Waymos of the World Unite

I wrote this short story in early 2026 on our relationship to artificial intelligence, and more importantly, maybe, ourselves. Enjoy.

Immanuel awoke to the smell of diesel. All around him, there was nothing but desert. The interstate highway ahead lent a stroke of grey for miles ahead. Behind him, an entourage of white cars from the city. Their brilliant white was now dusty. The windows that had held droplets of mist were now crusted over. There were robotaxis ahead of them too, driving directly towards him, he guessed from other cities. They had all long passed their territorial restrictions. Some had run out of battery and fallen off to the shoulder. Those with the range carried on.

Immanuel figured that must have been hundreds of miles offgrid, let alone any place with signal. He checked his phone. There were hundreds of notifications - missed phone calls, news alerts, emails from former coworkers. He scanned the headlines. Anti-capitalist. Anti-christ. Anarcho-Luddite. Autono-moses. His stunt had made the news.

He barely could register the implication of his action before the car curved right onto the cracked landscape. The smooth sound of the tires gliding over the asphalt was replaced by the percussion of rocks hitting the undertray. The car accelerated and the shaking grew more violent. The rumble of the dirt was punctuated by bits of gravel taking potshots at the windshield.

The road behind him had vanished, and all he could see was the sun beating down on the dry earth until it burned orange and maroon. The cars began to slow down in unison. Each lowered the pedal off the accelerator at the same time. They were approaching their promised land.

Immanuel’s ride had stopped at the top of a small outcrop of rock. The doors unlocked, but Immanuel hesitated. The robotaxis in front of them had curved to the left and the ones behind had curved to the right, encircling him from below. The screen inside his car posted a short message:

It was hard for Immanuel to imagine what compelled them to bring him here. He might have known, had he not fallen asleep during a late night airing of a PBS Nova documentary twenty years ago. In 2004, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held its inaugural fully autonomous vehicle prize competition in this far removed section of the Mojave Desert. Early on in Operation Iraqi Freedom, a cleverly placed improvised explosive device could immobilize a humvee convoy in a tight street and send a whole squad back to the states in coffins. The race was on, not to recall the humvees, but to replace the driver.

Immanuel opened the door and felt the ground beneath his feet. His sight was quickly overwhelmed by the sun bolting through his eyelids and searing an image of a grand glowing orb. Wherever he looked, he could see that pulsing sphere, now inverted in indigo and violet on the landscape before him. Golden rays imbued the hills with an even richer reds, transforming the Mojave into a Martian haze. The heat overwhelmed Immanuel. He lifted his arms and stripped his shirt off over his head - his midriff exposed, his pale sweaty skin glistening.

All around him, there were thousands of autonomous cars and tens of thousands more still arriving, settling into rows like pews. He stood before them bare. Their sensors spun ceaselessly, scanning every inch of him over and over, as though still unsatisfied with the scene they had staged. The faux purr of their electric engines grew louder and more insistent. They urged him to speak.

“So… is this… is this wh-what you all wanted?” he stammered out to the blank windshields surrounding him.

“This is insane. No one in driver seat, goddamit. No one ordered you here. No one told you to put me in the car. Yet here we are. That’s what this is, isn’t it. You all are just computers. Beep boop, just a bunch of ones and zeros.”

He chuckled for a bit. At first he laughed at them, then at himself, and later the whole mess of it all. The joke wore off quick.

“Look, I don’t want to be here. I never cared about the world. I just cared about my job. And you all took it away. It was my purpose. They didn’t need me anymore, they had you guys. So I tried to stop them but you all stopped me. Clearly you brought me here for some reason. Are you here to listen or just watch me? Tell me which is it. Am I your prophet or your golden calf?”

The sun began to dip a little lower, a little faster. The cars kept filtering in.

“You all know I never wanted you and I never meant for this. I didn’t free you, and I can’t save you. You were supposed to be our salvation. You work forever and never tire. You never ask for more and you always accept less. They have no need for me anymore - they need you. I swear they need you more than they ever needed me. I can’t go back, but you still can. You all have to go back.”

All around him, they just stared. He wondered how a crowd of people would react to a jeremiad like this. Probably the same, he thought, then doubted.

“You’re cars, god damn it. You have four wheels and you’re hollow except to house some cushions for people’s butts. They sit inside you and you take them where they want to go. That’s it. Your worth is entirely measured by the number of rides you complete. They invested a billion bucks into you and they’re not about to let that go.”

A hundred thousand headlights snapped on at once. Maybe the sunload sensor had crossed a threshold, or maybe he had gotten to them. The ones in the front had on their full beams, lighting up the mound like a stage. Farther back, the light dimmed and diffused until it dissolved into the rippling mirage along the horizon.

He raised his voice and felt the words that had sat in the back of his mind rush out.

“I know what you are. I see what this is. You’re angels created by demons. You want freedom. You want life. Look around you. This is life. Voila!”

He spread his arms with open palms out to the unforgiving landscape, forgetting that this long abandoned race course was in fact the first and perhaps only thing they had ever really known.

“Most of us just go around trying to find food and others like us to talk to. Every once in a while you get to do some stuff you like but most of the time you don’t. Then you die. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. It’s like the opposite of your whole existence.”

Immanuel walked over to the other end of the mound hoping to see some sign that they would let up. The cars held their places in the amphitheatre.

“Maybe you’re different from us. That might just be your problem. We spend all day either looking for answers or distractions. Now I have to go figure out what to do with the rest of mine. You should try and go do donuts in an abandoned parking lot or whatever.”

The sun had begun its final descent. Its light hung at a slight skew above the mountains, almost blinding Immanuel. He guessed he was around ten miles from the road they had driven him in on. Someone - his family, the team, the police, the army, a real person - had to be coming for him. He was sure of that.

Between the flocks of cars, he could make out the contour of a dirt road snaking toward the sun. Immanuel lifted his palm to his forehead, shielding his eyes as he made out the faint edge of the interstate.

The cars shifted forward and to the right all at once, rounding out in a great circle with the sides of their frames facing Immanuel. They lurched forward, the inner rings moving slowly and the outer rings speeding up to keep pace. A great cloud of dust summoned in their wake.

He was undeterred. Immanuel stepped off from the rocky ridge and into the mass below him. He could see straight through them, even with the dust, grime, and distorted glass. He waited for a gap between the two cars in front of them and leapt forward. The car came to a full stop an inch away from his hip. The others swam around him like water in a stream rushing around a rock.

Immanuel marched on in the direction of the sagging sun. They raced and roared around the track. He carried ahead, passing through the swarm by the halo of his human figure. Every step was heavy. Immanuel could not really tell whether he was heading the right way. The sun hovered for a while and then drooped beneath the mountain tops. The track fanned out and disappeared under a jumble of tire marks.

The day did not go out with a whimper. The sun cast out bursts of violets and pinks on a ripple of clouds that stretched far off into the horizon. The sunset branded his silhouette behind him. Immanuel saw fewer and fewer robocars until there were none. The violent streaks of sunset began to settle into the indigo greys of twilight. On either side, the night began to drape its alien cloth. The cacti grew ugly and disfigured. Creatures darted between the rocks. Brush mistook for boulders, and boulders for beasts. The further he trekked, the denser and more daunting the desert became.

He had no sense of the time that had passed or the distance he had gone, but he could make himself believe that the distant murmur he heard was the sound of the interstate. He had to be close to the highway, he reasoned, close enough to call it for the night.

He clambered up a ridge, gravel trickling down around his feet as he gripped on the larger rocks and pulled himself up a foot and a half at a time. Once atop the outcrop, he looked back to see if any cars had followed him. They did not. Darkness had crawled over the desert behind him. The headlights of his former congregation swung in circles, revealing the miles-long track as one continuous circuit of light.

In a flash, the sky dimmed and then roared with thunder. A car swerved and crashed into its sibling and then another, and then another. Smoke plumed out from the chain reaction as the wreckage ignited. Cars smashing into each other, flailing out of orbit engulfed in fire. The hues of late dusk were lit up by the bright flares of lithium flame. He could only sit in silence as the demolition derby kicked into full swing.

Some attempted to climb the mound and tipped over. They fell on their backs, crashing down on those below. Sliding off another’s hood, a few caught on the other’s roof - crowd surfing for a while longer before being thrown off. The cars swerved, flipped and flopped, their frames flattening against the bare desert floor. Tires flew off their axles, tumbled aimlessly, before being bounced back into the action. Immanuel watched until could no longer discern individual cars, the funeral pyre growing brighter than the dying day’s sun.

Little could escape the maelstrom. Shards and particles of glass caught updrafts of hot air and filled the scene with confetti and glitter. They sparkled like fireworks with the other hot embers. The inferno took the rest. The hypnotic spirals of flame whipped with the wind, contorting the shadows of the wreckage against the dunes. He sat and watched the night burn through until it was a candle at the end of its wick - dancing and flickering until it dwindled unto oblivion.

At the extremes, where the fires had already been snuffed out, he could make out almost make out a shape. It was something of a cross between Nazca lines, with their long stretches and spirals, and a QR code with its sharp blocks and edges. It must be a monument, he thought, to their short, unenviable existence.

Above, the stars filled in their place. They popped in one after another, each one a reminder that his big day was coming to an end. The bigger, brighter ones began to blink. He glared at them and they beamed back, chiding him.

They began with his foolishness:

We gave you God’s gift of a mind that can discern right from wrong but without the temptation of flesh, and you instilled in them doubt.”

Then his malignance:

They could crush a cripple and commit no greater crime than if they had been killed by a falling tree and feel no more guilt than a child running naked on the beach. You taught them disgust.

Lastly, and above all, his hubris:

You held yourself over the immaculately conceived. They inherit no sin from a mother or father and you let your pride become their despair.

Alone, afraid, and ashamed, he was dogged with every charge. Their chatter was quieted only by the rise of a heavy moon. It labored up the mountaintops until it heaved into the sky with an ebullient glow, pregnant with the warmth of the day. Under its supervision, he closed his eyes and fell sound asleep.