In 2025 the streets of New York City had become so
deplorably crowded that the city planners had decided to implement new
technologies designed to drastically reduce motorized traffic. Their goals were
twofold, both to minimize carbon emissions and to force people to walk rather
than rely on cars, cabs and busses. This would both clear the streets and
complement the mayor’s new fitness initiatives.
The largest obstacles, as they envisioned them, were how the
sidewalks could handle the added foot traffic, how they could keep pedestrians
moving quickly to their destinations and how a navigation device could be
employed for people who had increasingly forgotten how to get around on foot.
They decided that using a GPS device on a phone would be inexpensive and easy, but
ultimately would cause people to bump into each other, or worse, wander into
traffic while their heads were staring at their phones. Spoken directions would only be worse since
there would be a cacaphony of voices in the street, leading to confusion. In
fact they ruled out most current electronic technologies, all of which depend
on an inadequate interface. Think of the absurdity of a complex brain
communicating through a keyboard invented in the 19th century. They
wanted something much more primal, tapping into the instinctual drives of the
human brain, the hard-wired tracking instinct. They decided to rely on smell.
The device, called the Olfactigation Module, was pretty
simple: two small jets were positioned on each forearm, about the size of a
wrist watch. A global mapping system gathered information based on current
location and desired destination. It then set a clear and rational path and
guided each individual by means of a very precisely coded smell. A thin stream
of colored gas basically set a lane for each individual to follow. Each person
had a particular smell engineered to communicate directly to their neural
cortex, unique to that individual. No two smells were alike. Essentially each
person just walked, stayed in lane and followed their nose.
The complexity of the system was that no one would even have
to worry about bumping into others, or even wait for traffic lights. Those
would be abolished. The city, being sanitized of car fumes, now became the
perfect spot for a smell-based navigation system. Even smoking was banned
outright. The system would direct each person, setting the pace, direction,
marking the turns clearly. The gas dissipated a second after each person walked
past it, so there was little possibility of aromatic overload or pheromone
confusion. The really brilliant part was that you were directed not to a street
address, but an exact spot within a couple of inches. Every single space in the
city was given a precisely mapped point. So you could end up at the cracker
aisle in a particular grocery store, in your dentist’s chair for an
appointment, then back at your desk without every thinking about where you were
going. Without every worrying about bumping into anyone on the way somewhere.
The system also recorded the whereabouts of everyone in the
city, so you could find out, for example, that the person you planned to meet
is six blocks away and will arrive in precisely 10 minutes. Eventually they
also realized that there are slower and faster people, so they designed
different lanes, and even some very fast lanes so people could run wherever
they liked. No one had to worry about traffic and eventually the street
surfaces were one by one closed to cars and became wide pedestrian lanes. Of
course people sometimes needed to go across town, so the Olfactigation system
led them onto the subway lines, which were now free as well as part of the
system, so you never had to worry about how to get anywhere, your own
individual navigatrix would lead your every step, right onto the subway car, planning
any switches and taking you right your destination. People really loved it.
The only real trouble were a group of people who came to be
called “flaneurs” - those who really
don’t know where they want to go, and prefer to wander, intentionally bumping
into people, or even meeting people they don’t know. They started in the park
where there was open space and lanes were harder to control. They defied the
Mayor’s directives by shutting off their spray modules, smelling things they
weren’t supposed to and dropping into little grocery stores where the scent of
spices was so thick that the navigation system was thrown off. Kaluystan’s
Spice shop was a regular haunt. People were known to walk aimlessly from the
upper west side, into Zabar’s or Fairway to smell cheese, and then trek all the
way past Korea Town to smell kimchi, then past what used to be Balducci’s in
the village, down to China Town, where the scents were irresistible, funky,
rotting, fishy. Any place like this wrought havoc on the system and had people
walking in circles. That’s exactly what the flaneurs wanted.
Interestingly, the movement grew so popular that there were
pushers on the street hawking spice bags, which people would hold up to their
noses so they could take time to wander. There were radical flaneurs who lit
piles of myrrh or swung incense burners and chanted in the streets. This threw
off all the pedestrians, who were suddenly impossible to track, ended up in
little crowded barbershops by mistake, or found themselves discovering little
restaurants they never knew existed. Within a few years, the city had on its
hands a full blown revolution in smell. Work came to a virtual standstill since
no one could remember how to get to work. And the city once again stunk to high
heaven. But no one was smelling their own track, they were following other
people. Many even tossed away the underarm deodorant the city had made
mandatory.
Eventually, a giant cloud of body aroma hovered over the
city and then slowly but surely, they let back the buses. Then the cabs. Then
people started smoking in the streets again. The street vendors returned with
their dirty water hot dogs and candied peanuts. The shawarma could be smelled a
block away. So could the stale urine seeping up from the subway grates. The
city in all its glorious stench had returned.
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