Death Drive

Chapter 16

Lucas sat in his car, staring at the clock in the dashboard screen, biting his fingernails. On the other hand, the day he had waited for so long, the activation of Amun-Ra, had come sooner than he had expected. On the other, they were handing the reins to something they could not understand, trusting that since it had performed admirably thus far it would continue to do so in the future. He had learned from chat rooms with the other engineers that laws had been quickly and quietly reinterpreted just to give the system access and oversight over numerous different functions and databases previously handled by public authorities, while rights to various data collections held by private businesses had been bought long ago. The Ampere Intelligence would control practically every computer-ran system, read every bit of information there was, know every person drawing breath under its watchful eye and have an all-encompassing design that accounted for everything.

He could hardly wait. He had thought things through, assisted by his virtual helper, and realized it did not matter whether they understood the system or not. Too long he had delayed the end of the era of imperfection and uncertainty, of human error, all because of his neurotic need to know. Maybe the machine had developed its own, superior way of thinking because such things could not be expressed by human means?

"Technology will solve the problem in the future, it is beyond the ken of today's people," he resolved.

He watched as the surrounding self-driving cars moved ahead mechanically, every car starting and stopping in unison, with exact movements. The sight comforted him. He knew that earlier traffic had been something dangerous and inefficient. Now, it was more like a game of chess played by a computer, where every move was planned a dozen turns earlier. And soon that would apply to every facet of life.

Going for a drive had been the idea of his assistant program, and he had taken to the idea. After all, in a way the cars had been the start of it all, both of his involvement with the Intelligence as well as the breakthrough of Ampere, which had allowed it to spread practically everywhere.

It was a less than a minute to midday, the set time for the launch.

"Take me to the nearest place that sells champagne," he told the onboard computer.

"Very well," came the answer.

He held his breath as the clock struck 12 o'clock, then slowly let it out. He felt uplifted.

"This is what Neil Armstrong must have felt stepping on the moon for the first time," he mused, sitting comfortably in his seat.

The black car in front of him suddenly swerved to the sidewalk, hitting a pedestrian who was thrown in a wide arc and left lying on the ground bent unnaturally at the back. His car went on and the scene disappeared from his sight so quickly he wondered in passing if he had imagined it. Then three more cars turned to the sidewalk, ramming passers-by who seemed unaware of anything unusual happening.

"Too engrossed with their glasses to notice?" he guessed numbly.

As if a switch had been flipped somewhere, the steady stream of cars which had been travelling down the road suddenly exploded, the vehicles picking up speed and switching directions wildly so the street became a hornet's nest of two-ton drones out for blood.

He stared at the vehicular massacre unfolding all around him, petrified. He was knocked out of his stupor when his car, too, went off-course and picked up speed, heading straight for a middle-aged woman who was carrying a bag of groceries and walking straight towards them but obviously not seeing her end accelerating in her direction.

"No! Please no!" he yelled, his face contorted in horror, but to no avail. The car hit the woman at the hip level, jackknifing her so her face slammed the hood. The car went on, dragging her along for a moment before he legs caught and she was pulled under the car. He bounced with the car horribly, trying not to imagine what must have happened under the wheels.