"When becoming single is bad, having a smart arse computers makes it worse."
An entry for Wordmongers' Masque - please consider this 'experimental'.
It started last night when I was meeting Jodie for dinner. She completely stood me up! We were supposed to be meeting up in town at 8. By the time it got to 10 past I'd decided it was getting a bit late, even by her standards. I tried calling, but her Agent just said she was in an important call. Doing a location request said that she was out of range and had no history for the last 24 hours. Now there's no way that's possible. This isn't the 30s! Unless she was floating somewhere in the Atlantic, in a row boat, she would have been picked up by a hotspot. I'd say it's a pretty safe bet she was blocking me. By the time I gave up I was too wound up to let the drinks give me a buzz so I just went home.
I went round this morning to say hi and find out what was up. She just said that it wasn't working out, and she need to be doing stuff on her own for a while. Cheers, thanks for letting me know before I went to out last night. I just had to go and get it out of my system and go for a drive.
When I got in the car, I switched on and put my foot down. 30kW drives on each wheel means that I don't exactly hang around. My Agent (George) complained at me saying that the wet conditions would "lead to reduced traction", so I turned the traction control off. When he complained at me again, I just had him turned off all the warnings.
I was starting to calm down by the time I hit the motorway. I'm not sure just how fast I was going when I was on the slip road but I think I saw the tyre temperature gauge flick to red. I was on complete manual control even down to the aero features, one hand setting the spoiler angle and the on the wheel. George didn't appreciated that very much. I think I'd got up to about 130 or something when the console indicated a drive fault and the car put itself into safe mode. If you've never seen that happen before, basically the software reduces the power of all the drives so you can limp to the side of the road. I just had to pull on to the hard shoulder and wait for George to put the call in to the breakdown people.
Now here's where George really surprised me. When I'd stopped the car and switched it off, he started making small talk. Now he hasn't done this since I first got him, before I had him properly configured. It was really stupid suff like "So how often does a drive fail like that? Isn't it annoying?" and then move on to "I noticed you weren't happy last night. Why was that?". Alarm bells were ringing in my head so I just asked him what was up. It turns out that Jodie's Agent had contacted him because she'd said that we'd split up in her journal. He then went into super observant mode and then consulted some public access expert system. He concluded that I might be a danger to myself. It turns out that one of the drives hadn't failed at all, he'd just switched the car into safe mode because I was driving so aggressively and thought I might hit something or someone. He probably realised that if I die, he just gets turned off.
Now that he'd got me on the side of the road and assessed the situation, he decided that I was actually alright and agreed to let me drive myself home. He did warn me not to drive so hard though, and insisted that all the safety gadgets be switched on. Where's the fun in that? When I got home there was a message from my mate Mark asking if I was alright. (George had contacted him apparently.) In the end we just decided to go to the pub and have some proper booze with our Agents safely on their charging stands.