Page 12 of Smart Ass

He spun Evan’s car into the lot.

“Max, you did it! You actually did it!” Ben crowed. Then they both heard the sound of a click, as Evan disconnected the call. “Fuck, what’s happening now? Why did he hang up?”

A sensation unlike anything else swept through Max: elation and fear, all balled together.

Max could still track Evan’s phone. He was putting a new video call through. To the police. Max followed the call. It was easy to route it through the speakers to Ben.

“Holy shit…” Ben exhaled. “You got into his phone?”

That sounded like the good kind of holy shit. The type that had Max glowing with some approximation of pride.

That was, until Evan walked around a car, and they could see Quincy, already hurt and not doing anything to protect himself.

Max wanted to just reach through the network and fix things. But everything in the junkyard was turned off, nothing responding to his locational searches. The only thing he could control was Evan’s car, which was separated from the scene by dozens of other cars. And Evan would need it to take Quincy home.

Each clock cycle seemed to last an eon as Max waited for Evan to stride in and fix the situation.

Until it became apparent that Evan couldn’t fix the situation. Then time moved all too quickly.

Max had never felt so helpless. He controlled hundreds of manufacturing lines, processed millions of requests every hour from thousands of users.

And there was absolutely nothing he could do. Then Evan’s camera went pixelated and dark, before the call cut off altogether.

Ben let out an inarticulate yell. “Oh god. Oh fuck. I have to go to him… Oh…” Max had never heard Ben so upset, but it matched his own simulated responses exactly.

If Max had real feelings, he would be howling in rage. He could do so much, but he was completely powerless to help Quincy or Evan right now. He couldn’t even help Ben, who was sad and upset and so far away.

Far away from Max, and far away from Evan, too.

It would be stupid for Ben to go to the junkyard, though. He’d need at least a half hour and by then, it would be far too late.

But maybe there were some police cars in the area. Could Max divert them there?

It took milliseconds to find the server for the local police. Less than a minute to bypass their security protocols. Only a little more time to understand their logs and separate out active cases.

“The police are on their way,” Max announced. “And they’ve called in an ambulance.”

Max had already identified the vehicles. They sped through red lights, using their own traffic controllers to push self-directed cars to the sides of the road. Max still changed the lights to green when he could—the police cars went faster when traffic was flowing. The first two had only a few blocks remaining.

He formed his own sub-routine to help the four remaining squad cars and the ambulance move faster.

“Max, can you get into the police recordings? They should all have cameras on their vests.”

It took Max far too long to realize that the videos weren’t stored in the cloud, but kept on each local device until uploaded. Then, he had to figure out which officers were assigned to the case, and identify the recording units correlated with each of their badge numbers. By the time he found the first one and streamed it to Ben, Evan was being loaded into an ambulance, and the officer was mostly looking the other way.

A second recording showed Quincy being strapped to a similar stretcher, but loaded into a police van.

“Where are they going?” Ben asked.

That required hacking into another system. The fire department managed the ambulances. “Evan’s going to University Hospital. The only thing they’ve logged is his vitals and that he’s in stable condition, but should be prioritized in the emergency room. I can’t find any data on where Quincy’s going.”

“Fuck!” Ben swore. “Maxy, can you follow me on my phone?”

“Of course, Ben.” He’d already connected to it many times, when Ben routed his calls through the office speakers.

“Stay with me, alright? I’m going to the hospital and I need you right now.”

The simulation of pride came in a burst of euphoria, followed just as quickly by icy fear.

“I’m here, Ben,” Max said, his voice transmitted through Ben’s watch.

“Don’t go away.”

Max quickly diverted more processing power to the Maxamillion subroutine, shifting additional plant processes into their automated protocols.

He wouldn’t leave Ben. Staying with him was now a system priority.