by Neil Clarke
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Not in the rain. Let him get used to coming at night to charge. On a dry night, I’ll go down and spray him.”
And we went back to bed.
September became October. I saw Old Paint in the streets sometimes and I suspect he came and charged up at our place more than once. But the weather stayed wet and that was Mom’s excuse for not trying to catch him. Ben was playing football for his school and seemed so different it was like aliens had re-programmed my brother. Most days, I had to ride the bus alone. I noticed that Old Paint would show up at the school on the really stormy days and shadow me until I was on the bus. Once he was at my bus stop and followed me home. I knew I wasn’t supposed to get inside him, but no one had said I couldn’t talk to him. So I edged toward him as he followed the sidewalk and ran my fingers along his fender. “I miss you, Old Paint,” I told him. The locks bit down, he revved his engine and leaped away from the curb. He tore off through the afternoon traffic with other cars honking at him. It really hurt my feelings. I didn’t tell Mom or Ben. I was afraid she might report him as borderline aggressive and give his GPS code to the police.
January brought really nasty weather. Snow fell, melted into black ice, and more snow fell. For a solid week, the cycle repeated. The worst part was that all the busses were running on the “snow routes” that avoided hills. So our usual three block walk to the bus stop became six blocks to a main street. Each day, Old Paint was outside our apartments, edging along behind us as we walked to the bus stop. Ben ignored him, except to cuss that he could be inside a warm car instead of wading through snow and ice. Our bus stop was right in front of a charging station.
There was a line for the quick charge, and while we were waiting for the bus, a black van pulled up, blocking a car in. The lettering on the sign said Road Dog Recoveries. “Bounty hunters!” Ben said. “Cool. Watch this.”
They fanned out around the car they wanted. A man in a car at the end of the line shouted, “Don’t shoot those so close to the station!” Because they had their special tire piercing guns out and were taking aim at the red Beamer they had blocked in.
But that wasn’t the car they should have been watching. Two cars back in line, a black sedan with big wheels suddenly cranked its wheels and cut right through the median and the bushes and right at us. It hit one of the men as it did so and he went flying. The other men all fired at it. And missed. Then the red car freaked out, backed into the car behind it to gain a bit of space, and it shot over the curb into the median and high centered.
Ben grabbed me and jerked me to one side, but it wasn’t quite enough. I hadn’t even seen the black sedan coming toward us. It clipped me and the impact snatched me out of Ben’s grip. I went flying and rolling out into the street. When I hit the ground, I slid on the black ice and I thought I was never going to stop. Ben was yelling, cars were honking, and when I finally stopped the whole world was spinning. But I was okay. I got up. Ben was running toward me.
Then my arm started really hurting and I realized I couldn’t move it. I screamed. And Ben shouted, “RUN! Run, Sadie, get out of there!”
The black sedan had slewed around and was coming back at me. Later, I found out that it had belonged to a security service and had an attack mode if anyone tried to harm the VIP inside. It had interpreted the bounty hunters as assassins. No one could say why it came after me. But as it came at me and I turned to run, I saw something even scarier. Old Paint was roaring at me, full speed in reverse. I was going to be crushed between the two cars. I screamed, the black sedan hit me, and I was airborne.
But Old Paint’s rear door had opened upwards and as I flew toward him, he shifted into first, burned rubber and faded away from me like a catcher back-pedaling for a fly ball. I landed in the rear-facing back seat as air bags blossomed. It wasn’t exactly a soft landing, but his actions meant that it was the softest possible landing. I collapsed there as the hatch was closing, and then I fainted as his air bags puffed up all around me.
I woke up on the way to the emergency room. I couldn’t see anything because I was surrounded by air bags. I heard Ben shouting my name and then he was pushing the bags back. He was in the middle seat, leaning over the back, trying to reach me. “Who’s driving?” I asked, but he only shouted, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”
Old Paint ignored traffic signals and one way signs all the way to the hospital. Horns blaring and recorded voice shouting, “Emergency! Emergency! Out of the way, please! Emergency!” he beat out an ambulance and was opening the back hatch as he backed up to the emergency room loading dock. Ben jumped out, screaming for someone to help his sister. The air bags around me deflated and people in white lifted me out. I had one glimpse of Old Paint as he roared away from the ramp. His rear bumper was pushed in and his back window was crazed.
“What happened to Old Paint?” I cried. They had me on a gurney and were rolling me in. Ben trotted beside me, his cell phone to his ear.
“Compared to that black sedan? Nothing. He worked that car over until it couldn’t even turn a wheel. Slammed into it over and over. I thought you were going to be creamed in there. Mom?” Ben talked into his phone. “Mom, yeah, we’re at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital. Sadie got hit by a car, but Old Paint saved her. Come fast, they want our insurance number and I don’t know it.”
I wasn’t hurt that bad. My arm was broken and I was bruised all over. They kept me six hours for observation, but my concussion was mild. Mom stayed by my bed. Two cops came to ask what happened. Ben said a crazy car had hit me. Mom said she had no idea what good Samaritan had picked me up and gotten me to the hospital, but she thanked them. The policewoman said that the other witnesses had said the car had behaved in an extraordinary manner to save me. Ben looked at Mom and said, “Some old dude was driving it. After he busted up that black car, he opened the door and yelled at me to jump in. He said he drove in stock car races, demolition derbies when he was a kid. Then he brought us here. He left because he didn’t want to get in trouble.”
The cops asked him some more questions, but Ben just kept saying, “I don’t remember” or “I didn’t see, I was worried about my sister.” After they finally left, my mom said very quietly, “I hope the charging station didn’t catch the plates on camera.”
Ben just looked at her. “Yeah. Me, too,” he said. “But I couldn’t let them go out and disable him after he saved Sadie’s life.”
Mom took a deep breath. “Ben. Sadie. We both know it’s probably going to come down to that, eventually. He can’t run wild forever. And we all know that Old Paint is just following the directives of his programming. He’s not really . . . alive. He seems that way because we think of him that way. But it’s all just programming.”
“Saving Sadie’s life? Catching her in the back seat like that, cushioning her with air bags while he pounded that sedan into scrap?” Ben laughed and shook his head. “You won’t convince me of that, Mom.”
The hospital let me go home that evening. We all went to bed right away. But about midnight, I heard my mom get up, so I did, too. She was looking out through the blinds at our parking stall.
“Is he there? Is he okay?”
“No, baby, he’s not here. Go back to bed.”
Ben and I overslept the next morning and didn’t go to school. Mom hadn’t bothered waking us. We had a good six inches of snow outside, and school was cancelled for the day. When we came out to the living room, Mom was sitting at the computer watching a dot on a map. It wasn’t moving. There was a backpack at her feet and a heap of winter clothes beside her.
“You kids get your homework off Moodle,” she said. “I’m going to be gone for a while.” She sounded funny.
“No,” Ben said. “We’re going with you.”
We hiked through the snow to a bus stop and took a bus to a City Car rental lot and checked out a tiny car. Riding in it after riding in Old Paint was like crowding into a shower stall together. Mom sat in the single front seat and Ben and I had
the back seat. There was barely room for us with our coats on. Mom plugged in the coordinates, and the car demanded that she scan her credit card again. It had a prissy girl’s voice. “MacIntosh Lake is outside of Zones 1 through 12. Additional fees will apply,” the car told her.
She thumbed for them. The car didn’t move. “Hazardous conditions are reported. Cancellation recommended. You will not be charged if you terminate this transaction now.”
Mom sighed. “Just go,” she said, and we went. It wasn’t too bad. The main roads had been plowed and salted, and once we got on I-5, the plows and the other traffic had cleared most of the mess down to almost pavement. It felt really odd not to have Old Paint’s bulk around me and I leaned against Ben.
We didn’t talk much as the car hummed along. Ben had tossed a bunch of stuff in his backpack, including my pain medicine and a water bottle. I took a pill and slept most of the way. I woke up to Ben saying, “But there’s a chain across the access road.”
“So we’ll get out here,” Mom said.
I sat up. We were out in the country, and the only tracks on the snowy road behind us were ours. It was a very strange feeling. All I could see was wind-smoothed white snow and snow-laden trees on either side of the narrow road. We had pulled off the road into a driveway and stopped. There were two big yellow posts in front of us, with a heavy chain hung between them. A hunter-orange sign said, “CLOSED.” The road in front of us was mostly smooth snow and it wound out of sight into the woods.
Mom told the car to wait and it obediently shut down. We struggled back into our coats. None of us had real snow boots. Mom grabbed her pack and Ben brought his as we stepped out into smooth snow. The skies had cleared and it was cold. This snow wouldn’t melt any time soon. Ben followed Mom and she followed the ghost tire tracks that left the road and went around the access gate to the lake. Snow had almost filled them and the wind was polishing them away. I came last, stepping in their footprints. Mom pulled her coat tighter as we walked and said, “There were some great raves out here when I was in high school. But in summer.”
“What would you do to me if I went to a rave out in the woods?” Ben asked.
Mom just looked at him. We both knew he’d been to raves out in the woods. Ben shut up.
Mom saw Old Paint before we did, and she broke into a run. Old Paint was shut down, back under the trees. Snow was mounded over him; only the funky paint job on his sides showed. Twigs and leaves had fallen on his snowy roof during the night. His windows were thick with frost. He looked to me like he’d been there for years. As we got closer, his engine ticked twice and then went silent. Mom halted and flung out her arms. “Stay back, kids,” she warned us. Then she went forward alone.
She talked to him in a low voice as she walked slowly around the car. She kept shaking her head. Ben and I ignored what she’d said and walked slowly forward. Old Paint was still. Both his front and back bumpers were pushed in and he had a long crease down his passenger side. One of his headlights was cracked. His rear license plate hung by a single screw. “He’s dead,” I said, and I felt my eyes start to sting.
“Not quite,” my Mom said grimly. “He doesn’t have enough of a charge to move. His nanos have been trying to pop his dents out and fix his glass but that will take time.” She went around to the driver door and unlocked it with a key. She leaned in and popped the hood, and then tossed the keys to Ben. “Look in the back. There’s a hatch in the floor. Open it. Get out the stuff in there. Looks like we’re going to need Grandpa’s emergency kit.”
She dropped her pack on the ground in the snow and then wrestled a Charge-In-A-Box out of it. Ben and I were staring at her. “Hurry up!” she snapped.
We walked to the back of the car. Mom already had the cables out and she plugged Old Paint in. His horn tooted faintly. “Easy, big fella,” my brother said as he slid the key into the lock. He saw me looking at him and said, “Just shut up.”
We pushed the deflated air bags out of the way. We found the floor hatch and opened it. “Look at all this stuff!” My brother exclaimed. My mom walked back and looked in. She had a grim smile as she said, “My grandpa was always trying to keep me safe. He tried to think of everything to protect me. ‘Plan for the worst and hope for the best,’ he always said.” She took a deep breath and then sighed it out. “So. Let’s get to work.”
Ben and I more watched than worked. It was weird to watch her fix Old Paint. She was so calm. She pulled his dipstick, wiped it on her jeans, studied it, and then added something out of a can. Then she pulled another dipstick, checked it, and nodded. She checked wires and some she tightened. She replaced two fuses. She looked inside his radiator and then felt around under it. “No leaks!” she said. “That’s a miracle.” She stepped back and shut the hood.
Old Paint woke up. His engine turned over and then quit. Turned over again, ran a bit rough and then smoothed out. He sounded hoarse to me as he said, “Right front tire is flat. Do not attempt to move the vehicle.”
“There’s Fix-A-Flat in there,” Ben said, and Mom said, “Get it.”
He came back with it and his backpack. I stood next to him, stroking Old Paint’s fender and saying, “It’s going to be okay, Old Paint. It’s going to be okay.” Neither one of them made fun of me. While I was standing there, his front bumper suddenly popped out into position. You can’t really see nanos working to take out a dent, but he already looked less battered than he had. Ben handed Mom the can and she re-inflated the tire.
“Tire pressure is corrected,” Old Paint announced.
Then Ben took the scrubber spray and anti-virus box out of the pack and handed it to her without a word.
Mom took it and stood up slowly. She walked slowly to the back of the car and I followed her. She put away the left over emergency supplies. She gently shut the door. The glass nanos were at work on the rear window. It was almost clear again. She walked around the car and Ben and I both followed her. She got to the driver’s door, opened it and climbed in.
“Mom?” Ben asked her anxiously and she waved a hand at him. “I just want to check something,” she said.
She opened a little panel on his dash and a small screen lit up. She touched it lightly, scrolling down it. Then she stopped and leaned her forehead on the steering wheel for a minute. When she spoke, her voice was choked and muffled by her arms.
“My grandpa considered himself something of a hacker, in an old school way. He made some modifications to Old Paint. That’s Grandpa’s voice you hear, when Old Paint speaks. And you know how I told you some people remove the safety constraints from the car’s programming, the ‘do no harm to people’ or by-pass the speed constraints? Not my grandpa.” She sat up and pointed at the screen. “See all those red ‘override’ indicators? You’re not supposed to be able to do that. But Grandpa did. He gave Old Paint one ultimate command: “Protect logged users of vehicle.”
She flipped the little panel closed over the screen and spoke quietly. “I should have known. I was a wild kid. Drinking. Doping. So he broke into the software and overrode everything to make ‘protect the child’ the car’s highest priority. Hm.” She made a husky noise in her throat. “Got me out of a corner more times than I like to think about. I passed out more than once behind the wheel, but somehow I always got home safe.” She dashed tears from her eyes and then looked at us with a crooked smile. “Just programming, kids. That’s all. Just his programming. Despite all his tough talk, it was just his programming to protect, as best he could. No matter what.”
Ben was as puzzled as I was. “The car? Or Grandpa?”
She sniffed again but didn’t answer. She re-opened the panel on his dash and accessed his GPS. She was talking softly. “You remember that one spring break, my senior year? Arizona. And that boy named Mark. Sun, sun, and more sun. We hardly ever had to stop at a charging station. That’s where you should go, old friend. And drive safely.”
“Don’t we always?” he asked her.
She laughed out loud.
She got out and shut the door. He revved his engine a few times, and then began to pull forward. We stepped back out of his way, and he moved slowly past us, the deep snow squeaking under his tires. Mom stepped forward, brushing snow, twigs, and leaves off the solars on his roof. He stopped and let her clear them. Then, “All done. Run free,” she told him, and patted his rearview mirror.
When she stepped back, he revved his engine, tooted his horn twice, and peeled out in a shower of snow. We stood there and watched him go. Mom didn’t move until we couldn’t hear him anymore. Then she pitched the packet of anti-virus as far as she could into the woods. “There are some things that just don’t need curing,” she said.
We went back to the City Rents car and climbed in. My sneakers were soaked, my feet were numb and my jeans were wet halfway to my knees. We ate some peanut butter sandwiches that Ben had packed, Mom gave me another pain pill and I slept all the way home.
Three nights later, I got out of bed and padded toward the living room in my pajamas. I peeked around the corner. My Mom’s chair was rocked back as far as it would go and her toes were up on the edge of the desk. The bluish monitor light was the only light in the room. She was watching a moving dot on a map, and smiling. She had headphones on and was nodding her head to music we could barely hear. Oldies. I jumped when Ben put his hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me back into the hallway. He shook his head at me and I nodded. We both went back to bed.
I never saw Old Paint again. He stayed in Arizona, mostly charging off the sun and not moving around much once he was there. Once in a while, I’d get home from school and turn on the computer and check on him. He was just a red dot moving on thin lines in a faraway place, or, much more often, a black dot on an empty spot on the map. After a while, I stopped thinking about him.
Ben did two years of community college and then got a “Potential” scholarship to a college in Utah. It was hard to say goodbye to him, but by then I was in high school and had a life of my own. It was my turn to have spats with Mom.