Broken Pixels (Broken Realms, #4)

CHAPTER 6-2

After tucking the book bag under the sheet just above Cam’s neck where his head would have been, Sam pushed the gurney, while Mara walked on one side, looking at her phone in case a new message arrived. Ping kept pace on the opposite side. They did not cross paths with anyone as they took the elevator up one floor and followed Jazz’s instructions to turn right, where the hall ended at a cavernous loading area marked by three deep bays designed to allow trucks to back into the building. Each bay was closed off to the outdoors by a rolling garage-type door; each spray-painted with a yellow stenciled number.

Mara’s phone vibrated and a message from Cam came through. A transport will arrive at Bay 3 in approximately four minutes. Once it arrives, load the gurney and take a seat in the vehicle.

Mara pointed to the end of the bay, and Sam steered the gurney in that direction and asked, “Why are we going over here?”

“Cam says that is where the transport will pick us up,” she said.

“How can he know that?” Sam asked, as he pulled up to the bay and swung the foot of the gurney toward the open side.

Mara shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think he might have arranged the pickup wirelessly. Remember how he tracked Mom and called you without having a phone?” She waved her phone. “He said they didn’t need things like cells phones, because their synthetic bodies were capable of communicating without separate devices.”

Ping smiled. “It’ll be fascinating to see a world where people can call a cab simply by thinking it.”

A yellow light above the bay door flashed, and the door rose. Outside, a white van backed down a shallow incline, passing under the rising door just as it moved out of its path. Stopping just one-quarter inch from the edge of the bay, the van parking lights illuminated and then went dark after its engine cut off.

A look of concern passed over Sam’s face. “Uh, guys, why is this bay too deep and half the back door of the van is below where we stand?”

Suddenly a beeping sound came from below, and the van rose by way of some kind of lift underneath it.

Once the van leveled with them, the beeping stopped, and the vehicle’s rear doors popped open. Mara grabbed one door and Ping the other. She pointed ahead and said, “Just push the gurney inside. The wheels should collapse and fold beneath.”

Sam shoved the gurney forward, and it slipped inside almost soundlessly. Mara leaned in to see if she needed to secure the gurney but noticed that triangular stops had popped from the van’s floorboard, below the gurney’s wheels, holding it in place. She stepped away and nodded to Ping, who slammed the doors closed. Sam led them up the passenger side of the van to get in and was the first to look through the passenger window. He froze and turned to Mara and Ping.

“Ah, this thing doesn’t have a driver—or a steering wheel for that matter,” he said.

“What?” Mara leaned over his shoulder to glance in the window. The driver’s side had no steering wheel, dashboard or a rearview mirror. It was a duplicate of the passenger seat immediately inside the window. “Maybe the driver stepped into the rear to check on things.”

Mara pushed Sam away and opened the door, leaning into the cab of the vehicle. Behind the front seat was a bench and behind that was the cargo space holding the gurney. She straightened and said, “I’m not sure I understand what is going on here. How did this van get here without a driver?”

Ping opened the windowless side sliding door of the van and looked inside. After surveying the interior for a few moments, he said, “Clearly this vehicle wasn’t designed to be operated in the manner in which we are accustomed. I’m not even sure how we would operate it.”

Mara’s phone vibrated. She held it up and read the message from Cam aloud. “Vehicles in this realm are self-driving, auto-navigational. Just take a seat and close all the doors. I’ve entered the destination.”

Mara pressed her lips together and typed a response. Is it safe?

After a moment Cam responded, Ironic, considering the only traffic accident I’ve ever been a part of was in your realm. Yes. It’s extremely safe.

To Ping she said, “What do you think?”

“It makes sense that a culture which relies so much on technology would have developed a high degree of automation. They probably don’t have the same concerns about issues such as sedentary lifestyles and such, so why not automate everything? They’ve got the know-how.”

“All right then, let’s jump in,” Mara said.

Mara stepped into the van and slipped into what she thought of as the driver’s seat on the left front side of the van. Sam took the passenger seat, and Ping chose the backseat bench behind them. After closing the doors, they sat in silence for a few seconds, waiting for something to happen.

Sam gave his sister a questioning look and said, “Well, are we going somewhere?”

Rapping a knuckle on the windshield, Mara said, “Okay, we are ready to depart. Please take us to the repository.”

A soft feminine voice came from a speaker in the ceiling. “Children may not operate this vehicle without the presence of a competent adult.”

“What? What makes you think we’re not competent?” Mara said into the air.

Her phone vibrated. Cam texted Hold on. I’m overriding ...

The van’s engine started, and the platform underneath it lowered. The voice from the ceiling said, “Please secure your seat belts.” Sam blushed and reached for the strap over his shoulder. As soon as it clicked, the van inched out of the inclined bay and took a right.

Mara raised her phone and typed What was all that about a competent adult? She spoke the words aloud as she entered them.

While waiting for a response, she looked up as the van rounded the side of the hospital building and said, “It feels really weird, sitting here texting, while the vehicle is just driving itself.”

The phone vibrated, and Mara read Cam’s response aloud. “The vehicle detected that the three of you were biological and assumed you were under the age of ten. Since I am incapacitated, I did not meet its criteria.”

Sam laughed. “Just a bunch of kids out for a joy ride.”

“Cam said they are born with flesh-and-blood bodies but transfer to the synthetic ones when they are ten years old,” Mara said. “We might have trouble getting around without some help.”

“I have to admit it’s been a while since I was confused for a ten-year-old,” Ping said. “With some luck, we’ll be able to make a quiet exit from this realm, after we get Cam the help he requires.”

The van stopped at an intersection several hundred yards beyond the hospital, waited for a small blue car to cross their path and then took a left turn. Mara looked out the rear door’s window at the building they just left—it was identical to its counterpart in her realm. Except for the disorganized jumble of vehicles clustered at the front entrance, randomly parked in the driveway, some with tires up on the curb, as if the occupants had simply skidded to a stop and jumped out. Two ambulances sat idle with flashing red lights, unable to get past the traffic jam to the emergency entrance.

Apart from the chaos at the entrance, it was the same building where Mara met Cam for the first time just a few days ago. Even the skinny little trees and shrubs in the medians and the layout of the parking lot were the same, though the vehicles parked out front were unfamiliar models and all lacked side-view mirrors.

Turning away and looking at the road ahead, it struck her as ordinary enough, but something remained different that she couldn’t put her finger on.

“Don’t things look—I don’t know—more pristine, somehow? I can’t figure it out. It looks exactly the same here, but it seems less crowded or something. What is it?” she asked.

“Cables,” Ping said, pointing into the gray sky.

“What? I don’t see any cables,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s my point. No telephone or power lines running every which way from pole to pole. No poles even. That’s why everything looks so open and uncluttered. You’re actually looking at the horizon without seeing it through a maze of cables.”

The van slid over to a turning lane beneath an Interstate 84 West sign. A minute later they took the exit and descended rapidly down a sloping, sharply curving on-ramp.

Once they had fallen in line in the right lane, pacing the vehicle ahead, Sam pointed to the passing cars and said, “Look, nobody is paying attention to their driving. That woman is reading, and the guy over there looks like he’s combing his daughter’s hair or something.”

Mara’s gaze followed Sam’s finger. “Apart from the driving-without-looking part, they seem kind of ordinary though—just like us, out for a drive, running an errand, going to work ...”

“Taking a headless robot to his repository,” Sam added.

The van’s engine revved as it compensated for the highway, which sloped upward. It suddenly decelerated and jutted over to the right lane. Swerving onto the shoulder, it slowed to a crawl and stopped. Mara grabbed her armrest and said into the ceiling, “Okay, van, let’s make the drive less erratic. I’d like to get there in one piece, and I’m not so confident you people can put me back together, if we get into an accident.”

The voice from the ceiling said, “Emergency response vehicles approaching.”

Two fire engines and an ambulance sped by with lights flashing but no audible sirens, sending a gust of wind against the side of the van, causing it to sway on its suspension for a moment. Once those vehicles disappeared over the hill ahead, the van clicked into gear and inched forward, navigating again onto the highway. As they crested the hill, Mara gasped. The road ahead was clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic—and the sky was filled with smoke billowing up in several streams from downtown Portland.

“There must be a building on fire or something,” she said.

“That’s clearly not a single building,” Ping said. “It looks more like some kind of cataclysm involving multiple buildings or perhaps even blocks or neighborhoods.”