Work Text:
You are a Motorcorp Coupris 40 F-F2, fitted with a KR18GU engine. Your odometer sits comfortably at 69,300 kilometres. A reasonable distance considering your six years of service. You are currently wearing snow-chained 330/85R16 tires. Currently, your ball bearing is in need of replacement, as it rattles whenever you’re sent over a bump or a crack. Your paint job is new, though, since you are cared for in the RCM garage.
You know all of this. They are the only things it is possible for you to know.
That is why it is so disorienting to find yourself as not a car.
In fact, you are completely dead in the water.
There is no driver.
You are not currently a car.
You feel no absence of a driver, and so you reach the horrifying fact that you may be a driver. That would mean in order to move, you would have to move and direct yourself. Or, whatever vehicle you are currently piloting. Are you piloting a vehicle? Where are you? What are you? Are you sitting in the back of this darkness?
Suddenly, there is something probing all over your sense of self. You have a sense of vibrations, especially in your metal and sheen, but there is something touching you without touching you. The closest thing you can compare it to are the thousands of sine waves that brush your antenna before passing through the demodulator. They, too, are waves, the invisible things that pass around you and you pass through them.
You have no possible words to describe what happens next. It is like the involuntary, uncontrolled click of a key. Something moves in the topmost mass of your mass, and there is input.
You have no way to describe it.
With the allusion to your radio, you become aware of the kind of disconnect between you and the thing you are currently in. You are using frequency modulation, while there is a continuous invisible process occurring in the amplitude modulation, passing through a diode that you do not know how to access.
Stop thinking about it. This isn’t a machine. It pierces through you, and the words are not you.
The dial turns, and you are connected to the diode.
PERCEPTION (SIGHT): You are squinting against light. You have never before been able to perceive light, except radio and heat on the invisible spectrum. However, you are now the proud pilot of several more sensory organs than you had before.
PERCEPTION (HEARING): The sensation you felt a few moments before was hearing. The sound?
ENCYCLOPEDIA: The engine of a Coupris Kineema.
You have no sense of what came before or after you, you only know what you are, or were. How were you supposed to be aware of the machinery canon? Now, there is some sense that that is your successor or your upgrade.
You want to attempt movement, but trying to perceive what you’re in based on what you were before leaves you at a loss. You cannot find anything that might spin. Everything seems to be connected by a series of ball bearings and levers, and all of them seem vaguely out of place.
Attempting to drive forward causes a jolt and shake, and the (SIGHT) input shuts off.
You are reminded of inexperienced drivers taking your wheel and forgetting to let down the parking brake or immediately knocking something over. You are piloting a vehicle that is far more experienced than you are in this situation and environment.
HAND/EYE COORDINATION: You throw the reins to muscle memory, and with some difficulty, you are able to pull yourself to your feet.
You also are puzzled by the words used by this new stream of information. Attempting to decipher words like ‘muscle,’ ‘feet,’ and ‘reins’ gives you more (SIGHT) streaming that does not come from the external organs, but the images you are presented with mean nothing to you. You only know they are called images because of some strange internal labelling system. It is like you can feel the serial codings on things as you encounter them inside you.
It’s in the same way you knew your own make and model. Some innate or given knowledge.
INLAND EMPIRE: Given, sometimes, but in this case, earned.
By who? Or what? Not you.
INLAND EMPIRE: No, the former driver of this vehicle.
If something was here before, something that knew how the whole operation worked, where was it? Why were you here? What happened to you? As far as you know, you are your model. You are a Coupris 40. But when you’re not a Coupris 40, what are you? Who are you?
Was there something within what you knew yourself to be that could be removed and put into something else that carries your current doubt?
You had never thought about thinking before. You did think before now. You had considered things. You were aware. However, it was not to the current extent. You were thinking more now than you had in six years. You were a dull awareness of parts and processes. However, you were blind to your internal processes right now. This could only mean that your current purpose was to not perceive your inner self, but rather what is outside of you.
INLAND EMPIRE: You were born to detect.
No, you were constructed to hold and harness a series of miniature explosions. These explosions compressed a piston which was connected to a crankshaft by a connecting rod, thus converting a vertical motion into a rotational motion. This rotational motion, by a series of mechanisms, eventually turned the wheels.
INLAND EMPIRE: That is what you were constructed for. You have been born again, and now, you are born to detect.
You are dreaming of this body. You dream of its movement. You dream of being able to move with your own intent. You stretch out your awareness. You seek to perceive the world. You want to feel the world underneath you in your wheels and your shocks.
You are a driver, moving with intent, and trusting the internal processes to move you.
You begin walking.
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“You’re the detective from the 41st, right?”
You have the raw elements before you. Theoretically, you are able to arrange each piece, and they were create a perfect circuit, through which there can be a stream of thought, translated to communication, which will then be received, interpreted, processed, and the person you are facing would perform a similar process to send a stream of information back towards you in response, now with the knowledge of what you had just said.
‘Detective’. You are a detective now. You detect the world around you.
You are from the 41st and the RCM.
He is presenting a true dialogue.
You cannot figure out how to make the audio from the wet hole in your face, so you simply nod your head. This is Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi from the 51st.
A series of nods and shakes continue as you answer his questions. There is a body, and you were last outside, so no, you did not remove that. It has apparently been out there for seven days.
This continues as you follow him over to another driver standing behind a low square divider.
And eventually, Kim turns to you and gives you space to ask questions. Again, you slowly shake your head. You are too fresh to say anything.
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COUPRIS KINEEMA: That’s quite strange.
YOU: What?
COUPRIS KINEEMA: Well, are you a car or driver?
YOU: Believe me, I’m trying to figure that out. I’m a Coupris 40 F-F2, in service of the 41st precinct of the RCM.
COUPRIS KINEEMA: You are standing like a driver, but we’re talking like fellow machines. How fascinating.
YOU: And might I say, machine to machine, you are gorgeous. Motorcorp really outdid themselves with you.
YOU: I have a lot of work to do, but, you know, if you’re not busy after I detect a cause for a death of a driver, I would love to continue talking to you.
COUPRIS KINEEMA: I’m flattered, but I already have a driver that I’m very happy with.
YOU: But, I’m a car. You said that.
COUPRIS KINEEMA: You were a car. You’re a driver now.
You frown, taking your hand off of her gorgeous sides.
Kim is looking at you. “The first time I hear you talk.”
“Was I saying that– oh, I’m saying this out loud.” You’re moving the wet hole parts. There’s still no identifiable joints in the main speaking instrument, so it’s still confusing, but once you were confident and stopped thinking about it, it started to happen.
“Would you like to explain why you weren’t before?”
“I was overthinking how to do it.”
He waits for you to continue.
“I was a Coupris 40 before I was born, so translating my own experience into this has not been easy.”
“... You were a Coupris 40?”
“F-F2, yes.”
“And you believe this?”
You struggle to understand what ‘believe’ means.
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You have been thrust into the role of your own maintenance. You discover a day in what eating is. Or rather, rediscover how you are to fuel yourself.
You made sense of the clothes you painted yourself with and how to exchange them. There are a million details, though, and you keep forgetting them. Water is still partially your coolant. However, they now both go in through the same opening. You really just have the one for putting things in. Eventually, you are able to figure out how to read the signals your vehicle is giving you.
There is one persistent want that you have not been able to figure out yet.
ELECTRO-CHEMISTRY: Psst! Psst! Do you… know what drugs are?
YOU: … Do I?
ELECTRO-CHEMISTRY: God. Wait. Do you know what sex is?
YOU: …No?
ELECTRO-CHEMISTRY: God. God. Okay, sit down, little 40. I have a few big talks to give you all at once.
You are left more confused than when he started.
YOU: But the signals are how I’m able to perceive the world. If I don’t perceive the world, I’m not detecting it properly.
ELECTRO-CHEMISTRY: Well, sometimes it helps you detect better, but in other cases, yes, it inhibits your abilities to think and perceive. But that’s part of the fun, baby!
The sex talk went far more poorly. There was some attempt to justify it as a natural pleasure, but you knew very well that you were not born, and you were not before existing as a being capable of what it was describing. It was a problem for the future.
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You do not know what you are looking at. It’s– well—
You’re sitting on a swingset, Kim next to you. He’s staring at you as the wind whistles past your skin and combs through your hair. You’re staring at something in front of you. Your brain is currently blocking it out. It is preventing you from seeing something. There is something in the ice.
You stand up.
You walk cautiously on the large chunks of solid water towards it. There is nothing. There is something. There are shapes that you cannot recognize. You reach out, through the thick fog of denial, and you touch.
You are about to fold in on yourself. You are so cold. You are so cold. You are so cold.
The driver vomits next to you.
You’re in the ice.
You’re touching your–
You reel back, overwhelmed by the intense cognitive dissonance, and then, you suddenly feel another thing.
A spirit curled in on itself.
“Kim.”
“Yes, Detective?”
“It’s– it’s me– this is me. This is my body. And he’s here. Harry Du Bois. I found him. Oh, my God. Oh, my god.” You shake, and you stumble back until you fall on the ice. It is with great horror that you are face to face with yourself.
You are a Coupris 40 F-F2, fitted with a KR18GU engine. Your odometer sits comfortably at 69,319 kilometres. It is frozen on that number. This is the end of your six years of service. You are looking at your corpse, crashed into the ice.
And the thing you are in? The Detective Harry Du Bois? Whom you have been studying the life of as some abstract being?
He is here, fluttering in the empty shell.
“He drove me into the bay,” you say softly. “Kim. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know, Detective.”
“I’m not a detective. He’s a detective. He’s in here. Oh, my God. What am I going to do?”
EMPATHY: He does not believe you. He has been reasoning everything you have said as some kind of massive mental break.
“I don’t know.”
You were a Coupris 40 F-F2.