The simulation’s initial frame showed the gray silhouette of a 2033 Toyota Phase sedan with a marker caption phrased in red, “Mondo: Manual Override Without Proper Certification.” Briefly touching the virtual right arrow button, Gomez was rewarded with this extra information on a pull-down menu: “Illegal Passing Without Signal; Speeding 10-20 Miles Above Posted Limit.” When Chen pressed the “Resume” virtual button, the sedan repeatedly changed lanes and sped up to 70 mph between vehicles. The simulation automatically stopped when one variable changed in the marker caption: “Mondo: Traveling in a Shoulder/Emergency Lane.” It was at this point just 20 seconds before the time of impact when it went off again, pointing to the same silver sedan silhouette on the left shoulder of the Upper Deck of the Capital Beltway, Outer Loop, indicating his speed was even faster. Chen tapped the 3-D button image again to proceed to the next variable change. About 4.7 seconds before impact, another caption appeared, in yellow, above a silver silhouette of a 2037 Toyota Madrigal SUV turning its wheels into the left shoulder, which read, “Henderson: Sleeping While Controlling an Automatically Driving Vehicle.” Zooming in, they saw the soft purple silhouetted male figure with a ‘Z’ in a cloud caption within his leaning head. The “cloud-Z” was at that time, the international symbol for sleeping, no longer delegated to the Sunday Online cartoons, so this was in no way a lack of tactfulness on the part of the original programmer.
“Sorta’ enough blame to go around,” said Officer Chen.
“My initial thoughts,” said Officer Gomez. At this point their only duty was to see if there were any charges to file other than minor traffic violations. The Commonwealth Attorney couldn’t charge a dead person with his own homicide, and Mr. Henderson couldn’t be charged with what his automatically controlled vehicle had done in response to his dozing off because legally, that was a legitimate reason to be in the shoulder. All automatic vehicles were considered “uncontrolled” when the driver was asleep and were mandated to pull out of traffic as quickly as possible. Though falling asleep during autodrive was a traffic violation, in Virginia, it was never a legal cause of an accident.
“Finish to make sure,” continued Gomez, “’Wonder how those two, in the SUV, each got such nasty head blows.”
The SUV was still in the process of pulling into the shoulder, when, a few frames later, the female passenger jiggles the shoulder of the driver but unfortunately it was too late. The SUV was in the way of Mondo’s sedan resulting in a 103 mph impact. The male driver in the sedan did not have his seat belt on and paid the fatal price immediately.
A few frames later, both officers’ jaws dropped as the answer to Gomez’s question appeared. A four-foot-long wooden beam ,loosely placed atop of two pieces of luggage came over the captain’s chairs at a velocity approximately 40 miles per hour and landed squarely on both victims, impacting exactly the same place on both of their heads: the place where the spinal cord meets the brain, before falling back behind the front seats onto the floor. Fortunately it was not enough to be immediately fatal, because the medical team was able to get to them very fast.
This 2×4 culprit was the last-minute packing idea from Ken, and surplus material from his son’s playground set for Ken and Karen’s grandchildren. Ken just wanted to take it off his son’s hands because his son had no wood chipper, which was the only way one could dispose of untreated wood and un-recyclable yard waste in Maryland. Paper was no longer made from wood but plastics, which were always recycled by nanobots from everyone’s trash. In Virginia, where Ken and Karen lived, there were all kinds of places to use wood.
Officer Gomez reached for his Rosary, dangling from his rear-view mirror, and did the old familiar Sign Of The Cross.