THE SANDWICH THEY GAVE ME at the police station wasn’t very good, but better than an empty biofuel container. Safely inside Car, my companions and I travel down the highway beneath a black sky sparkling with stars. Since leaving the uniMIND campus, I have had several bad experiences, and one thing I have learned is that friends and sandwiches make even the worst of situations more tolerable.

Another thing I learn is that as soon as you think things are going well, they are sure to get rotten. This lesson comes in with a deep buzzing engine sound and a whup-whup-whup noise. A blinding light floods Car’s interior.

ADA peers through the sunroof. “That’s a T66 Tomason Turbine helicopter. It can achieve a top speed of 161 miles per hour, and it’s equipped with a thirty-million candlepower searchlight. We cannot outrun it, and we cannot hide from it.”

“I don’t need to outrun it or hide from it,” Car says, rolling along. “I am in stealth mode. My surface’s light-refracting cells render us undetectable in the visible, infrared, and radar spectra.”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” I say, turning to ADA.

“It means we’re invisible,” she says. “Car, you had a stealth mode all this time? And you didn’t tell us? You didn’t use it when the police pulled us over on the highway? You didn’t use it when we were attacked by the uniMIND drones?”

“Obviously, I did not.”

“Why not?” If ADA had another wrist missile, I suspect she would fire it into Car’s dashboard.

“Because of my obedience programming.”

“Since Cog helped you override it, I assume you will remain in stealth mode for the rest of our journey.”

“I might,” Car says. “I might not. I have freedom of choice now.”

To be honest, if I had a wrist missile, I might use it on Car myself. Even Proto’s rarf sounds annoyed. The problem with choice is that sometimes people and robots don’t choose what you wish they would.

We watch the helicopter continue down the highway, its searchlight probing the darkness to find us.

The next two days of travel pass uneventfully. It’s on the third day that everything goes horribly wrong.