Short Fiction

The Hitcher’s Wife

They should look me in the eye

It was not a mad world, just a different one. Only serial killers drove personal cars and hitchhiked now. Normal people, or sheep as my husband liked to call them, took the train or the government buses that self-drove and self-checked if you had a ticket. Government-approved transportation was always safe because the penalty for any transgression was death.

No ticket? Death.

Insulting the AI-assisted driver? Death.

Stealing another passenger’s phone? Death.

At first, people had been against such drastic measures, but after a few dozen deaths, they had gotten used to it and learned to appreciate the “safest means of transportation ever co-designed by people and machines.”

The laws were simple and easy to understand. People liked that. Only lawyers enjoyed rebarbative rules and their thousands of corollaries and exceptions. But lawyers weren’t welcome in our modern world, at least not on government-approved public transportation.

Debating, criticizing, or arguing about the new public transportation code while on government-approved vehicles? Death.

My husband was a law professor and had accurately predicted these changes. Not so much because of his exceptional analytical mind but because the government had hired him to write the new laws.

It had been a simple job.

Most of his colleagues refused to listen and kept practicing law. The same thing happened to writers in the twenties. They couldn’t accept AI was better than them and kept publishing inane poetry and disingenuous memoirs, pretending only they had a voice that readers emotionally related to. Soon, the only readers left were other human writers.

Nothing more than an echo chamber.

My husband rejected that idea and drastically changed his career. He became a serial killer. “There’s no better way to become a lawless.”

It was a new world where roads were both the safest and the most dangerous they had ever been. Machines protected the collective, but the individuals were left to fight for their lives.

Low-profile criminals were quickly killed or redeemed. The statistics of the central bureau estimate that 32% of them became model citizens during the Year of the Change. A footnote mentions machines completely revised their human behavior predictive models after this because the first estimate had been 31.7%, and the additional 0.3% was way beyond the acceptable margins of error.

After the Change, serial killers were the only people left on the roads.

My husband chose to drive, and I opted for hitchhiking. I became known as the hitcher’s wife because I always told the drivers someone had picked up my husband a few minutes before after we had decided to split to make the hitchhiking easier.

It didn’t matter how weird or improbable my story was; they barely listened to me, too much focused on my cleavage. That’s how I got them. They always tried to rape me before killing me. It might work with the average sheep, but if your victim is a serial killer herself, not so much.

Of course, I made a mistake one day.

I mixed up our schedules and hitchhiked on my husband’s chosen road. He saw me and offered me a ride because that was his rule. I accepted and got in because that was mine. He made love to me but didn’t have the strength to give me the happy ending I craved.

The sheep say our modern world is lonely, but my loneliness is killing them, not me.

I used one of Philip Ogley’s stories to kickstart mine. I recommend you read it:

I also recommend you read more of his stories, but if you’re a gourmet, read mine first. Gourmets always save the best for last.

Smillew is a professional hitcher. He hitches for money on ko-fi, and teaches hitching on Substack.