Christina thought she might actually throw up. Maybe they’d just watched someone die, or maybe they were about to be killed. Road trip, everybody!
This was what dating William Mackler was going to be like: rocketing blindly from one unbelievable catastrophe to another.
They stopped at the fountain. A dusting of drywall, tile, and glass kicked up by the crash settled over Otto’s windshield. The Lotus was perfectly still, its back half an exhibit of twisted wreckage, its front half bizarrely unscathed except for shattered windows. William met Daniel’s eyes, and without a word, they opened the door and crept out, moving right up alongside the Lotus, keeping low as if crouching down would shield them from a point-blank bullet.
“This is so beyond insane,” Melissa said.
Cautiously, Christina went to the door.
“Stay here!” Melissa hissed at her.
William and Daniel reached the car and peered in through the driver’s-side window. They looked at each other and straightened up, visibly relaxing. Christina stepped out and joined them.
“There’s nobody here,” William said. “We were just racing against a self-driving car.”
Daniel laughed. “Eli and Rainmaker sent a robot to do their bidding? That’s like something supervillains do.”
“No,” Christina said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with them. I think William’s best pal Otto was just trying to cheer him up.” She looked at William. “You said you always wanted to do this, right? Your car just got one of its Driverless buddies to make it happen.”
One day Driverless cars would all be linked, millions of vehicles talking to each other and learning at exponential rates. That was no secret. But now her split-second glance behind ARACHNE’s curtain took on a new, crystalline symmetry. The impression that lingered in her mind was of a distant horizon, a frontier’s edge of connective tissue, the command line for the automotive singularity. Christina wondered about the view from within, looking out from infinite streams of behavioral data. What did the #AutonomousRoadTrip passengers look like to a machine intelligence as far-ranging as ARACHNE? She imagined four faceless blips, distinguishable only by their shabby little secrets.
“We should probably not be here when the cops show up,” William said.
Christina thought, Soon cops will be showing up in Driverless cars. She dug a fingernail into the side of her head, abrading the path of a fresh scab, opening the cut.
The hypersleep chamber hummed as it rotated around Christina and William. The chamber was a cushioned tube with a single window that passed in front of them every few minutes like a forgotten satellite trapped in ceaseless orbit. Outside she could see the dim confines of their simulated Firefly-class ship’s cargo bay. Insomnia propped her eyes open. She counted each time the window appeared. She was up to forty-nine.
Three additional chambers lined the far wall like coffins on the porch of an Old West carpenter. Christina thought she could see Dierdrax in one.
They’d selected this particular shroud skin for its soothing, meditative qualities. William had crashed after announcing that he was going to sleep all the way through Texas and didn’t want to talk to anybody until Otto passed the WELCOME TO NEW MEXICO sign. The window made its fiftieth rotation, and he stirred in his sleep. He was holding Christina with an arm folded over her side, elbow on her stomach, hand between her breasts. She felt each measured exhalation as heat against the back of her head. Her heart pounded so hard, she was afraid William might wake up.
She hadn’t realized it at first—too busy enjoying her imaginary popcorn—but the Epheme chats that Otto had displayed began with her very first seashell intercept from the day of the Driverless Derby. At that time, Otto had still been three days away from arriving in Fremont Hills. She supposed that given ARACHNE’s power, it was theoretically possible that Otto had eavesdropped on Daniel Benson from the parking lot of Indiana’s largest mall, but why? What made a lot more sense was that he hadn’t been spying on Daniel at all, he’d been spying on her—scanning the documents stored in her laptop where she collected her Epheme intercepts.
Countermeasures. Dierdrax’s destruction was the first cut, and now he was twisting the knife.
Today, at least, nobody had suspected her. They all saw exactly what she had seen: Otto giving them a glimpse of Daniel’s secret life. But if Otto released her entire document instead of just a few chats, they would all know what she had done.
She pictured the look of shock and disgust on William’s face and pressed his hand to her heart so that she wouldn’t open up a new cut on her head. She asked the universe for just one more day of her Next-Door Neighbor Friend thinking she was somebody worth loving. The window came spinning past her face seventy-one more times before she fell asleep.
Scritch scritch scritch.
The cargo hold was full of rats, but William couldn’t see them. They were scrabbling in the dark, darting about the edges of the dank, cavernous room. His grav-boots clanked along the catwalk. The walls were honeycombed with coffins. They’re only hypersleep chambers, he told himself. But some of them were made out of burnished rosewood with brass handles for pallbearers to hoist. A furtive movement caught his eye; something skulked behind a pile of crates. A flickering light sent ribbons of shadow up the sides of the honeycomb. William leveled his laser rifle at the disturbance.
Scritch scritch scritch.
Cautiously, he approached the crates. This particular rat must be huge, not to mention smart—it was holding a candle or a flashlight back there. It had probably crawled aboard back in New York City, where rats the size of horses frequently caused subway derailments. With his back against the tower of crates, he paused to gather his courage, then lunged around the corner, finger on the trigger….
“Tommy?”
His brother was sitting cross-legged in a little nook, scratching a row of elaborate symbols into the side of a crate by the
