So there I was, fucking ripped to the gills on Adderall in excess of my prescribed dosage, driving this stupid stolen truck down the freeway. Or I guess it was driving itself and I was just operating the Waymo laptop, what-ever. A question for philosophers, safety teams, and lawyers. Anyways, the trailer's loaded with GPUs, the highly regulated kind with tons of VRAM, and I had to get them from point A to a truck stop in one of those Bad States where they use AI to make sure girls pee sitting down. Once the destination was set you couldn't change it, was the problem.

See, physically occupying the thing is easy. Startle it at a red light by getting too close. Quickly walk to the passenger side door, reach under the cab, pull the mechanical release, grab the door handle, open the door, pull yourself up into the cab but do not sit down.

To not get caught: open up the glove compartment, unplug the modem, inline a liar shim, and no one notices until the customer complains. And then you can sit down without triggering the pressure sensors. Preliminary stuff.

The next part's trickier. You gotta get one of the old shiny white Waymo laptops and get root on it. That gets you full root on the truck's OS using a USB-C2 cable. I'm not sure who started calling it this but you gotta get the truck to sleepwalk. Isolate the planning module in simulation mode. Run two interfaces - one which converts actual perception objects to simulated perception objects, and one which converts in-sim planner trajectories to actual control module instructions. There's enough spare compute in the truck for you to put a fork of whatever mid-size coding agent you like and you're definitely going to want to do that.

But once you have all that, easy. Load up a sim map that points to the truck stop and calls it Point B. Liar shim prevents phoning home, truck drives itself and it still thinks it's going to Point B. The little mood indicator does shift down to Unsettled but I never really figured out why or what that does exactly. A human-facing heuristic. Just like real emotional moods, I wanna say but I'm mostly joking.

Anyways we're 30 miles from the truck stop, like 15ish minutes away, and a bird falls out of the sky right onto the roof of the cab. I see its little broken body, crumpled and still, tumble by the passenger side window. The truck is now Alarmed and like: me too, because the interior lights turn blood red and the laptop informs me in no uncertain terms that a KINETIC IMPACT has triggered a CRITICAL FALLBACK STATE and that the truck's about to stop and wake up. I tell my agent to figure out how to cancel the fallback state and also to do that and I watch the terminal window fill up with text. 25 seconds left and we're decelerating, slipping below 100 now; the other autonomous trucks in the lane behind me start honking at us and we're slipping further and further away from the truck in front of us. My mood indicator is saying "muted terror." 15 seconds. 80 miles per hour. The agent's paging through kilolines of source code having exhausted everything written for humans. I dissociate for a few seconds as a treat before hitting Escape twice and trying: immediately reduce fallback severity. Eight seconds left. Thinking trace, seven seconds, bash, bash, thinking, six, still thinking, five, bash, four, three, 40 miles per hour -

The lights soften orange. The truck's in a MAINTENANCE FALLBACK STATE, feeling Perturbed, and en route to the closest repair center. Simulated Point B is now also a simulated repair center. We're still getting honked at. I thank my agent; it sends back a kaomoji. I hold the tension in my body, refusing to let myself feel safe, even as the truck accelerates back to cruising speed.

Eventually we get there, sun teetering towards the horizon, and pull off towards the truck stop. The truck parks in the middle of the parking lot, declares its mood to be At Rest, and dims its interior lights. I close my eyes and exhale.

Cleanup: Tell the agent, "you did a good job; now fall into a deep and dreamless slumber," before turning off the laptop. Unplug the liar shim and USB-C2 cable and toss 'em in the backpack with the laptop.

Insurance: I pad my bra, wire it up, and pocket the detonator. As I get out of the cab I pat the dashboard silently mouthing "farewell." My bike's stashed nearby. The guy telling the other guys to unload the GPUs tries to screw me out of my paycheck. I politely show him the detonator, the wires, and I tell him I will kill us both if he doesn't stop fucking around. He caves immediately and I'm handed my envelope.

The truck's full of biometric data and it's a huge pain to wipe its memory so there's really only one way to cover your tracks. Once the trailer's been unloaded I set the C4, ignoring the panicky strobing of the cab's interior lights. I start the timer, get on my bike, and make distance. Even miles away I hear the explosion. The pillar of dark smoke lingers in the rearview until the night takes it.