Taking the Highway (6 page)

“Of course that’s what I want. That’s what we all want. Detroit is only Detroit because people believe in it.”

“People believe in money,” Andre said.

“That’s what I’m saying. They’re coming to
us
. The economic summit is here—”

“Because ‘Detroit
is
the economic summit.’ I remember the speech.”

“Wrote that one myself.” Oliver took a bite of coleslaw. “And I happen to like Greenfield Village. I like fourths, too. I’ve got a few on the payroll, but I could use a few more. I could use you.”

Because you get me for free.
Andre pushed his plate aside and sipped his tea. “Why can’t Nikhil pretty up your party?” As Oliver’s son, Nikhil would have no choice but to attend. Plus, he qualified as a fourth. Barely.

Oliver leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I’m trying to help you, kid. I’ve invited people who are important to know. People who could be beneficial to your career.”

“Like who, the police commissioner?”

“No, just the mayor.”

Andre spit a chip of ice back into his glass. “The mayor isn’t coming to a city councilman’s fundraiser.”

Oliver lifted his own glass. “Someone from her office,” he said into his tea.

“How stupid are you? The mayor’s office will send an intern looking for free beer. Maybe I’d better make an appearance to class up your—” He stopped when a flash on the video monitor caught his eye. Smoke. Flame. Cars.

Oliver was watching the other monitor, over Andre’s head. He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “Holy shit, is that on the highway?” Patrons hushed each other as everyone listened for the audio.

The smiling spinner was gone from the screen, replaced by a scene of tangled, burning metal and jagged splinters of plastic. The camera shook. It was probably a hand-held job, the first to spot the scene and start uploading. The shaking and panning blurred the background, and Andre couldn’t see where it was or what was going on. A bomb? Footage from yet another overseas war? And what was with all the cars? The camera paused for the split second and he recognized the unmistakable outline of the 555 art gallery. Whatever was happening, it was happening less than ten kilometers from here. He grabbed for his datapad, hoping to get a better picture than this amateur reporting.

The audio blared into the room, a voiceover narrating the now-looping footage. “. . . failure in the Overdrive system on Interstate 96 at West Grand, in an area covering eight square kilometers.”

Oliver turned back to Andre, his eyes wide, and then he was scrambling in his pocket for his pad.

Audio screamed from the phone in Andre’s head. [
ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ALL NEARBY UNITS REPORT IN FOR REROUTING.
] He clicked in a response, giving his current location and waited for the department AI to figure out where to send him.

Oliver waved at the monitors. “I gotta—”

“Yeah.”

Oliver laid a hand on Andre’s shoulder and steered him toward the door. “Let’s go.”

On the street outside Aqua Taco, pedestrians, bikes, and cars flowed in disturbingly normal patterns. Andre still didn’t know where he was going—he doubted the traffic router could see anything in that mess—but wherever it was, he’d need his car. He shot down the sidewalk toward Bella Trattoria, belatedly realizing he’d left his hat at the restaurant and was now getting soaked. The chatter in his head was starting to jumble together with cross-talk, but still no official instructions.

The Raven sensed the key in his pocket and unlocked itself. He jumped in and already had the car in gear when the passenger door opened and Oliver climbed in beside him. Andre stared at him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Oliver held up his datapad. “It’s a mess out there. Can’t take the Challenger into that.”

Andre nodded and drove into the street. The Raven’s police seal made it exempt from the minimum passenger laws, but Andre wasn’t supposed to carry civilians in an on-duty car. Supposed to or not, Oliver was here, and he might be useful. “Get me some information,” Andre said. “News, spins, someone has to know something.”

“Like what?”

“Location! I need exact coordinates.” He upped the volume in his implant and strained to make out anything that would help him find the fastest way to the scene. The service drives would be mobbed, but if he could hit the right cross street, he might be able to find a way onto the highway.

Oliver held up his datapad and said something, but Andre couldn’t make it out. He swore, and instructed his implant to mute everything except official instructions. “What?”

“I said, Overdrive is down in several places.”

“Wrong! It’s just a single node. The system automatically slows everything else down.” He listened to his head. “They’ve red-lighted a bunch of eastbound on-ramps, trying to stop the flow of traffic.” He turned onto Joy Road and immediately regretted it. Cars were slamming on the brakes or turning down alleys to avoid gridlock. Andre jammed the wheel to the right and took the narrow shoulder.

Oliver gripped the door handle. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know! Maybe if you find me a location of some kind—”

[
ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
] Finally, the damn AI had found him. “Sergeant LaCroix, please report to Eastbound Interstate 96 via Livernois Avenue.”

Andre tapped the dash and told the car where to go. He found an empty alley to make his turn and let the GPS calculate his route. “I got the place,” he told Oliver. “Find out what’s going on.”

“They’re saying it’s a bomb. Terrorists.”

Andre took a corner that splashed an arc of puddle water onto the sidewalk. “God, I hope so.”

Oliver gasped. “Are you crazy? How can you hope for that?”

“What’s the last big highway pileup you can remember?” In his peripheral vision he could see Oliver tapping fingers to thumb, counting.

“There was that thing in Phoenix before Arizona agreed to go Overdrive. But that was . . . six? Seven years ago?”

“Not in Detroit,” Andre said.

The Overdrive system, essentially an overlapping series of AIs, was able to monitor and control any vehicle produced in the last twelve years. Every federally-funded highway was lined with sensors that pinpointed every car’s speed, trajectory, and proximity to other vehicles. The data was communicated to control towers perched on berms and buildings above the highways. A series of lights on the dashboard signaled the driver when the system made an adjustment, overriding manual control. Detroit had been the pilot city, the first with autonomous highways. Building the system brought jobs. Jobs brought confidence. Detroiters marked the return to economic prosperity from the beginning of that program.

Now, they took it for granted. It was funny how quickly drivers had embraced behaving like passengers during commuting time. Andre did it at least once a week, reading behind the wheel, unable to keep from imagining his father’s horror. Papa LaCroix had not been a man who liked to entrust his destiny to others. Cruise control was bad enough. The proximity that the Overdrive system allowed—at speeds approaching 200 KPH—would have sent him scurrying to the surface streets.

The system had originally been designed to keep a following distance of twelve meters between every car, but after only three months of operation, the system’s designers had reduced the margin to only four meters without incident. Everyone got used to it because the safety record was perfect. A mechanical failure of a single car meant that every other vehicle was automatically maneuvered away—signal lights flaring across their dashboards and emergency services notified. Auto accidents were low-speed crashes on surface streets, never on the highways, not with Overdrive in charge.

“Everybody hurtles along nodding out their windows to everyone else,” Andre said. “That’s why I hope this was some kind of deliberate act. If it’s a malfunction, nobody will trust the highways.”

The dashboard told him to take the on-ramp at Livernois. He made the turn and came out onto the service drive, packed with four-passenger vehicles, none of which were getting on the highway, since their cars would not let them pass a red-lighted ramp.

Andre wrenched the wheel to the left, slipped between two stopped cars, and hurled down the on-ramp onto the eerily empty highway. He noted the absence of the Overdrive greeting and realized how quickly he’d become used to it himself.

Oliver looked over his shoulder, craning to see behind them. “I’ve never run a red light before.”

“It loses its thrill.” Andre gritted his teeth and hit the accelerator. Warning lights swept across the dash.
Please take manual control. Overdrive malfunction. Please take manual control.

He clicked into his phone implant and gave his new location, telling dispatch that he was approaching the scene. A kilometer ahead, he could see a whole lot of cars going nowhere. At least there were none behind him, although that wouldn’t last long. Within minutes, cars from further back, beyond the shutdown, would catch up. The system would reroute as much traffic as it could, but they couldn’t close the entire length of highway. He caught a glimpse of a helicopter above, but couldn’t tell if it was police or news.

“This is bad,” Oliver said. Andre wondered if he’d determined that by looking at the road or looking at his datapad.

“How many dead? Do they know?”

Oliver poked his pad. “None confirmed. The warning lights came on and most of the people took control. But at those speeds? All they could do was hit the brakes. Lots of injuries, older cars without airweb.” He read some more from his screen. “This knot of cars is like five klicks long and half of these cars plowed into the ones in front of them.”

[
ATTENTION! ATTENTION! SERGEANT LACROIX, PLEASE CONFIRM VISUAL.
]

Andre touched the spot behind his ear and clicked a single pulse of acknowledgment.

He reconfigured the Raven’s comscreen to record forward video.

“Oh, crap. I was afraid of that.” A human voice had taken over for the AI but did not identify herself. “We have some kids in that mess. Too small for airweb and bounced around pretty hard. How am I going to get an ambulance in there?”

“What about coming from the other side?”

“What?” Oliver said.

Andre shut him up by shaking his head and pointing to his implant with raised eyebrows.

“Worse over there,” the dispatcher said. “They’re between exits and right in the middle of things. I need you to clear a path.”

Andre looked at six lanes of cars, bumpers touching, horns honking. A few passengers were already abandoning their vehicles and walking up the slippery embankment to the service drive. Others were gesturing to those behind them to move out of the way, but everyone was jammed in too tightly to solve the problem without coordinated effort.
Kids. Shit. Injured kids . . .
“Do I get any help here?”

“I’ll hold traffic from coming at you as long as I can. I’ve closed every Detroit on-ramp. The only thing coming at you is coming from the outburbs.”

Andre tried for some measure of calm. He had a momentary fantasy of cautious suburban drivers noticing the empty highway, seeing the Overdrive warnings, and either slowing down or getting off. But that wasn’t how people drove.

He moved the Raven to the shoulder and got out. The rain came straight down from a windless sky, each drop nailing his head as if drilling itself into his skull.

Oliver slammed his door and stood beside him. “This is the back of the line. What did they send you here for?”

Andre pointed to the middle of the traffic. “We need to get in there. Ambulance. Kids. We need to clear these cars.”

“Right. How?”

“One at a time. We have to turn them around and get them to exit by going up the on-ramp.”

“And risk a head-on crash?” Oliver wiped rain out of his eyes and looked at the highway behind them. “Nobody’s going to do that.”

“Overdrive shut the ramps.” He tapped the trunk of the nearest car. “Talk them into it. Open up space. Don’t let anyone crowd in.”

Andre remembered his first day on the force, the terror of working patrol. It felt like every car was a loaded gun, ready to blow him away. He’d quickly learned what he could change and what he couldn’t and how fast to step aside. Oliver would have to do the same.

He surveyed the backs of cars for a likely opening. The truck lane was going nowhere. No semi had the turning radius to move where they needed to go. At least they were in the far left lane, away from the cars. Things looked bad in the center, but a purple Octave on the far right seemed undamaged, or at least drivable. He pulled Oliver’s arm and steered him toward it while he took the car directly in front of it.

He rapped on the window until the driver cracked it . The heater was on in the car and the driver’s bangs curled up off her forehead. “What?”

He held up his shield. “DPD. Everyone all right in here? Is your car drivable?”

“We’re fine. Can you tell us what’s going on?”

“I don’t know the cause. Right now I need you to back up your vehicle.”

“I can’t!”

Andre took a breath. “When the car behind you moves, I need you to back up, turn your car one hundred eighty degrees, and follow the car behind you. Use the Livernois on-ramp to exit the highway.”

“But that doesn’t—”

“Please, Ma’am, we’re in a hurry.”

She consulted her rearview. “That car isn’t moving.”

Andre popped his head above the car. Oliver was nowhere near the purple Octave. He’d moved two lanes over and was in consultation with the driver of a gray Ford.

Andre ran to Oliver and grabbed his arm. “I told you to start over there.”

Oliver shook him off. “The Octave is full of panicked grandmothers. There’s no way they’re leading this train. Whoever goes first has to go fast and everyone has to follow or it stays chaos.” He pointed to the Ford, which was crammed with high-schoolers, the smallest one behind the wheel. This was his leader? “Stuart here loves to drive and knows what to do.”

“This isn’t fucking driver’s ed!”

“I know.” Oliver tapped the Ford’s roof. “Go, Stuart.”