“Excuse me,” I said, and then, louder again, “Excuse me!”
My Uber driver reached over to turn down the radio, and then said, “Yeah?”
“I think we’re going the wrong way,” I said. “Look, I put in my home address as the destination, but you’re going north. I live two miles south of here. We’re getting farther away.”
We stopped at a red light, and my driver tapped at his phone in its cradle to check his map. “Ah,” he said, “there’s your trouble, missy, you’ve selected the Dark Uber option. Overrides your destination and takes you somewhere else instead. Somewhere you really don’t want to go.”
I stared, dumbstruck, down at my own phone screen. The inverted colors of the Dark Uber logo flashed unnaturally back up at me. The destination read YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE.
Was I really so out of it to have accidentally selected it? Or were there more sinister forces than my ADHD at work here?
The silver Prius sped on into the night, with me as its captive occupant. The driver was whistling a tune that laid itself discordantly over the Top 40 still piping from the radio, forming strange harmonies.
“If wherever I’m going is so bad,” I said, “why are you so willing to take me there? You seem like a nice enough guy.”
“It’s the pay, ain’t it?” said my driver “The rates are double, triple a regular ride. And I’ve got a family at home to support.”
“I see,” I said.
“I’m sorry, I really am,” said my driver. “Not much I can do. What’s done is done. I’ll tell you, I’m looking forward to the drop off about as much as you are. It’s a terrible sight. Oh, there are some things I wish I could forget…. But I shouldn’t be telling you this. No, you’ll find out soon enough.”
I thought for a moment, and then said, “So how many of you drivers do this route?”
“Oh, about two dozen of us, at last count,” said my driver conversationally. “We’ve got a meet-up, once a week. If you’re going to be spending your days ferrying innocent souls to their undeserved doom, you’ve got to be able to have a drink about it with the boys, otherwise you’ll go crazy.”
“Right,” I said. On my phone screen, an awful black was creeping in at the edges of the map as we drew closer to my ultimate destination. “Listen, do you know where you picked me up from?”
In his rearview mirror, I saw my driver frown as he tried to remember. “Near the library, right?”
“It was a union hall,” I said. “Look, here’s my card—” and I passed up to the driver’s seat my business card, with its official-looking IWW logo. He took it and glanced at it, then back to me in the mirror, confused.
“You’re being exploited, do you know that?” I said.
“I am?”
“This work is obviously psychologically damaging,” I said. “I bet you don’t get any paid time off at all.”
“No,” said my driver slowly. “No, we don’t…”
“And you’re feeling undervalued,” I added.
“Well I don’t know about that,” said my driver unsteadily, but I barreled on. We were only a mile or so away now, according to my phone. I didn’t have much time. “There’s strength in numbers,” I said. “And you’re obviously a valued class of employee. Essential to their bottom line. Doing the work nobody else wants to. If you let me go, I— I can help you and the rest of the Dark Uber drivers organize. Stage walkouts. Make demands. I do this for a living, I swear, I can help you.”
My driver was silent.
“And I can help get you health insurance,” I added desperately. “For you and your family.”
“You really think you could do all that?” he said, at length.
Less than a half mile away now. My phone screen had started to emit a smell of burned metal and ozone.
“Yes,” I said, “oh, yes, I absolutely could, if there’s anyone that can help you it’s me, I’m an organizer, professionally, I’ve helped reporters, baristas, truck drivers…”
The car reached an intersection. Straight ahead, on the dark road, I could see something huge and dark, a great emptiness, just as if a giant mouth had taken a bite out of the air and left a throbbing hole, a vast and hungry nothing, and it was waiting, it was ready, it wanted me—
My driver put on his blinker, and then turned left, away from the awful sight that was to have been the end of me, and back towards the lights of the town.
“I’m taking you to the Red Horse,” said my driver, “there’ll be some of the boys there, and you can tell us more about this organizing business.”
I slumped back against the seat, breathing deeply. “Thank you,” I said, “oh, thank you so much—”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, and I smiled weakly, but then he went on: “But don’t think this gets you off the hook, either. It’ll come for you eventually.”
“Oh.”
“I just hope until it waits until after we’ve got that paid vacation thing figured out.”