Inhuman(24)

“But why wouldn’t he just…” He paused as he looked to the A.I. for guidance. “Why wouldn’t he just crush us?”

“The answer to that question can wait,” the A.I. replied urgently. “The priority is for us to stop this car from careening into an object at a high rate of speed and...”

The A.I. stopped midsentence as the car roof suddenly became transparent, a feature that wasn’t activated by any of the three passengers in the car. The trio looked upward to see the candidate looming over them, flying like a vulture, circling as it watched the proceedings below.

The A.I. turned to see a monolithic structure that he and James instantly recognized as the bridge that connected the north shore mountains to the downtown core of the rain-drenched city. The candidate appeared to be guiding them toward it.

“I have a very bad feeling about this,” the A.I. uttered.

“We’ve got to stop this car,” James whispered, his face instantly draining of color.

“What? What’s going on?” Thel asked, examining the shared expressions of foreboding on their faces.

James looked her in the eye as he swallowed back his fear to speak. “We need to stop this car now.” He lunged forward toward the cockpit of the car, spinning the seat next to Thel so he was in the driver’s position. He began pressing buttons on the dashboard. “We’re physically locked out of the car’s systems,” James informed his companions. “I can’t get the steering wheel to engage!”

“And the door locks aren’t functioning either!” Thel shouted as she tried to manually open the doors. “Neither are the windows!”

Suddenly, an idea flashed into the A.I.’s mind. He began to speak as he turned himself around and searched for the release button on the back seat. “Unless the coding of the sim changed, the car may still be working based on the model of real electric cars in the first half of the twentieth century.”

“What are you doing?” Thel asked him.

“If we can access the trunk, we may be able to find an object James can use to disable the onboard computer and cut power to the A/C motors.”

Thel jumped into action, feeling with her fingers around the lining of the back seats, searching for a lever. “Is this it?” she asked as she pressed a small red button. The backs of the seats lowered, as if to answer her question.

The A.I. pulled the seats all the way down, and then thrust his body toward the trunk, groping for any sort of tool he could toss to James to help him destroy the car’s onboard computer system.

For his part, James punched and pounded the dash, trying with all his might to puncture the plastic paneling on the dash so he could access the wiring underneath. Even after his knuckles became bloodied, the durable dash was barely scuffed.

“Do you see anything?” Thel asked the A.I., terrified as the car sped, dangerously fast, onto the onramp leading to the bridge deck.

“I do!” the A.I. called back. “There’s a tire iron, but it’s screwed into place.”

“Can you loosen the screws?”

“I-I don’t think so,” the A.I. replied, the terror finally overcoming him as his hands shook, his fingers unable to grasp the cold, cruel screws, the sweat from his fingertips making the work impossible. I’m just a man now, he thought, unable to block the notion. I can’t save them...or me.

James stopped pounding the dash as he began to understand the sadistic logic the candidate was employing. The bridge appeared to be fifty meters above the water at its highest point, and they were quickly speeding up the incline. Fifty meters was right on the edge of being survivable if their car were to careen over the edge, off the bridge. From that height, hitting the water might be like hitting concrete if the fall was sharp enough. “I think…” James began, but his lips had difficulty forming the words as the adrenaline shook him, the fear caused tremors throughout his body. “I think we better brace for impact.”

The A.I. gave up his attempt to pry the tire iron free and grabbed Thel’s arm, pulling her down to the floor of the cab. “Get flat,” he spoke.

“Oh God,” Thel whispered as she realized there’d be no saving of the day, no heroic rescue just in time.

“Thel,” James said over his shoulder as they approached what he realized could be the end of their matrix patterns, the end of their conscious lives, “I love you.”

“I love you too!”

A pre-programmed violent turn of the car’s wheels jerked the car violently to the right, causing it to cross into the oncoming lanes before impacting the guardrail, the left front side hitting first, the momentum threatened to flip the car into a roll. The driver’s side airbag inflated and cushioned James from the worst effects of the initial collision, but the vehicle momentum, with the added lift of the guardrail, caused the car to flip up and over the safety barrier, turning it upside before, terrifyingly, the gravity seemed to seep out of the car interior.