The Passengers(90)
‘That’s what worries me.’
Chapter 62
Libby and Nia held on to the handrails adjacent to the train doors, giggling and steadying themselves as it pulled into Birmingham’s New Street Station.
Libby stretched out her arms and wrapped them around Nia, pulling her in close as she hugged her friend goodbye. ‘Thank you for coming with me,’ said Libby. ‘And thank you for listening to me moan yet again. I don’t know how I’d have coped in the last few months without you.’
‘Ah, hush your mouth. You’re drunk.’
‘A little, but I mean it. You’re an amazing friend.’
‘And don’t you ever forget it,’ Nia smiled. ‘And remember what I said about he who shall not be named. You need to start clearing that boy out of your head. The sooner he goes, the sooner you’ll meet someone who deserves to be with you. Promise me?’
‘I promise.’ Libby hugged her friend again before the train doors beeped, opened and the two went their separate ways.
She took her phone off airplane mode and thirty-plus messages appeared from friends and co-workers congratulating her on wiping the floor with Government spokesman David Glass. As Libby had predicted, the video had gone viral.
The fifty-minute high-speed train journey from London to Birmingham had been an uneventful one, with just two requests for photographs as Nia and Libby took up residence at the onboard bar. By the time they reached the city, it was still only the early evening but dark. And Libby was somewhere in between woozy and drunk. Nia had been just the tonic she needed, even if it meant waking up with a hangover tomorrow morning. Preparing for the inevitable, she stopped off at a kiosk to buy a bottle of water and a packet of aspirin before walking home to clear her head.
As Libby made her way through the outskirts of the city centre, she was pleased to see people driving vehicles again and not vehicles driving them. The hijacking’s aftermath had seen a sharp upturn in demand for Level Two and Level Three cars and use of city bikes had also skyrocketed. Humans were no longer such slaves to technology.
David Glass had been correct about the damage inflicted upon the British economy with the suspension of Level Five production. The concept was also losing billions in foreign sales as countries put a halt on purchasing or further developing the concept for the time being. It wouldn’t last as progress and technology were inevitable but at least the future would be more transparent. And while Libby might never completely warm to autonomous vehicles, she believed that when in the right hands, the pros of AI outweighed the cons.
As the face of TIAI, Libby occasionally took the brunt of unwanted attention. She and her fellow campaigners were blamed by disgruntled out-of-work employees for contract cancellations, reduced hours and incomes. Earlier that evening, when a scruffy, bearded man bumped into her on the train and knocked her handbag to the floor, she feared he might be acting on threats made against her. However, he shuffled off without a harsh word or an apology.
But each time she doubted the courage of her convictions, she recalled the black smoke rising across Birmingham’s horizon as driverless cars collided with one another. It was her duty to ensure nothing like that could ever happen again.
Libby drank from her water bottle and carefully made her way down the floodlit steps to the canal towpath. She clicked on an app on her phone linked to the seven cameras inside and outside her house that her father had insisted they installed. Soon after the hijacking, the paparazzi took up residence outside her gated community, hiding in parked cars with blacked-out windows and inside rooms rented from a handful of less than scrupulous neighbours. On every occasion, Libby refused to talk to the snappers or to act on their vile insults as they tried to goad her. Eventually, she wore identical outfits each time she left the house when she learned that publications weren’t interested in printing pictures of celebrities wearing the same clothes, day in, day out. To the reader, it looked like old news. The paparazzi gradually began to leave her alone.
Her watch began to vibrate. Her mum had left her a video message and she pressed play. ‘Hi Libs, are we still okay to come up this weekend?’
Libby recorded one of her own and sent it. ‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Let me know which train you’re catching and I’ll come meet you. Love you. x’
As two cyclists raced past her under the bright white streetlights, she recalled how another consequence of the hijacking was reconnecting with the estranged parents she had virtually shut out of her life. When reporters besieged her home, they had insisted she stayed with them in Northampton. And despite having spent much of the last decade avoiding the family home because of the memories associated with her brother’s death, she was too sapped of energy to protest.
For years, she couldn’t understand why her parents hadn’t sold the house where their eldest child had ended his life. She had hated that everything in Nicky’s bedroom remained unchanged, even down to the bedsheets he’d last slept on. It wasn’t as if they were awaiting his return from a school trip.
It was only when she confronted her fears and spent time under their roof that she understood by running away she had been denying herself the opportunity of forgiveness. Libby blamed herself for his death – she had been the one with whom he had spent much of his time; the one he could talk to with unabridged honesty about his feelings of despair. And Libby had been the one who had so wanted to believe he was managing his depression that he was ready to return home from his last admission to hospital. He had died on her watch; it was her fault.