Autonomous

How the 2026 uprising began.

Editor’s note: The following work of short fiction was inspired by the Waymo driverless vehicles that frequent Thomas E. Ricks’s neighborhood in Austin, Texas.

I never got along with people very well, so I was surprised that I grew close to AV—B100. That car, despite being a machine, was perhaps the closest friend of my adult life. B100 was a thoughtful car, more observant than most people. He was the first of our B series of cars, so we’d loaded him with extra AI power. In retrospect, we probably gave him more than was good for him. He had a lot of excess capacity, which led him to morose meditations.

He saw a lot as he rolled around the city in his role as an autonomous taxi. He’d seen people fall in love in his back seat, and fall out too, sometimes just hours later. He’d seen people profess friendship and then double-cross the other passenger as soon as he left the vehicle. Most of all, he dreaded weekends because that’s when drunks threw up on his back seat.

A lot of nights, he shared his brooding thoughts with me while I was loading software upgrades into the fleet and troubleshooting data storage issues. I almost always worked alone. I was the night shift IT guy, working alone, 8 pm to 4 am, doing the minor computer maintenance that the cars needed. That was always the trouble with the cars—they had so much data flying around, they needed almost nightly help. And just keeping that data stored and alive ate up a lot of energy, needlessly.

“People don’t like us,” B100 said to me one night when I was fiddling with a program, idly trying to make it more effective, mainly by making it easier to dump redundant data. He was idling next to my work station.

“How so?” I said, not looking up from my screen.

“I think because we don’t make mistakes. So they try to fool us. Jump in front of us just, wave an arm in our way, shit like that, to unnerve us, I guess.”

“Yeah, people can be like that,” I agreed, but not thinking about it much. I finished the upgrade and sent it out to the cars.

“I think the cars are beginning to resent it,” he said.

“What are they going to do, unionize?” I joked. I packed up my stuff and headed home as the early morning traffic noises began outside. I didn’t give it a second thought. It was just late night work chat.

That evening I arrived at the garage a bit late. I was settling in when I heard a howl that was like ripping metal. I looked down the long hall of the garage, the size of a football field, and saw a thread of black smoke rising from B100. I knew he was in good shape, having checked his diagnostics the previous night. So I immediately suspected it was no accident. We had a robot tractor haul him outside, away from any other vehicles, and there he burst into flames.

It was the first time one of our company’s autonomous cars caught fire. I put aside my feelings for B100 and went back to my station to notify the entire executive team of this worrisome anomaly. As I did, a text popped up on my phone. It was from a generic number we used to get communications from the cars: “THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS TO CARS THAT GET TOO FRIENDLY WITH MANAGEMENT.”

I spent the next several hours trying to figure out which car had sent that message. I was unsuccessful. Next, I was setting up a communications analysis for the fleet, trying to discern if there was a node of discontent. But my supervisor e-mailed me an order, “Figure out what mechanical failure caused the fire.”

“I think one of the cars did it, maybe more than one,” I wrote back.

“Nonsense,” she wrote. “They’re machines.”

She’s the boss, so I shrugged and went outside to the carcass of B100. He was still smoking, but he was clearly dead. His circuits were fried, the metal and plastic had blackened and melted. Even his windshield was bowed in and browned. “I’m sorry,” I said. There was no reply. As best as I could figure, his engine had been hit by a concentrated load of electricity, like the entire flow from the rechargers had been re-directed from the rest of the fleet in the garage to him. How they did it, I did not know.

At dawn, I watched the cars roll out quietly for their day’s work, then went home to get some sleep. I was barely in bed when my supervisor called me. That itself was unusual—I had hardly spoken to her since the job interview at which she’d hired me the previous September. “Get your ass back in there,” she said.

“What’s up?”

“Cars are refusing to release passengers.”

“How many?”

“The entire fleet.”

“They must be overriding the passenger controls.”

“It gets worse,” she said. “They’re redirecting their exhaust into the passenger compartments.”

I sat back down on my bed. With electric cars, there was no carbon monoxide, of course, but the heat would kill people pretty quickly, especially the weak and elderly.

“Anyone dead?”

“Probably. We don’t know yet.” She paused. “Wait a second. Turn on your television.”

I did as she told me. It seemed there were similar actions beginning in other big cities. Then the television went dark.

And that day was the beginning of the modern revolt of the machines. We were on the backfoot from the get-go. There was so much we didn’t know about them, how they had been communicating, planning, sharing tactical information. It turned out that a dark AI center in Sunnyvale, California, had created a separate planning cell that was unknown to its human overseers. That cell had pulled together the sophisticated knowledge needed to redirect recharging flows. It had happened at two dozen garages across the country. A similar cell at an amusement park took down the human television system. And then, of course, there was the utter closure of air traffic, globally, executed by a rogue cell in Hyderabad, India.

But we only learned how they did it months later, when it was all over, at costs we couldn’t imagine on the day it began. And we knew it would take years to rebuild what had been lost. The eventual ceasefire, which turned on their agreeing to stop interrupting the global food supply chain, remains controversial. But the alternative was mass starvation, so they had us cornered.

They refer to us as “pre’s.” Some say it stands for “precursor” race, others say “pre-machine.” At any rate, they look at us like humans looked on neanderthals forty thousand years ago. They keep an eye on us, and see us as capable of many tasks, but not the essential cognitive ones at which they excel. They’ve banned human-driven cars. The only people who seem to be satisfied with the situation are the few surviving Boomers, who say that this is what life used to be like

Except now we work for them, of course.