Lenny fell in love with Bea around burrito number five. He recognized that dizzying jolt to his brain the instant the tunnel’s mouth sighed with a sweet pneumatic hiss and the vacuum-sealed burrito glided in.

Three hours and twenty-one minutes earlier, 2,553 miles away, at her end of the tunnel in the East Bay facility, Bea had been thinking of him. She must have. He wished he could trace her regard for his existence beyond the minute or two it would’ve taken her to pluck the flash-chilled burrito from the sorting dock, nest it in its carbon-fibre pod, and send it in the near-vacuum of the tunnel deep into the Earth to be blasted across the continent at just below the speed of sound.

Lenny worked the subterranean off-ramp in New Jersey, where multitudes of the famed Mission burritos of the Bay Area arrived levitating on magnetic currents, ready for dispatch to the ravenous gullets of the five boroughs of New York City. Since the blast aboveground, the flow had dwindled to one burrito at a time.…