1:09
1:08
1:07
William squeezed his eyes shut and took a few deep breaths. He imagined his body storing frigid air for later, as if his lungs were equipped with pouches like a squirrel’s cheeks.
His thoughts drifted until he was flooded with a familiar sort of sickly sweet hurt, pining for things he had not yet done, things he could do only if he won the car and the all-expenses-paid trip to the Moonshadow Festival in Arizona.
He saw himself with his friends, passing bottles in the belly of Autonomous as cornfields blurred into the trailer-strewn outskirts of Midwestern cities. The late-night talks they would have, uninhibited and free. Cruising up New York’s Fifth Avenue or LA’s Sunset Boulevard, getting out to stretch their legs in New Orleans, stumbling arm in arm down Bourbon Street.
He saw himself looking back on these stray moments from his frost-rimed bedroom window, many months from now, while his friends woke up in dorm rooms hundreds of miles apart, awash in memories of their last great road trip, all of them thinking Take me back.
William opened his eyes.
0:47
0:46
He patted the bench. “Thanks for the air-conditioning.” He commanded his legs to take him out of the car, but they would not obey.
His vision swam. The clock’s digits blurred together into a gorgeous constellation that reminded William of swirling electrons, particle acceleration, a 3-D model of some AP Physics shit he didn’t know anything about.
He rubbed his eyes, and the clock snapped back into place, but the digits resolved into letters instead:
William, It Was Really Nothing.
The title of a song by the Smiths. His mother’s favorite song, by his mother’s favorite band. She’d traveled to England to see them as a teenager in the 1980s and still owned all their albums on vinyl. His brother, Tommy, had perfected a wry, crooning impersonation of the Smiths’ lead singer, Morrissey. And the song that Tommy always chose was “William, It Was Really Nothing.”
Classic Mackler family joke.
William blinked until the numbers returned.
0:14
0:13
He smoothed back his hair and scrambled outside.
He was not about to lose.
Autonomous was the size of a Hummer and a half, but there was nothing boxy about it—the exterior was all clean lines and sweeping curves, like a bullet train had mated with the Batmobile. William fitted his hand into the outline of salty sweat that had dried on the window. Why did it have to be so hot? His palm and the window glass were involved in some kind of gross alchemy that produced a viscous smear if he slid his hand around. This was acceptable according to Derby rules. You could slide your hand around to your heart’s content. You could switch hands from right to left and back again, as long as you were vigilant about always touching the car.
William, It Was Really Nothing.
There was no way that had happened. Autonomous was in sleep mode, not synced to any of his online profiles. Only the winner would be allowed to do that.
His tired eyes were playing tricks on him. He was probably in the early stages of heatstroke. At least he’d worn shorts and a T-shirt, unlike the guy in front of him: Raef Henderson, the antivirus-software mogul, who rested his hand on the sunbaked hood of the car.
William lost himself in a close reading of Henderson’s outfit: scuffed dress shoes, pleated khakis, and a tucked-in button-down shirt the color of an overcast sky. A gray shirt on a hot day was an invitation for your fellow citizens to bask in the glory of your sweat stains. William knew this, and he was seventeen years old. A forty-eight-year-old man ought to have been more self-aware. Especially one who owned a private island off the coast of Belize.
The Driverless Derby was being livestreamed to 4.3 million viewers and counting. Camera drones emblazoned with the Driverless logo—a sleek steering wheel with a happy face, like a German-engineered emoji—flitted busily about the car, swooping low for close-ups of the contestants and circling high above for bird’s-eye view shots.
White vans from network and cable news staked out a perimeter. Scrappy online teams jabbed furiously at tablet computers, their heads wreathed in cigarette smoke. Among the crowd of spectators, sunlight glinted in dizzying patterns, reflected off phones held aloft.
Before becoming the twenty-third contestant out, a branding consultant named Lexie had posted twenty-two wonderfully composed pictures of Autonomous to document each time someone gave up and walked away. She’d left William to endure the Derby with the antivirus guy and an astronaut in front of him, two creators of the popular YouTube channel AutoNoyz behind him, and on the other side of the car, a trust-fund kid and a pink-mohawked actress (Natalie Sharpe, star of Street Legal and all four sequels), whom William could not see unless he stood on the running board.
Lexie had dropped out as a pallid bathwater dawn crept across the sky, and was the only fallen contestant William actually missed. Her left arm had been amputated at the elbow, but instead of a prosthetic with a hand or a hook, the artificial limb tapered down to a telescoping rod, at the end of which her phone sat snugly harnessed.
Did that arm have other functions, he wondered, or had Lexie opted to live her life as a bionic selfie stick?
Between the drones, the contestants, and the spectators, 1,354 photographs of the Derby had been posted. Raef Henderson’s sweat stains were extremely well documented and preserved online for all eternity. He was the subject of a meme in which people photoshopped blotches of his sweat onto the fur of spotted wildlife. Cheetahs and frogs were the most popular.
#SweatyNormcore was trending nationally.
Henderson presumably had no idea of his internet celebrity status, because he rarely removed his phone from the clunky plastic holster attached to his belt. William, on the other hand, had spent the past twenty-seven hours answering a steady barrage of texts from his friends watching the livestream back home. Based
