“What’s the microwave situation?” Daniel asked. “I brought some Hot Pockets.”
“In your bag?” Melissa wrinkled her nose. “Those have to stay frozen.”
“What’s the freezer situation?” Daniel asked.
“That brings me to my last point.” Ming-Waller made her eyes twinkle. “Half the fun of your trip will be exploring the country. The other half will be exploring the car. There is no instruction manual because we want you to uncover each new treasure as you find it. I challenge you to discover everything this car has to offer. You’ve got an entire world at your fingertips. Don’t miss a thing.”
With that, the screen went dark. Christina could see their distorted reflections in the curved surface: shadowy wraiths with tiny bodies and bulbous heads, the car’s interior stretched into an infinite expanse of luxury. William, Melissa, and Daniel all looked down at their buzzing phones in unison. Christina fought the urge to smile; that would ruin the fun of her little surprise. She felt the plastic lump in her front pocket. It was completely still. Buzzless.
William laughed. “I got a text from the car.”
“Me too,” Melissa said.
“Same,” Daniel said.
“‘Hello, William.’” He read the text aloud. “‘This is an automated message to let you know that we’re synced! It was fun getting to know you. I don’t want to startle you, so I’d like to get your permission before all my systems come online. One quick thing: my name can be a mouthful, so you can call me Otto for short when you give me a voice command. I’m really looking forward to our trip together. Onward!’”
William looked at Christina’s empty hands. “Did you not get a text?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her device.
Melissa’s jaw dropped. “What. Is. That.”
William held his stomach and pretended to retch. Daniel just stared.
Christina held it up proudly for everyone to see, like a kid at show-and-tell. “This is a Nokia TR-15 flip phone, made right around the time we were all born. It has no data plan, no wireless capabilities, no texting, no games, no apps, no internet.”
Melissa’s face paled. She looked at Christina with unabashed disgust, as if Christina were dangling a dead rodent by its tail. “Where do you even get something like that?”
“Lemme guess,” William said. “Upstairs.”
Christina nodded. “The point is, Autonomous won’t be syncing with me.”
“So how are you going to…” Melissa couldn’t quite get the words out. She tried again, miming the action of typing with her fingers. “What if you need to…internet….”
“I brought a laptop,” Christina said. “It’s running Linux. It doesn’t remember anything, doesn’t log my keystrokes, doesn’t know my favorite sites. As far as Autonomous knows—”
“You don’t exist,” Daniel said.
William laughed in that sharp, lilting way that Christina recognized as pure and genuine. He draped an arm around her and pulled her close. “That’s amazing,” he said. “See? This is why I love you.”
Christina smiled dutifully, wishing for an ounce of Dierdrax’s abilities. She imagined driving her code hand into William’s chest and boiling his heart inside his rib cage. The word love came out of his mouth so casually. What he really meant was This is why I appreciate aspects of your personality. At least if he’d said it like that, it wouldn’t have driven home the point that he viewed their friendship as so totally platonic, it was okay to throw love around, because it was absurd that he might actually mean love love.
“Let’s do this,” William said. “Otto! Permission granted. All systems go.”
Christina’s perception of depth and space tilted. Pretty blues and reds flitted by, classic LED colors in sparkling backlit geometries. Many-sided polygons tickled her synapses. Paper-thin screens descended from the ceiling, their planar surfaces awash in oily fractals, carving out canyons of information that turned the interior of the car into a maze.
Christina tried to make sense of things and decided that she was trapped inside the Driverless system start-up procedure. A riot of calculations and diagnostics, a labyrinth of drivers and utilities, all booting up around her. It was raw and abrupt and shocking—total sensory overload. It must be a glitch. The road trip was essentially one long quality-assurance test.
And yet—
Christina oriented herself. She became aware of William beside her. She reached out a hand and parted manic lines of code scrawled upon the air like a beaded doorway and glimpsed Melissa and Daniel beyond its blinkered confines.
And yet the loneliness—
Flat maps coalesced on either side of her face so that she was looking down a corridor lined by roads. At the end was a figure dressed in a formfitting black stab jacket trailing green phosphorescence from her hand: Dierdrax.
And yet the loneliness that flickered around her like a dying bulb had a particular texture that she recognized as her own. Her avatar vanished and left her alone in her basement room with the curtains drawn, doing nothing in particular, time closing in like a trash compactor, constricting her soul until its bland essence oozed out and pooled on the floor. She leaned over the puddle and saw the average face of an average girl with average problems, nothing a million people hadn’t gone through before.
“Christina!”
The chaos of data whisked away like a veil in the wind, and she found herself looking into William’s eyes.
“You okay? You just spaced out.”
She felt his hand on her knee.
“I’m fine,” she managed to say. Had she been the only one lost in the start-up procedure? The visions were gone, but now the car was filled with a horrible noise, the overprocessed vocals of some harmonizing boy band.
Otto was clearly trying to torture
