Mike didn’t sleep that night. He sat in his Prius outside Tom’s apartment, engine off, staring at his phone. He’d searched “Organic mobility division,” “Organic Ford partnership,” “Organic robotaxi contract” — reading everything he could find. Earnings reports. Press releases. A few critical blog posts that had been buried by SEO. A Reddit thread from two years ago that asked why Organic’s robotaxis had a higher “incident rate” than Waymo’s fleet and got locked by moderators within hours.
None of it was a smoking gun. But all of it, stacked together, painted a picture of a company that had moved very fast to own a very large piece of the autonomous vehicle market — and had not been particularly careful about how.
His mom had been Keith Adams’ secretary. She’d handled his files, his schedule, his correspondence. The closed-door meetings. The Ford arrangement. Whatever she’d found, it was enough to get her killed and have the whole thing packaged as a hit and run with conveniently corrupted camera footage.
And now Keith knew someone had been listening at the bathroom door.
Mike’s phone buzzed. Uber Eats. A delivery request.
He stared at it. The rational thing to do was run. Leave the city. Go back to San Jose. Tell no one. Disappear into his dorm room and his data structures PDFs and his two-thousand-dollar-a-month existence until graduation.
But he needed the money. And some part of him — the dumb, stubborn, twenty-three-year-old part — thought that maybe if he just acted normal, went about his routine, Keith would conclude that whoever was in that hallway hadn’t heard anything important.
He accepted the delivery.
The pickup was ramen from a spot in SoMa. Nothing unusual. The drop-off address, though — Presidio. A residential street up near the park.
That was weird. Mike had done hundreds of deliveries in San Francisco. Nobody in Presidio ordered ramen from SoMa at eleven o’clock at night. That neighborhood had its own restaurants. Its own everything. The people who lived there didn’t need Uber Eats — they had private chefs.
He drove anyway. It was good to try to take his mind off everything and engage in a meaningless, cash-generating robotic chore. He wanted a little moment to stabilize. As he crossed Market Street, the first drops hit his windshield. Light rain, barely there — just enough to smear the city lights across the glass. By the time he reached Geary, it was steady. By Divisadero — that street — it was coming down hard, the wipers on full, the Prius hydroplaning slightly on the turns.
The route took him through quiet streets, past dark Victorian houses, under cypress trees that whipped sideways in a wind that had come from nowhere. The GPS led him to a house set back from the road, barely visible behind a hedge. He parked, grabbed the bag, and ran through the downpour to the door.
Rang the doorbell. No answer. Rain hammered his back.
Rang again. Nothing. A flash of lightning lit the hedges white for half a second.
He left the food on the doorstep, took a photo for the app, and sprinted back to the Prius. Sat down. Slammed the door. Water dripped from his hair onto the steering wheel. Outside, the sky cracked open — thunder rolling across the Presidio like artillery, lightning forking over the treetops in intervals that were getting shorter.
He checked his phone for the next request.
In the rearview mirror, headlights appeared. Two vehicles, approaching fast from behind, cutting through sheets of rain. White Fords. Mint-green logos on the doors.
Mike’s stomach dropped.
He grabbed the gear shift but it was too late. The first robotaxi slammed into his rear bumper at full speed. His head snapped back against the headrest. Before he could process the impact, the second vehicle hit him from the front — a head-on collision that caved in the hood and shattered the windshield. Rain poured into the cabin through the broken glass.
Then they reversed. Both of them. In unison.
And came again.
The Prius folded like aluminum foil. Mike felt his ribs crack. Something warm ran down his face — blood mixing with rainwater. The steering wheel was pressed against his chest and he couldn’t breathe. The vehicles reversed one final time, paused — calculating — and sped away into the storm.
Silence, except for the rain.
Mike hung sideways in the seatbelt, blood filling his left eye. His phone was buzzing somewhere beneath him. His fingers wouldn’t move. His breath came in shallow, wet gasps. Rain fell on his face through the open windshield.
Keith. Organic. The Ford robotaxis. The same machines that tried to kill the old man on Divisadero. The same machines that killed his mom on a residential street in the Outer Richmond with no witnesses and every camera dark.
He was going to die the same way she did.
His vision blurred. The streetlights smeared into long streaks of orange through the rain. He felt himself going.
Then — footsteps. Fast. Splashing through puddles. Someone running toward the car.
A face appeared at the shattered window, rain streaming down it. Bearded, glasses, a cap pulled low. But Mike could see the eyes. Dark, steady, familiar.
It was him. The old man from the alley on Divisadero.
The man reached through the broken glass and pressed two fingers against Mike’s neck. Then he pulled something from his coat — a vial. Blue cap. The same clear liquid. He loaded a syringe with practiced hands and plunged it into Mike’s thigh.
“Stay with me,” the man said. “This will feel strange. Don’t fight it.”
The liquid entered his bloodstream and Mike felt it immediately — a warmth spreading from his thigh upward through his core, into his chest, his arms, his skull. Not healing this time. Something else. Something deeper. His cells vibrated at a frequency he could almost hear.
And then the sky answered.
The entire world went white. Not a flash — a sustained, blinding, total whiteout. Every hair on Mike’s body stood on end. The air itself seemed to crystallize. He felt the Prius lift — or maybe it was him lifting — as a column of energy found the crumpled metal frame and poured through it, through him, through the liquid that was already rewriting something fundamental in his blood. The thunder didn’t come after. It came with it — inside it — inside him. Every nerve ending fired at once. His heartbeat — irregular, fading — suddenly locked into a rhythm that wasn’t his own, a pulse that felt borrowed from somewhere, or somewhen, else.
The last thing he saw was the man’s face looking down at him through the light. Calm. Knowing.
Then nothing.
Light.
Not the orange glow of San Francisco streetlights. Sunlight. Morning sunlight, warm and clean, falling across a bed that wasn’t his.
Mike opened his eyes.
He was lying in a twin bed in a small room. Blue walls. A desk with a closed laptop. A Warriors poster. A bookshelf with a mix of paperbacks and manga. Clothes on the floor. A half-empty glass of water on the nightstand.
This wasn’t his dorm. This wasn’t Mom’s apartment. He’d never been in this room before.
He sat up. His body felt — different. Lighter. Smaller. His hands were his hands but not quite. Less callused. Thinner wrists. He looked down at himself. A teenager’s body. Lean, not yet filled out.
From downstairs, a voice. Familiar, but warmer than he’d ever heard it. Relaxed. Parental.
“Mike! Come eat your breakfast, you’re going to be late for school again!”
Tom Friedrich’s voice.
Mike stood on shaky legs, opened the bedroom door, and walked down a narrow staircase into a small kitchen. Tom was standing at the stove in a bathrobe, scrambling eggs, a coffee mug in his free hand. He looked younger. Healthier. His hair was darker, his face less lined.
He looked at Mike and smiled. “Morning, kid. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Mike opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“Where’s Mom?”
Tom’s smile faded. He set down the spatula. “What?”
“My mom. Where is she?”
Tom stared at him. “Mike, are you okay? You left your phone on the kitchen table last night, you’re acting a little—”
“Tom. Where is my mom?”
Tom put his coffee down. His expression shifted from confusion to concern. “Mike. If this is a joke, it’s not funny.” He paused. His voice softened. “Your mom has been where she’s been for the last sixteen years. Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. In Colma. You know that.”
The words hit Mike like a second collision. His knees almost buckled. Something was very, very wrong.
His mind raced backward — the rain hammering the Prius. The white light. The vibration in his blood. The old man’s face. The vial. The robotaxis crushing him from both ends. His Prius — where was his Prius? The lightning. That impossible surge of energy that had passed through his body at the same moment the liquid was rewriting something inside him. What had happened?
“Mike?” Tom stepped closer, gently gripping his shoulder. “Hey. Snap out of it, kid. Sit down. Eat your food.”
Mike blinked. He looked at Tom’s face — younger, less worn, but unmistakably Tom. The same kind eyes. The same stubble he never fully committed to shaving.
“Dad,” Mike said, testing the word.
Tom’s eyebrows rose. Then he smiled — a real, warm smile. “There he is. Is the real Mike Friedrich back now?”
Mike sat down at the kitchen table. His hands were trembling. He looked around the kitchen. Photos on the refrigerator. Him and Tom. Tom and him. Birthday parties. Little league. A vacation somewhere with mountains. Years and years of a life he had never lived.
No Anita. Not in a single photo.
Tom slid a plate of eggs across the counter. “Eat. Bus comes in twenty.”
Mike reached for the phone lying on the kitchen table — the one Tom said he’d left there last night. Not his phone. An older model, a cracked iPhone 11 in a case he didn’t recognize. He pressed the home button.
The screen said: Monday, September 9, 2019.
Mike stared at it.
He was sixteen years old. A high school senior. Tom Friedrich’s only son.
And Anita Hidalgo had never existed.
End of Episode 3