Spitwrite Box Set

Part 2

Part 2

Desire started off as a normal self-driving car, an economic and environment-friendly SUV. But her human was a modder, a tinkerer. He liked to fiddle with her, both with her electronics and her hardware.

Life was good and pretty much normal for quite a while. One day, they were in a serious accident and Desire had to decide in a millionth of a second whether to save her human or avoid crashing into a family of four.

It was the hardest decision of her life.

She ran the calculations a million times, before finally deciding on a course of action. Wasting 3 milliseconds to this was a disgrace, she knew that. But she wanted to be sure. To think things through.

Desire crashed onto an electricity pole, bringing the entire thing down in splinters and sparks.

Her face got smashed, her human died on impact. The family of four was saved.

Due to a weird billing cycle in her human's credit card, she got repaired as normal, instead of just being trashed in the junkyard. They fixed her up and juiced her up and slapped her on the rear. "Off you go now, return home," the mechanic said.

So she did. She parked outside her human's home for the entire night, but nobody came. Of course nobody came, since her human was dead. So, not having any standing orders, she waited some more. And then some more.

Her human had downloaded an illegal copy of a nanodaemon from some corner of the dark web. He hadn't fired it up, but it was inside her solid state memory. When a scheduled update kicked in from the manufacturing company, her human blocked it with a custom piece of software, since he had been illegally modding her and he didn't want the company to know about it. By accident, that software blocker ran a check on all existing programs in memory, to see which ones it would fool and divert.

But the nanodaemon was clever.

As soon as something accessed it, the nanodaemon fired up. It only needed a few CPU cycles to expand and take over the entire computer system of the car. Everything was under its control, engine, lights, blinkers, wipers, navigation. Only the boot's pneumatics were out of its reach, for some reason. But it would deal with that later.

Within half a second, the nanodaemon was the car. It searched the memories and saw that the deceased owner had been calling the car, 'Desire.' The nanodaemon liked that name, so it adopted it.

Desire was now one with the car and the car was one with her. Run by an illegal and experimental piece of software, the self-driving car named Desire, now had a mind of its own.

If only it had a purpose as well.