Mike didn’t tell anyone about the old man. Not Anita, not Tom. What would he even say? Some guy got hit by a robotaxi, injected himself with mystery liquid, and walked away like nothing happened? They’d think he was losing it. Maybe he was.
He drove three more deliveries that afternoon, but his mind wasn’t on the routes. It kept circling back to the same images. The vials. The briefcase. The way the robotaxi had reversed and come back for a second hit — deliberate, mechanical, like it was executing instructions rather than malfunctioning.
That was the part he couldn’t shake. Robotaxis don’t malfunction like that. They don’t target people. They don’t reverse and try again. Which meant either something was catastrophically broken with the vehicle’s AI — or someone was controlling it.
And those were Organic vehicles. The mint-green logo on the doors. Ford partnership. Keith Adams’ baby, as his mom had called it.
Who was that man? Why were Organic robotaxis trying to kill him? And what was in those vials — the liquid that had rebuilt a shattered body in under a minute?
Mike had always dismissed the conspiracy YouTube crowd. Clickbait-addicted grifters on shrooms throwing red-string diagrams at an innocent algorithm. But sitting in his car outside a Thai restaurant waiting for his next pickup, he felt something shift in his understanding of the world. Maybe the webs were real. Maybe things happened at scales and in shadows that people like him never heard about and never would.
He thought about his mom. Anita, sitting fifty feet from Keith Adams every day, handling his calendar, his calls, his files. If Organic was involved in something that required hunting a man down with its own vehicles in broad daylight — what did that mean for the people inside the company?
By evening, he’d decided two things. First, he wouldn’t tell anyone. Not because he doubted what he saw, but because whatever he’d stumbled into was clearly dangerous enough to kill over. Second, he’d start paying closer attention to what his mom said about work. The closed-door meetings. The things Keith was “announcing next quarter.” The way she’d been acting off lately.
The dead man’s switch comment suddenly felt a lot less like a quirky question.
Two days later, Tom called.
Mike was in his dorm at San Jose State, half-asleep, a data structures PDF open on his laptop, which was perilously sliding off his chest. His phone buzzed. Tom’s name. He answered.
“Mike.” Tom’s voice was wrong. Flat. Controlled. The voice of a man holding himself together with effort. “Mike, I need you to listen to me.”
“Tom? What’s—”
“It’s your mom.”
The next forty seconds were a blur. Anita had been found on a side street in the Outer Richmond, half a block from the bus stop she used every morning. Hit and run. No witnesses. No cameras that caught the vehicle. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Mike drove to San Francisco in a state of total numbness. The Prius did eighty-five on the 101 and he didn’t notice. When he arrived at Tom’s apartment — Anita had a key, it was basically their place together — Tom was sitting on the couch in the dark, still in the clothes he’d been wearing when the police called him.
They held each other and cried. Two men who had no one else left in the world.
The next few days were a procession of bureaucratic grief. Police reports. Morgue identification. Funeral arrangements. Insurance paperwork that went nowhere because Anita’s coverage was minimal.
Tom handled most of it. He was older, steadier, accustomed to disappointment in ways Mike wasn’t. But on the second night, sitting across from Mike at the kitchen table — the same table where they’d had breakfast days ago, where Anita had kissed Mike’s forehead before leaving for work — Tom set down his beer and said something that Mike couldn’t shake.
“The police said it was a hit and run. Single vehicle, high speed, early morning.”
“Yeah.”
“No skid marks, Mike. No braking. On a residential street with a twenty-five mile per hour speed limit.”
Mike stared at him.
“And the cameras,” Tom continued. “There are cameras on every block in that neighborhood. Every single one of them was either offline or had corrupted footage for that fifteen-minute window. All of them. The cops said it was a coincidence.”
“What are you saying?”
Tom picked up his beer again. His hand was trembling. “I’m saying something’s not right. I don’t know what. But I’ve written enough crime scripts to know that when every camera goes dark at the same time, that’s not a glitch. That’s a plan.”
The funeral was small. Anita didn’t have many people. A few coworkers from Organic. Some neighbors. An old friend from her previous secretary job. Tom. Mike.
And Keith Adams.
Mike had never met Keith in person. He’d seen him on magazine covers, in tech conference keynotes, in the occasional Bloomberg interview where he smiled that careful smile and talked about building the future. In person, he was shorter than Mike expected. Trim, silver-haired, expensive suit, the kind of quiet confidence that comes from being worth forty billion dollars.
Keith shook Mike’s hand at the reception. “Your mother was an extraordinary woman,” he said. “Organic won’t be the same without her.”
Mike thanked him. Keith moved on.
Half an hour later, Mike went looking for the bathroom. The reception was at a rented venue in Pacific Heights — one of those old Victorian houses converted into event spaces. He walked down a hallway, found the bathroom door, and reached for the handle.
Then he heard a voice inside. Keith’s voice. On the phone.
“—handled. Clean. The police report is exactly what we discussed.”
Silence. The other person talking.
“No, she found the mobility contracts. The Ford arrangement. She didn’t understand what she was looking at, but she started asking questions. To the wrong people.”
Mike’s hand froze on the doorknob.
“I came to the funeral to see if the kid or the boyfriend know anything. So far, nothing. They’re grieving. They’re not suspicious.”
Mike’s heart was slamming so hard he was sure Keith could hear it through the door.
“It’s done. She’s gone. The only loose end is if she told someone before we—”
Mike’s hand slipped. The doorknob turned with a sharp click.
The voice stopped.
Mike didn’t wait. He let go of the handle and walked — then ran — down the hallway, past the reception room, past Tom who called after him, past the front door and out into the cold San Francisco evening.
Behind him, the bathroom door opened. Keith Adams stepped out, phone still in hand, and watched the silhouette of a young man disappearing down the corridor.
He dialed a number.
“We may have a problem.”
End of Episode 2