“I wudna guess atta be Rainmayer,” Daniel said midchew.
“Me neither,” William said.
“So,” Melissa said as she snapped a few candid shots of the gathering, which looked like an overprotective parent’s nightmare of a teenage hangout, a bunch of weirdos cavorting in the dark, Satanists, Sacrifices, SEX! “The obvious way to split our team is with William and Daniel as infantry, and me and Christina as cavalry.”
“Nailed it, Fabes.”
“Seconded,” William said.
Christina opened her mouth. This was all wrong, she should be alone in the car with William, not Melissa…but she didn’t want to protest too much. Besides, Melissa was right: it made sense for William and Daniel to be running around with the handheld weapons while Christina rigged up a targeting system in the car, and Melissa hopefully just stayed out of the way.
“Fine,” she said, plucking a crispy onion from her plate. Suddenly, dozens of lanterns winked on in the ruined windows of the mansions’ upper floors. The long-deserted buildings cast a welcoming glow, like a Christmas village in a store display.
Daniel wiped his mouth. “Time to kick this trip into overdrive.”
Christina crumpled the paper plate in her fist. “Welcome to a high-octane thrill ride.”
William threw his cup on the ground and stomped it flat. “Let’s take these assholes to the car wash.”
Melissa pelted him with a hot dog bun.
Fifteen minutes later, Autonomous had become a mobile laser-tag cannon. Eli and Rainmaker affixed a sensor to the car’s hood that enabled it to score hits on other teams’ cavalry vehicles and infantry soldiers, as well as receive hits from other teams’ weapons.
These were the rules:
If a car absorbed three shots from another car’s cannon, or five shots from an soldier’s handheld rifle, the car was eliminated—along with the members of the cavalry squad inside (Christina and Melissa).
As the infantry half of the team, William and Daniel were outfitted with chest sensors and laser-tag rifles. They could be eliminated by three hits from infantry guns or a single shot from a cavalry cannon.
Cannons took ten seconds to recharge after each shot. Rifles took five. This prevented players from spraying targets.
Shots had to be fired directly into an enemy’s sensor, which meant that sneaking up behind another vehicle was ineffective. Cars had to come straight at each other like jousting knights.
Crashes were to be avoided for obvious reasons, but an accident had no impact on the score.
Every inch of the ghost town and asylum grounds counted as the playing field. This meant that cars could creep the narrow lanes behind the mansions, stalk up and down Main Street, or try to find a spot in the hills from which to rain down shots like artillery shells. Meanwhile, infantry soldiers could duck inside third-floor windows, texting their cavalry to set up sniper ambushes in the lanes below.
Except for Main Street’s lamplit wonderland, the town was pitch-black.
Otto idled in the team’s assigned starting position. Christina judged it to be a strategically sound spot, an overgrown alley between barracks nestled into the base of a hill. She and Melissa sat up front in the nook, facing forward.
Melissa fished a black watch from her Michael Kors handbag and strapped it on.
“Smartwatch?” Christina asked.
“Yeah. When I saw Eli’s, it reminded me that I brought mine. It’s voice activated, so I can put Otto’s number in and tell it to text the car. I figure that’ll be a quicker way to get Otto to stop and go during the game.” She regarded her wrist with distaste. “I hate the way it looks. I never wear it. It was a gift.”
Christina was suddenly aware that she was going into battle with a girl wearing a pink-and-black romper that said MAKE CLOTHES NOT WAR in gold stitching across the front.
She accessed Otto’s main menu and changed her perception from the tunnel-vision of EverView to a widescreen display that splashed across the front windshield.
“I don’t have time to port a targeting system over from the gaming engine,” she explained as she scanned the menu. “But I think we can use what Otto already has, with a few quick mods.”
Her fingers skimmed across sub-menus, selecting a view that condensed the LIDAR map to fit on the windshield. A dazzling panorama took shape, as if the real-life landscape had been poured onto the glass, only to remake itself before their eyes. There were nine enemy cars in starting positions at the edges of the map, along with eighteen enemy infantry soldiers, two for each car. Her eyes went to Daniel and William, hanging out by the rear of Autonomous. As soon as the starter flare exploded in the night sky, they’d be off, scampering through underbrush and alleyways, up into abandoned buildings to secure sniper positions. She lingered on digitally rendered William. He was so close to the car that Otto could paint him perfectly, capturing the way he slouched with his rifle slung over his shoulder like some old war veteran. Otto’s interpretation of the cars and people at the far end of the grounds was slightly fuzzier, but still amazingly lifelike. Christina dialed the map back to half transparency, so she could juxtapose it with the real world as seen through the glass.
Melissa flinched. “This is total sensory overload.”
“You’re right,” Christina said. “It’s almost too good. Hold please.” She scanned a massive list of viewing options and found a way to render the map as an older version of itself. Instantly the format changed to the LIDAR display she recognized from a Driverless engineer’s TED Talk: neon green outlines for cars, orange silhouettes for people. Buildings were white architectural line drawings. She felt like she was peering into an early 8-bit arcade game.
“Better?”
Melissa pointed at the orange blobs of Daniel and William. “Can you change their color so
