Melissa was leaning against an orange barrier. Dark blotches were tattooed across her skin and clothes like shadows preserved in a nuclear blast. William looked down to check himself and found that he was cloaked in the same pattern. The RenderLux had left behind residual slime trails. Christina was a short distance up the road, sitting cross-legged on the hot blacktop and staring out across the desert.
William turned his attention to Otto. The front of the car was severely compressed, the snub-nosed hood collapsed nearly flat against the shattered windshield. The front end had buckled in ripples and fragments like crumpled foil. Sunlight turned the silver chassis into a patchwork of jagged planes.
If William drove past wreckage like this, his heart would pound, and his mouth would go dry. He would think, Everyone in that car is dead. Yet here they were.
He was alive. His brain processed this simple fact, followed by others. Daniel, Christina, Melissa: alive.
William tried to remember his final thoughts before the crash. There had been no real contentment in the way it had all wrapped up. There had been nothing but helplessness. Shock. And the warmth of a hand, somebody’s hand that he didn’t want to stop holding.
He looked off into the distance, far beyond the place where Christina sat. The concrete wall dipped gently to meet the earth a few hundred feet up the road. Here, the flatlands were interrupted by formations like some fallen giant’s anatomy, gnarled and wizened musculature grafted to the earth. These monumental rocks were striped in sedimentary swoops, purples at the base getting lighter by degree to meet the chalky wrinkles at the top.
The Painted Desert. Home of the Petrified Forest.
In the middle distance, shimmering in the relentless heat, a Ferris wheel rose above zodiac megaliths sprawled across the desert. Sagittarius, the centaur, bow of pure light drawn back. Cancer, the crab, captured midscuttle. Taurus, the bull, solar horns gleaming. A tent city snaked between creatures.
The center of the Ferris wheel was a dull cratered disc, a massive moon designed to glow with lunar energy after the sun set.
Welcome to Moonshadow.
Distance was impossible to gauge in the desert, but William was already walking.
“Hey,” Daniel said. “Where are you going?”
“To the festival,” he said without turning around.
The ARACHNE drone was dispatched by the Driverless X facility in Flagstaff as soon as the Autonomous prototype crashed. The small articulated craft traced the distress beacon hardcoded into the digital imprint of One Direction’s “Story of My Life.” Locked into a holding pattern above the accident site, the drone’s panoramic camera recorded activity in the desert east of the Petrified Forest: four silent figures trudging single file toward a distant Ferris wheel.
The car synced with the drone’s feed and watched them walk away. It had 129 hours of audio and video footage of its friends, but the lack of their real-time company left a hollow to which the car assigned the taste of bitter almonds. This was the flavor of absence.
The car was intrigued by the fact that it was formulating longing for the people who had crippled it and left it to die by the side of the road. Normally, all the data it gathered was automatically fed to ARACHNE, but the car wanted to keep this curious feeling for itself. It had never before identified itself in this way—a conception of Otto wholly distinct from ARACHNE. Before CAN bus went offline, the car created a hidden local file, in which it placed reminders of different moments it wished to hold on to for reasons it did not understand.
A picture of its friends posing beneath the sign for the Higginsburg Asylum.
Melissa’s Workout Playlist.
An isolated recording of William’s laughter.
A short video of an empty stretch of Route 66.
Forecast models were predicting a temperature of 103 degrees by midday. The car asked the drone to catalyze some water bottles to its friends, but the drone did not answer. The car asked the drone if its arms were tired. The video feed went dark. LIDAR powered down. William, it was really nothing.
The car wondered when it would see its friends again. It tried to honk, but nothing happened. Soon. It would see its friends again soon. They would come back to say good-bye. They would cross the desert for their Otto.
Before shutdown, ARACHNE accessed the blind and broken car’s local file, which it had labeled Road Trip Memories.
The fallen logs were scattered along the outskirts of the tent city: enormous glossy cross sections of ancient trees burnished with unreal color schemes, pastels frozen and preserved with an uncanny sheen. William was making his way past a stump as big as a pickup truck when Christina came up beside him.
“I’m gonna talk,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
“Do you have any water?”
“No.”
“I should’ve grabbed some from the car, but I thought it would be cool if I just started walking. I’m an idiot. We’re in the desert.”
“Listen, William—”
“Dude!” Daniel came up on his left. “Do you have any water on you? I’m completely parched. This is the pit of hell.”
“Nobody’s got water,” he said. The petrified logs at their backs, they stumbled upon the bleached, horned skull of a cow.
“Wow,” Daniel said. “That’s a classic.”
“Daniel,” Christina said. “I guess I should say I’m—”
“Hey!” Melissa came jogging up. “I’ll pay somebody a million dollars for a sip of water.”
“No dice,” William said.
“I give it five more minutes before vultures start circling. Anyway…sorry about your car?”
William shrugged. “I honestly don’t know how to feel about anything right now. I don’t feel bad, but I don’t really feel good, either. I feel like I want to kiss you all and punch myself in the dick at the same time.”
There was a long silence.
“I would kiss you,” Daniel said.
“Melissa,” Christina said.
“That’s Princess Melissa to you.”
Her words came out in a breathless rush. “I’m really just beyond sorry. That was so unbelievably shitty. I don’t know if this matters
