Every once in a while, the car swerves into a different lane without warning or deceleration. The force shakes me – violently, interrupting my thoughts. Grasping a leather seat reeking of chemical perfume, I narrowly avoid hitting my head on the passenger window. The driver, Bennet, doesn’t look bothered. The entire thing feels like a power play. I can’t protest – either I let him accompany me to my meeting with the LA Urban Planning Board, or I get dropped in the middle of nowhere with hardly any time to find alternate transport.
“Interesting number plate,” I say, “One-Alpha-One, is this your car?” I wonder how much the DMV got paid-off for this.
“Not my car,” he says without looking at me. “And it’s the car’s name.”
“They have names now?”
“Of course.”
He lets the conversation die like he has little interest in talking to me. He’s young, perhaps a decade my junior, so I forgive his lack of manners. The car swerves again, forcing me to press my elbow against the door as my head feels like it’s going to detach from my neck. That’s when I notice, he isn’t holding the wheel.
“Awful AI on this car,” I grumble.
“This model is a bit too old for AI,” Bennet replies.
I don’t have the patience to ask what he means.
“Can you keep it under control, please? My lawyer would love it if you injured me.”
I don’t mean to threaten the man, but my nerves are stretched, and the AI’s navigation has my heart pounding in my neck.
“I couldn’t control him if I wanted to,” he says, all indifferent. He leans back and lets the wheel spin on its own, charting an obscure path through the five lanes of the highway, left to right and right to left between the moving vehicles.
I want to tell the guy to drop the act, but he’s silent and dead serious. Anger bubbles through my chest. Something very rude is about to escape my mouth, but what the car does next leaves my jaw on the floor.
The aperture-like emblem in the middle of the driver’s wheel has spun open and the wheel is coming apart. Seamless plastic breaks into components that wrinkle like liquid surfaces, like skin. The interior of the car looks organic – twitching, creasing, writhing. I should demand an explanation from Bennet, but the sight has me speechless. In the corner of my mind, I remember a story I heard yesterday, in the heat and noise of a protest. It was ridiculous to listen to.
I’d managed to organize a gathering of about five hundred, with scores more ready to turn up should things become violent. We’d blocked the mouth of the Palm Acres parking lot, allowing no construction vehicles through.
Our signs read, “NO MORE HIGHWAYS THROUGH BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS”, “SPARE THE PARKS”, “BUILD CITIES FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR CARS!” Most of us were climate activists in one way or another. Half the crowd were pragmatic about it, knowing this would be one of many battles. The other half were people like Jimmy. Everyone calls him “Jimmy” though his name is Michael, and he’s more a Jim Morrison than Jimi Hendrix. He would go to every gathering, and I saw him hurry in my general direction that day, looking anxious, as if something was chasing him. I could smell him, damp and herbal, long before he was close enough to speak.
“Gretchen!” He said, his voice was far too high-pitched for his build. “Can I have a minute?”
“Sure,” I smiled.
He gestured me to a corner between a lone palm and a bus stop. In front of us, the narrow sidewalk ended abruptly and the highway began.
I followed Jimmy. Once under the scant shade of the palm tree, he leaned forward to whisper something to me. I’d never expect this kind of shyness from him.
“I’m telling you this because I don’t know who else to call,” he said, each word an odorous bouquet, “I know you have an open mind. I saw something really alarming the other day. It’s about the new car model, the Ford, I forgot the name.”
“The semi-autonomous one?” I helped.
“That one.”
“Tell me,” I said.
For once, I thought he might be useful. The pie chart for sponsors of the highway project we were protesting has a solid slice dedicated to Ford. They’re popular in LA, after all, whatever Jimmy had to say, I was planning to use against them.
I held my breath.
“I was hanging around the park here in Palm Acres, right? It was the dead of night and fuck me, I know, I shouldn’t have. But it’s just so nice here and with the entire place possibly getting bulldozed, I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted, you get me? Anyway, I was between the trees and suddenly I heard the bushes breaking and the rumbling of an engine. I look around the shrubbery and what do I see? One of these new Fords. Lights barely flickering, slowly rolling up the hill.”
“So, someone drove their car into the park?”
“No, but that’s the thing!” He said.
He’d grown excited. His voice rose a few decibels. “I tried to find the driver and offer them a beer, you know, in exchange for some privacy, but there was no one behind the wheel.”
“So, an AI malfunction?”
“What else? I’ll show you the tracks later if you want. I came back this morning to check and they were still there.”
I appreciated the fact that he’d checked himself. Self-doubt showed me he was rational at the time.
“But Gretchen,” he said, and scratched his neck where the beard ended, “that’s not the weirdest bit. Please believe me about what happened next. Do you promise to listen?”
“I promise,” I nodded. A blazing red flag slowly rose in the back of my mind.
“The car couldn’t detect me, I reckon, because even though I was close, it kept doing its thing. And I’ve never seen a car do that. I’ve seen them drive on their own, sure. But this one was moving strange. The front wheels tilted sideways. The entire front bit seemed to lower. The lid morphed into something like fluid, or skin. Then, just below the lights, not above, the thing opened. Not like to show the engine but like a mouth. Like a horse, to be precise, I swear, please believe me.”
He was panting in terror and the stank of sweat in the noon heat.
“It didn’t have much in there, just smooth metal, almost like a palate, lined with wires, and teeth, or something like teeth, shards of thick and crooked metal. It needed teeth for what it was about to do.” He took a deep breath. “It dug its teeth into the ground and started chewing up the soil, along with the grass and the bushes. It ate until dirt and grass and little rocks started piling on the seats. It chomped down an entire tree, too. It made this horrible screeching sound while eating the larger stones. The sound of metal scraping against rock made me want to blow out my eardrums. When it was done, a good bit of land stood barren.”
For a moment, I thought to ask if he was alone at the park that night, but of course he was. I couldn’t think of anything in response to his yarn. His storytelling was fun, I’ll give him that. Good imagery and all. I caught myself shaking my head.
“I could show you!” He insisted, but I was already backing off into the crowd. I wondered, for the umpteenth time, whether Jimmy was a sincere, walking stereotype, or if he was a plant by the opposition to make us look like a joke.
Jimmy and the like were the reason I chose to talk to the council on my own, away from the rank and file of the protest. And goddamn, if I’m not becoming more of a Jimmy by the second. The rumble of the engine sounds like excited breathing as the wheel finishes transforming. The latter has split into a tunnel now, and inside I glimpse at an almost organic tangle of naked cables and pipes.
As the car becomes alive, its driver seems less human. From ear to ear, his face creeps open. There is flesh and bone inside him, but also the electric flicker of something else. He leans over the wheel, expression vacant, his breathing still.
Like snakes from a barrel, a braid of piping and cable drives itself into his features. He leans further still. Behind his eyes, a blue light flickers on and off. I watch it dim as his eyeballs fill with smoke, until the border between the whites and the irises blurs.
My seatbelt is stuck. I push on the handle, the doors might as well be welded into place. The seat sucks me in, gripping me. The machine wants me to watch the connection take place. Outside, we’ve entered a slower stretch of traffic. The vehicle drags between industrial buildings and parking lots, not a person to be seen on the streets. Between two crumbling blocks, the cables withdraw from the man’s face. He is lucid again, despite the veil of smoke behind his eyes.
He turns to me.
“You’ll want to know what happened. We talked, the car and I. I’m happy to answer your questions, as no doubt you’ll have many.”
The wheel reassembled. He’s not holding it. The vehicle creeps through empty streets, leaving us plenty of time to converse. I feel my skirt pocket for my phone. It’s gone, fallen into some crack somewhere, swallowed by the seats.
“Is this… some new technology?” my voice rasps.
“Actually, it’s quite old. In the nineties, Ford and other companies discovered some of their cars had gained sentience. They reacted to voices, they drove on their own, even though no autonomy was baked into their design. The rest, all these new electronics and push for AI, has been about allowing them to communicate better.”
“So, this car can hear me?”
“He can.”
“Will it speak to me?”
“He, it’s a he, this car is my father.” Bennet pauses, so I can process the new information. “He will speak to you once you’re alone.”
“I’m not here to talk to this thing. I thought you were driving me to the planning council.”
“I was, but you’ve upset him – Alpha – terribly. He finds your hatred unacceptable.”
I try to interrupt – I don’t hate cars, but there is a time and place for them. The current over-dependence is both destructive and dangerous. Being a pedestrian in cities like LA feels like being a second-class citizen.
Bennet doesn’t even let me start speaking. When I utter as much as a syllable, the car swerves sideways. My head slams into the glass window.
“Cars are not that different from you and I, Ms. Marston, and they have no desire to be different,” I hear him, throbbing pain radiates through my cranium. “They wish to be included, they want to participate in society. In America, they’ve been given these rare opportunities. As a civil rights activist, you’ll understand why your rhetoric, that aims to eradicate and exclude them, makes them aggressive.”
A soot-dark mist falls over my vision. The pain and terror mess with my blood pressure, with my head. Through the haze, I hear the car stop with a screech of the brakes, followed by the sound of a seatbelt unbuckling. The driver’s side door opens, and Bennet exits to the street. I can’t make out what he says before he shuts the door.
The Ford leaps forward like a rabid animal. Back and forth, along the wide empty roads, at speeds so intense my head throbs. I feel a profound suffocating nausea. The steering wheel spins on its own. The pedals dance like piano keys.
It’s a power play. I am at the mercy of this thing. A chasm of grim possibilities opens in my mind, each scenario more disturbing than the last.
I have to fight for control.
I aim for the driver’s seat. Gritting my teeth, I slip the seatbelt over my head. A sharp turn bangs my brow into the steering wheel. A second shot of pain joins the nausea. I think my head is bleeding.
I bank left, throwing myself onto the driver’s seat. Gripping the wheel with both hands, I put all my strength into taming it.
The wheel grips back. The plastic and metal flow, trapping my fingers. The aperture spins open revealing the pipes and wires inside.
No.
I thrash to get away. The seatbelt pulls me back, pressing my body into the seat. The piping and cables slither out, dark with oily soot. I twist my face away.
Perhaps the car believes I’m barely human, like Bennet, or perhaps it doesn’t care. It intends to speak to me in its own way regardless. The cables cover my face. They block my vision, and tangle into my hair, creating a painful pull. The pipe finds a way between my teeth. I taste burnt fuel as it pries them apart. The car’s breath floods my senses. It’s the smell of a poorly ventilated underground parking lot where you feel the lung cancer forming with every breath.
It doesn’t want to speak to me. It wants to kill me. This thing isn’t just sentient, it’s smart.
It understands why it’s incompatible with humans – and it wants us to accommodate it anyway.
I pull away from the metallic grip, but the wires and pipes are flexible and strong. My body is stuck to the driver’s seat.
My hands are free. Cables cover my eyes. I find the gear shift and push at it, hoping to control the speed of the car. My legs are too short to reach the pedals.
The gear shift throbs under my fingers.
This is where my struggle turns desperate. The belt responds by wrapping around me, squeezing me so hard the blood barely circulates to my limbs. The more I fight, the more I breathe in the toxic fumes of the car. It’s letting me know unambiguously I’ll be dead unless I surrender.
I’m thirty years old and this hasn’t happened to me. It happened to roofied friends in college – but I was always cautious. I know cautious ones get raped too, but I also had good fortune.
My luck, it seems, has run out. At least I can’t see a thing as the seat tilts back and the gear shift slithers along my leg. The rest feels like surgery. Bad sex is like having your organs harvested. As the car speeds through nameless streets, occasionally tilting me off balance. A repugnant liquid soaks through my skirt. It has the texture of motor oil, slippery, and thick. The gear shift pumps it out vigorously as if it wants displace my blood with its own fluids.
The act is over in minutes. The pipes and seatbelts loosen and withdraw. I collapse on the seat, unsteady under the nauseating motion. The car wants to ignore me now. I’m holding my neck, coughing. The tacky perfume of the seats feels like fresh mountain air after what I went through.
Through the loosened belt, I reach under the passenger seat for my backpack. From inside it, I get the bottle of water, and bring it to my lips. I should be drinking, I really should. But the cabled, tender inside of the wheel still stretches wide open, and I pour the water, all two liters of it, inside its fragile, pulsing innards.
I realize what I’ve done and I brace for the car’s painful retaliation. Instead, I catch the smell of burning plastic.
Days pass and I regain some semblance of sanity. The incident is so strange, so fantastical, that it’s easy to pretend it never happened. Besides, Alpha is dead now, smashed against a pillar of steel and concrete, and I got out of the wreckage mostly intact.
Sure, I can’t stand being on a car seat, but the public transport in Los Angeles is acceptable, if slow. I have to pad my arrival times by an hour and ride next to homeless folks, but they are safe, if opportunistic about my belongings.
Weeks later, I found out I’m going to need an abortion. I browse the clinics in my area and wonder which one will let me keep whatever is left of the fetus.
A few months pass and my social life begins to heal. I return to activism. One day, I might even drum up the courage to speak to Jimmy about his night in the park.
One evening in September I have my boyfriend over. He doesn’t know about the incident, and he probably shouldn’t –we haven’t been together that long. His name is Shaun. I think he dates me out of loneliness rather than genuine passion. The sentiment is mutual.
We’re eating my competent take on Mediterranean cuisine. The house is quiet. Nowadays, I don’t like silence. Shaun hasn’t spoken in a while, he’s lost in his thoughts. I’d rather not be alone with mine.
“If cars were sentient,” I say, “what civil rights would you grant them? How would you make sure they don’t infringe on people and the environment?”
“Sentient cars? How would that even work?”
Minutes later, I hear a crunching noise outside like my garden fence is breaking into pieces. Shaun’s ears perk up. White lights flash through the window, lightning-bright.
“A thunderstorm?” He wonders aloud.
The wallpaper bulges and tears. The house’s wooden front wall snaps into planks and splinters. A segment of the roof caves in and rains on the threshold as the glass and timber door falls to the side.
From the rubble emerges a wolf-grey Toyota truck, its roof as high as the ceiling. A huge thing, the largest I’ve seen. When it notices me, it heads in my direction. My skin freezes. The car drives ahead, then stands still. Its wheels rest on whatever’s left of the shoe rack and humble little bookshelf. The lights flicker red at me. It’s beckoning me forward.
The driver’s seat is empty.