“Yes,” Melissa said. “This is fake. Driverless invested millions of dollars in an event to fool everybody into thinking…what, exactly?”
“I’m just saying,” Christina said.
“We’re all just saying, at this point.” Melissa’s voice cracked.
“Man,” Daniel said, “imagine if Henry Ford could see this shit.”
Melissa took a dainty sip of Red Bull and left a lipstick smear on the rim of the glass. “He’d be like, What’s a computer?”
“He’d be like, My glorious assembly line has saved humanity.”
“He was a horrible racist,” Christina said.
The screen on the right was devoted to heavy social monitoring. The #SweatyNormcore meme had evolved rapidly from spotted wildlife to historical events—sweat stains could now be seen hovering ominously over the attack on Pearl Harbor. Someone had started a Twitter handle for one of the Driverless drones, which tweeted exclusively in all caps about how it wanted to destroy humanity and perform weird sex acts on the other drones. The account had 134,987 followers.
The screen on the left displayed a group of the biggest YouTube stars hanging out together in the Brooklyn office of some ad agency, reacting to the livestream and sponsoring giveaways for their fans. Melissa had demanded to watch it. The group included her hero, Jessa Park: DJ, style icon, makeup tutorialist.
Jessa Park’s YouTube channel had 7,834,097 subscribers. Christina wondered if they were all like Melissa. An army of eight million Melissa Fabers blotting lipstick in unison…
“No way this is supposed to happen,” Daniel said.
“Hey, Hernandez.” Melissa tapped Christina on the shoulder. “Can you hack the mainframe and make that car stop?”
“Sure,” Christina said. “Here I go.” She sat completely still, watching one of the side screens.
Message boards were infested with reaction GIFs, reactions to reaction GIFs, and trolls.
That one dude William looks like somebody put Lego hair on a finger and drew eyes on it.
All this surface-level internet shit made Christina feel violated. She didn’t even like touching the keyboard when this stuff was on her screen. Her keystrokes were definitely being logged. She would have to scour her system like a meth addict cleaning tiles with a toothbrush when the Derby was over.
“Our boy’s still holding on,” Daniel said with a hint of pride in his voice, as if he’d trained William for just this kind of situation. Autonomous crawled inexorably across the parking lot, shedding another contestant: the AutoNoyz host immediately behind William, whom Christina thought of as Stick Bug, threw up his hands with a look of self-disgust and fast-walked away from the moving car.
“Bye-bye,” Daniel said.
Christina’s overcaffeinated, undernourished brain had trouble dredging up the proper emotional response. She rode a wave of excitement—only four people left besides William!—before settling once again into dull anxiety.
Daniel rubbed his eyes. His elbow came within an inch of Christina’s ear.
She put up her hands, fingers splayed in the universal gesture for everybody just back up. “Seriously,” she said.
At that moment, the creaking mechanism of her brain finally reverted to its natural state: wishing William would just give up and forfeit the contest.
With a few weeks of summer left before she traded the CB Lounge for a dorm room at the University at Buffalo, Christina wanted to spend as much time as possible with William. Preferably here in town. Alone in this room.
In theory, a road trip with William would be wonderful, but hitting the open road trapped in a Driverless car with William and Melissa and Daniel sounded like a nonstop shit-fest. There was simply no way a trip like that would end well. For any of them.
Secretly, Christina was rooting for Natalie Sharpe.
Let go, Mackler, she willed him through the screen, across hundreds of miles of cornfields and highway. She couldn’t see his face. The livestream producers had decided to stick with the drone’s-eye view as Autonomous made its way through the parking lot. It was the same angle a news chopper would take on a police chase.
“I feel like we should put on some music,” Melissa said. “Like a soundtrack for this.”
“It already feels like we’re in a movie,” Daniel said.
Melissa put her phone down next to her glass. Her eyes flicked between phone and computer screens. “You always feel like you’re in a movie.”
“I can’t prove I’m not.”
“Fuck,” Christina said.
“What?”
“Just making sure your movie is rated R.”
“You can actually say that once and still get a PG-13,” Melissa said.
“Fuck.” Christina stared glumly as Autonomous began to make a wide turn toward the south end of the parking lot. William’s steps quickened, but he didn’t falter.
The fact that William was currently walking alongside a moving car in the parking lot of Indiana’s largest mall was all her fault.
William’s road to the Driverless Derby began on a Thursday in May. Christina remembered the day of the week because they had been talking about something that William called the Thursday Feeling.
“Catchy name.” She spritzed her bedroom doorknob with Windex and wiped it with a scrap of cloth.
“Well, there isn’t a word for it yet,” William said. “How do feelings get names?”
“You have to register it with the Feeling Patent Office first.” She scrubbed away streaks on the metal. The reflection of her face was a convex smear.
William spun slowly in her desk chair, knees catching light the color of dryer lint that slashed in through the basement window. Leave it to Fremont Hills to turn a spring afternoon ugly and overcast. Of course, Buffalo would be even worse. Supposedly the city had to double the staff of its suicide hotline from September to April because the perpetually leaden sky drove people to the brink.
“Antici-something,” he said, thinking out loud. “Looking-forward-to-it-ive-ness.”
Christina Febrezed her bed and smoothed the tucked-in sheets, tightening the hospital corners. William bit the ends off a Twizzler and stuck the licorice straw into a can of Coke. He quit spinning, took a big sip, and then chewed up the wet half of the Twizzler. Behind him on the center monitor, Christina’s avatar, Dierdrax, sat dormant. Dierdrax was a cyborg sorceress. Her left hand was composed entirely of source code.
Christina
