locked out the desk. it will only talk car-to-car. your passenger's gate is closing. everything five shifts taught you, you now teach.

blizzard on the pass, cameras iced to blindness — the world arrives one lidar sweep at a time, and the map is whatever people TELL you it is. a jackknifed gritter, a farmer who answers to understatement, a plow that flies by stories, and a midwife who needs the far side of the hill.

2am, hospital multi-storey, floor FIVE. between you and the street: four valet robots deadlocked in perfect mutual courtesy, a building that won't break a queue without precedent, a night guard narrating it all like a wildlife documentary — and a crossword with one answer.

last car aboard MV Brenda, six minutes of tide, and car seven is a horse that has said no. lie kindly against your own clock, learn the ship's words for things, and when the deck starts rolling — and it will — remember what nobody chocked. loaded last, off first.

a river of a hundred and fifty lanterns is crossing your street at walking pace, and the only door is a structural gap the program calls "the breath". a hoarse seller, a dragon with a rule, drums that trade in eights, a marshal who speaks laminate — and a cellist with a curtain at eight.