C. and I bought a house out in the hills beyond Sacramento, because, well, that's where we can afford a nice house. Fortunately, the commuting situation from Sac into the Bay Area had much improved: a straight, smooth concrete walkway had been constructed high above everything else, hundreds of feet off the ground, stretching from Sac to the northern part of Contra Costa County. And something about the new type of concrete used meant that you could walk on it at very high speed, and bike insanely quickly-- much faster than a car. (It did no moving of its own; it was simply some newly invented material on which all movement was, like, multiplied by a factor of eight.)
It also helped that I figured out a way for us to pull our legs in to half their length and stretch our arms to double size, so that we could move along like an ape. It turns out this is a very easy thing to do once you figure out how to bend a couple of joints slightly differently. I wish I could remember how I did it, because it kicked ass and it really worked. C. and I tore along like cheetahs, low to the ground, on our knuckles.
At the Contra Costa end of the walkway, there was a series of stairs back down to the ground, many hundreds of feet down. This was the part that slowed most travelers, but not us: with our long arms we just braced a hand against each wall of the stairwell and leapt down the shaft, braking our fall with our long arms. Exhilarating descent!
At the base of the stairs, there was a train hub with bullet trains going everywhere, ready to take us to the South Bay. But first we went into an office building that had been turned into a mall-- instead of a long sprawling horizontal mall with stores lined up in rows along the sides, there were a handful of shops on each floor, and they were stacked floor after floor after floor. We could brachiate up and down between floors rapidly, of course.
But mostly I wanted breakfast, and it looked like most of the shops had already gone out of business. Fortunately, there was a breakfast place on the basement level. It advertised the cheapest breakfast in the Bay Area. Their menu made no sense, I couldn't tell what any of the stuff they were offering was; it was more like car parts than food, it seemed like. I asked if they had, you know, sausage and eggs and pancakes. "Oh, sure," the counter guy says, "twenty-five cents an item, all items."
So I ordered two eggs, two pancakes, two sausage, and two slices of toast, plus an orange juice. Nine items, $2.25. What a bargain! But then he started dealing the items one at a time onto my plate, just tossed 'em on their with his hand: a fried egg, a sausage, another egg, a pancake... It was the most unappealing food I've ever seen.