Yeah, right. William would never sell that car. He’d be the only person in America who took a Driverless prototype to his job at a scrap-metal yard.
“He’s not answering me,” Daniel said, attacking his phone with freakishly long thumbs.
Christina’s head felt like it weighed fifty pounds. She put her elbow on the desk and propped up her chin. She stared into the screen, letting her eyes go slack. Autonomous was now headed due south. Her eyes drifted to the room full of YouTube stars. The bros from the DudeTown channel were high-fiving. Jessa Park was dancing with the PearlyGreats, a Christian comedy trio.
The astronaut at the front of Autonomous, who’d been forced to walk backward, stumbled and just barely kept her balance before gracefully putting up her hands and walking away, shaking her head.
Christina took a deep breath.
“Everybody turn around!” Melissa sounded suddenly chipper.
Christina looked over her shoulder. Melissa was holding her phone up to take a picture of the three of them with William and Autonomous on the screen in the background.
Christina said what she always said right before a picture: “Wait.”
Melissa composed her face into a coy smile, lips pursed, like a mask snapping into place. Daniel leaned over Christina’s head to put his tanned arm around Melissa. Christina wondered if he went to a tanning salon. Fremont Hills wasn’t exactly a beach town.
Melissa tapped the screen, and a second later, her face melted back to its resting state. Daniel dropped his arm.
“Don’t Glam this one up,” he said. “It makes me look orange.”
Glam was the filter used by celebrities to hide blemishes and whiten teeth and smooth out skin.
“Too late,” Melissa said, tapping. “You got Glammed.”
“Don’t post that, please,” Christina said.
“Posted,” Melissa announced.
Christina turned back to the computer screen. The likelihood of anyone connecting Christina Hernandez with one of her dark web handles was incredibly slim, but she still didn’t like her face being plastered all over social networks. She imagined some malicious bot crawling the data embedded in Melissa’s photos like a spider spinning a web along a musty old picture in a frame, executing commands to infiltrate Christina’s personal life and leave her exposed.
She wished she could wipe away her paranoia with a dish towel, or reach inside her brain and scoop out the bad thoughts.
Autonomous sped up.
William faltered, then righted himself. His hand hadn’t left the windshield. The contestants were jogging at a decent clip. Sunlight slid like radiant eels along the car’s silver roof. There were four contestants left—two on each side—and Christina couldn’t help but think of pallbearers at some weird dystopian funeral.
They were headed straight for the parking-lot exit. There was only one way to go: out into a five-lane highway, which hadn’t been blocked off for the Derby.
Traffic thundered past the lot at 75 miles per hour.
The combined digital energy of 4.3 million people simultaneously freaking out across every social network seemed to bleed into the CB Lounge.
Jessa Park stopped dancing.
“There’s no way this is right,” Daniel said in disbelief. He was clutching his phone in two hands as if it were a religious totem.
“Let go, Mackler,” Christina muttered.
“They have to stop it,” Melissa said firmly. “They’ll just have to shut it down.”
Autonomous cruised down the exit ramp, past the mall’s big marquee sign that boasted Macy’s and Best Buy and dozens of smaller stores.
“It’s not stopping,” Daniel said. He turned to Christina, as if she hadn’t noticed. “It’s not stopping.”
The contestants were running now, legs pumping, struggling to keep up. The second AutoNoyz host, older than Stick Bug and burdened with a beer gut, tripped over his feet and face-planted into the cement. He sprawled with his arms out straight, as if he’d been frozen in the act of stealing home.
“Let go!” Christina implored the screen.
“What is he doing?” Hysteria crept into Melissa’s voice.
“He’s not gonna let go,” Daniel said with hushed admiration that made Christina want to fry his insides with a Ward of Conflagration.
The trust-fund kid, whose perpetually beaming smile had been wiped from his face, shoved himself clear of the car. His 3-D smartwatch left a vaporous holo-trail in the air. He staggered onto one of the mall’s chemically enhanced strips of neon grass, where he fell to his knees.
Christina’s heart pounded. It was down to William and Natalie Sharpe, and they both seemed to be chugging along just fine. Autonomous reached the end of the exit ramp and nosed out into the first highway lane without slowing down.
Both contestants held on.
“No, no, no,” Christina said. She felt as though she were a drone buzzing about the CB Lounge, viewing them all from above. There was a thick, dreamy quality to the air in the room. She had the absurd notion that she could simply pull the plug on Kimberly and make it all go away.
“William, move!” Melissa leaned forward to shout at the screen and waved her arm wildly as if she could shoo him away from traffic and magically compel him to safety.
Not even Dierdrax could do that.
Melissa’s hand hit the side of her glass and sent Red Bull sloshing off the desk, fizzing angrily, soaking the carpet.
A black Escalade raced down the sun-blasted interstate toward the side of Autonomous. In seconds, William would be crushed between the cars.
Christina closed her eyes.
What had she done?
A horn blast registered at the edge of William’s awareness.
It was very hot.
His legs were churning robotically, matching the pace of the hulking silver beast beside him. He could not remember his last sip of water. A big black car screamed past, swerving to miss Autonomous by inches. No, not a car, an SUV, an Escalade—he’d recently seen one demolished down at Tanski’s. Cars and people were both so easily broken down into scraps of what they had been.
“Come on!”
Pain shot up his arm. Someone was tugging viciously at his wrist. William turned his head.
“Snap out of it!” Natalie
