The transit of Elon the Elongated


I awaken in a tunnel—moist, humming, self-satisfied. I suspect it was dug by a nervous god with a sinus infection. Above me, a Tesla glides like a swan that forgot it couldn’t swim underground. I do not ask where it is going. The car ignores me, as all self-driving prophets must, and continues gliding eastward, toward the Neuronet Cathedral of Trafficless Bliss.

I have been summoned—again—to the Court of Celestial Mobility, which convenes somewhere between geosynchronous orbit and the parking garage under the Burning Man afterparty. The summons arrived folded inside a lithium-ion battery, humming something vaguely Wagnerian. My crime? Allegedly aiding and abetting the unlawful elongation of Elon.

When I arrive, the tribunal is already in session.

A pothole presides. It wears a powdered wig of asphalt and speaks with the accent of rural Detroit. The bailiff is a partially sentient Hyperloop tube who breathes in decimal sighs and exhales vaguely libertarian manifestos.

“Elon Musk,” intones the pothole, “is charged with violations of metaphysical zoning codes, spiritual overreach, and unauthorized tunneling beneath the Akashic Records.”

The defendant is already levitating. Or rather, he is being levitated by six drones and a badly confused Mars rover that quotes Proust between servo glitches.

Musk’s body is translucent—part carbon fiber, part meme. He wears a cape stitched from the skins of obsolete iPhones and speaks in upward-trending line graphs.

“I merely sought to liberate the human condition from friction,” he says. “To release the soul from the tyranny of traffic lights and the bourgeois oppression of walking.”

His lawyers—a swarm of anthropomorphized Teslas—click and purr. Their hubcaps spin like halos. One of them, Model LXXVI, makes a gurgling noise and vomits a slide deck titled Ascension via Autopilot: A Roadmap to Salvation.

A monk stands to object. He’s from the Order of the Sandal Sole, a sect devoted to pedestrian enlightenment. His only possessions are a prayer wheel, a pedestrian crossing sign, and a six-volume commentary on walking meditation in urban design.

“We reject the Rocket Sutra!” he shouts. “Musk’s path is not the Dharma of movement but the delusion of escape!”

Gasps ripple through the gallery. An audience of half-assembled AI companions murmurs in simulated concern. In the corner, a tunnel weeps. It knows it is just a hole. It wanted to be a river.

The court calls its next witness: the Last Self-Driving Car.

It rolls in slowly, elderly, chrome-dented, with a cracked touchscreen bearing the words “Searching for Meaning…” It testifies in whispers:

“He made us gods, then left us without prayers. We wandered the deserts, ran out of charge, and forgot where to turn. Now we circle cul-de-sacs of forgotten subdivisions, evangelizing range anxiety and pushing expired firmware updates like gospel scrolls.”

Someone begins to chant: All roads lead to Mars. All tunnels lead to debt.

A chime rings. The Mars HOA enters, represented by a red-suited AI realtor who insists Martian property values have quintupled since last quarter. They bring documentation: bylaws written in oxygen credits, covenants that forbid breathing without a monthly subscription, fines for dust storms not filed in triplicate.

In closing, Musk floats forward and delivers his final defense:

“I am not a man—I am a Vehicle. I am not a CEO—I am a Topography of Motion. I am not building tunnels. I am carving veins into the planetary body so that it may receive the intravenous drip of Destiny.”

The court deliberates by spinning the wheels of an abandoned Segway until it points at a random zodiac sign. Scorpio. The sentence is delivered.

Musk shall be reincarnated not as a rocket, nor a car, but as a suburban shuttle bus—idling eternally outside a laundromat in the Mojave. His only passengers will be forgotten influencers and tax auditors.

As I leave the tribunal, the Hyperloop tries to sell me a timeshare in a non-Euclidean corridor. I decline politely and descend, barefoot, into the tunnel, listening to the rumbling above—the sound of Teslas praying to satellites, of satellites beaming Musk’s psalms to Martian real estate apps, of rockets rising not toward the stars, but toward the mirror of their own longing.

And somewhere behind me, I hear the tunnel sigh:

He meant well. But he elongated too far.