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DAY ONE

But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.

—CHARLES DARWIN, in a letter to a friend, 1861

CHAPTER ONE

Abbott

Abbott Coburn had spent much of his twenty-six years dreading the wrong things, in the wrong amounts, for the wrong reasons. So it was appropriate that in his final hours before achieving international infamy, he was dreading a routine trip he'd accepted as a driver for the rideshare service Lyft. The passenger had ordered an early-morning ride from Victorville, California, to Los Angeles International Airport, a facility Abbott believed had been designed to make every traveler feel like they were doing it wrong.

He rolled up to the pickup spot—the parking lot of a Circle K convenience store—to find a woman sitting on a black box, one large enough that she probably could've mailed herself to her destination with the addition of some breathing holes and a piss drain. It had wheels, and she was rolling herself back and forth a few inches in each direction with her feet, working out nervous energy. The millions of strangers who would become obsessed with that box in the coming days would usually describe it incorrectly, calling it everything from a "footlocker" to an "armored munitions crate." What the woman was actually sitting on was a road case, the type musicians use to transport concert gear. This one was covered in band stickers, a detail that would have been inconsequential in a rational society but would turn out to be extremely consequential in ours.

Abbott rolled down the window and braced himself, doing his usual scan for reassuring signs that the passenger is Normal (he'd developed a sixth sense for the weirdos who, for example, wanted to sit in the front). The woman on the box wore green cargo pants and a dazzling orange hoodie that looked to Abbott like high-visibility work gear. Though, if she were on the job, the bosses weren't strict about the dress code: She wore a faded trucker cap that said, welcome to the shitshow. Below that was a pair of oversize sunglasses with lime-green plastic frames and, below that, smeared lipstick that looked like it had been hurriedly applied in the dark. Her hair was short enough that it appeared to have been buzzed without a mirror while driving down a bumpy road. It did not occur to Abbott that all of this would be an excellent way to thwart security cameras and facial recognition software.

Abbott, his nervous system already hovering a finger over its big red Fight-or-Flight button, asked, "You got the Lyft to LAX?"

He was hopeful she'd say no, but there was no one else in the vicinity aside from a rail-thin man by the tire air machine having a tense argument via either Bluetooth or psychosis.

"Oh my god," said the woman on the box, "I have a huge favor to ask you. HUGE. I am in so much trouble with my employer."

She removed her green sunglasses as if the situation had become much too serious for such eyewear. Her eyes were bloodshot, and Abbott thought she'd either been recently smoking weed or recently crying, though he knew from personal experience that it was possible to do both simultaneously. He was now absolutely certain that the favor she was about to ask was going to be illegal, impossible, or just a string of nonsense words. He wasn't sure how to respond without accidentally agreeing, so he just stared.

"Okay," she said, after realizing it was still her turn to talk. "Yes, I ordered a trip to LAX, but in the time I've been waiting, I found out that's not going to work. This is a big problem. BIG problem."

Her voice was shaky, and Abbott decided that she had, in fact, been crying. He instantly sensed two opposing instincts in his brain quietly begin to go to war with each other.

"This box I'm sitting on?" she continued. "The guy who hired me has to have it by Monday, the Fourth of July. I can't ship it, because I can't let it out of my sight—I have to stay with it, wherever it goes. And I can't fly, for reasons that would take all day to explain. Now, I'm going to ask you a question. It's going to sound like a hypothetical or a joke, but it's an actual question. Okay? Okay. So, how much would you charge to drive me to Washington, DC?"

Abbott took a moment to make sure he'd heard her right before replying, "Oh, that's not something you can do in a Lyft; the maximum trip is only—"

"No, no. You'd clock out of your app or however you do it. I'm asking you, personally, as a citizen with a beautiful working car—what is this, an Escalade?"

"A, uh, Lincoln Navigator. It actually belongs to—"