The high beams drilled light cones deep into the night. Maddie stared at the scarred tarmac rushing toward her. She’d set the cruise to sixty-seven. The monotony of the endless loop of asphalt and mile markers made her tired. Taking this trip hadn’t been her choice, not after a long day of work.
She looked over at Frank in the passenger seat. Even in the dim glow of the dashboard he looked handsome. His wavy hair, the broad forehead and Roman nose, and those delicious lips. Enough to make her forget the tedious drive. Almost.
He turned his head and said, “We gotta go faster or we’re gonna be late.”
She concentrated on the road again and didn’t reply.
“I mean it.”
She shook her head, then, thinking he might not have seen that in the dark, said, “Nope. Sixty-seven is all I can do or the insurance company will be on my case.”
“Fuck the insurance company.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“What are they gonna do?”
She glanced at him. He was staring ahead into the dark.
“Why do you even ask?” she said. “They’re gonna raise my rate. Since my credit is maxed out, I won’t be able to pay and they’ll cancel the policy.”
Her credit was maxed out because she had just paid the monthly lease for the van. She distributed delivery bots to grocery stores. It was a good job as jobs go. No salary or benefits, but the rate she got for each delivery was decent. Each month it took about a week of deliveries before her credit was above what she called the danger zone.
He reached over and clicked the cruise control lever up a few notches.
She swatted him away. “Keep your goddamn hands to yourself, Frank.”
The speedometer had inched up to sixty-nine. Before she could reduce the speed, the van said in the sonorous voice of her favorite singer, “You are speeding, Maddie. Slow down now. You can’t afford it the increase in insurance.”
“Fucking van,” he said.
Maddie lowered the cruising tempo to sixty-seven. Two miles above the speed limit was safe. It was within the margin of error the GPS system allowed. Or was it her speedometer? Whatever. She checked the fuel gauge. It had better be enough.
She’d met Frank at a club close to Portland’s Willamette River. He said he was new in town and didn’t know anyone. His beaming smile, good looks and sweet demeanor just bowled her over. That first night had been out of this world. The way his lips kissed an invisible line down to her belly button and beyond sent shivers down her spine even now. She fell for him, hard.
Her friend Ellen told her to be careful. Nobody in their circles knew a thing about him. Ellen had access to loads of information. Had she checked into Frank? Maddie wouldn’t put it past her.
In any case, she didn’t worry. Being with Frank was amazing, she couldn’t wait to get her work done to meet up with him. Great clubs, great music and, afterwards, great sex. Five days flew by in a dream. On the sixth he asked to move in with her. She almost said yes, but her innate wariness asserted itself. Great sex was one thing, but moving in? Wasn’t that a little too soon? She said no. He pouted and made a cute face. It took all her resolve to stay firm.
A day later he asked her to drive him into the no-man’s-land of eastern Oregon. A big no-no. Her insurance didn’t allow passengers—something about additional liability. But she still felt guilty about the moving-in rejection, so she agreed.
The only reason she could afford to drive was her low Individual Risk Index for single, white females aged twenty-five to thirty. Just one IRX bracket higher and insurance would be unaffordable, even for someone who had a pretty steady gig like her.
“If I’m late, I’m gonna lose out on that deal,” he said. Frank had gotten a lead on a delivery of some brand new party drug, smuggled in from China.
Wanting to move into her flat was the first sign that he wasn’t the rich playboy he’d pretended to be. She’d been paying for clubs, drinks and food, but didn’t give it much thought. Since then she’d learned that he was deeply in debt. He needed a big score to settle his obligations. It was a warning flag, but, hey, it could happen to the nicest folks.
You only ever get to really know a guy after you’ve been in a car with him. First, he wants to drive. That’s a given. And if that’s not possible, he starts bossing you around. About which road to take. About the proper way to drive. Frank was all that and worse. He was using her and bossing her around. Good thing she hadn’t let him move in.
Frank couldn’t drive at all because his IRX was in the stratospheric range. As they were leaving Portland, he told her some weird story about driving in San Francisco. Once she parsed it, what was left of the rose-colored lenses came off for good. He’d taken a friend’s car and driven without insurance to finalize another deal. Meanwhile, the California Department of Transportation activated the kill switch in the car and invalidated his license. His friend was waiting for his insurance to be reinstated, which was expensive enough. On top of that he had to pay the reactivation fee to the DOT, almost as much as the insurance. Frank couldn’t have cared less.
Once this trip was over, she’d tell him to get lost.
They left Route 84 and the sensors embedded in the road ended. At least her van would stop telling her where she should eat and what she should buy at each exit. The vast rural expanses of eastern Oregon turned out to be the last vestige of the pre-algorithmic era. Just not enough people to justify the cost of connecting everything. And the roads weren’t worse than those maintained by the sensor companies.
“Can you go faster now?” Frank said.
“Nope. The GPS’s still tracking me.”
They lumbered along on the two-lane road. The land, or what little she could see of it, was dark brown, featureless, endless. She didn’t know where they were. The occasional trees seemed like spindly wardens warning her to turn back.
The Double D Ranch, Frank pick-up destination, didn’t have an address you could tap into the GPS. Or, if it did, Frank didn’t know it. Or maybe he just didn’t tell her, like it was a secret passcode only the initiated learned.
“We’re getting close,” Frank said.The dark gave no indication that anything had changed.
“How would you know?”
“I know.”
The high beams strafed a steel gate that sported a pair of steer horns at the apex. Maybe this was an actual ranch. One that raised what cattle were still around. But the horns could be for show. Most of the ranches out in the eastern stretches of the state were fronts anyway.
“So, do they do any actual ranching at the Double D?” Maddie said.
“Probably. A little. They got to have some cover. Even this far from civilization you got to look legit.”
In the pre-algorithmic era the folks living out here were looked down upon by the Portlanders. Dumb yokels who were prepping for doomsday and the jackbooted government agents who never came. Funny thing was, they ended up being right, sorta. Except, it wasn’t the government they should’ve been afraid of but the algorithms.
Their takeover had started slowly. It had all been so convenient, free stuff in exchange for your data. One step logically required the next and people never thought twice before they tapped the Agree button. Before long, opting out wasn’t an option anymore. Now the algorithms knew more about you than you did yourself. Some folks ranted about fascism, but the algorithms didn’t care about politics or ideology. They just tracked every digital bit you left behind and fed it into your IRX.
“They do anything other than smuggle fancy new party drugs from China?” she said.
“I dunno. Probably. Though nothing I’d care about.”
“What do you care about?” She should’ve asked that question before she hopped into bed with him.
“Making a big score. I sell a kilo of that stuff, all my debts are gone. That’ll get my IRX down into a decent range. After that, we’ll see. I might use the rest to play the risk market. You make a bet on some highly unlikely event, you can turn a dollar into ten thousand.”
“Yeah, but you could lose everything.”
Another farm gate showed up in the high beams, no fancy wooden structure, just a steel gate with wire fencing. Someone had woven plastic into the mesh to spell “Duh Duh.”
Maddie pulled up to the gate and waited for Frank to open it. There was no lock or anything, just a metal loop hooking the gate to the post. Not a lot of security for a drug operation. But then anyone could just cut the barbed wire on either side of the gate and drive through. As she passed through the open gate, she saw a camera on each post. That made sense. Out here, the gate could be a couple of miles from the house. They probably had an algorithm watching.
“How far to the house?” she said after Frank got back in the van.
“I dunno.”
“Do you know anything about this place at all?”
“They got a delivery of Eubliss, that’s all that matters.”
“That’s what it’s called? Eubliss? Like euphoria and bliss? Man, that’s lame.”
“You won’t think so after you try it.”
The hell she would. She got going again on the dirt road. It was surprisingly smooth, but she was hesitant to speed up. Even one stray pothole could damage her van. And that would be trouble.
After ten minutes, a halo appeared on the night horizon and as she came closer it dissolved into two bright lights high above the ground. Five minutes later a farm house, a barn and a silo crept into focus like a sepia still life. All it needed was that sad looking couple with the pitchfork.
She pulled up to the farm house and stopped. Frank was out of the van before she could ask any questions.
“Stay in the van,” he said. “Don’t get out or wander around. These guys are really twitchy.”
She nodded, a cold fear creeping toward her core. Frank stood next to the van and tapped on his phone. A moment later, a new light came on above the door to the silo. He went inside and the light went off again.
She sat in her van, the window down. Bad idea, driving Frank here. The guys at the ranch weren’t just some yokels making money on the side, they probably were with a syndicate. Which meant the authorities knew about this location and the van was now recorded on syndicate property. Shit. There went her IRX.
Maddie hated how the IRX determined her choices. Her first thought was always Will this increase my IRX. It was a different sort of control, not the cops harassing you, but you regulating yourself. And you had to. Ellen’s brother had done twenty-five miles above the speed limit. Of course, his insurance went into the stratosphere. But the algorithm also affected a ton of other things. Rent, interest rate, you name it. The guy had to crash at Ellen’s because he got thrown out of his apartment. And driving to a syndicate property had to be a hell of a lot worse than speeding.
Frank came back after what seemed like a short time. She’d never done a drug deal, but she imagined haggling, bids placed and rejected, buyers and sellers with poker faces inching their way toward a deal. Fifteen minutes seemed too short for that.
He carried a black satchel the size of a backpack. It looked heavy. He opened the door, got in and said, “Let’s go.”
Maddie made a sweeping turn and headed out on the dirt road again. A quick look at the fuel gauge wasn’t very reassuring her. It was barely enough to get back home.
As she headed back to the road, driving faster now that she knew there weren’t any potholes, a new thought wormed itself into her mind.
“How did you pay for the drugs?” she said.
Frank said nothing.
“I thought you were broke.”
“I’m not broke broke.”
“So you could pay for fuel?”
“Uh, no, not anymore.”
“Wait. What? You telling me you had enough credit for your Eubliss but not to pay for fuel?”
Frank kept staring ahead. “No. It was more of a down payment type of situation.”
“A down payment of what? Credit? Damn it, Frank. All the way here I was freaking out about not having enough fuel and all the while you got credit in your pocket? Man, you could’ve fronted some for me to fill up. If they operate on down payments, a few bucks less wouldn’t have mattered.”
Frank didn’t answer.
Once she let his story bounce around her brain, she knew she had it wrong. Frank had no credit. Damn, she bought him a sandwich before they left Portland and he wolfed it down as if he hadn’t eaten in a day. A guy as impulsive as Frank doesn’t go hungry so he can save money for a drug down payment. That requires forethought, calculation, exactly the kind of qualities he hadn’t displayed so far.
“What did you pay with? I know it wasn’t credit.”
“I did a risk default swap. They had a trading terminal on-site. Once I cash in, it’ll pay for the drugs and a lot more.”
“And if you don’t?”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
She was pretty sure it could and would.
The IRX, like anything capitalist, had spawned its own derivative trading. How it worked was beyond her. Ellen had told her that one could buy futures based on the IRX. Like a bet that a specific personal IRX at a specific date was at a certain level, or higher or lower. As far as Maddie was concerned it was stuff only mathematicians could figure out. She’d seen a few high flyers jumping from a twentieth story window because they had made the wrong bet.
The worst were the folks taking out risk default swaps. Like taking out life insurance on a guy who plays by the rules. The payoff only comes when he screws up.
They were back on I-84 and cruising at a comfortable sixty-seven. At least they weren’t in a hurry anymore. Maddie relaxed. Three more hours and she’d be back in Portland and, most importantly, she’d drop him some place and never see him again. If life were fair, that alone should improve her IRX.
She was sucking on an energy candy, when Frank shifted in the passenger seat. At first she thought he was trying to make nice.
Too late for that, buddy.
But he wasn’t. His torso was actually moving away from her. By the time she realized why, it was too late. He’d stretched out his left leg to her footwell and his foot mashed down on her right foot, pressing the accelerator all the way down.
“What the fuck are you doing!” she said, trying her damndest to lift her foot up. The speedometer needle was over seventy already.
“Stop it. What’s wrong with you?”
The van chimed in, “Maddie, this is way too fast, slow down now. You can’t afford it.”
Maddie pounded Frank’s leg with her fist. That must’ve bothered him because he nudged the steering wheel enough to make the van swerve, which made her grip the wheel again. At eighty, a little swerve could land them both in a ditch.
She fought against the pressure of his foot, but was no match for his brute strength. When the needle hit eighty-five, the van spoke again. “Maddie, your insurance just tripled. Since you don’t have enough credit to pay the new premium, your company has cancelled the policy. You may drive to the next gas station, five point three miles ahead, where the van will be disabled. Your IRX has tripled as well.”
Frank took his foot off hers. The van slowed to normal speed again. And Maddie knew how Frank had paid for his drugs. He’d made the one-to-ten-thousand bet that she would speed.
“You asshole,” she said, sounding like her cat. She pulled over. “Get out.”
Frank laughed. He opened the door, stepped onto the tarmac and said, “Thanks for buying my drugs, sucker.”
He took the bag, slammed the door shut and took out his phone. He now had credits to take a robot-cab home while she’d be stranded at the next gas station.
