But he had, in a way, thought Karl, climbing helplessly back into the driver’s seat. It didn’t matter how much he felt like the big guy, with Cruiz. How clever the AI he’d built, how impressive his work ethic. When confronted with an actual big guy – someone who could casually pay three hundred and fifty quid to be shuttled across the country like precious cargo by night; well, someone who could get his bloody handlers to pay for it, in fact – Karl was just a pair of hands on a steering wheel. He snapped the indicator on with such taut energy that he felt like the lever would come away in his hand. It flashed into his head that there was a story about a driver who’d wet himself at the wheel trying to get someone to Stansted on time. And the tip – this was the punch line, this was why it did the rounds – the tip was a fiver. Was that what Karl had become, despite everything he’d achieved, thought he’d achieved? Someone who would basically soil himself for the price of a pint, if someone more important told him to?

No. Karl squeezed the pedal down, watched the numbers climb. Enough of this. This was not the moment for introspection. It wasn’t even the moment to fantasize about turning around, scooping up the guy’s stupid hat and his headphones and just posting them out of the window. It was about mind over matter, now; it was about nothing but the present. If the guy was going to treat Karl like a machine, then he would be a machine, just for now. His brain could be disengaged; his cramping body could be ignored, from second to second. Karl could look after himself. He was just going to have to pray, to God or whoever else was there, that someone else was looking after James until he could take over.

*

Karl found his brain doing much what Cruiz’s software was designed to do: finding optimum pathways, pairing users with desired outcomes. Karl was its user and it had identified that what he needed were memories of the many times he had been a positive force in James’s life. As a result, as they whittled away the distance from here to the drop-off – Newcastle 34, Newcastle 22, said the signs – Karl’s brain played on a loop the scene that did him the most credit. It had been two weeks after Michaela had moved out of the flat, seemingly gone mad in fact, disappeared to Germany, telling James she didn’t want to be together any more. Not as a couple, not as business partners. Karl had been driving up and down like a blue-arsed fly for the whole period; he hadn’t taken seriously the extent of the problem until James left a voicemail. He’d known without needing to listen to it that something was up, properly up.