== Trigger Warning: ==

This story contains (or will contain) mentions of suicide, violence, illicit drugs, and rape. There will be no detailed descriptions of any of these, but reader caution is advised.

This chapter contains: violence (attempted murder).

==================

It was a Monday morning, and I was on my way to classes, when everything started to change.

I got a message from Johnny in the middle of the night.

<Unknown sender>: Watch out.

“Watch out?” I thought. “What for?”

I tried asking them about it, but up until the moment I had left home, in the morning, they still hadn’t answered me. How could I watch out for something, if I didn’t know what it was?

It was a twenty minutes’ walk from my house to the campus. I was nearly halfway there when I found out what it was that Johnny had tried to warn me about.

It all happened very fast. I heard a scream. Then someone grabbed my arm, and I was pulled forcefully from the sidewalk into a store. I fell down, and scraped my arm. I looked to my side, and saw that the person who’d pulled me had also fallen to the floor. It was a businessman around his thirties, wearing a really ugly suit. He wasn’t looking at me, but rather at the door to the store. I was ready to lash out at him, to complain and ask what the fuck was wrong with him. But I stopped myself, because I noticed that something else was not right about the whole situation.

“The hell was that?” someone nearby asked.

The voice had come from a salesperson, which was standing next to us. She, too, had her gaze fixed at something outside the store. I looked behind me, to the door, but saw nothing out of ordinary.

Or rather, there was something out of ordinary. The people on the street, and the clients at the store, they all seemed to be in a sort of trance. They were gathering outside, and murmuring. The businessman, the one who had pulled me, moments ago, finally realized he was still clutching my arm, and let go all of a sudden.

“Sorry!” he said, exasperated. “Are you all right?”

Now why exactly would this guy be apologizing, if he was the one to throw me on the floor, to begin with?

“Why did you do that?” I questioned, feeling very annoyed.

“You mean you didn’t see it?” he asked me.

“See what?” I felt my chest tighten. Something was definitely wrong.

“The car!” he looked really shocked when speaking. “It drove onto the sidewalk.”

“What?!” I exclaimed. Then I chuckled, because it was a ridiculous claim. No car drives on the sidewalk. They’re coded in a way that makes this sort of thing impossible. “No, that can’t be right,” I told him.

“It’s true,” said the salesperson beside us.

It did seem that they weren’t lying. A few other people had seen it too, and they were gathering together to talk about it. But even then, I still found that story hard to believe. I had studied cars before. Surely, at the beginning of automated driving, there were occasional accidents. But there hasn’t been any accident involving a car in the last fifty years. They were the safest method of transportation available, along with airplanes. Things like those simply didn’t happen anymore.

The store I was in didn’t have any security cameras up front. But one of the people on the sidewalk had been filming a cat at the moment, and happened to record it by sheer chance. I watched the video in disbelief. It had really happened fast. I saw a black car suddenly speed up on the road, then pull into the sidewalk, and drive over it for about twenty meters, before pulling back into the traffic lane. It almost hit me. It would have, I guess, if not for the businessman in the ugly suit.

People were worried about me for a while. Of course they were. The whole situation was bizarre, almost unbelievable. They would be worried. But I told them all that I was all right.

I wasn’t, of course.

I felt nauseous all the rest of the way to school. It couldn’t have been an accident. These things just don’t happen by accident. And this was right after Johnny had warned me to “watch out,” too. I couldn’t help but think that the two things were connected. Was I becoming paranoid? Or did someone really just try to kill me? That someone had been able to hack into a car and instruct it to pursue a pedestrian? I knew that was impossible. Except it wasn’t, because it just happened to me.

Was Cyan trying to get rid of me?

Running over me with a car did sound a bit excessive. That sort of things would draw too much attention. It would be in the news, and people would investigate. Was it even Cyan’s work, after all? It could be a coincidence.

I arrived in class.

“Late as usual, Ms. Oliveira?” the teacher asked me. “What’s your excuse, this time?”

“Um… Sorry…” I said, before dropping my backpack on top of an empty desk. “A car tried to run over me.”

Everyone, even the teacher, laughed at my explanation. I knew they would. It was unbelievable enough for people to assume that I was joking. I grimaced.

After the first lesson, I decided to seek Abigail’s help.

“Hey, Abby,” I called. She was chatting with a couple of other students.

“Sup, Luce?”

“Could you come with me for a moment? I need to ask you something.”

I led Abigail away from the classroom and into a secluded part of the building. She asked me a couple of questions along the way, but I remained in silence, and she must have gathered that whatever this was about, it was serious.

“Look at this,” I told her, and showed her the recording from earlier.

“Oh, what a cute kitten,” she said. Well, yes, the video did start with a cat, right? It was the whole reason why someone even managed to get a recording of the accident at all.

Then the black car appeared on the recording. The whole thing happened, and the playback ended.

“Wait… What?! What is that?” said Abby, surprised.

She played the video over from the start. I watched the whole scene repeat itself again, feeling even more nauseous than before.

“Okay, you’re pulling my leg here, Lucia,” she said. “What’s this? Did you make it? It looks really well done.” Well, obviously, Abigail didn’t believe the video was real. I wouldn’t have either, in her place.

“Look closer,” I told her. Then I played the video from the start one more time, at a fraction the frame speed. I watched her as Abigail studied the recording intently. She replayed it over and over, at various speed and zoom settings.

“Hey, this one looks like you,” she pointed at my image on the screen. I watched the black car come into the sidewalk and nearly run over me for what felt like the millionth time that day. “I don’t get it. Who made this video?”

“A woman, on the street today,” I told Abigail. She probably wouldn’t believe me, but I still had to try. “She really was just filming the cat when it all happened.”

“What happened? You mean the car thing? But this isn’t real, right?”

Abby turned to look into my eyes, and I began to cry. I think that, up until that moment, I had been frozen in a state of shock, and now that I was finally coming out of that, I was beginning to realize that I had almost died that morning. It was real, no matter how much I wanted to believe it wasn’t.

“Wow,” said Abby, once I had calmed down enough to tell her the whole story. “So a car had actually tried to run over you, this morning! I thought you were joking.”

“I wish I was,” I told her. “What do you think happened?” This was really the whole reason I decided to show Abigail the video. She was my reference when it came to information security, so I figured that if anyone would know, it would be her.

“I don’t know,” she told me. “Frankly? This isn’t supposed to happen.”

I knew as much, already. “Do you think someone could have hacked it?” I asked.

“Not likely,” she told me. “Only the routing system in integrated with the network. The core driving engine is completely cut off from the rest. And this looks like a driving issue. It’s almost as if it suddenly misrecognized the sidewalk as part of the road. Not to mention it should have stopped when it saw you there, so there’s something wrong with the safety protocols, as well. But all of that is really freaky and unbelievable. I mean, it’s the same core system in all other cars, and you don’t see this sort of thing happening all the time. If this is a bug, it’s one heck of a weird bug.”

“What if someone built that car?” I asked.

“Well, in that case anything’s possible,” Abby told me. “You can write your own driving engine, or override parts of the default one. But why would anyone even do that? You… don’t think that someone was actively trying to kill you, do you?”

“What do you think?” I asked her.

Abby played back the video one more time.

“Well, it does seem like it,” she admitted.

I took a deep breath. Abigail’s words only seemed to support what I had been thinking before. This was too unnatural a situation to be a coincidence, such as a bug in a system that’s been tried and true for over fifty years. There was someone’s hand behind this. Combined with the warning Johnny had given me, earlier, this pointed at one likely suspect.

“Shit, Luce, this is big,” said Abigail. “You need to tell the police about this.”

“It’s not like they’re going to believe me,” I admitted. “I mean, you didn’t, at first.”

“But there were witnesses, right? Like the woman who recorded this, and that guy you mentioned, the one who pulled you into the store. I think that if everyone goes there, combined with that video, they will have to take you seriously.”

I nodded. Abby was right, this was big enough to get the police involved. Even if it did turn out to be a rare malfunction or a bug, those still would have repercussions of their own. But, honestly? That was the best case scenario. If my suspicions were true, Cyan was trying to do me in. They might have specifically modified a car just for the task, they wouldn’t stop at one failed attempt. Somehow, I had the feeling that the police wouldn’t be able to protect me in this case.

“All right, I’ll do it,” I told Abby. It’s not like failing to report this would help me in any way, either. I’d call the woman from earlier (I had her id, since she’d sent me the video recording), then ask her if she could go to the police station with me. Hopefully, I wouldn’t suffer any more murder attempts in the meantime. Abby gave me a hug, and we walked together to the classroom.

I had no idea, then, that by the end of that Monday my life would never be the same.