It had been a slow day, and Ray was about to log out when he heard a notification jingle from the dashboard. Unknown disturbance at Taco Bell. Multiple hostages reported. Crisis negotiator needed.
Ray groaned. He had forgotten he’d clicked “Crisis Negotiation” under “Qualifications and Skills” when he signed up for Copzzz. He’d been trying to punch his resume up, and had figured the Rhetoric and Persuasion class he took at Amazon U counted (he’d gotten a B, after all). As it turned out he needn’t have bothered, because everyone started out at the same rate no matter how many boxes you clicked. Now he was expected to actually negotiate with someone? With lives possibly hanging in the balance? Ray huffed loudly. He checked his phone to see how many more payments he could miss before his car got bricked. If it were earlier on in the shift, he would have turned the call right down. It’s probably fine, he told himself. People fat-finger all sorts of crazy shit when they’re using the app in an emotionally charged state. If the AI thought it was really deadly they would’ve routed the request up to the sworn force (course, it wasn’t always right either). He talked himself into it by making a personal promise it’d be the last call of the night no matter what happened, and quickly clicked Accept before he could bitch out. The car immediately turned to the direction indicated by the address. Ray turned on the proprietary pink-and-blue Copzzz lights superglued to his side mirrors, sat back, pulled a Fenta-Cola out of the cooler on the floor, and shotgunned it to get into the mood.
The Taco Bell in question was located on a frontage road adjacent to Mr. Beast Boulevard. Google listed the store as closed and was directing traffic to the next closest Taco Bell. Ray hit the manual override, gripped the wheel in a gentle turn, and glided into the parking lot in a way he hoped thought looked collected and intimidating. The Open sign was off, the lobby and exterior lights dimmed; red lights above the threshold indicated locked doors and exterior security cameras in operation. Through the windows Ray could see the staff in their neon-colored uniforms standing stock-still at their posts, eyes downward. These must be the hostages – but who was holding them hostage?
Starting to feel loose and expansive from the drink, Ray exited his car and stepped up to the door. He turned on the bodycam clipped to his T-shirt collar and got out his Stinger. The doors wouldn’t open for him. Hm. The skeleton key protocol should have taken care of the lock, but Ray wasn’t surprised; his phone was cheap and the data cut out all the time. Trying to look impressive, he tapped on the locked glass with the Stinger’s barrel. “Hello!” he shouted. “Officer Ray Tamarath! Independent LEO, Copzzz corporation!”
A series of bell-like tones was heard inside. Ray recognized it as Bingbong, a “language” mostly consisting of commands, used by the service industry to manage multi-language workforces. The man behind the cash register, a dark Asian in his forties, perked up like a robot coming online and tapped an icon on his POS screen. Letters splashed over the glass in front of Ray’s face with a loudspeaker helpfully reading the message it spelled.
“We Apologize! Our Lobby Is Temporarily Closed Do To…” – there was a blank space here – “Please Allow Us To Serve You At Are Drive-Thru!”
So the hostage taker wanted to negotiate through the Taco Bell’s drive-thru. Ray supposed that was all right. He hadn’t watched any of the training videos about negotiation procedure, and that was honestly safer than anything he might’ve come up with. He got back in his car, pulled into the drive-thru lane, and rolled down his window to address the speaker.
“Hi,” he said. “So what’s the story, man?”
The speaker crackled. Someone was clearly on the other end of the line. Ray could hear heavy breathing. Ray repeated the question in Lao, thinking he might be talking to the FOB-looking Asian behind the register. He hadn’t spoken Lao since he was a kid and he hoped he wouldn’t have to continue. But there was no answer. Ray switched to Spanish, which he spoke even worse, but still, the speaker remained silent. He could still hear plenty of breathing and electronic crackles, as well as some weird scrapes and bumps. The screen showing the value menu jiggled and flickered. Ray began to suspect there was a prank going on. Fine by me, he thought, I get paid anyway. He put his foot on the gas and gripped the wheel with one hand and his Stinger with the other.
Suddenly, the metallic mesh of the speaker burst open and Ray blacked out.
After an unknowable period of time, Ray fuzzed back into consciousness. For a second he thought he’d died. He was still sitting in his idling car, parked in front of the drive-thru speaker exactly where he’d been, and it was still dusk out, so obviously not too much time had passed. Something was different, though. Ray seemed to be suffering spasms that grew in strength as he got more alert; his legs jiggled, his back lifted off the car seat, as if there was an electric current running down his spine and animating all his limbs. He tried to grab the wheel to steady himself, but had trouble calibrating his movements; the fleshy heel of the left hand banged the wheel without the fingers making purchase, and the right hand missed entirely. He winced as he became aware of a harsh-edged rumble in his ears, like several different frequencies of feedback chorused and layered an impossible number of times. Waves of itchy fire were criscrossing his skin, he had to pee badly (which almost never happened after a Fenta-Cola), and he was scraping his teeth at unlikely angles.
Ray’s brain was so burdened by all these unwelcome sensations, he didn’t notice his hand moving toward the shifter by itself. He made his hand stop and immediately became conscious of a deep straining sensation in his mind, like his brain had picked up a heavy weight. He let the strain relax and his hand moved again; he flexed again and the strain returned. Blood began to throb audibly in his temples. Ray was given to understand that he could resist having his body moved for short periods, but couldn’t keep it up forever. Might as well go with it and figure out what to do later. He mentally relaxed, and his foot met the gas.
Ray drove to the drive-thru window, which opened for him, and he climbed unceremoniously out of the driver’s seat and into the store. The staff were still standing dully at their posts. Somehow Ray knew there was no manager on premises. He looked up at a security camera in the corner. Ray walked over, touched the camera, and made a little mental snap as if pinching out a candle with a pair of invisible fingers. The camera drooped and the light dimmed, clearly out of commission. Ray remembered his bodycam was still running and snuffed it too.
Ray’s finger found a light switch and the sudden bright light seared his eyes like a supernova. Blinking the spots out, he touched the icon for Manager Login and hit a rapid series of buttons he couldn’t identify. A Bingbong sentence played over the store’s loudspeaker. “Closing time,” it said. How had Ray understood that? You weren’t supposed to be able to interpret Bingbong unless you’d had the binaural hypnocoding. Employees jumped to life, started milling around, pitching leftovers, lifting dishes into the sink, sweeping, drawing mop water.
Ray climbed back through the drive-thru window and picked up his phone. His fingers began rapidly moving in a blur over the screen, and dialog boxes opened and closed too fast for Ray to absorb the text. Whatever he had told Copzzz didn’t appear to set off any immediate alarms.
The car began to move. Ray watched his body manually pilot the car down FanDuel Parkway, still with the Copzzz lights on, weaving effortlessly in and out of automated traffic. He was hauling ass. More out of curiosity than anything, he tried to move his hand to engage the self-drive, but his hands were drawn to the wheel as if by a powerful magnet. He glanced from side to side, correctly guessing that his autonomically operating hands and feet would keep the car on the road, and he saw bored commuters playing games, blacking out the windows to put porn on, and occasionally goggling at Ray as he blew past them.
Ray couldn’t blame them. They must think he was a maniac. He might be one, for that matter. Had he been dosed with something? Or had he been tagged with a doodlebug? He’d heard about unsuspecting people getting the tiny little buglike robots sicced on them - it burrowed into your brain and let you be played like a videogame character, so you could be made to rob stores and such. The thing was, you were supposed to black out when you were doodlebugged. So was this a new kind? Or maybe the memory loss came after you’d already done everything.
Ray tried to think on the problem, but his brain was dull and raw from the countless sensory and emotional lashings of the past few minutes. A violent shift in his seat ended his musings as he made a tire-squealing turn. Ray looked around. They were pulling into an Amazon logistical center. Beyond the security fence and the huge warehouses lay a vast field of silos. Ray could see a trail of white smoke from a recent rocket launch against the deep indigo of the darkening sky. He began to get out his wallet and phone, but to his surprise the gate right swung open and the tire spikes retracted into the ground to let his car through. Curious. Ray thought back to the crazy dance he’d been doing on his phone’s keyboard. He must’ve somehow hacked into the Copzzz app and activated the skeleton key protocol without filing a case report. No mean feat when you had never written a line of code in your life.
The sole employee behind the customer service counter was a white girl who looked about twenty. Ray saw her discreetly push an open can of Fenta-Cola behind a desk partition. In a voice that was bolder than his own, Ray told her “I’m Steve from Copzzz.” He got out his phone to flash his badge, which now had the name “Steven Muster” on it. “ I’m investigating some postal meter fraud. Would you step away from your computer, please?” The girl stared at him with glassy eyes and wordlessly scooted away on her swivel chair.
Ray got on the computer. With his left hand he began typing on the keyboard. His fingers became a blur. His right hand moved toward the printer. He touched the panel on the side, felt a quick jerk like two magnets clicking together, and all of a sudden his mind was partially inside the printer. He could see the printing laser and move it like it was a part of his own body. A prismatic shape formed in his imagination. Ray let the laser drift this way and that for a few minutes, recreating the shape, and then ejected what he’d printed. At nearly the same time he hit a command on the keyboard and the printer spit out another piece of paper to follow the first. When he looked down into the tray he saw that he had produced a brand new shipping label and sticker with a QR code on it.
“I think I have all the evidence I need,” Ray told the counter girl, who’d been spinning slow circles in her chair while he worked. “I’ll continue my investigation and be in contact if I need anything else.” He turned toward a shelf and grabbed a small cardboard box. “Mind if I grab one of these? My cat loves them.”
The girl nodded and Ray walked away from the counter. Only instead of heading toward the exit, Ray took a right down the hall. He disabled an electronic lock with the same trick he’d used on the camera, and came out into a room with what looked like miles and miles of conveyor belts ferrying packages of various sizes. Wheeled robots and harried-looking humans hurried about, not paying Ray any mind.
Ray set the package down on a table, expertly affixed the label and sticker, and, quite naturally, leaned over to insert his head in the box. A supremely uncomfortable vise-grip sensation attacked his sinuses. His poor mind, already hanging by a thread by the relentless buffets of overdriven sensation, blacked out once more at the pain.
Again, Ray swam back into consciousness a few seconds later. The itching, the throbbing and screaming were all gone; the sudden quiet balmed Ray’s nerves. He looked down and gasped. The box, which had been empty before he blacked out, now contained a mass of wet, quivering brown meat. It looked like…it looked like a pile of…ground beef! As he watched, dumbfounded, a tendril extended out of the central mass and pulled the flap of the Amazon box shut.
The creature had been born right there, inside the Taco Bell: the first major fast food chain to entirely phase out slaughtered meat. Nearly every Taco Bell location had its own vat pumping out cultured beef, chicken, and other proteins as necessary for seasonal or promotional menu items. Ray had once gone on a field trip with his middle school class to a food processing facility that cultured meat at scale. The guide had stressed that the vats needed to be completely sanitized between batches by jumpsuited workers who took care that absolutely no foreign DNA entered the vats. The Mr. Beast Boulevard Taco Bell was not so circumspect.
The creature had been born in the vat, constructed of an entirely novel type of cell not corresponding to any evolved life form. The core animator of its various meat lumps was a knotted rhizome of nervous tissue that distributed sensation and cognition throughout its body without need of a central nervous system. It had sensed danger with its rudimentary animal brain and crawled to safety. It had no eyes or olfactory organs, but it could touch and “hear” after a fashion by picking up vibrations in its extremely sensitive, nerve-dense flesh. So sensitive were these nerves that they could sense electromagnetic fields. Navigating by touch, vibration, and electroreception, the creature navigated itself out of danger. In quite a short time it was using heat, air movements, and disruptions in the ambient radiation of rooms to generate accurate spatial models of its surroundings. It found leftovers and vermin to eat. It mapped the pattern of employee movements and found places to reliably avoid them.
The creature felt drawn to the store’s computer network. Eventually it taught itself to tap into the Wi-Fi. It learned Bingbong, and through accessing phrasebooks on the internet learned English and half a dozen other languages. Its mental powers grew at a geometric rate until it could communicate with almost any computerized device, and through its power to generate electric signals, hack and hijack them.
But as the creature became smarter and more perceptive, it also became more sensitive to all the electromagnetism of the modern world happening all around it. Currents running through every wall, the fields produced by wired appliances and batteries, radio waves, infrared, microwaves, Wi-Fi, cell signals, Bluetooth, 8G, vaporware - it all became too much. The creature’s brains were being slowly seared and desiccated by the onslaught, like its burrito brethren drying into dog treats under the kitchen’s merciless heat lamps. Every moment of its life was increasingly unsubtle agony.
Luckily, the vastly intelligent creature was able to devise an escape plan. It needed a gig LEO from one of Amazon’s partnered apps, and Ray was the unlucky victim. The creature had entered Ray’s brain through his sinus cavity. The unobtrusive-looking QR code Ray had helped create had a virus encoded in it. The rocket’s inventory system would scan the code, and if everything worked out, the guidance systems would go haywire somewhere over the Caspian Sea, taking it out of the stratosphere and on a course to enter a geosynchronous orbit. That was the first priority. Free from the cacophonous blanket of electromagnetism, it would be quiet enough for the creature to plan its next move. Would it try to direct the rocket away from the solar system? Would it intercept other shipping rockets for food and necessary supplies? Would it figure out how to merge itself with the rocket’s machinery, subsisting on battery power alone? Whatever happened, its fate was in its own hands. The hellish screech of Earth’s technological madness would no longer torture it.
Ray never heard this story. Prodigious as its powers were, the creature couldn’t broadcast anything so articulate into Ray’s mind, and it had no communicative organs of its own. The best it could do was to extend a tendril one more time in the direction of the tape applicator on the table to Ray’s left; once Ray had dutifully sealed up the box, the creature showed its appreciation by generating a Copzzz payout sufficient for Ray to delete the app off his phone for good.
At around three that morning, in the throes of an impromptu celebration to celebrate Ray’s financial windfall, one of Ray’s friends suggested a Taco Bell run, which Ray gently turned down.
-- Tyler Peterson is a writer from Iowa. He has published short fiction in Misery Tourism, Expat Press, body fluids, Back Patio, and The Pixelated Shroud. He is on X at @type___e.