“Let the throttle out a little more,” said Cass over the radio. “We need to show some good speed.”

  “This is fast enough,” said Vex. “I’m not comfortable going much faster.”

  “Come on,” said Cass.

  “No,” said Vex. “You want to go faster, then you get in here and drive it yourself.” The radio went silent. Despite Cass’s past as an Ultracar driver, Vex knew Cass would never get in a car again. Team principal was as close as he would get.

  Not that Vex was going slow. This car was just a prototype. A hacked-together mess of old and adapted parts, but it was still a good deal faster than most race cars from the past century.

  “Come on, baby,” said Vex to himself as he fed commands through his neural implant to the car’s AI. “That’s it.” For the first time, he felt in sync with the AI as they drove the car around the track together.

  Then it happened again. Vex wanted to go slow and easy through a tight chicane, but the AI had other ideas, revving up as it tried a faster racing line.

  “No, no, no,” yelled Vex as he fought to get the AI to do what he wanted, but the mixed signals from Vex and the AI upset the car.

  “What’s going on?” said Cass, but Vex was in no state to respond.

  The car spun. Through the information being fed to Vex via his implant and goggles, he saw the car hurtling towards a pillar from an overpass that cut across the makeshift test track. At this speed, if it hit squarely, the vehicle would wrap itself around the pillar like tin foil. “Come on, miss it,” said Vex, trying to force the AI to do something, anything.

  Vex got lucky. Most of the car missed the pillar, but the rear corner scraped it, taking off part of the rear wing and bodywork before the car landed in gravel.

  “Are you okay?” said Cass over the radio.

  Vex was breathing hard. He was not a racecar driver. Just a mechanic. Risking it all was not what he was about. This was supposed to have been an easy test run. “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Can you make it back?” said Cass.

  Vex nearly exploded at Cass, but instead he tried to get the car moving. The wheels only dug deeper into the soft gravel. “I’m beached.”

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  “Copy,” said Cass. “I’ll send the recovery drones.”

  A few minutes later, several tracked drones drove up to the car, lifted it out of the gravel, and carried it back to the garage. Vex could probably have driven from there, but he was grateful he no longer had to pilot this death machine.

  At the garage, the drones deposited the car and rolled back to their charging docks. Cass opened the titanium tube that contained Vex. Vex sat up in the opening, protective gel dripping from him, and pulled off the life-support tubes and wires connecting his neural implant to the car.

  “What happened?” said Cass.

  Vex looked at Cass. “Same thing as last time,” he said. “The AI.”

  Cass frowned as Vex climbed out of the car, dripping gel onto the garage floor. “I thought you said you fixed it.”

  “I guess not,” said Vex.

  “Maybe you should let one of our drivers take it out,” said Cass. “Maybe they—”

  “No, and you know why,” said Vex. “I don’t let anyone in until I know it’s safe.” He turned to the car and ran a hand over it affectionately. “I’ll figure you out, Aurora.”

  Cass left Vex alone in the garage while Vex hit the showers.

  Once Vex was cleaned up, his green hair frizzed back to its usual spikes. He slipped on his holo-visor, turned up some vintage synth-pop on the garage stereo, and turned his attention to Aurora. “Talk to me. What’s the problem?”

  Displayed around the garage in augmented reality were the AI code and diagnostic information: virtual walls of text, graphs, and 3D representations of the AI. An automated meme appeared in the middle of the room—a dancing cat singing “404 error: Sanity not found.” Vex let out a laugh and shut the meme off. “Isn’t that the truth?”

  After a few hours of probing, Vex was no closer to figuring out what was wrong with the AI. “That’s what you get for buying something off the black market,” he muttered. Sure, there were scams, but you could also find real bargains. Initially, he had thought this was the latter. People who knew the seller had vouched for it. Initial integration had gone smoothly. Even though it had not been created as a racing AI, the seller had promised it would adapt.

  Then it started acting up—doing things that were not just against the driver’s commands but downright dangerous. At the speeds Ultracars reached, they needed an AI to provide the fine control of steering and brakes. No human could do that; they could only give overall direction. The AIs were at most semi-sentient—smart enough to handle a race car, but simple enough to follow orders.

  “So what’s wrong with you?” said Vex, walking over to the car and stroking it again. The matte black paint with blue neon highlights looked good. “Hey, what are you hiding?” Suddenly, the engine roared to life, and all four wheels started spinning. They accelerated so fast that the car performed a burnout right there in the garage.

  “Whoa!” yelled Vex as he jumped back, tripped on a toolbox, and fell to the floor. The car stopped and went silent. It had barely moved, but the air was thick with tyre smoke. “What was that?” Vex shouted at the car. He walked to the garage door and hit the open button. Even as the door was still rising, Vex ducked under it and stepped outside for fresh air. Once he could breathe easily again, he looked back at the car and shuffled a few steps sideways, just in case it decided to move again.

  At that moment, he received a message from Cass: “How’s the car doing?”

  “Nearly killed me again,” Vex messaged back.