The national association meeting had been a blast as always. Those guys never skimped on the booze or fun. The thought of going back to normal life with Liz and the kid left me gloomy. I put it out of my exploding head, pulled on a blue polo, and dragged my toothbrush across teeth that jangled at every touch. Grabbing my bag, I rushed down to the lobby, scanned my finger chip at the front desk, and raced out to find a taxi to the airport.
There was only one in sight, slowing to a stop at the curb. I reached it on the heels of a middle-aged man in a suit, his close-cropped head turning to watch me as I slung my bag past him through the open back door.
“Sorry, got here first.” I slipped by him into the taxi and grabbed the door handle.
The man wedged a knee against the inner door panel, smiling as he did so. He seemed more amused than angry.
I waited, considering where to take this.
“Going to Reagan?” His voice was low and rich.
I nodded but didn’t slide over.
“So am I.” He tossed a small bag over me. “I’d be happy to share my cab with you.”
Great! One of those smug polite types you can’t shake up.
As the taxi started off, he held out his hand and flashed his big, white teeth at me as if he really felt friendly, the brazen hypocrite. “I’m John.”
“I’m Mike.” I kept my hands tucked under my arms.
A feminine voice drifted through the speaker. “Destination, please.” Black paneling walled off the driver’s compartment.
“Reagan.” It felt good to show Mr. ‘I’m the adult here’ who was in charge.
“Please speak more distinctly. Did you say, ‘Reagan’?”
“Of course, I said Reagan, you hunk-a-junk. Are you deaf? Get us outta here before I miss my flight.”
“I don’t understand.” The voice seemed indifferent. “Destination, please.”
“Reagan National Airport.” Boy Scout John strung the words out like a school diction lesson.
“Thank you. Destination, Reagan National Airport. Estimated drive time, one hour, six minutes. Estimated time of arrival, eight-forty-seven a.m.”
As the car wended its way through the suburban business neighborhood, we remained in stolid silence. John seemed absorbed in a small, leather-bound book. I stared at the passing office buildings and oriental restaurants. A drumming sounded overhead. One of those new aerial two-seaters speeding toward the horizon, its glossy cobalt exterior radiating success. Just like the one I’d been itching to buy.
“That’s the way to travel.” I jabbed a finger at the window. “No waiting for traffic, or street lights, or anything.”
John smiled complacently. “Seems inefficient to me.”
Some guys just don’t get it.
My thoughts wandered back to the day before, the saucy smile on Tawna’s exotic face, Linda’s bold Texas drawl calling, “Come on, sugar,” as her curvy hips bobbed and swayed down the hallway in front of me.
“Heh, did you see that!”
Wrenched from my pleasant thoughts by John’s grip on my arm, I flung his hand off and sat upright. “What’re you doing? Keep your hands off me.”
“Sorry, but something bizarre just happened. Was our light red or yellow?”
Was this guy serious? “I don’t know. What’d you see?”
“When I looked up, people were crossing our street. I expected the taxi to stop, but it didn’t even slow down. Women and children on both sides had to step back to the sidewalk. A guy half-way across had to make a run for it. We swiped his back-side and swung him around. Then he hit the back window with his briefcase. When I looked back, people were shaking their fists at us. Didn’t you notice anything?”
I stared at him, wondering if he were a nut-case or a practical joker. “I didn’t see anything.”
He faced his palms toward me. “Okay.” After slipping his book into his jacket pocket, he pressed the button to open his window. Nothing happened. “Driver, open the right, rear window.”
“The car is climate controlled. To change the temperature settings, please use the control panel on the seat back in front of you.”
“I want to open the window.” John made his words especially slow and distinct. “Please open the right rear window.”
“Are you deaf?” the pleasant voice asked. “To change the temperature settings, please use the control panel on the seat back in front of you.”
John looked at me as if I should have an opinion. I shook my head and turned to my window.
By this time, we were winding our way along the Clara Barton Parkway, all lanes traveling southeast along a corridor of brilliant red, orange, and yellow hues. A sleek sky-blue Cayman appeared behind us, then edged its way within a hair’s breadth of a car to our left before pulling even with us. For a spellbound moment, our two cars hung together around a clockwise curve like two drops from a spinning sprinkler. The sporty minx shot ahead and made for a widening gap ahead of us. Our taxi burst into a sprint, pinning us to our seats and denying the lane to the intruder.
“Back at ya’!” I gave a gesture of triumph to the driver of the sports car. Ignoring John’s protests, I mouthed my opinion of him in no uncertain terms.
Eyes glaring, he maneuvered around the car in front of him and prepared to shoulder us into submission.
“Aw, don’t let him do that to you!” I gripped my bag like a steering wheel. As if in answer, our fearless charioteer bounded forward, catching the cheeky coupe on its right front corner and scraping off a layer of that sky-blue paint.
I pummeled the air with my fists as the man eased his car over to the road’s edge. The shocked eyes and gaping mouth of a man flummoxed in his defeat became one of the golden points of my week .
In the middle of my victory dance, a hand gripped my upper arm and spun me around. John’s stern and sober face confronted me. “Are you nuts! This is serious. You’re acting like a teenager in a demolition derby.”
If there’s anything I hate worse than supercilious rich men in expensive sports cars, it’s a stern, sober man telling me I’m acting like a juvenile.
“Lay offa me!” I grabbed him by his shirt front and gave him a shake. “That man deserved what he got. I hate those kinda guys, showing off their pricey cars, thinking the world revolves around them.”
For a moment, that amused look returned to John’s eyes, before his expression became serious again.
What do you make of such a look? What the devil was the man thinking?
He sat back and straightened his shirt. “Don’t you think this taxi is behaving oddly?”
I jerked my hands up. “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing serious happened. We’ll be at the airport in twenty minutes and this will all be over. Chill out a little.”
A resigned look settled over his features.
As we exited the parkway and approached the Chain Bridge, a bicyclist signaled a left turn and swung out in front of us. Our taxi hung back for a time. As if growing impatient, it revved the engine and jolted forward. A loud clunk sounded as we struck the rear of the bicycle. The bike leaped forward and landed, wobbling, on its front tire, before tipping over. The taxi drove on, unrelenting wheels churning over bike and rider as they lay. The dreadful significance of our vertical lurch crashed onto my startled brain, and I reached for a nausea bag. Screams pierced the air, continuing in dying waves behind us.
This time John didn’t speak, but hammered the keyboard in front of him. The writing appeared on the screen: ‘stop stop stop stop.’
I seized his arm. “What’re you doing? There’s no way we can help back there. We’ll tell someone when we get to the airport.”
“Someone was seriously hurt.” He shook off my grip. “We have to go back.” The typing accomplished nothing. He pried and pushed at the door. Also futile. “Driver, stop the car! Stop the car now.”
“Don’t stop! Go to Reagan!”
“No!” He was shouting now. “Stop! Wait!”
I raised my voice too. “Don’t stop! No. Go.”
“No! Stop, wait.”
“No, don’t stop, go.”
All I can figure is that the overlapping syllables merged into something the driver recognized. The voice purred. “Destination successfully changed. New destination, Otsego, Ohio. Estimated drive time, eight hours, seventeen minutes. Estimated time of arrival, five-twelve p.m.”
I assume my own expression mirrored John’s horrified look. We stared at each other, stunned into dumbness. The taxi had changed destination in time to veer off onto a west-bound highway. It charged forward as if delighted by the sight of less traffic.
John passed a sleeve over his forehead. “Now what?”
Not the chastisement I’d expected. It’s not in my nature, I confess, to admit guilt in the face of any confrontation. But something in those mild but searching eyes clutched me inside, pinned me down like a buggy specimen, and turned my struggling conscience to face my dissected ego.
“This is my fault.” The unnatural words chunked past my lips like cubes forced through a rubber tube. “I shouldn’t have gone against you back there.”
John stuck out his hand. After a moment, I met it halfway. We decided to ask the car to change destination again and chose a local restaurant. John made the request.
“Lay offa me!” The taxi’s tone had become surly. It stayed the course and took our speed up a notch.
I looked at our paltry belongings and ran my hand under the seat. Nothing useful, like a hammer or a crowbar, but another thought occurred to me. “Our phones. Let’s call for help.” I motioned at him. “You call. I don’t want to mess this up.”
John explained our taxi’s actions to someone at a local police station waiting through a long pause. “Hello! Is anyone there. Hello.”
A gravelly, indistinct voice erupted from the phone.
“No, I’m not drunk. I’m not crazy. I’m not joking.”
After more rough mumblings from the phone, John found the taxi’s ID code and reported it. The muttering on the other end got louder.
“I’m actually in the cab! We’re not going to the airport. We’re on Route 123, passing northwestwards through McLean. Why don’t you check…” John put away his phone. “They wouldn’t believe me. They think the cab’s still on its way to Reagan and I’m some crackpot causing trouble.”
I stared at the sky for a time, contemplating the shapes of clouds. “It’ll run out of gas at some point.”
“These cars are hybrid.”
“Then, it’ll run out of gas and charge at some point.”
John shook his head. “They can plug into charging stations with no supervision.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll figure something out, Mike. Don’t worry.”
I swiped his hand off and grimaced at him. One apology, and he thought I was milk toast.
He had no more time to get gooey on me. Our taxi had gained a taste for speed and now angled for opportunities to accelerate madly. Its wild motions tossed us like a salad, side to side, top to bottom, front to back.
“We’ve got to stop this thing.” John scanned the horizon during a moment of relative stability. “It will hurt more people.”
“Yeah, like us. Where’s a cop when you need one? They’d be sure to go after us, driving like this.”
“I wonder what they’d do to stop us. It might not be pretty.”
The answer appeared about an hour later. Traffic had thinned to a trickle, and we were cruising at over ninety miles per hour, based on my timing of mile markers. The police car’s nose peeked out past a grove of trees on John’s side. We caught a live one, all right, and he was after us, siren screeching.
John and I shared relieved glances before turning to watch the pursuit. The taxi maintained its speed as the cruiser pulled alongside. We waved our arms and pointed to the front of the taxi. The policeman edged forward and peered through the glass. At last, he seemed to understand that our driver wasn’t human, and he tried to pull ahead of us.
What followed seemed not of this world. The taxi’s engine let loose a lunatic shriek as its body struck sideways at the patrol car. The shocked face of the officer flashed past us, and I watched him struggle for a time behind us, getting his car under control. With a resolute air, he renewed the chase and drew his gun, aiming at a rear tire. I heard a bullet strike metal.
The cab went nuts. It swiftly fell back and rammed the cruiser, punching and recoiling repeatedly like a frightened child hitting a spider with a shoe. When the skidding police car landed askew in a ditch, the taxi gave a snort of triumph and increased its breakneck pace. “Back at ya’! That man deserved what he got.”
Wait. What? My own words, thrown back at me? I clutched at my seat, my heart knocking like a bad bearing. An explosion welled up in me, and I had to say something, anything, even if it made no sense. “If I could just get my arms around this thing, I’d like to shake it to pieces.”
“What did you say?” John looked at me as if I were a sage.
The guy had gone off the deep end, but I answered him anyway. “What, the part about getting my arms around this thing?”
“No, the other part.”
“I’d like to shake this thing to pieces?”
He nodded but sat quiet for a time. “Mike …” He was whispering, as if afraid the maniacal car was spying on us. “I want to try something. An experiment.”
Why I didn’t ask him to explain before nodding is beyond me. I guess I figured any action would be better than hurtling down the road in a belligerent vehicle with a wrathful police force on our tail.
“When I signal like this …” He made a gesture with his hand. “… we’ll both throw ourselves to the left side of the car.”
Another short nod was all I could muster. We undid our seatbelts for more range of motion. When he gave the signal, we both pushed off the floor and threw our bodies to the left. The car shifted. In reaction, the car veered further in the opposite direction. We tried the same action to the right, causing the reverse reaction.
The highway turned into a two-lane road. Still the car raced along. We passed one car, then another. Pulling around a third, a semi nearly flattened us. Our cab soon gained on a school bus filled with young children, out for a field trip perhaps. A line of trucks filled the oncoming lane. The taxi’s engine panted as if exasperated. At last it made its move, striking a blow to the back of the bus. The bus slowed at first, but there was no place to pull over. As more faces appeared at the back window, the bus sped up.
John frantically worked his GPS and examined our path.
“Mike! There’s a bridge coming up. Let’s do what we did before, but this time we’ve got to do it back and forth, as fast as we can.”
My muddled brain toiled overtime. Bridge, taxi swerving left and right, losing control, crashing through decrepit guardrails, going down into the drink. John’s intentions flashed through the fog. “What, are you crazy? I’m not ready to die!”
“Have any kids?” He pointed to the terrified little faces peeking out over the last bench of the bus. “Help me, or don’t help me, but don’t get in my way.”
Jimmy. The dearest moments of his childhood sprang up in sharp contrast to my jaded existence. Cradling the little peanut in the crook of my arm, stroking the soft, fuzzy head; carrying his eight-year-old form into the emergency room after he had crashed headlong with his bike into a tree; seeing him hold up the little league trophy with his teammates. I didn’t want to die. But living to see another father cope with the death of his child would have been hell on earth. I nodded. “Ready when you are.”
The bridge came into view. I glued my eyes to John’s tensed hand. Once the hand moved, we became a blur of continual motion, push to the left, thud, push to the right, thud, push to the left, thud. The car reacted in opposition each time, its motions getting larger and more out of control with each cycle. We increased our efforts, shortening the cycle and pushing harder. My breath became sharp in my lungs and my legs felt leaden. Just keep it up. A few seconds more.
The taxi had almost crossed the bridge when it swerved into the path of an oncoming truck. The collision spun us. Then we barreled straight for the guardrail, which yielded to the car’s force. Glancing left as we careened over the edge, I saw the bus speeding off the bridge. Pure joy filled my heart. Nothing else mattered.
A shudder went through the cab as some remnant of the barrier caught its underside. The beast’s quest had come to an end, and it hung motionless, smashed and depleted. The impact from the truck had popped open John’s door. When the car stopped moving, we slid toward the opening. Grabbing a seat belt with one hand, I caught John with the other, and we dangled there too, unable to find any secure footing. The barrier creaked, shifted, creaked again. John looked at me serenely and smiled a last big toothy smile. Then he let go.
The barrier held until emergency personnel rescued me. They found John’s broken body on the sharp rocks below.
To this day, whenever I’m tempted by the figure of a woman, John’s steady gaze and friendly smile appear between us, and I turn away. I’ve come to feel a profound gratitude for this precious gift. My life with Liz and Jimmy has a richness now that I never thought possible.
The authorities either never found or never revealed the cause of the taxi’s malfunction. A case of AI gone amok? I believe it. The system latched onto the worst elements of my selfish and combative personality. Does the fault ultimately lie in software, or in the human soul?
I know one thing for sure. That Titan ran its course as all Titans do, its unbounded passions wreaking havoc before delivering it up to a desolate end. If not for my good friend, John, I would have shared its fate.