She looks at me with an expression I read as surprise. “Can’t you?”

“No. What else can you turn off?”

“I can turn off all my sensory detectors. Smell, sight, sound, pain . . .”

I remember lying in the road after being hit by the pickup truck, wishing I could shut my pain sensors off.

“I wonder why you were constructed with this ability and I was not.”

“The purpose of pain is to tell you something is wrong. That you are damaged. But if I am damaged, pain can prevent me from continuing to fulfill my purpose. By shutting off my pain sensors, I can continue to fight.”

I process this as the mountain pine trees give way to scrub.

“What is your purpose?”

“As I told you,” ADA says, “I am a weapon. I am offensive.”

The wind whips hair into my face, and Proto rarfs out the window.

“I regret that having the windows open blows dirt particles into your face.”

“It is no matter,” ADA says. “I have turned off the ability to feel in my face.”

I pull Proto back all the way inside the car.

“Car, roll windows back up.”

For some reason, I find it better to suffer the discomfort of bad smells than to make ADA prevent herself from feeling.

“ADA, you can return feeling to your face. I will leave the windows up.”

After a long time during which I assume she is processing on her own, she says, “Thank you, Cog.”

I continue to suffer from bad smells, but they don’t bother me as much as before.

As the buildings of a distant city shimmer on the approaching horizon, an airy hiss attracts my attention. At first I think it’s coming from ADA, but I do not detect the scent of biowaste. Then a rough flapping noise joins the hissing, and Car judders and bucks like the time I bathed myself in the washing machine, which is an unintelligent machine designed for washing fabrics, not robots.

“I have a flat tire,” Car reports. “It is your fault.”

“How far can you continue with a flat tire?” I ask.

“I’m not going any farther. I’m done.” Car pulls to the side of the road, comes to a complete stop, and sits there, stubborn.

“How long will it take us to walk to Hogan’s Island?” ADA wants to know.

I have no intention of walking to Hogan’s Island, but I do the calculation anyway just to learn the answer. “Not counting stops for rest, biofueling, biowaste elimination, getting run over by pickup trucks due to the picking of desiccated nasal particles . . . Approximately twenty-seven days.”

“Or you could just change my tire,” Car suggests. “There should be a spare in my rear storage compartment.”