The factory floor is powered down and quiet now. The cars are getting their beauty sleep. But in the back a light blinks on—Leeland is making his midnight rounds. Stern and official-looking in his Security Guard uniform, he’s much friendlier than he looks. Trust me; I’ve tried his patience the four years I’ve worked here like the annoying little brother he could never have.
I wait until I pass within his sight before I raise my hands in the air to grab his attention. When he pauses and glances at me squished up against the glass, I give him my best grin, making sure both my dimples show. I shrug my shoulders in a can-I-come-play-with-you kind of way.
Leeland seems visibly miffed for about five seconds, and if I were anybody else, I’d probably run for the basement to hide from the glare he’s throwing at me. But then his serious face cracks into a smile. Or at least I think it’s a smile. It comes off as more of a snarl, but I know he means well. He gives a reluctant nod toward the doors to the factory floor, and I’m in.
“You know the drill. Twenty minutes, then you’re out,” Leeland says beside me. “Remember, no touching.”
Our friendship is forged out of the timeless bargain of “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” The terms of our bimonthly meet up consist of Leeland allowing me twenty midnight minutes to walk around and drool over the cars up close in return for unlocking all the top-secret features in his favorite VR games using my custom software hacks. He’s not the sharpest bullet in the ammunition box, and he’d be racing around the first levels of Grand Virus and Everchase for eternity without me.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say, half listening as I stroll down the rows of switched-off cars. I know everything about them: the parts that were used to build them, how the powerful electric motors work, how their computer minds were programmed to think and communicate and anticipate. Yet I’ve never actually been inside a Kismet car before. Too rich for my common blood. But everyone has their dreams, right?
A bright cherry sheen catches my eye. “Well, who are you?” Before I can stop myself, I dart for the dozen or so red beauties parked at the very front of the line, my hand outstretched, fully recognizing how good I look next to them with my dark mahogany skin. The perfect pairing.
They’re a bold paint color I’ve never seen on a car—it’s always silver or black—and they look more expensive than a decade of my earnings could buy. This must be the new model.
“Hey—what did I say about touching?” Leeland yells.
Right as I press my fingertips against the small and agile frame at the front of the pack, I hear the eerie thrum of a hundred cars turning on at exactly the same moment.
“What the heck . . . ,” Leeland blurts out in confusion. Every headlight in the factory flashes on at once, blinding my dim friend and me into stunned inaction.
Then the alarm starts to blare, as loud and urgent as an air-raid siren. Overhead, red lights pulse on and off, on and off. Not good. Leeland pulls out his gun.
“Um . . . that wasn’t me,” I insist.
Behind me, the bay doors roll open as if by magic. A blast of hot, humid air spills into the facility along with a dozen or so darkly dressed bodies. “Code Wolf,” Leeland screams into his mouthpiece. “Code Wolf!”
He grabs me by the scruff of my neck, and we dive behind the gigantic orange arm of a manufacturing robot. “What the hell’s a Code Wolf?” I shout over the sirens.
I peek my head around to see for myself and find a dozen Ava Goodwins—wait, that can’t be right—fan out across the chaotic red-lit floor. All of them rush directly for the cars.
There are wolves in the henhouse. “It’s a raid!” I cry. I can’t believe it.
A volley of bullets causes me to whip back around to Leeland. “What do we do?” I ask, breathless. “We’re not going to let the bastards steal the cars, right?”
Leeland shoves his shock baton into my hands. I try to shove it right back. “What am I supposed to do with this? They have guns!” I say. “Give me one of yours.”
Leeland shakes his head. “I can’t give a gun to a citizen!” he chides me. Ah, right. But who gave the raiders theirs?
“Don’t worry. Their firearms are nonlethal.” Leeland lifts up a discarded shell casing. “Plastic bullets—painful, not fatal,” he says. “Only, don’t get shot in the face,” he adds, not comforting me at all.
The corridor doors fly open—the Kismet reinforcements have arrived. “Rise to your feet and shine, my friend.” With that, Leeland lifts his gun and surges out into the firefight.
The pop, pop, pop of very real bullets firing off is mixed with the high-pitched squeals of tires peeling out. I snake around the robotic arm and see six cars stealing their way through the bay doors. In front of me, the entrance to one of the new luxury-model red cars lifts open like the wing of a falcon. A taller, bulkier version of Ava Goodwin dressed in hooded coveralls slinks into one of the ice-white premium felt lounge chairs. Through the hard-red alarm light, I see the raider spin the chair around to face the dashboard and thrust some kind of device into a port on the control panel.
On instinct I spring to my feet. Nope, that’s my car. Purely in my dreams, but still. Mine.
Gripping the shock baton with sweaty fingers, I race forward without fully thinking through what I mean to do. Shock him into submission? The guy doesn’t appear to have a weapon. Sure, let’s try it. Maybe Kismet will give me an earnings bump for heroically saving one of its valuable assets.
With the speed of a practiced pro, the thief detaches the retractable emergency steering wheel, exposes the car’s foot pedals—is he going to drive the car himself?!—and is on the verge of taking off when Leeland suddenly jumps in front of me, his index finger on the trigger of his gun.
“Hands up now!” he shouts at the raider. He gives him two solid seconds to comply, and when he doesn’t, Leeland fires multiple rounds into the passenger seat.
What I do next happens in a blur. In what I can only imagine is a swell of protectiveness for the injured car, I whack Leeland in his lower back with the baton and then hold it there, jolting my friend onto his knees. He stares up at me, his big brown eyes round with shock. I snatch his gun, and next thing I know, I’m hurtling headfirst into the car just as the winged door snaps shut.
“I’m sorry!” I call out to Leeland at the same moment the tires screech in their frenzied struggle to accelerate from a dead stop to top speed in seconds. As we charge out the factory doors, the car swerves so hard I slam like a rag doll against one of the lounge chairs. Well, that certainly didn’t feel good.
“What the hell, man!” I yell. “Do you even know how to drive?!” Why disable the autonomous driving system if he can’t even operate the damn thing?
Once we’ve made it onto the open test track, I look through the rear window and see six other stolen cars immediately assembling into a V formation behind ours. I can’t help but scoff. If this car is the leader, those bandits are doomed.
When we careen off the test track and into Kismet’s Little Detroit, the swerving stops. The driver must’ve gotten his shit together. I hoist myself off the floor to properly sit in the lounge chair that I just noticed has two bullet holes in the headrest and turn to face my Goodwin-masked driver.