THE CRETAN LABYRINTH
THE LIGHTS DIMMED back to normal. Moti’s disappearance reassured me I had made it to the vestibule in the San José hospital. Better yet, there was no Costa Rican security force awaiting my arrival.
I ambled out of the TC and into the hallway. My first task: find some sort of staff locker room. Somewhere I could change out of my ass-revealing—
“Mr. Byram!”
Are you fucking kidding me? Had IT tracked me down already?
Adrenaline coursed through my veins. After everything I’d been through, I was surprised my glands were still able to make the stuff. I turned and saw a nurse coming toward me. He had a pleasant face and super-thick eyebrows.
Act cool. It’s just one guy. You can overpower him. That’s first. Second, you take his scrubs and get to the parking lot. Third is you find an ambulance and drive it straight to Sylvia. Even though you’ve never actually driven anything outside of video games.
I curled my right hand into a fist, ready to clock him if need be, but his expression was one of concern, not apprehension.
“I’m really glad you came back,” he said. “You know, I felt a little guilty that I didn’t work harder yesterday to make you stay. Kept me up a little last night. I never saw injuries like that.” He looked me up and down. “Looks like you got some new ones since then.”
Shit, my bruises. “I—uh—fell,” I said. “Off a cliff,” I added unnecessarily.
He blinked, unsure if I was kidding or not. “Is your wife around, by any chance? Some IT people came by yesterday to fix the TC, and they had some questions for her. They’ve been talking to everyone after that attack.”
My wife? I thought. How does he—Oh. This guy must have met the “other” me. “Yes. She’s—um—outside. I’ll tell her.”
“Okay,” said the nurse with a cheerful smile. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”
Guess other me wasn’t looking so hot.
He walked off, and I wandered the halls until I found a directory that led me down to the basement laundry. It was occupied by bots, who kept offering to help me find the exit. I salted them with some story about my clothing accidentally being sent down for cleaning. Getting around without comms was already proving to be a pain in the ass. Even the most basic tasks required either salting my way past an app or explaining why my comms weren’t working. I couldn’t even operate a printer on my own.
“I can’t go back out there like this. Can’t you print me some clothes? Or point me to a lost and found?” I kept asking the bots, until finally one handed me a clean pair of scrubs and a lab coat. It ushered me back out through the exit, leaving me to change in the hallway. Thankfully, no one walked past.
It felt weird to walk around like a half nurse, half doctor, but at least I was fully clothed again. I wiped my sweaty forehead on my sleeve. In fact, my whole body was sweaty. I began to suspect Moti had me pegged. I wasn’t cut out for this shit.
I took the stairs up to the ground floor, avoiding both the elevator and as many security cameras as I could see.
Outside, the late-morning Sun was glaring, and the piss-warm rain was unpleasantly piss-like. Something buzzed by my ear, and for a moment I was certain it was some IT nano carrying synthesized venom. I looked around for the man Moti told me I wouldn’t see coming but couldn’t find him. It’s just a bug, Joel. Keep it together.
I took cover under an awning. I had no idea where to find an ambulance. Was there a dedicated ambulance garage? Man, I’d give anything to have my comms working right now. I circled the entire circumference of the hospital to no avail. Fuck. Moti hadn’t told me what to do if there were no ambulances to steal.
After a second tour around the cluster of buildings that made up the hospital, I ended up settling on the emergency room entrance as my perch. My assessment was that sooner or later an ambulance would show up there. I scanned the white-and-green skyline of San José. The column of smoke from yesterday’s explosion was gone, and the jungle-covered mountains were clear in the distance. Everything looked pretty normal. And to think, less than twenty-four hours ago, the city had been in chaos.
A siren wailed, drawing my attention back to the road. It was an ambulance, coming straight for the hospital. Finally some good luck. I stepped behind a concrete column as the white-and-orange-striped vehicle pulled into the circular driveway in front of the emergency room entrance. A crew of paramedics popped out—one from each door, and another from the rear. With the aid of a fourth paramedic in the cabin, they extracted a rolling gurney upon which lay a poor bastard who had cracked his head open like a bloody coconut. Two of the paramedics took the patient into the ER, but the other two stayed outside. Damn it. I didn’t know if they were getting ready to go on another call or shoot the shit; I only knew they were in between me and my best chance of getting to Sylvia. Who knew when another empty ambulance would show up?
Confidence, Joel. I stepped out from behind the column and walked briskly toward the ambulance. The rasp of my slipper-covered feet on the asphalt sounded deafening. But I kept going, pretending I didn’t see the paramedics, even though they were less than three meters away. One of them—a blond woman who looked young, maybe midtwenties—called after me. “¡Doctor! Estábamos a punto de irnos. ¿Viene?”
Shit, the lab coat. She thought I was a doctor. “Sí, sí,” I said to them without turning around. I did not speak Spanish, and I didn’t have my comms to translate. “Uh—buenos nachos. Gracias.”
She frowned. “¿Cuál es su nombre? Espera.”
“Sorry! Apologismo or whatever, but I’m in a hurry. Rápido. Adios.” I threw a wave over my shoulder and got in the front of the ambulance. There was a U-shaped steering wheel before me, as well as a small console. Which was blank. Shit balls.
The problem with my video game driving experience is that old-fashioned cars from the twenty-first century had things like speedometers and gearshifts. I tapped the screen, but saw nothing like that. I swiped through a few menus in hopes of finding words like manual or start, but to no avail. The blond paramedic began walking toward me, so I broke down.
“Hello, ambulance?” Most vehicle apps were pretty basic, intelligence-wise. They were excellent drivers and navigators, but painfully mediocre at basic puzzling. Once a salter gained access to a car or a drone, getting it to do what they wanted was easy. Insurance companies had deduced that stolen vehicles that fought back were recovered with significantly more damage than those that just played along while patiently waiting to be recovered.
“Who are you?” the ambulance asked pointedly. “You are not authorized to be in my cabin.”
Oooh, a stickler for the rules. Good. “Your driver reported several poor performance issues. I’m here to run diagnostics.”
“Your comms aren’t registering. Please identify yourself.”
The blond paramedic knocked on the door window, speaking in accented English. “Doctor, can you please step out for a moment?”
I grabbed the handle so she couldn’t open it. “I’m—uh—Johnny the mechanic. Your first task is to lock the doors.”
The locks clicked shut. The paramedic pulled on the handle. “Hey! Come out right now or I’m calling security!”
“A little slow,” I said to the ambulance. “Let’s see you open up a manual operating screen.”
“Protocol dictates that I do not—”
“Look, either put it in manual mode now or I’ll send you directly to recovery. You’re an ambulance, for God’s sake—one malfunction could mean the difference between life and death. So either prove to me you’re functional, or I’ll flash your firmware!”
Normally I don’t like to threaten or insult apps because it’s hard to tell how they’ll react. Part of the art of salting is reverse-engineering an app’s purpose. Once you know why it thinks it exists, it’s much easier to convince it that the things you want will help it improve upon its programming. Ambulances will naturally put saving human lives above all else, so I hoped it would accept my logic.
The engine hummed on. The blond paramedic jumped back, immediately calling someone on her comms. The way things had been going, it was probably the hospital’s most jacked security guard. She ran back into the ER.
“Better,” I said, making sure to sound grudging. “But let’s see how your controls work. Pull up a simpler user interface, please.”
The console flipped through a few options until it came to a much more familiar-looking layout. Speedometer, battery gauges, gearshift. “That one,” I said. Gas and brake pedals were projected onto the floor. “Now give me control of the wheel.”
“Sir, that is highly—”
“Do you wanna do it, or do you wanna be scrapped? Now pull up a map and disable all third-party APIs. I don’t want you cheating.”
Manual mode is only meant to be used in desperate situations, like if an ambulance has to go off-road or into a canyon to rescue someone. It’s a very expensive feature to activate on busy thoroughfares, exponentially more so than to hurry. Driving manual meant you not only paid for other vehicles to prioritize your route over theirs (like Joel2 did when he told his golf cart to hurry), it also meant other cars on the road were taking on the risk associated with your human errors. Autonomous vehicles wisely distrusted human drivers and would choose to pull over rather than drive next to a manually operated car. It also helped that the manually driven vehicle continuously broadcast an alert roughly translating to: Everyone, look out, I’m being driven by a monkey.
“Confirmed,” sulked the ambulance.
I double-checked the GDS coordinates Moti had written on my forearm in marker. A few of the numbers were smudged, but hopefully the ambulance could make them out. “Now, plot the quickest route to this location,” I said, holding my left arm toward the console. A highlighted line appeared on the display map, mainly taking Route 1 north-northwest from San José to the mountains. I just hoped the Costa Rican authorities wouldn’t send any security forces after me.
I switched gears to drive, but nothing happened.
Looking to my right, I could see the blond paramedic had just emerged from the emergency lobby with a real doctor and a nurse. They began hurrying toward me.
“I just put you in drive,” I said, trying not to sound desperate. “Why aren’t you moving forward?”
“You do not seem qualified to operate this vehicle,” stated the ambulance.
“Don’t tell me how to do my job!” I yelled, full-on panic seeping through my voice. I hoped the ambulance would interpret it as anger. “Go, now!”
The three hospital employees were uncomfortably close. “I want you to disable your autonomics,” I said. “I’m making the decisions from here on out.”
“Hey!” the blond paramedic said, clutching at the locked passenger door. She thumped a fist on the window.
“Go!” I yelled, tapping the drive icon and stepping on the projected gas pedal repeatedly. The ambulance didn’t budge. All three hospital employees were trying to get in now. The doctor went around to the passenger door, while the nurse moved toward the back.
Fuckity fuck, I’m fucked. May as well go for broke.
I banged my hands as hard as I could on the steering wheel. “People will die if you don’t move!” I screamed.
To my relief, the ambulance jutted into drive. The hospital employees leaped back. I stomped my foot on the gas pedal projection as I hard as I could, and the vehicle flew off the curb, tires screeching. Fortunately, the ambulance’s suspension was decent enough that I was able to hold on and keep my foot on the pedal without flying around the cabin.
The doctor, the nurse, and the blond paramedic were all yelling and chasing after me now. I heard something smash against the rear of the vehicle. Shit, did someone jump on the back? I checked the rearview stream. Nope, all three were a good distance behind me.
“Collision imminent,” remarked the ambulance. I was so distracted by the rear stream that I’d forgotten that I was still driving. I veered hard right and managed to barely avoid T-boning another car entering the hospital. I veered hard left to correct course, jumping another curb or two in the process. This thing handled like a walrus on wheels.
“I do not believe my chassis is architected to withstand head-on collisions at this speed,” the ambulance informed me.
“All part of the test,” I said, trying to reassure us both as I blew through an intersection. It looked like I managed to align myself with the path the ambulance had outlined for me. “Congratulations, you performed sufficiently enough to progress to the second part of the assessment,” I said. “Let’s see how you are at notifying me of obstacles.”
“Very well. I should also advise you that we are exceeding the speed limit. Fruit vendor.”
“Uh—yes. That’s the point,” I said, frantically maneuvering around an old lady’s fruit cart. She chucked an orange at me. My heart was in my throat, blocking my airway with every frantic beat. This isn’t a game, dumb ass. If you crash or hit someone here, there’s no restore. I swerved onto Route 1, the ambulance’s tires squealing in protest. The road was not quite the broad thoroughfare the ambulance’s display screen made it out to be. Then again, I should have probably taken into account that any map on the antique device would be out-of-date.
“How long will it take us to get to our location?” I said.
“Monteverde is a hundred and twenty-eight kilometers away. With current traffic conditions, estimated time of arrival is about three hours from now.”
Way too slow. “We need to make it in half that time,” I said, pushing the gas pedal down to the floor. Storefronts swept past. Horns honked. “Make sure you tell any cars and pedestrians ahead to clear the road. Say it’s an emergency.”
“Most of them are already aware,” said the ambulance.
No wonder Route 1 had started to clear out. I considered myself incredibly lucky that the police hadn’t clocked my wild exit from the city. I could only assume they still had their hands full cleaning up yesterday’s attack. In the rearview stream, I could see the white high-rises of San José receding behind me as I turned the car toward the mountains. I had no idea what I would do when I reached Sylvia’s location, but it felt good to finally be heading toward something, instead of waiting or running away.
It was a feeling that proved to be short-lived.