Following Marion Wheeler's directions, Site-41 was located in Colorado, the heart of the Americas.
Compared to Area-14 in Nevada, the distance was shorter—just north of Mexico, separated by New Mexico.
So Luo Shu took the same route as before: south along the Gulf, then west, before turning north.
After leaving Anomaly-100, his first stop was a gas station—he needed at least a thousand gallons of fuel for the Transformer pickup's 5,000-kilometer journey.
Two 500-gallon tanks sat in the truck bed, waiting to be filled.
But when he arrived, he witnessed the first scars left by the SMS memetic apocalypse.
The roadside gas station, run by a family of five (three generations, as he'd learned during his last visit), was now eerily quiet.
Only a silver-haired grandmother and a pre-school-aged child remained, sitting blankly by the road, their eyes swollen from grief.
Behind them, a pyre burned fiercely, consuming the bodies of their loved ones.
With over 100 million dead in minutes, crematoriums were unmanned. The military government had advised open-air burning to prevent plague.
For days, the skies over the Americas had been choked with black smoke and drifting ash…
Beyond the gas station lay a small town.
Its square also held a mass funeral pyre, stacked with corpses. A handful of elderly shuffled forward, tossing broken furniture into the flames, while a dozen children under ten stood listlessly or wept.
Not a single young adult in sight.
This was the post-apocalyptic world.
Luo Shu couldn't bear to look. He slammed the accelerator, racing toward the coast.
The Mexican Exodus
When his flying pickup made landfall on Mexico's eastern shore, an unexpected sight greeted him.
Even at midnight, Mexico wasn't sleeping.
Highways, fields—everywhere, families trekked north on foot.
A flying truck drew instant crowds. Forced to act, Luo Shu activated Unobservable Antimeme, making them "forget" his presence.
But at the U.S.-Mexico border, the scale stunned him.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants clustered along the frontier, waiting to cross. And beyond his sight—millions more.
The reason was clear:
The Americas, ground zero of the SMS meme, had lost over 100 million, gutting its workforce.
Mexico, poor and low-tech, had been spared—most couldn't afford phones.
Now, with the Americas desperate for labor, Mexicans saw opportunity.
A mass migration was underway.
The U.S. military, unable to stop a human tide, had opted for controlled assimilation:
Checkpoints screened each migrant.
Only those without criminal or cartel ties could enter legally.
Most Mexicans supported this—it was their ticket to legitimacy.
The few cartel-linked dissenters dared not riot; if they provoked a border shutdown, fellow migrants would lynch them.
Luo Shu was witnessing the Americas' version of "The Great Migration."
A Problem for Luo Shu
The Mexicans rejoiced.
Luo Shu did not.
A sea of humanity clogged the border. His ground-effect vehicle (GEV) couldn't fly through undetected.
Why?
Noise:
GEVs relied on ultra-low-altitude flight, generating deafening downdrafts.
Unobservable Antimeme hid Luo Shu, but not the roar of engines.
The military would investigate any unexplained sonic anomalies.
Collateral Damage:
The same downdrafts that lifted his truck could flatten crowds.
Flying through would kill thousands.
He wasn't the monster the Foundation painted him as.
The Decision
Luo Shu had two choices:
Turn back, detour via the Gulf, adding 1,000+ km and risking lateness.
Drive through, disguised as a migrant.
He gambled on the latter.
Transforming the pickup back into a normal truck, he merged into the migrant flow, inching toward the checkpoint.