✅ A Dose of Humiliation

65. The Choice Not Made

Sorry for the delay on this chapter! I had it all ready, and then got distracted before hitting 'Publish'.

Serena was driving the SUV today. That kind of surprised me, but it really shouldn't have. It was probably that I didn't know anybody else with more than one car to choose from, certainly not a girl my own age, so it surprised me every time I saw her car and it wasn't the last one I'd seen.

"So..." she said as we pulled away from the mall. "School?" I was disoriented for just a second by that thought. After the number of times they'd had to reschedule Serena's appointment, I was half thinking it was Saturday again.

"Uhh..." I said. "Yeah, I guess. It's kind of... There's this voice inside me saying we're late anyway, why not have fun for a while. But that's not really me, is it? I've never been so careless about doing the things I'm supposed to do."

"I should be trying to keep you on the right path," she said. "Urging you to go to school and do all your work. But I think we've both had a long morning. And yeah, we've got a valid reason to be late. Nobody's going to argue with that. Maybe we can relax until lunch, and then rejoin our classes. Less disruptive to everyone else, right?"

I thought about it. I _knew_ it was the kind of thing I would never even consider, but the possibility was so tempting. And I could also see that she was right; that there was no reason coming into school in the middle of a class, interrupting everyone else, when it was already so close to lunch. By the time we arrived, I would be a disruptive influence; and I would already have missed so much that I wouldn't learn anything in that class.

"Where would we go, then?" I asked. "Cafeteria early, catch up with everybody over lunch?"

Serena didn't respond. I didn't say anything about that; I had probably spent five minutes thinking it over before I replied to what she had said. But as the time passed, I started to feel uncomfortable with the silence. There was a difference between taking a moment to think of a response and not speaking at all.

"Maybe I should go hang out with Josh," I joked. "If I'm going to cut classes, we may as well go all the way." But she didn't answer again, and didn't even laugh at the desperate sarcasm. I turned my head and noticed that her hands were resting limply on the wheel, and when I paid more attention, I could see that her head was tilted slightly to one side. Serena had fallen asleep. My first thought was to be offended; surely I wasn't that boring. But beyond the kneejerk response, I knew that this was just a symptom of the Goodnight dose. She couldn't help it, and it was nothing to do with me.

My heart pounded as I realised that we were on a major highway, with the driver asleep at the wheel. But then I heard a steady metronome click-click from the dash as the navigation system signalled a turn, and a few seconds later one of her hands fell down by her side as the wheel started to turn. Her car was completely computerised, capable of driving itself better than any human ever could.

I hesitated for a second, and then extended one nervous finger to poke Serena in the arm. She didn't stir, so I poked her again.

"Auto-drive level 3 enabled," an electronic voice declared, with an almost musical cadence. "Please confirm your intended destination." I almost jumped out of my seat then, just because I hadn't expected something like that. I glanced out of the windows, and realised that we were on Ash Road. I guessed that the autopilot was just following a route that Serena drove often. Maybe she always turned off the highway there, or maybe it had guessed her intention from the lane she had been in, or something. So she hadn't actually told it where we were going. How did I do this? What would it do if it didn't know where to go?