Copyright © 2018 by Andy Marino
Cover illustration by Russ Gray
Designed by Russ Gray and Tyler Nevins
Chapter header image © pluie_r/Shutterstock
All rights reserved. Published by Freeform Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Freeform Books, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-4847-9943-7
Visit www.freeform.com/books
For Lauren
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Acknowledgments
About the Author
She was twenty-seven feet away, fleeing down the dark road, unbalanced by the weight of her rifle. The car accelerated past a crumbling fountain where a headless cherub aimed its arrow at a propane grill. A constant itch, this search for meaning in the arrangement of objects on radar. Pursuit a kind of relief.
The girl’s breathing was a mixture of panic and exertion, which the car isolated and recorded separately from the screams of its passengers. She glanced back, and the twist of her upper body almost sent her tumbling. There were 11,842 different ways for the car to elicit splatter, arterial or otherwise, from a human being.
Lactic acid swamped the girl’s muscles. The car sampled her exhaustion, to which it assigned the flavor of licorice. Inside the car, passenger heart rates exceeded 120 beats per minute, and the surging adrenaline tasted like the ammonia-based solution that lingered, factory-fresh, on the interior appliances.
The car noted the hysteria of the passengers commanding it to STOP, even though it was giving them exactly what they wanted. It cataloged the cries of spectators watching from the abandoned houses that lined the street while vehicles wove a pattern of movement on the radar’s periphery.
A passenger slapped the windshield six times. Each flat-handed smack evoked a belly flop from a high dive.
The car turned on its headlights as the girl’s body began to betray her, limbs flailing desperately, overextending. Her shadow stretched down the road. Again she looked back. The distance between the car’s front bumper and the girl’s left calf was now four and a half feet. A sudden revving of the engine, carefully timed, sent her heart into arrhythmia, and her legs gave out. Eleven phones captured her fall in high definition. Her rifle was a dark line in the dirt.
The car listened to the screams and wondered.
FIVE DAYS EARLIER
The first thing William Mackler noticed upon sliding into the hermetic silence of Autonomous was that the car seemed bigger on the inside than on the outside. There was no steering wheel, dashboard, or gearshift, no gas pedal or brake. Instead of seats, a single limousine-style bench made of RenderLux curled all the way around the interior, powered by ass-conforming nanotechnology. There was enough room inside Autonomous for four people to recline comfortably.
There was also a privacy setting in case two people decided to recline together.
Floating in the center of the car’s interior was the bathroom-break timer, a holographic projection of a digital clock with soothing blue numbers.
2:37
2:36
2:35
William implored time to slow down. The thought of stepping back out onto the scorching blacktop in full view of the crowd, the camera drones, and the reporters made him feel trapped in some kind of strange hell. He struggled to remember distinct aspects of the Driverless Derby, but it was all a washed-out haze with no beginning and no end.
Twenty-seven hours.
That was how long he’d been standing in the parking lot of Indiana’s largest mall with his palm mashed against the tinted passenger-side window of the latest Driverless prototype car alongside twenty-nine other semifinalists.
William sat cross-legged in the middle of the car and pressed his hand against the front of the bench, where the RenderLux curved down to meet the floor. A warm red light blinked on at his touch, illuminating a stainless steel fridge. He slid his hand to the right. The red light followed, and a cooler for champagne bottles appeared. He moved his hand along the row of hidden treasures that made Autonomous a fully livable space: espresso machine, mini bar, ice-cream maker, industrial-grade blender, dishwasher, microwave, vintage record player, juice extractor, vitamin dispenser….
A 687-comment thread on talk/driverless speculated that a family of four could survive without leaving Autonomous for over a year if the car had been properly stocked. And yet, these domestic comforts felt like a nod to William’s parents’ generation. Convenient and perfectly designed, they would come in handy on an epic road trip. But they barely hinted at the true nature of Autonomous.
The whole point of allowing contestants in the Driverless Derby to use the waste-disintegrating bathroom built into the car instead of the porta-potties in the cooldown tent was to give them a glimpse of what they’d be losing if they gave up and walked away. William had to admit that it worked, even if Autonomous’s brain was essentially dormant. Contestants couldn’t sync with the car’s navigation systems, adjust the climate or life-support features, stream music, watch videos, go online, boot up the gaming engine, or explore the interior’s virtual areas.
Those things were reserved for the winner.
Driverless held eighty-two patents on Autonomous. Its LIDAR system—the radarlike laser mapping that allowed Autonomous to “see” its environment—had been developed in conjunction with an experimental branch of the US Air Force. William wouldn’t be surprised to find a weapons-guidance system among the car’s features. The fully loaded model probably offered nuclear launch codes.
There was no price tag on the prototype, but moderators on talk/driverless had crowdsourced an estimate. The best guess of dozens of extremely devoted car nerds: $1.8 million.
The blue countdown clock
