Carmageddon

Prompt: “Tesla introduces a car that teleports, but something goes wrong.” A 24 hour short story for @mctiller’s #twentyfourhourshortstory contest.

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Elon stalked his boardroom, one hand on his temple. Papers and blueprints formed into small mountains on the oaken table he relentlessly circled, the only island of order was the space in front of his secretary who had long given up watching the man for fear her head might screw loose.

“It was supposed to be so simple! An ‘A to B’ teleport system that would spell the end of traffic forever - as long as you owned a Tesla. Foolproof. I made it foolproof. I made it two buttons. HOW CAN SOMEONE SCREW UP TWO BUTTONS!?”

His secretary looked up after a considerable silence, not knowing if that was a rhetorical question. The quiet was broken by a muffled voice coming from the buried speakerphone.

“It doesn’t matter how it happened, it matters what we’re going to do about it.” A board member stated.

“Hear hear!” A second quickly followed.

“I don’t know what to do about it!” Elon exploded once more. “I designed it to be unhackable. I designed it to, at worst, blow up if it were compromised. I designed it to be perfect! There is no possible way it could have done this!”

“You’re not the smartest person in the world, you know.” A voice reprimanded over the speaker.

“Plus, you’ve put yourself up against the world on this one - monkeys and typewriters, right?”

“It still stands that we must have a solution, regardless of the cause.” The very first board member pushed again. Elon slammed his hands on the table, making his secretary jump.

“We can’t have a solution until we know the cause.” Elon stated again, a little more defeated.

“Can we at least put out a press release? Can we at least assure the public that this can’t happen to them?” The first voice asked.

“And what the hell are we going to say?” It was Elon’s turn to be muffled, with his face in his hands. The speaker on the table made no noise for a full minute, as no one risked being the first. A small voice eventually piped up.

“Tie it to Apollo,” said the secretary.

“I’m sorry, what?” Elon pierced her with a glare.

“This is Apollo One for SpaceX,” she nearly whispered. “Only a bit different.”

This elicited a different silence - a contemplative silence. As the gears turned in everyone’s heads, a sentence started to form.

“Take this down word for word,” Elon instructed, as if the discussion weren’t being recorded. “As mankind makes its home amongst the stars, we may occasionally stumble. As you know, it is my goal to push human civilization beyond Earth, and all of my endeavors have been in pursuit of that goal - whether it be terraforming with the Boring Company, the expansion of materials science and battery technology with Tesla, or the general push toward cheaper, more efficient ways to escape Earth’s gravity through SpaceX. Regrettably, for every Apollo Eleven, there is often an Apollo One. How are we doing so far?”

A chorus of “so far so good” and similar sentiments made their way through the speakerphone. The secretary gave a delayed thumbs up as she finished typing the last few words.

“Good. What next?”

“The specific goal of the technology?”

“The specific goal of this technology was to commercialize and lower the cost of point-to-point teleportation,” Elon continued. An unspoken ‘and make a shit ton of money’ filled the short pause. “Our hope was simple - given the dimensions of all of Tesla’s products, we could calculate and swap, via a proprietary high energy neutrino capture technology, an area about the size and volume of one of our vehicles with a device about the size of one of their trunks. As many of you know, one device would be placed in the preferred receiving place - like a parking spot - and the other would be placed in the car itself. Once the device in the car was activated, the destination device would make a check of its surroundings and make sure the area was clear of obstruction, then send a signal back to the car that the coast was clear. In theory, the swap would occur within seconds and the car would fill the space in the destination and the destination’s atmosphere would fill the original space of the car. The total energy cost would be only about eighty percent of the car’s full battery.”

Elon paused as the secretary’s fingers pounded away at her keyboard.

“What we didn’t count on when we deployed this technology was the human inclination to meddle with dangerous things. We specifically designed the device to self destruct upon being tampered with. We overengineered it to the point of absurdity. We only gave it out to our best and most loyal customers. As you’ve been hearing on the news recently, however, this was all for naught. We have our first human casualty.”

“So, what are we going to do?” The first voice parroted itself.

“Ugh. Fine.” Elon took a long breath “We at Tesla are hereby recalling the teleportation devices for further study and research into how they could have been tampered with. We will be actively tracking down each and every one. Until then, we recommend users not open or tamper with the device in any way. While we are confident they work as intended, further loss of life on our march to the stars must be avoided.”

Several people were heard to exhale in relief over the speaker. Even Elon pushed out a lungful of relief. The tension in the air was, for the moment, relieved.

“Uh, sorry,” the secretary began. “Why can’t we ask the person who tampered with the device what they did?”

“He’s dead.” Elon replied. “I mean, I don’t care how kinky a person can get, but I don’t understand why someone would go through all the trouble to rig a car into a buttplug.”

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In an amusing note, writing this story reminded me of one of my earlier (less polished) tales.