The driverless car went right too. There could be no doubt. This seemed to Lyle to be of zero interest to anybody but Lyle. Either these cars had become so common no one noticed, or everyone was so consumed with their own thing that they’d not have noticed a pink elephant following Lyle. He pedaled until he came to an alley and took a sharp right into it, then stopped. The car followed him. Lyle dismounted his bike.
The car slowed. It looked to Lyle like a bubble with a brain.
The car inched forward, and Lyle stepped in front of it. He scanned the attached houses across the street, a short, stark white one decorated with purple perennials attached to a taller greenish-gray house with exterior metal staircases. Was anyone in the window to bear witness? No such luck. Lyle pulled out his phone. He called up the video function and hit record.
The car had come to a complete stop ten or so feet from Lyle. He couldn’t help imbue it with human characteristics. In this case, Lyle decided that it had made a decision. It wasn’t going to run him over. He walked to the front of the car, his video still recording. Lyle, careful not to move out from the front of the car so that it might have an escape path, peered inside. He nearly laughed when he saw the cup holder. Maybe autonomous vehicles got thirsty. Other than that, the bulb of technology wanted for anything human. Sterile, beige leather seats matched either side of an instrument panel between. A trough stood in place of the dash with more gadgetry beneath it.
Lyle looked up at the black eye on the top.
The car lurched forward.
Lyle lunged out of the way. Off went the car. Just a roll of the wheel at first and then a sincere acceleration.
Lyle looked around. Did anyone see that? Did he see that? The car disappeared down Lloyd, took a right and by the time Lyle hopped on his bike again, it had disappeared. He didn’t stop riding until he’d reached City Hall. He took his bicycle onto the train with him. No car would follow him here. Not that he particularly cared. He was thinking of the Google car the way he’d think of a patient’s medical symptom, not as something to wish away but as a key piece of evidence. What was the car telling him?
Mostly, it was reiterating to him what his note had told him: he wasn’t imagining things. Second, it was telling him that whatever strange situation he’d stumbled into involved a powerful actor, powerful enough to involve a driverless car. How powerful did that make someone?
It did give him two disparate pieces of evidence to connect, and disparate clues were of immense value to Lyle when he’d taken on medical mysteries. The more disparate the better. Someone from central California with a pronounced stiff neck and sound sensitivity could have valley fever. Talk about disparate: here was this driverless car and then there was the note on his refrigerator. The note referred to seizures and channelopathy and Lyle had trouble seeing any Venn diagram with an overlap between these disease states and a Google car.
The note mentioned Google. And now the car. What was someone trying to do?
Draw him in?
Warn him?
Taunt him?
To what end?
Lyle looked through rows of commuters at the map on the wall over the door. He knew where he was headed and hadn’t fully admitted it to himself, or the reasons why. He could see the stop on the map, downtown Berkeley, Shattuck Avenue. He was going to find Melanie. His jaw tightened. The last time he saw her might’ve been eighteen months earlier. She’d stopped by his house with a bag of groceries. “Green things,” she said, “to help your liver process.” It was loving, painful, and patronizing. She’d looked around his house like a detective. “I’m here if you need me,” she’d said and closed the door quietly.
The time before that had been their last screaming fight—her screaming at him to wake up and him fighting with silence. Then her acceptance had set in.
What inspired this visit?
The question slithered over and around his brain, a deadly snake in his valley of denial. He stared absently at a woman clicking on her tablet and considered the question. He was going to warn Melanie, right? Warn her about what? A note he’d written to himself? He shook his head and knew that to be too simplistic. He swiveled his head and watched the man sitting next to him pecking at a game on his phone, transfixed. So, Lyle thought, maybe I’m going to ask her if she’d heard of anything like this potential pandemic; she’s a nurse, and one of the most well-read and thoughtful people anywhere. If it’s out there, she’ll know.
He shook his head and watched another man wearing headphones while staring at a phone he held so close to his face that it couldn’t possibly have been good for his eyes. It was oddly peaceful, Lyle thought, all these people so lost in their virtual worlds that Lyle could just stare at them, lapping up and observing the world without interference or conflict. No risk of interaction. Then he had a sudden thought about what he was going to ask Melanie. The question sent a tremor through him. He tried to will the question away and it clung and festered and he knew instantly he couldn’t deny it.
I’m going to ask her why I can’t do it anymore.
I can’t figure anything out. I don’t know how to try. Then he smiled, a private smile, because he knew even that wasn’t quite it. He settled back in his seat and let his shoulders relax. He was going to let the thing reveal itself to him, this powerful motivation leading him east. He looked back at the man sitting next to him lost in a game that involved shooting blocks that, when he hit them, turned into stars and soared and then turned into points.
A drip of drool gathered on the corner of the man’s lip.
Lyle closed his eyes, searching broken, blurry memories from his trip to Steamboat, and disparate clues.
Thirty-Six
Jackie Badger pulled her rental into the dirt parking lot at Lantern outside of Hawthorne. Alarm bells went off. Why were there six other cars in the lot?
She found out when she walked in the heavy, steel door. In the middle of the room, cubicles had been pushed back to make way for a conference table. Around the table sat eight people, most of whom she recognized but only distantly. Lantern representatives from various tech companies. They’d gathered only once before, at least in her presence, just after Denny’s death. They’d called it a fact-finding mission, but mostly it led to an internal, off-the-record explanation that Denny had died from a heart attack and that the Lantern program would be put on hold. Jackie had held her tongue, not sure what to say, absorbing occasional pointed looks from Alex and, at least once, giving one back. Would there be profit in accusing Alex of, what, murdering Denny? Police were not called, foul play never asserted, which Jackie rightly assumed was the product of wanting to keep this eye-popping project under wraps.
Now they’d called Jackie back to Nevada. It was early evening. The six men and two women sitting around the table were a characteristic lot of ambitious nerds. The men wore jeans and loose T-shirts and fashionable, colorful tennis shoes. Both women wore sweatshirts. In the middle of the table, a speakerphone with a green light on the side. People listening in. Jackie figured telecommunications giants. At the head sat Alex, as petite as Jackie, no less feisty.