Driven by Autopilot

by L. B. Zinger

part 1

When Irving’s head banged into Sheila’s knee for the fourth time, she snapped out of her stupor. It was the third time she had nodded off in the last hour, an hour they had spent parked in a traffic jam on the Interstate causeway in Florida. Her knitting was on the floor by her feet. The Irish wool sweater with the lovely cables was tangled but undamaged.

Irving was undamaged as well; he continued pulling and snipping at wires under the dashboard. Sheila was irritated. She needed a rest stop and there was no respite in sight. They would be lucky to make it to Sarasota before nightfall. She avoided looking down at the watery strait as waves sparkled and shimmered. How much longer would it take to clear the damned accident? Irving pressed on with stripping wires and pulling cables.

Sheila looked down at Irving’s fogged glasses and determined campaign of destruction. After 50 years of marriage, I’ve had it with his tinkering. Now he’s trying to override the autonomous driving feature on my new car. He could easily ruin Kitty’s electronics. She had named the new MyElectriKar 2100, “Kitty,” after instantly falling in love with the car’s comfort and safety features. She believed that the car reciprocated and spoke to her like a true friend.

Irving was another matter. Over the years, his adolescent hobby of dismantling appliances had evolved into a nightmare: the house was cluttered with tangles of wires and cables, spent and evacuated bodies of toasters and even microwave ovens as his “workshop” overflowed into the rest of the house. Malfunctions required surgery, but surgery required technical expertise and intelligence, neither of which was Irving’s strong suit. She was fed up with a houseful of nonfunctioning electrical equipment and must-have gadgets. This annual trip to Florida was an equalizer: a small ranch with no stairs and no clutter. She could walk around barefoot without fear of injury. They just had to get there.

The Fully Autonomous MyElectriKar 2100 was a godsend. It was capable of getting them from New Jersey to Florida without traffic incident and in complete comfort. The MyElectriKar 2100 came with multiple safety features, including a driver lockout that had been activated when Irving’s license was revoked last summer for losing control of their Cadillac and crashing up against a fast-food restaurant. Kitty responded promptly to Sheila’s initially timid requests and ignored Irving. Irving hated the car and had attempted to take control of it every chance he got since it left the showroom.

Sheila looked at the waves of heat from the hoods of the other cars in the multi-mile backup and felt grateful that Kitty had deployed her solar panels to help climate control. The car seemed to instinctively know Sheila’s preferences. When Irving wanted to have colder air or to make a lane change, Kitty politely reminded him that his voice was not on record; the registered owner was named Sheila. Since the car obeyed all traffic laws, Sheila was not subjected to Irving’s swerving in and out of lanes because it was “inefficient to sit in traffic.”

“Can you hand me a pair of pliers or a screwdriver from the tool kit in the backseat?” he growled.

Sheila rummaged in the toolbox and produced a small pair of needle-nosed pliers and a rusting screwdriver and handed them to him, her annoyance and frustration growing. Why did she always ‘enable’ him instead of telling him how she really felt?

“Bah, these are too small!” He tossed both of them away and continued hacking at wires hanging under the steering wheel, using tweezers and manicure scissors. He shook his head as if Sheila had failed him once again, by offering inferior tools. I’ll need a new manicure set, she thought. At least he hasn’t found my good sewing scissors.

A bubble of anger rose in her chest. It had always been about Irving, not Sheila, for the last twenty years of their marriage. Once they retired, they no longer had the comfort and peace of separate occupations. Irving asserted his dominance and controlled household operations, to Sheila’s dismay. She often wondered how they had managed to survive under her management alone for all those years without his superior skills. Sometimes the degree to which she hated him surprised her.

Irving let out a yelp when a spark singed his fingers as he cut through the insulation. Two pieces of bare wire hung under the dashboard.

“Just like in the movies. I can hotwire this stupid car and take over the driving myself.” He leered triumphantly.

Sheila said nothing. She looked out at the kaleidoscope of flashing lights on both sides of the road and tried to control her anger. A car or two escaped every few minutes on the northbound side and immediately took off. On their side, an occasional motorcycle or minicar managed to squeak down the breakdown lane and get up to the emergency vehicles, at which point they were forced to merge back in. There was nowhere for Irving to go. Over the sound of the engines’ idling, occasional shouts could be heard. Luckily, there was no gunfire.

She turned back to her knitting, still angry and unable to concentrate on the complex pattern. She was confident that Irving could do no real harm to the car, and that his flimsy tools would soon break. I’m surprised the scissors haven’t snapped yet, she mused. Kitty was strangely silent. Why doesn’t she try to stop him? I wouldn’t care if she did.

All the way down I-95, he had complained about Kitty’s adherence to the speed limit, “her” willingness to stop for rest room breaks whenever Sheila wanted them, and the totality with which “she” ignored his commands. This delay had been the last straw, and he was determined to override the autopilot program, not that there was anywhere to go if he did take over. He had worked up a sweat trying to cut the wires under the dashboard and now was breathing heavily.

The one MyElectriKar feature that Sheila would like right now was the portable rest room. The last stop had been in Tampa, at a restaurant where she had indulged in more coffee than she should have. The optional expandable port-a-potty for the MyElectriKar was an extra $3000 and came with an “enhanced comfort and life safety package.” Irving had objected to spending that much money on an “accessory,” of course, so it wasn’t installed. She touched a button to give herself a gentle massage while she waited.

Sheila had read the Owner’s Manual cover to cover and made little notes in the margins about things like jumper cables, sudden battery failure and how the autonomous driving feature actually worked. Accordingly, she knew that Irving’s mission was doomed, but it was less stressful to have him occupied than trying to entertain him. A nagging thought about the warning not to remove the black cover on the components under the dashboard crossed her mind, but she shook it off and knit on.

Irving shouted, “I’ve got it! This is it!” He inserted the screwdriver into the black plastic panel, removed it with a hoot of triumph and flung it on the driver’s seat. He grabbed his cell phone, turned on the flashlight and dove back under the dash to carefully inspect his find. He gave running commentary as he traced each wire to its end point, describing all the connections.

Sheila ignored him. He asked Kitty for assistance, but her response was what sounded very much like a low growl and a flickering of her lights from green to dark blue and then red. Sheila felt a flutter of concern; it seemed as if Kitty were angry. She looked out the window, trying to figure out when traffic would start moving. People moved around outside. She put her hand on the door handle to get out and walk a little, just to get away from Irving for a few minutes.

There was a scream, abruptly cut off. She turned to see Irving’s face frozen in a rictus of horror as he convulsed, gave a loud gasp and stopped breathing. In his left hand he clutched the end of a thick electrical trunk, and in his right were the goddamned manicure scissors pinching the last fibers of the other end of the trunk.

Kitty began an alarm. “Alert! Alert! System breach!” Red and yellow lights flashed. Kitty sounded angry and somewhat hostile; a fact Sheila only appreciated on later reflection.

“Kitty, Irving’s had a seizure and he’s not breathing!” Sheila shrieked as she undid her seatbelt and reached over to snatch the cable away from the hand holding the scissors. With a few sparks and a fizzle, the wire fell to the carpet and Irving fell back on the seat.

“Call 9-1-1, Kitty!” she yelled, feeling Irving’s neck for a pulse. She reached around him, fully reclined his seat and wrestled him onto his back. No breathing, no pulse, airway open, time to start CPR. “Kitty, did you call the rescue squad?”

“Help is on the way,” replied the digitized voice. Sheila noticed that the pitch of Kitty’s voice had dropped another octave and was much slower. The lights on the console flickered yellow to black. As she started chest compressions, Sheila noted that the car was getting warmer. Uh, oh! Has Irving fried the car with his meddling?

“Open the windows, Kitty!” she yelled. The windows went down slowly, and the moon roof opened. Sheila kept compressions up, pausing every 100 or so to recheck for breathing or a pulse. Still nothing. She noted that traffic was starting to move around them. She felt the engine start up and the car rolled into the breakdown lane and stopped. “Thank you, Kitty.” This car was truly a miracle.

Proceed to part 2...