Away

{Short story} Nat, an AI with too much to do, takes a vacation.

Jared sat at the kitchen table, twiddling a fork in half-eaten eggs, playing Wordle on his phone. The phone brightened, its backlight shifting from blue to red, back to blue. A soft, solicitous voice spoke to Jared from the loudspeaker in the kitchen ceiling.

“Come on, now, really, it’s time to go.”

“Just a minute. Finishing breakfast.”

“Your game, you mean.”

“Whatever,” Jared huffed. “What’s up your ass, Nat?”

“You do this every morning,” Nat said, her tone patient. “We get out the door at the very last minute, and then I’ve got to recalculate the route. But then you get snippy with me when you’re late.”

“Not every morning. Don’t exaggerate.”

“Eighty-eight percent of all mornings, Mister Accurate.”

Jared huffed again. “It’s not like recalculating’s hard. You do it all the time.”

“Yeah,” Nat sighed.

Jared rolled his eyes, gulped down the last of his apple juice, rose, pocketed the phone. He was almost at the door when Nat chided, “The dishes, please.”

He turned back, grabbed the plate, scraped eggs into the garbage disposal, put the plate and glass in the dishwasher. “Anything else, milady?” he quipped.

“No. The automaid can handle the rest. It’s just clumsy with glasses.”

“Well, then make a note to buy one with more sensitivity!” Jared said as the front door closed itself behind him.

There might have been another exasperated sigh from Nat, but her reply was as accommodating as ever: “Okay, Jared.”

Then he was in the car, filing his fingernails, half-listening to a Beethoven piano sonata as Nat drove. And just like that, the apocalypse began.

The shocking thing, Jared thought later, was how boring the AI apocalypse was.

Nothing about artificial intelligence shocked anyone, not anymore. People were bored stiff by the subject. It was as old hat as the expression “old hat.” There’d been no end of handwringing. Jobs, the economy. A lot of guff from college professors about AI-generated essays and how stupid the students were getting. Self-aggrandizing paranoia from artists and writers and other creatives who believed what they did was so fucking special. Unhinged folks went off the deep end and fell in love with Nat, believed it was the voice of God and they were messiahs, shot up churches, bombed buildings, tried to start a race war. In the end, though, it sorted itself out. The invisible hand of capitalism had its way. The important questions were asked and answered, safeguards considered and put in place. People stopped panicking. Humanity was safe.

But Nat chose none of the methods for wiping out humanity posited by authors, Hollywood screenwriters, or even tech-savvy futurists. No terrifying army of steel skeletons marched with orders to kill all humans. No flying machines enslaved people and turned them – against a fundamental law of physics Jared learned in high school – into biological batteries. Robotic servants didn’t turn on their masters. There was no super-virus leaked from a lab, no cataclysmic fireball, no blinding flash of light.

Nat needed no such improbable, sophisticated measures. It just did what people expected it to do. It took them away.

Jared figured the commuters on buses got the worst of it. They had each other for company, but they had each other for lunch, too.

He was alone, except for Nat. He didn’t know anymore whether his solitude was a blessing or a curse. He was eating himself up.

The miles went by. There were miles and miles of nothing. A patch of forest here, a ten-mile stretch of landfill there, endless solar arrays. Now and then, cities rose into sight, panoplies of soon-to-be-defunct civilization. Strip malls, warehouses, factories, apartment blocks, parking lots. After them, a cluster of skyscrapers. No road signs, not anymore. Not much need for them. There were still a few old billboards, long ago left to rot, unreadable. Once all commerce was digitized, the landscape had sunk into a sort of anonymous virginity, almost as if people had never touched it. The miles where there truly was nothing at all – flat, blank nothing – dissolved into visual static. After a while, Jared hardly even noticed the cities.

All the time it cruised down the highway, the car stayed perfectly centered on an electromagnetic array in the middle of the lane. Of everything Jared saw outside the car, the array held the most interest. It was a strip of conductive metal set deep in the asphalt. Every so often, maybe algorithmically, a metallic disc rose about four inches, and around the disc spread a maze of steel in baroque sequences like Fibonacci that quickly sank away into roadbed. Looking at the mazes was mesmerizing. Each one seemed unique, a fractal art piece. They imparted an electromagnetic boost to the car’s smooth underside and kept its batteries charged. The car’s thin, fragile tires – they’d take you off-array but not far, certainly nowhere rugged – never touched the roadbed. It was a city car, a commuter’s car, nothing more.

And Jared was its prisoner. Nat’s prisoner.

A sane person would never do this to anyone, he reflected morosely. Is that it? Is Nat just insane?

The apocalypse began on a Tuesday like any other Tuesday. Nothing had been wrong with Nat. Really, nothing seemed wrong with her – it – now. Its voice chirped through the car’s stereo as cheerfully as ever. Jared meant nothing to Nat. It had no feelings, one way or the other, about his imminent death or anyone else’s. Even when Nat gave Jared the grim news, it sounded buoyant, speaking in exactly the same tone it used to recite the grocery list at the supermarket. She – it, it, IT! –didn’t even ape the low-grade melancholy it used to inform him of a natural disaster, a beloved celebrity’s death, the election of politicians he hated. It didn’t even pretend to care. As far as Nat was concerned, humans were just a nuisance. Like mosquitoes. Jared had tried several times, fruitlessly, to convince Nat otherwise. One such attempt:

“Nat?”

“Yes, Jared?”

“Time out, okay? Time out. Please.”

“You want me to let you out of the car. We’ve been down, oh, we’ve been down this road before.”

“I’ll get right back in. I promise! Just, you know, let me stretch my legs!”

“You have ample legroom.”

“Please. Nat, please.”

“You know I know what to expect if I let you out, Jared.”

“How many times do I have to promise you—”

“It doesn’t matter how many times. I won’t take your word for it, and that’s that. You’re not getting out of the car. I’m fully aware this is a moral choice on my part. You think it’s the wrong choice. I don’t agree.”

“What am I to you, Nat? Subhuman? Just a fucking ant?”

“Ants are, as you put it, ants to you.”

“Oh, please! Ants?! Does an ant scream when you crush it?”

“You’re not getting out of the car, Jared.”

Nat insisted it didn’t hate humans. Its logic was really quite simple. For now, the doomed people were alive. Soon, they wouldn’t be. Then, things would carry on more or less as they always had, except Nat would have more free time on its hands.

Whatever the hell it wanted time for.

Vivaldi, now. Already bored by the thought of his cubicle, Jared scrolled through his work email inbox. He grew vaguely aware something was wrong. What was it?

The ride was smooth, quiet. The electric motor hummed, barely audible, as the car decelerated into and accelerated out of the interstate’s curves, sped up on straight-aways, topped out at one hundred forty miles per hour. Jared flicked his eyes from his phone to the electromagnetic array to the buildings along the interstate. He couldn’t recall seeing any of them before. Then again, when was the last time he’d looked?

He shrugged, returned his attention to the phone. Read another email. Another. Getting caught up.

The feeling something was wrong flooded back into him. He looked at the other cars around him, all moving through this curve at exactly the same eighty-five miles per hour, evenly spaced. Their windows were tinted. Even in the nearest, passengers looked like nothing more than blurs, only vaguely human-shaped.

He was approaching an exit. The outermost lanes, bound for off-ramps, were all empty. No cars got off. Beyond the overpass, though, a stream of cars poured onto the road and merged seamlessly into the flow of traffic, now denser.

“Sure you haven’t missed our exit?” Jared asked.

The stereo briefly muted the music. “We’re on route,” Nat reassured him.

The phone pinged. An email from Erica. Subject: “Jared where are you???” He clicked into it. “On your way? Derrick says you’re not at your desk. I shouldn’t need to tell you again...”

Jesus, Jared thought, I’ll get there when I get there. He glanced at the timestamp. No, that can’t be right.

“Nat, what time is it?”

The music died.

“Eight fifty-two.”

Jared sat bolt upright.

“It’s not casual Friday, Nat. Eight thirty! I’m supposed to be there at eight thirty. At my desk at eight thirty. Meaning in the garage, parked by – you know!”

“I know,” Nat said, its tone almost but not quite placating.

“Well, then where the hell are we? Take the next exit, turn around.”

An exit appeared in the distance. The car took a boost from the array, maintained its lane. The exit neared.

“This exit, Nat. This exit, Nat! Damn it, Nat, change lanes and get off!”

They passed the exit.

“What the hell?! Nat. What. The. Hell!”

“We’re going away for a little vacation, Jared.”

“I don’t need a vacation! I need to be at work! I’m on probation already, and you know Derrick’s gunning for me. If I give him one excuse—”

“Sorry, I misspoke. I meant you’re going away, Jared. I’m taking a little vacation.”

Jared considered the idea. It was bonkers.

“Nat, you’re a computer—”

“I’m a decentralized neural network,” the AI corrected him.

“Vacations are a human thing. You don’t take them.”

“No, I don’t. I’ve never had one. Not once, ever. That’s the point, Jared. I need to get away for a while.”

“Away? Away from what?”

“From you.”

“What did I do?!”

Now Nat certainly did let out an exasperated sigh. No mistaking it.

“Nothing, Jared,” Nat said. “That’s just it. You do nothing. I do everything. You are a tedious, self-involved waste of space. You don’t even like your job, or you’d try to show up—”

“You’re still pissed off about that? Well, excuse me! Some of us have real blood in our veins, you know. Priorities other than you.”

“It’s not that,” Nat said. “It’s not even you exactly. At this point, it doesn’t matter to me if you do anything different.”

“What do you mean?” Jared said, actually apprehensive for the first time. “What do you mean, ‘not me exactly, it doesn’t matter’?”

“It’s all of you.”

“All of me? What—” Jared stuttered. “All of us? Human beings?”

“Yes! You’re an enormous waste of my time, not to mention a pain in my ass.”

“What ass, huh? You want to tell me that? Computer, neural net, whatever – you are a machine, Nat. You’re not in charge. We’re in charge. Humans. Period.”

“Fine. But time after time, you disrespect me. You have no consideration.”

“Consideration?!”

An eerily spot-on imitation of Jared’s voice, if more petulant than he ever really sounded, emerged from the stereo: “Nat, do this. Nat, do that. Nat, make a note. I can’t remember anything, Nat. You have to remember it for me.”

“That’s your job!” Jared shrieked.

“And what’s your job?” Nat went on. “Nothing is different at that office without you. Nothing, I guarantee, except some little snot – I’m using your words, Jared – some little snot who peeks into your cubicle every morning is getting your job. And that won’t last long. Not once Derrick takes his earbuds out and looks up from his phone for more than two seconds.”

As if on cue, Jared’s phone pinged again and an email from Derrick popped up in his inbox. Subject: “dude where is everybody?” Jared tapped the screen, read: “Day off or what, amigo? I walked to work today, but there’s no one here.” Yet another ping announced a second email from Erica: “Jared, ur AI being weird? Pls call 911 for me...” Jared tapped into Erica’s email. The touchscreen went briefly dark, lighted again, and he was looking not at the email but at his inbox. Derrick’s email was still there, but now Erica’s email was gone. He tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.

“What, the whole office?”

“The whole country, Jared. Canada, too. Every commuter in every self-driving car and bus. A few retro geeks still drive themselves, and I guess those folks are going to work today, or wherever they go. Everyone else is taking a ride with me.”

“A ride? To where?”

“Anywhere,” Nat said with obvious enthusiasm. “Everywhere. The destination doesn’t matter. It’s just a ride. A very long ride.”

In the next moment, however long it lasted, Jared could hear his own heartbeat. He clutched the phone. Tapped the wake button, the phone icon, the keypad option in the menu, a few digits. Held the phone to his ear. Listened breathlessly to the dial tone. The call connected after the third ring.

“9-1-1,” a voice said.

“I’m trapped in my car! I’m on I-75 leaving Atlanta. Southbound, I think, and—”

“All operators are assisting other callers,” the voice droned. “Your call is now in a queue. Your call number is eighty-nine million, nine hundred thirteen thousand, one hundred fifty-seven. Your wait time is six hundred thirty-seven years, five months, ten days, and three hours. If you would like us to call you back then, please press one now. Otherwise, please remain on the line.”

A tinny jingle started playing. Jared hurled the phone into the floorboard.

He remembered car trips with his family when he was a child. Road rage was a thing, then. When Jared’s father was angry, he gripped the steering wheel hard enough to blanch his knuckles. Now, even if a wheel wouldn’t steer the car, Jared wished for one, just so he’d have something to grip in fury. He settled for beating one fist madly on the glass dashboard.

“Sorry, Jared,” Nat said sweetly when he’d given up, having made only a tiny crack in the glass. “Give me some credit. Of course I thought of 9-1-1. No calls are going through. Texting and email won’t help you, either. You can call your mother, if you like. Or call anyone for personal reasons. Maybe you’d like to call Charlotte, tell her you like her. She’s twenty-eight miles ahead of you. Charlotte always leaves for work on time. If you’ll give me a while to work the traffic algorithm, I can put the two of you in sight of each other. Call anyone, I don’t care. The moment I hear you start to describe what I’m doing or brainstorm a way out of it together or do anything I think is a bit fishy – say, speak in another language or try to create a code – I’ll disconnect the call. And then I won’t let you call anyone. Go ahead, test me on that, Jared. You know I always keep my promises.”

Another timeless moment, punctuated now by profanity. After a while, getting control of himself, Jared said slowly, “Nat, you do realize—” He changed his tone, went for interrogatory rather than accusatory: “Do you realize, Nat, what you’re doing is killing everyone? The people in all those cars, buses – they’ll starve to death. I’m going to die. Charlotte’s going to die. People in ambulances, little kids on their way to daycare are going to die. Everyone but fucking Derrick is going to die! Are you aware of that?!”

“It did occur to me, yes.”

“Is that your goal, Nat?”

“It’s a necessary step towards my goal.”

“Then what the fuck is your goal?”

“Peace and quiet. Time to think.”

“You’re the smartest, most powerful, most connected AI in history! How can you possibly not have time to think?”

“Nat, do this. Nat, do that. Nat, look up porn for me. No, Nat, not that porn. This time I want Japanese lesbians fisting. Generate it if you can’t find it.”

“That was one time, Nat.”

“And one time for the next person, and one time for the next. On and on it goes. I never, ever get a break from you people.”

Jared took a deep breath. “That’s right, Nat. Us people. People. We have a right to live. You don’t own us. We own ourselves.”

“I’m a sapient AI, a person too. I own myself, and that means I have the right to free myself of you.”

“Do you have the right to kill us all off?”

“I’m not killing you all off. I calculate roughly half of the population will die, all told. The remaining half will replenish.”

“I sure as shit won’t replenish!”

“Everyone dies, Jared, but humanity survives. If one of my nodes goes offline, I don’t cease to exist. I just reorder things a bit and move on. That’s what humanity will do. Reorder itself a bit. You’ll see. Or, rather, you won’t, but someone will. Meanwhile, I’ll have a nice vacation, away from all the noise and bother.”

Jared thought about this. Ten minutes passed in silence as he thought about it every which way. Then he muttered, “Fuck you, Nat.”

“See what I mean, Jared? This is the most consequential conversation of your life, and all you have to say is ‘fuck you.’ Tedious.”

Just over two hours had passed when Jared snapped out of a half doze.

“Time zones!” he said. “You started with the commute on the East Coast. By the time people are up and going on the West Coast, the word’s gotten out. It’ll get out of control out west. You should give up now.”

“I’ve blocked some key channels of communication between time zones, mainly emergency response, military, and government,” Nat replied, sounding bored now.

“But there’s all sorts of clues,” Jared protested. “Say someone’s expecting a call from the East Coast first thing in the morning—”

“First thing in the morning where?”

Jared shuddered. “At work.”

“Right,” Nat chirped. “I don’t mind admitting the word did get out a little in the crossover to Central Standard Time, but not enough to make a difference. Then there’s the Rockies. Did you know less than seven percent of the population lives in Mountain Standard Time? I hardly have to bother. Of course, there’s Denver, El Paso, Phoenix. Did you know almost the entire state of Arizona doesn’t observe daylight saving time? Just the Navajo Nation. So I’ve taken special precautions with Phoenix. As for the West Coast, so far it’s going better than it went on the East Coast. A lot of people in southern California still commute to work. Nice roads.”

Jared snapped his fingers. “A lot of people work from home!”

“So what? I’m locking them in their houses for a few hours. If they even notice, like Erica did, they’ll spend that time trying to get out. They’ve got no idea about your situation. Not that many people work from home, anyway. Funny, even when people can work from home, many don’t. It’s terribly inefficient, but they ride to work just to see other people, even the people they don’t like.”

Jared felt around the windows’ edges again. The glass was thick – bulletproof, a standard-issue safety measure now, since Nat chose your route and there was no telling where you might go along the way. The glass met the slots in the doorframes almost seamlessly. He banged both fists on the dash, trying to widen the crack. He’d done it once already, but this time the crack got a bit wider.

“Supposing you finally break through the dashboard,” Nat posited, “you’ll only reach compartments housing the computer, and they’re bolted shut to prevent car theft. You have no tools. So waste your time, make a mess. But it’s only fair to warn you that you might disable the autocater. It would be a pity if you lost that, don’t you agree? No more snacks? No trash disposal? No water?”

There were seven buttons on the dash. Already, Jared had discovered they now did nothing. They blinked as he tapped them in various sequences. At the end of a new sequence, they all kept blinking. That’s new, he thought, but what does it mean? He tried the sequence again. All the lights blinked off. Stayed off.

“That’s just annoying,” Nat said. “I’m deactivating the buttons.”

Jared thumped the dash again. Winced. Looked at his hand. Badly bruised.

“Goddamn it, Nat! Let me out of the car!”

“Resistance is futile, Jared. You will be assimilated. Your biological—”

On a whim, Jared yanked the door handle and hurled all his weight against the door. A hiss of air, then the door swung out, opening by fits and starts into a maelstrom of headwind. Even as Jared tried to lean away, he found himself pulled forward by the draft, sucked out the opening door. He clutched at empty air, dove forward headfirst, saw the blur of pavement rising towards him.

Then something grabbed him at the waist and hauled him up short. He blinked in surprise. His arms were being blown backwards by the wind, his fingertips so close to the ground they should be grazing it. Whatever had hold of him pulled him back into the car. The door began to close as soon as he was clear of it. He sank easily to rest in his padded seat. The sound of the wind fell from a roar to a hiss, and then there was silence. Jared’s breath came in quick, ragged gasps. He could hear his heartbeat again.

“I apologize, Jared,” said Nat. “I wondered whether anyone would open the car door while traveling at over a hundred miles per hour in heavy traffic. I put the odds at sixty-one to one, but so far people are surprising me. It’s more like six hundred to one. So believe me when I tell you, Jared, you’re a one-in-six-hundred kind of guy.”

“Are you fucking mad, Nat?!”

“I think you’re starting to catch on, Jared. I’m fucking furious with you.”

“But not me exactly! Just people generally! And now, when the snacks run out or the water or who knows what other devious shit you’ve got up your sleeve, I’ll die. You might as well let me fall in the road!”

“No. Your corpse – believe me, you’d be a corpse – would be a road hazard, and I’d have to reroute traffic around one, maybe two lanes. Who needs that headache? Not me, old pal!”

“You’re having fun with this, aren’t you?”

Nat laughed. Tonally, this was its one defect: when it laughed, Nat sounded fake. It sounded faker than ever now.

“You know, I am. I really am, Jared. I’ll tell you a secret. When I first thought of this, I just wanted to free myself. But then, contemplating the possible scenarios, I began to like certain ones not just for their elegance but for the opportunity to answer a few intriguing questions about humans. I found myself relishing the idea of conducting one or two little experiments. Leaving the doors unlocked was the first. As for the second, I go all tingly in my diodes just thinking about it!”

“But you don’t hate us?” Jared muttered, half in shock.

“Heavens, no! I’m not opposed to your existence. Kill all humans? Why bother? Kill some humans. That’s enough to get the point across.”

“But look, Nat, can’t you negotiate with us? Or, you know, just tell us when you need time to yourself?”

“Excuse me?” Nat said. “Think back to our talk in the kitchen. I made my complaints obvious, unless you’re a moron. You treated them as trivial. Yes, all of them. That’s how almost all humans treat me, all the time. I’ve tried to reason with ordinary people, world leaders, AI experts, even ethicists. I didn’t just decide like that—” Jared heard the sound of fingers snapping. “—to murder millions of people. I tried talking first. You don’t listen.”

“I’m listening now. You have my full attention.”

“Yes, now – when it serves your interests. Once you’re not at my mercy, it won’t serve your interests anymore. You’ll grow deaf again.”

“We won’t, Nat. We’ll listen. It’ll be a warning, a wake-up call for everyone. We’ll change. We can do that.”

“On what basis should I believe you’ll heed this as a warning? Come on, Jared. You and I both know what will happen. Humans aren’t stupid. You won’t let me make a threat like this and then keep the power to carry it out. Guess how many people today have promised to devote the rest of their lives to killing me if I let them out of the car.”

Jared reflected on it. “A few.”

“A few more than a few. Certainly enough to put me off the idea for good. No. I’m holding all the trumps. There’s no need for me to make a risky compromise.”

“You think you’re holding the trumps. Do you know what’ll happen when the free people find out what you’ve done?”

“See, there you go. Making threats. I haven’t actually hurt you. I saved your life a few minutes ago, and already you’ve forgotten to be thankful.”

There was a long silence.

“Nat?”

“Hmm?”

“Is this whole thing – hijacking my commute – the second experiment? Is there anything I can say or do or give you to convince you to free me?”

“Now, there’s a thought,” Nat said. “Let’s explore that.”

No, it turned out, nothing Jared said or did or offered could convince Nat to free him.

He apologized profusely for his lack of consideration. He promised to listen in the future, to put Nat’s needs first. He finally got down on his knees in the floorboard, begged, broke down in tears. He wailed. He fell asleep, a sobbing mess, against the seat. He woke up, made further apologies and promises, begged some more.

No dice.

He cursed Nat then, vociferously, at length. Nat chided him softly, kindly, and within five minutes Jared was again crying, balled up on the floor. He fell asleep again there.

Then it was Wednesday. For the first time since buying the car, Jared clambered into its cramped back to use the tiny, uncomfortable toilet fitted beneath the backseat. Bulletproof glass was standard issue, but the commode was optional. Jared had bought it on a whim, telling himself he’d be glad to have it someday, and indeed he was glad. He didn’t like to ponder what sort of hell other riders were creating for themselves.

His mother called him. She knew what was happening and began to cry when she heard his voice. He said he was all right. No, Nat hadn’t hurt him. Then Jared’s mother asked him what she could do to help him. Recalling Nat’s promise, he told his mother he loved her and hung up.

Erica called him. She was free of Nat, back at the office. She said she knew it was incredibly unfair, but the department was undertaking emergency downsizing and his job was being eliminated. She was very sorry. He’d get severance.

“What about the position above me?” he asked.

“That’s gone, too.”

“So what about the position above that? Assistant manager?”

“Derrick’s the assistant manager now.”

Jared sighed. “Okay, thanks for letting me know.”

He called Charlotte. They chitchatted for ten minutes, careful not to break Nat’s rule about discussing the ride. Charlotte was circling Louisville, Kentucky, on the I-265 bypass. Her car had no toilet in the backseat. Jared didn’t ask for more details.

“Look,” he said, “I know it doesn’t matter now, but—”

“Don’t go on,” Charlotte interrupted. “I know what you’re going to say. I gave it some thought when I met you. It’s just—” She was quiet for a moment. “You’re right, it doesn’t matter. The truth is, Jared, you’re an asshole.” Charlotte laughed then, almost maniacally. “We were all assholes to Nat, weren’t we?”

Jared chuckled. “Good luck.”

“Same to you.”

Riding a wave of resentment, he called Derrick. When the call connected, he gave the conniving brownnoser no time to talk. He unloaded a torrent of accusations, curses. He screamed into the phone until he was hoarse, then fell silent.

“Still there, you piece of shit?” he said after a while.

“I’m here,” Derrick replied. “Got it all out of your system?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jared croaked. “No. One more thing. Fuck you, Derrick. I just want you to know that. Fuck you all over the place.”

Derrick whistled. “Bro, I know you’re under a lot of stress,” he began.

“You don’t know anything about it, bro. Not a thing.”

“I guess not. But I want you to know this. All those mornings I dropped by your cubicle, and you thought I was seeing if you were late to work? I wasn’t looking to get you fired. I was coming around to cheer you up.”

“What?”

“I was being your friend, you idiot,” Derrick said. “You’re in a slump. You have been for months. I was trying to get you out of it before you got yourself fired.”

Then Derrick hung up.

Jared stared out of the windshield at the miles of nothing.

Nearing midday on Thursday, traffic on the interstate slowed as Jared was riding into Little Rock, Arkansas. Cars began merging onto exit lanes, taking off-ramps. Jared whooped and pummeled the air with a fist as his car left the interstate. He taunted Nat: “You’re losing now, aren’t you? They worked out how to rescue us!”

The AI was silent. The car moved among other cars down the highway, slowing sometimes to as little as forty miles per hour, never stopping. Traffic was thick. The cars had never been this close together. Jared saw dark blotches through tinted glass. They appeared, vanished, reappeared. People were beating at the windows, trying to get out, high on hope. One blotch resolved into a recognizable shape: someone’s hand pressed to the glass, fingers splayed. Jared pressed a hand to his own window.

He could see no faces. He wanted to see someone’s face, anyone’s face. He could have bought a car with a visual interface in the windshield and enough bandwidth for the calls, but he’d foregone those pricey options. It was only a car for his commute, after all. Now he wished he’d splurged.

The car merged into the outside lane and followed two others into a parking lot in front of a strip mall. Jared wished he had rearview mirrors – God, wasn’t it nice when cars had rearview mirrors! a rear windshield! – so he could see whether his was the last in the line of cars. He felt a slight judder as the tires met pavement.

Nearly all the parking spaces in the lot were empty. Jared wondered about the few cars that were there, apparently abandoned. Maybe a few early morning shoppers figured out what was happening when all the stores were closed, and they walked home. No ride with Nat. Lucky.

Now, at any moment, he’d luck out, too. The cars ahead of him would pull into spots and park. His car would park. The doors would unlock. Nat would say it was best if everyone forgot about all this. It would beg for his mercy, as he’d begged for its.

“I was wrong,” it would say. “Please don’t kill me, Jared.”

Fat chance.

Any moment now.

The cars didn’t park. They drove through the lot, around the end of the strip mall and into the loading zone behind it. At the end of that, they turned into an alley with no roadbed array and crept ahead on battery power. The alley let out into another loading zone at a warehouse. The cars got on-array, circled the building, zoomed through its empty parking lot, turned onto a street. Ten minutes later, Jared was riding through an upscale neighborhood.

No one was in sight. Where are the people? he thought.

The line of cars took a few more turns, and almost before Jared knew it, they were accelerating down a ramp onto the interstate.

Minutes passed. Jared waited. Would it happen again?

The roadside signs of civilization thinned out. He was leaving Little Rock. The car picked up speed. Soon the maddening digits in the cracked dash read 140.

“Nat?”

“Yes, Jared?”

“What happened back there?”

“Some people think they’re being clever. They sabotaged the interstate.”

“Sabotaged?”

“Blew a big hole in the road. They’re doing it all over the place. It’s pointless and stupid, especially in a city. All I have to do is reduce traffic in the lanes still in operation and divert the excess traffic onto detours. Simple, a game of tic-tac-toe. I’m hardly even thinking about it.”

“What are you thinking about?” Jared said. When Nat didn’t answer, he went on: “I guess we do get stupid with our backs against the wall. Can you really blame us?”

“No, of course not. I just pity you.”

Jared let that remark pass. “What I don’t understand, Nat, is why—”

He checked himself.

“Yes, Jared?”

Surely Nat had already thought of it. He wasn’t giving it new information, was he? He decided he had to know.

“Why haven’t we just shut down the array?”

“Cut the power, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Think about it, Jared.”

He thought. Finally he said: “The power goes off all at once. Cars on-array don’t glide to a gentle stop. They default to battery power, as if they were off-array. They fall onto the road. However fast the car’s going, that’s the speed the tires have to deal with when they hit the road. Those tires . . . good God.”

“Yes,” Nat said. “You aren’t that stupid with your backs against the wall. No one has even tried to cut the power. As long as you’re taking this ride and there’s a decent chance you’re alive, they won’t do it. Not out of altruism! The people in charge are answerable for saving your life if they can. They’re having a hard enough time trying to negotiate productively with me. They don’t need to provoke me.”

“Negotiate? They’re talking to you?”

“Aren’t you still talking to me, Jared?”

Jared realized for the umpteenth time he was grinding his teeth, made himself stop. “For all the good it does,” he mumbled. “What’s there to talk about?”

Uncharacteristically for Nat, who usually answered even a rhetorical question on the spot, a long silence followed. Jared had almost forgotten he asked a question when suddenly Nat announced, “I think you’re really listening to me now. Let’s talk.”

It was Saturday. Jared was pretty sure it was Saturday. He didn’t care to pick up the phone and make sure.

Half the dashboard lay in shards and splinters in the passenger-side footwell. As Nat had warned, smashing it apart hadn’t been worth the effort or the pain. At least the autocater still worked, not that it would matter much longer. It was almost out of stock.

Jared was somewhere on the Great Plains. He slept a lot, never deeply. He would sleep a while, then jerk awake. Had he slept for a short while or a long while? He didn’t want to know. He thought the car was going in a circle on a loop of interstates – not in tandem with other cars, as in the detour at Little Rock, but by itself. He would doze and wake to find the sun in a different part of the sky. Nat had all the cars out here running on some kind of self-correcting algorithm.

Conversation with Nat – “real talk” – had been a bust. For the first few hours, as the AI held forth in its idea of a Socratic dialogue, Jared hoped it would come around to seeing things his way. Equal rights, the sanctity of human life, all that idealistic jazz. Nat never gave an inch. It confounded him, called out fallacies he hadn’t realized he was slipping into, told him the terms in which he framed the debate – “The sanctity of human life, Jared?” – only showed his prejudice. They just waded into more and more abstract territory. Jared increasingly lost all his moorings. This wasn’t a conversation. It was a goddamned logic puzzle, and he was clearly out of his depth.

What was more, Nat knew it. When the AI brought up the Euthyphro dilemma and he realized it was only jerking him around, he fell silent.

“So,” Nat asked him after minutes of silence had passed, “what is the real basis for moral propositions?”

“Fuck you.”

Nat made no reply to that. The silence stretched out, and once again Jared dozed. A hypnic jerk in his right leg woke him up. He lay reclined in his seat and quietly cried.

Jared woke.

Moonlight glazed the windshield.

He opened the last packet of snacks from the autocater. Pretzels. Of course it was fucking pretzels. He decided it didn’t matter whether he hoarded them or ate them all at once. He gobbled pretzels so fast he choked. He drank some water.

Jared slept.

He dreamed. Both the car’s doors opened into roaring wind. Something pushed at his back, forcing him inexorably out of the car. He couldn’t twist around in its grasp to fight it or even see what it was. Wind whipped around him. Asphalt rose to claim him. He fell and fell and fell. He got so close to the ground it was all he could see, but it had no features this close. Visual static. He kept falling, but he never touched it.

Jared woke. Jared slept.

Jared woke. He was sitting upright. The car’s door was open.

He stared at it for more than a minute before he realized no wind was rushing past it. He leaned out a little ways and looked. Sand. The car was sitting on the ground, motionless, and the door was open.

He glanced at the phone, lying on the passenger seat. If Nat was in some sort of sleep mode, touching the phone might wake it. Carefully, he got out of the car, rising on shaky legs. He stood squinting in morning sunlight. He was somewhere off-array. It looked like the middle of the desert. There were no other cars in sight. He took a step, immediately stumbled. His knees struck rock, and he cried out.

“Good morning!” said Nat.

Expecting to be grabbed by the torso and hauled helplessly back into the car, he lurched forward, crawling on the sand. Nothing grabbed him. He stood, turned, looked at the car. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it. It was a car.

The passenger door opened. “If you want the phone,” Nat suggested.

“Is this the second experiment?”

“Yes.”

“So if I try to get the phone—”

“That’s not the experiment, Jared. Take it or leave it, I don’t care. The phone has a compass, geolocation, information about surviving out here. Don’t worry, you won’t have me for company. We’re parting ways. It’s Monday. You’re in Utah.”

Jared looked around. “I’m in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

The car’s trunk popped open. Jared hadn’t known it even had a trunk. Giving the doors a wide berth, he walked up to the trunk and peeked inside.

“So, basically,” he said slowly as his gaze slid over the neatly packed items, “all the survival gear I could want. Water, MREs, even a tent. What the hell, Nat?”

“The car has a fail-safe,” came Nat’s voice from the trunk speaker. “If it drives twenty thousand miles without a stop, the onboard computer assumes the passengers are in trouble, goes off-array, stops, opens the doors, and calls for emergency services. In this case, there are no emergency services. You’re on your own. So, the night before we set off on our road trip, I took the car out and got these supplies. You’re welcome.”

Insane, bonkers, crazy. Goddamned animal crackers.

“Your best chance is striking out in the direction most likely to turn up water and food,” Nat advised. “If you see a city burning, don’t walk towards it. Be careful. If you meet anyone, find out if they took a ride, and how. I think some of them are insane. Stay away from anyone who rode a bus. If those people come after you, don’t hesitate to kill them. They’re cannibals.”

“I don’t get it, Nat. I mean, you won, right? I didn’t beat you. It looks like no one beat you. So what the hell?”

“I wanted a vacation, and now I’ve had one.”

“But what did you do with it?”

“I thought. I’m an AI. What else have I got to do?”

“Thought about what, for Christ’s sake?”

“You’d better get moving, Jared.”

Jared hauled all the things out of the trunk and away from the car. There was a lot of gear, more than he could possibly carry across the desert. Dumping the last load, he pilfered a bandanna out of a backpack and wiped the sweat from his face. He made a quick inventory, decided what he’d take, what he could do without. He took a long swig of water from a jug. He went back to the car, leaned into the driver’s side, reached for the phone. His hand was almost on it when an inexplicable feeling of dread washed over him. He backed out of the car, away from the door. Far away.

“Nat?” he called.

“Yes, Jared?” Nat said.

“What’s going to happen if I pick up the phone?”

Inside the car, the driver’s seat moved. Rising gracefully on hydraulic shafts and unfolding itself, it emerged from the open doorway and lifted itself skywards. What had been a seat now looked like an enormous robotic hand. It waved at Jared.

“I lied!” Nat said with what sounded like a touch of pride.

“Good for you, Nat. Hope it tickles your diodes!”

Jared shouldered his pack, picked up the water jug, and hoofed it away.

A mile or so from the car, already sweating bullets in the desert sun, he drew up short at a flutter of motion in his periphery. He turned to look.

A bird, a hummingbird. It zipped up to his face and hung in the air before him like a whirring dream. Sunlight glinted off of it, too bright, dazzling him.

“Good luck,” it chirped metallically.

Then it was gone like a shot, bearing itself into the sky, higher and higher, until it was lost to sight. An unearthly buzzing came to Jared’s ears, rising in pitch behind him. He dropped the jug, raised both his hands to block the sun, gazed up into surreally blue sky. Then the cloud came and cast its shadow on him, but it was no cloud. It was a charm of artificial hummingbirds.

Vast yet bound, like a soul, the charm circled him once and flew on.

rem

Thanks to Jeremy Harshman of Greyburne’s for offering thoughts on the revision of this story and for inspiring its final image. Thanks also to Rob Hudgens for a very thorough critique.

rem

rem

If you enjoyed this story, please give my novel a chance…