The article focuses on the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on technological innovations. It mentions about Hawthorne's 1843 allegory "The Celestial Railroad" on technological society and the cult of efficiency, and offers the account of a nineteenth-century American everyman who, upon learning that a new rail line has been extended to the Celestial City, a well-known pilgrimage site, decides to gratify a liberal curiosity by making a trip thither.