I’m here to give meaning to life.

I watched as the image grew smaller and smaller, fading to a shimmering dark smudge on the horizon until it disappeared from view as the road swerved down into a canyon.

His face frozen in surprise.

The road shimmered in the distance with heat and the nothingness around me. No cars. No pedestrians. Not even proper shrubs, just dry tousled bursts of brown short brush over flat ground with some hills vaguely visible in the distance on both sides of the road. The blistering sun dominated the sky, diluting the blue to a cloudless white.