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She snatched it out of the air just before it hit her in the face.
The blob-woman gasped sympathetically.
Emilia forced herself to take her time attaching the chip to her bracelet, and made sure she had both her bags before fleeing out to the parking lot.
She had to put down one suitcase to activate the charm.
A gadabout obligingly chimed to let her know it was unlocked. She stared at it in horror.
Some cheaper rentals were high-end brands brought down in value by their age. They were still elegant, with just a tad less gloss in the paint.
This gadabout was not like that.
This beast of a vehicle had never been fashionable. It had never been fast. Its bizarre purple paint job was blotched, as if it hid the evidence of many collisions. The squat shape of it told Emilia it had been a knock-off of the cheapest high-economy vehicle on the market back in her grandparents’ day.
She automatically lifted her wrist and swiped to put her bracelet in camera mode. Before renting anything - a room or a vehicle, her grandfather had always made sure she knew to document its condition.
And she could absolutely imagine this rental facility trying to say she had defaced the gadabout.
After carefully date-stamping her record and saving it, she flicked the charm to unlock the trunk.
It was filled with trash, like the previous renter had held a party in the car.
Luckily, Emilia was prepared. She grabbed an empty plastic cell from her suitcase and emptied the disposable cups and cans into it, sealed it back up, and put it in the trunk with her suitcases beside it.
Heaving a sigh, she slammed the trunk down and opened the driver’s side door.
“Welcome to your gadabout,” a robotic voice said.
Wow. It was so old that it didn’t even have PersonalTouch audio.
When she was strapped in and ready to go, she entered the address for the Drayven house.
“This address does not exist,” the voice said, in the same bright, robotic tone.
She entered it again, more carefully.
“This address does not exist.”
She sighed and tapped her bracelet, entering the address there to see if she could find another landmark for the gadabout to target.
Oddly, the bracelet couldn’t find the exact address either. The satellite image showed a forest where the house should be.
“Good grief,” she said.
But Drayven was wealthy, maybe he had a house in the trees somewhere.
She entered the coordinates to the only street that led to the edge of the trees and hoped for the best.
“Comm service is unreliable,” the robotic voice said, as it prepared for take-off. “Be sure to keep both hands on the controls in case manual navigation is necessary.”
Holy crap.
This pile of junk was still reliant on an external connection for navigation.
Emilia had her flight license. She had passed a manual navigation test back on Terra-17, on her eighteenth birthday.
But it had been years since she had practiced. She didn’t fly much, and what she had flown might not have been a FleetPace, but it was modern enough not to need her assistance unless there was a serious emergency.
