Things have changed. It has become dangerous to get around these days. After the cars started to self-drive and the self-driving crash lawsuits became a cottage industry, few manufacturers were left. You see, the autonomous cars killed so many people, and so frequently, that you essentially had no choice but to take a self-driving car to your destination. "Better him than me," I muttered regularly to myself.
I used my phone to hail a self-driver to get to work. I knew what I was in for. When the car arrived, it was even worse that I thought. A cumslicked Buick arrived, announcing itself mostly by its strong smell of feces and animalistic sex. I opened the door and was immediately overcome. I signaled "wait" on the ridehail app and scoured the gutter for a solution.
In an instant I found it. A pile of fresh dog shit, steaming in the winter cold. I grabbed as much as I could in my shaky hands and packed my nostrils full. This was the best solution for riding in the autonomous vehicles - the ridership uses them as whorehouses, bathrooms, heroin shooting galleries and worse.
"Drive! Drive!" I yelled to nobody in particular. It was just me, and the machine, and the incredible amount of body fluid and excrement. We only made it about two blocks before it ran over the first pedestrian. It was an octogenarian, his walker and mangled body jamming up the wheel in the wheel well. The system roared to life in a mechanical tone, "RIDER: CLEAR JAM. LEFT FRONT WHEEL WELL." I sighed and got the pry bar out of the vehicle's trunk.
Archimedes was purported to have said, "Give me a long enough lever and I could move the world." Well, I wish I had a longer one. I pried and bent that old sonofabitch out of there and put his battered body in the trunk. Better him than me. I used my phone to submit an accidental kill ticket, it was the 25th I had submitted in the past 20 days. The dog shit in my nose was oozing down now and burning a little.
As the vehicle began to speed up again, I began to wonder if the old man was really dead. There was a thumping and muffled moaning noise coming from the trunk, but I had read a lot of Eastern European vampire literature and assumed it was just decomposition gas escaping the corpse. That's usually what happens on these rides. Besides, I was late for work.
When I arrived at the office, the building was closed again for regulatory inspection. Fucking bureaucrats. I sent the cumslicked Buick back to cruise and retriggered the ridehail app, hoping for an uneventful ride home.
