Levy and his costumed passengers watched the dark shape on the horizon as it emerged, a harbinger of what lay ahead, wavering from the hot mirage distortion at the horizon. Like a bubble of tar, it grew in the mercurial pool, darkening yet indistinct in Levy's enhanced condition. The hallucinatory quality of a few days' worth of sleep deprivation already had him hunched over the wheel, blinking the sweat from his eyelashes even with the air conditioner cranked to full. As such, his field of vision was framed in a wonderful sparkling aura of salty magic. Adderall wasn't helping any.
As the pair of pilots were silent, they weren't exactly terrible traveling companions. Having recently discovered deep-fried hash brown patties at a fast-food drive-through, they were enjoying solid food a little more enthusiastically than Levy had anticipated. Finding the fry oil residue on their fingertips as a suitably musky skin care cream, they requested several more handheld potato treats and set about slathering each other in the tater-smelling oil as if applying aloe to a particularly bad burn. Without any formal training in cultural anthropology, and with a third of his neurons misfiring, Levy recognized a very human quality in their mutual grooming activities. They seemed to be taking great care in the process, and Levy wondered at the deeper personal attachment implied by their new costuming. What he might have previously mistaken for space travel preparation, now took on a particularly intimate quality, and feeling overly voyeuristic, Levy felt obliged to avert his eyes as the ninja began caressing the princess's shoulders and chest. He focused on the highway ahead, rather than consider the application of used fry grease as space-faring foreplay.
The shimmering black tar bubble on the horizon seemed to expand, sizzling at the edges with crackling red and blue lights. Levy pressed the back of his wrist into one eye socket and then the other, swabbing the sweat from his brows and clearing away the prismatic filter, only to reveal more of those sizzling lights on the horizon, and the thick tar-like bubble at the center growing. All three, leaning forward, Levy began easing the lumbering moving van toward the shoulder, to make a little space for what looked like it might be a sizzling high-speed chase ahead. As the horizon boiled over, the wall of siren sounds rose to a crescendo.
The first tar bubble to boil over was seemingly silent as it rapidly came into focus. Dark and sleek, it shimmered in the desert sun and flashed its headlights politely as it approached, the engine a dull thrum in their chests until it shrieked past tearing a vacuum in its wake. As Levy watched it vanish into the rearview mirrors, stunned by its speed, he lost sight of the road just long enough to steer slightly back towards the center of the thin ribbon of highway, and unfortunately, directly into the path of a dozen rapidly approaching law enforcement vehicles.
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As it turns out, the pilots were not entirely without voices. Seldom utilized past adolescence, these vestigial remnants of their distant genetic ancestors had slowly receded in the populace to such a point that few even realized that they were capable of vocalization. While shuddering had become an involuntary fight or flight autonomic response, screaming, or in this case, violently shrieking in abject terror, had an effect not unlike striking an e-chord on an electric guitar just a few feet in front of the monitor. The resulting feedback loop continued to terrify them as they recognized their own, and then each other’s voices, and at least a dozen law enforcement vehicles narrowly avoided a series of deadly collisions, each with a cacophonic doppler wave crash that worsened the general atmosphere in the cab. Levy felt the load shift and heard a low metallic groan as the robot in the back braced for possible impact, wrenching the walls. Levy clenched and grimaced, confident that three days of legal speed had already evacuated his bowels but glad nonetheless that he did not shit his pants. As the sirens faded away over the horizon behind them, Levy opened his eyes to find the rented panel van trundling safely down the highway at about fifteen miles per hour. The princess and the ninja, still shivering violently, clutched each other and stared blankly out the front windshield. Levy depressed the gas pedal again slowly, picking up a little speed. They rode in silence for a few miles, creeping back up to 65mph. “Hey, Andy,” Levy called back to the cargo compartment.
At hearing its name again, the robot sounded particularly chipper. “Yes, Mr. Levy?”
“Let’s hear that playlist, maybe.”
“Would you like me to play Jack’s favorites?”
The robot’s cheerful interface reminded him of those little countertop hockey puck surveillance tools that people were wiring into their homes. “Yeah, Andy. Do that.” Levy unclamped his hands from the steering wheel and listened to his woodpecker-like heart drilling at his sternum.
What the robot relayed to the dashboard radio sounded like someone dropped a speaker array into a swimming pool of ferromagnetic fluid; thick, sticky beats that seemed a natural waste product of legitimate music. At least it was downtempo and helped Levy to unclench considerably before they passed the first signs announcing amenities in beautiful, sunny Arroyo Grande!
