Chapter Text
The storm promised to be a big one. Michael knew that when he'd driven to the hotel on the edge of LA - he could've gone on to the Foundation, but he'd chosen instead to weather it out here. After all, this hotel had sheltered parking and he wanted another night away from Devon. Devon was a great man, but Michael wanted a rest. Just a little breather - a night of watching HBO and watching the storm out of a nearly panoramic second floor window while he drank cold soda from the machine down the hall. Lightning was looking promising in the distance as he settled in, settled back, to relax. And it seemed Kitt was relaxing, too. There wasn't so much as a chirp from his comlink as he waited, eyes half closed. It was going to be a good night.
---
One floor below, Kitt fought a losing battle.
His comm systems had been cut out first, leaving him unable to call for help as a program, alien to his system, executed itself in perfection, using the conductivity of his MBS to transmit a routine into his CPU that cut off his contact from the car. As swiftly as he opened one channel, five closed. He tried to access his line to Michael's comlink, to Bonnie, to Devon - even to April, but there was nothing.
His world grew darker and darker, his sensory systems going next, but he felt the hand on his door, felt it open, though he struggled to keep it closed, but now, in such turmoil, there was nothing he could do.
The power button was pressed. False key turned. His engine came alive and he couldn't cut it off.
He had awareness to know he was being driven, but even that dimmed.
---
Jeremy Matthews crowed as he raced the black Trans Am through the black night further from LA. With this kind of research material, his Master's was guaranteed. That was, if they didn't just push him straight through to Doctor's. God, wouldn't that be fantastic!
He wouldn't keep it for long, he told himself. Just long enough to look through some of the programming, long enough to look through the mechanics of the thing - because it was too amazing not to. He had to find out what made this car tick, and he'd monitored the activity as his program had worked. It'd been perfect, undercutting the AI, working while it drove until it stopped for the night. Fantastic how it'd anticipated and ... God, it was perfect. The car was his now, at least for a while.
Twenty miles out, he pulled the car off the road. Here was as good a place as any to get started.
"All right, all right," he murmured to himself as he went through the bag he'd thrown onto the passenger seat. A notebook and pencil later, he was making note of all the systems he could see displayed that he wanted to take a look into. Some were self explanatory - doors, windows, eject L and R. Only an idiot couldn't guess what that did. Turbo Boost was a little more mysterious, but he figured he didn't really want to press that button.
Some little systems, though, he wondered about. Pursuit mode - that seemed obvious, but what did it really do? And what about Super Pursuit mode?
"Chemical analyzer," Matthews continued, writing in a hasty scrawl across the notebook. None of anything on his person had his name on it, intentionally. He didn't want to leave any hints as to his identity. It was bad enough he'd opened the door bare-handed, but he figured he could wipe down the steering wheel and the door handles later. "Microjam... microlock... Damn. When they say a car comes loaded..."
There were panels in the center console he started to look through, and was surprised to see the car still had a glove compartment. Looks like they didn't rip out everything GM did the first time around.
But behind this one was a little strap that looked to go around someone's arm.
He looked it over curiously and started to consider its use. He knew it couldn't be used for harm - that had to be one of this thing's tenets. If it didn't have the Three Laws, it had to have something close. That meant it was something... some kind of sensor. Galvanic response? Probably part of it.
What else could they sense through skin now, he asked himself. Blood oxygen, he answered. And then went further. Strap around the arm - blood pressure, too. Maybe even chemical composition of blood? Like alcohol level, any foriegn substances...
He laughed aloud as he strapped the thing around his bare upper arm, grinning like mad. Loaded. The real, original loaded car.
The storm outside hadn't even entered his mind until, suddenly, his world was white, he felt the air knocked from him, and he thought he felt his heart stop.
The car's hull steamed around him, rain instantly heated into gas from the one deft lightning strike.
---
"Bon? Hey, it's Michael, I--"
"Michael. Thank God. You need to come to the Foundation. Now."
"...Bon? What's the matter? I can't... I mean, I could get a cab--"
"I know. You don't have Kitt."
"...And you're not yelling at me?"
"No, because he's here."
"Thank Go--"
"Don't thank anyone yet. He... Just... just get here, Michael, however you can."
---
Finally, the veil started to lift. He saw again, at last, and he felt so grateful, though he could only... see. Perhaps some of his sensors had been damaged - perhaps he only had video now, plain video. But that didn't account for how Michael and Bonnie were looking at him.
He looked at them as well, confused. Michael looked almost angry - at that patient stage of angry he reached when something serious had happened. And Bonnie looked... absolutely crushed.
What had happened?
Michael approached, and that was when he realised that he was looking at them from the inside of his cabin. Had all of his cameras malfunctioned but this one?
When Michael opened the door, he asked softly, "Michael? What's wrong?"
And didn't recognize his own voice.
"I don't know how you got here. Or how you know my name. But maybe you can tell me what you're doing in my car, and why he's not responding to any of Bonnie's efforts."
He recognized that tone, and he knew that, to whomever heard that tone, it could mean danger. But why was Michael saying that to him?
And then he felt... a burning. His video sensors burned. And they went dark for a split second.
"I think I'm malfunctioning," said that voice that was not his. "My video sensors aren't online correctly, and they can't seem to stabilise. Michael, what happened to me?"
Michael's hands came near and grasped...
Him?
Him.himhimhimhimhimhimhim-- and the world faded once more.
---
"Michael..." Bonnie stared at the young man Michael now held limp from the front of his T-shirt. "What did you do to him?"
"Nothing," he said, dumbfounded, staring at the kid who'd just... fainted when he'd pulled him out of Kitt's cabin. One arm still had the blood analyser cuff around it, and Michael nodded for Bonnie to come detach it. "I just... picked him up, and he knocked out..."
Not that the questioning had been going well, anyway. In fact, some of those answers, those tones, the way those words just rolled out of the kids mouth, had made his stomach churn. He didn't want to believe what he'd heard.
It took both of them, but eventually, the kid was laid out on the couch there in Bonnie's pseudo-office, still out cold.
And they waited. And they didn't talk. Neither of them wanted to believe what they'd heard, and the awkwardness was proof enough of that.
It was nearly twenty minutes later that the kid finally started to stir. By that point, Michael had gone through his pockets and the backpack in Kitt's passenger seat. Not a hint of ID. No clue who this kid was, except that his notebook had had copious notes about Kitt's systems. He was a plain kid, really. Brown hair, cut short, brown eyes, from what he'd seen before he'd spontaneously lost consciousness just from being lifted.
Michael'd not even bumped his head.
But he was right there when the kid's eyes opened again, and was waiting quietly even when he heard his name (how the hell did this kid know his name?) from the kid's mouth.
"Maybe you can tell us this time," he asked, his voice a little less menacing, he thought. "What did you do with Kitt?"
The answer he got, the tone he got it in, so quiet and almost hurt, struck at that feeling in stomach that was building up again.
"But Michael," he heard, "I am Kitt."
This time, it was Michael who had to fight to stay conscious.
"Oh God."