A gray dot appeared on a map, hurtling through two-dimensional space.
Charlie opened his door and was about to get in when Peter yelled, “Charlie, wait.”
Peter caught up. “You’re going to need my help.”
“How’d you—”
“I’ll explain on the way. We should take my car. It’s faster,” Peter said without apology.
When they got to his BMW, he threw Charlie the keys. “You drive. I’ll deal with the Game.”
“I can handle the Game.”
“Trust me, this is beyond your skill,” Peter said haughtily.
Moments later, they were tearing down the highway, following the gray dot that the Game promised them was Alex. Charlie hoped that was true, that they weren’t following some random dot, but they had no other leads, so all they could do was hope.
The speedometer read 110. The Aziteks showed the navigation line over the road ahead.
“How’d you find me?”
“The Game. I was trying to find Alex, after the photo.”
“Do you think he’d really…”
“Beaten by his dad, by Kurt, humiliated in front of the entire school, yeah, I do.”
The navigation line on Charlie’s Aziteks blanked out. “What happened?”
“Players are fucking with us.”
“Why?”
“For the lolz.” Peter moved his fingers, navigating windows Charlie couldn’t see. “I’ll get it back.” Peter waved something over to Charlie’s Aziteks, a series of branching gray lines ahead, forks and probabilities, some on the highway, some exiting here or there, each giving rise to more branches, receding over the horizon. Alex was a quantum man now.
“Which one do I follow?” Charlie asked, weaving through traffic.
“I’m working on that.” Peter moved his hands. “I bought us a Wayfinder. It’s making me solve multiagent pathfinding problems. Fucker.”
Just as one branch leading to an exit approached, it disappeared.
“Jesus, I need more warning,” Charlie shouted.
Charlie spun the wheel to the right to get around a car in front of them, but then in real life the wheel locked under his hands. It spun against him, out of his control, back to the left.
“Holy shit!”
They nearly rammed into the car racing beside them.
“I didn’t do that!” Charlie yelled.
“We’re being hacked. Hang on.”
The wheel released and Charlie had control again. “Who’s doing that, the Game?”
“No, other players are throwing shit at us.”
Peter cleared a few more paths, the road ahead clarifying.
Then they saw the creature, small and spry. In their Aziteks, it leaped on a car in front of them, perched long enough for them to speed closer, then leaped at them, hitting their windshield and sending out a spiderweb of virtual cracks. It trailed a bloody mess and rolled up and over the roof.
“What the fuck?”
“I’ve seen these things, they’re dumb fucking Game bots, they mess up electronics for real. So cheap any moron can buy them and throw them at us.”
“What do I do?”
“Just drive. I’ll handle them.”
Another virtual bot came into view ahead and sprang from car to car, getting closer. It flew under them, small wings just lithe enough for it to glide like a flying squirrel, disappearing under the front of the car. In the AR-sound piping in from their Aziteks and through the satellite radio, too, they heard a grinding, chewing noise, teeth on metal, and in reality the wheel locked up again, spinning left, nearly crashing, sending the car next to them into a honking, swerving fit, then the creature tore up through the floor in the gamespace and ripped into the dashboard. The wipers went on full blast for real and sprayed the windshield with water, messing with their view, while the car swerved right, the wheel spinning under Charlie’s hands, death-metal music suddenly blaring full blast from the radio, and they grazed the guardrails, which screamed metal on metal and sparked. “Fuck, Peter, do something,” Charlie yelled over the chaos.
“Hold on,” Peter shouted. He reached “into” the virtual hole in the dash and pulled the thing out writhing, all teeth and spit. It bit his hand in the AR, loosing a gush of virtual blood and leaving a bloody stump. Their Aziteks painted background over Peter’s hand wherever it moved so it looked as if nothing were left. Peter grabbed the creature with his other hand and smashed its head into the dash until it stopped moving.
“Fuck,” Peter said, “that just swallowed my Goldz.”
There were still too many gray lines ahead.
“I can’t help.” Peter sounded strangely, uncharacteristically desperate, as if his whole mysterious-chill-outsider persona was a front.
Charlie didn’t like it. But for once, he was one step ahead of the Game, and he didn’t need Peter’s help. “I know where we’re going.”
“You do?”
Someone must have heard because two more creatures appeared, leaping toward them from the cars ahead, suicide-diving into their windshield, spreading their wings the moment before impact to blot out the view. The windshield went black and red.
“Oh, no.” Charlie hit the windshield wipers, but all it did was smear the filth around.
Charlie lifted his Aziteks off his face, hit suddenly with blinding sunlight. But the second he raised them, the car spun out of control, the wheel whipping violently back and forth.
“Put them back on!” Peter cried. The cars around them were blaring their horns.
It was crazy—they were trapped in augmented reality. If he took the Aziteks off, the Game would apparently smash them dead. It was play or die. Charlie put the glasses on and the splattered bots were back blocking his view, but the car immediately stopped swerving.
Peter opened his window and reached out of the car with his “remaining” hand, his seat belt unbuckled at 100 mph, pulling off one of the carcasses. The moment it was clear, Charlie saw a car immediately ahead that they were plowing toward.
He jerked left and whipped past it, horns blaring, clipping its back bumper.
“Get the other one,” Charlie yelled, still blinded on his side.
“I can’t reach it.”
“Shit,” Charlie shouted. “Take the wheel.”
Peter held the wheel while Charlie unbuckled his belt and leaned out the window, feeling the air whip past him. He grabbed the thing and yanked it off, having to pull hard before the digital form would move. When it caught the side wind, it ripped out of his hand, and he saw it whip backward in the rearview mirror as it smacked off the crash wall onto the road, smearing as it went. Charlie pulled his seat belt back on and stared at the road ahead.
“It’s the spillway.”
Peter understood, ashamed that Charlie had thought of it first.
People went there to die. You could jump off. You plow your car into the forty-foot-thick concrete retaining wall. You could ankle-weight yourself on the other side and drown. The place had a romantic reputation for loss and despair.
“There, that’s our exit,” Charlie said.
The bots were gone now. The wheel no longer jerked out of control. It was eerily silent, as if the Game had heard Charlie put it all together and silenced the jesters throwing obstacles in their way, out of respect for the solemn task ahead.
But as Charlie changed lanes toward the exit and the spillway beyond, a car coming the other way suddenly rammed over the median and rolled, the terrified driver looking not stylized and hyperreal like a character in the Game, but just horrified and real, and Charlie realized this was no joke and swerved, the poor guy’s car being hacked as Charlie’s had been, the guy probably going to die as casualty of a Game he didn’t even know existed, and Charlie swerved with all his might, fishtailing across three lanes, smashing off the far sidewall just as the other car came down where they’d been a second before with a horrifying impact as Charlie barreled off the exit onto the grass and nearly into a ditch before pulling with all his might to veer back onto the country road as it veered around toward them, wheels sending a spray of dust as they jerked back onto the road. He drove white-knuckle forward, adrenaline surging, shaking, eyes dead-locked ahead. He glanced in the mirror just once at the car flaming behind them and felt sickened.
“Jesus Christ, that car came out of nowhere.” Charlie’s hands were shaking.
Peter stared at him, rattled from the maneuver, and said, totally honest and bewildered, “What car?”