The Living Word

Tim gripped the phial around his neck, sobbing quietly as the coffin descended. His father was going to his final rest, ravaged at the end from years of smoking and drinking, one illegal and the other unwise. The sleek black coffin hit bottom in the traditional burial trench. It was new, hermetically sealed around his father's sterilized and quiescent corpus, the term for a hibernating body. It was an end-of-life decision he had not wanted, but the government had insisted. It was this or extract the brain and potentially be "woken up" at a future date as connected meat, or worse face being digitized. Tim didn't want to think about it.

The slurry of burial fluid followed with a whoosh, specifically geared to swell and fill the burial chamber with a load bearing and nearly impenetrable casing. It punctuated the ceremony and startled the pastor, a nice elderly Lutheran gentleman. His features betrayed a youth treatment or two, with the occasional odd reflection off of slightly differently patterned skin. Tim didn't want to think about that either. Several government men nodded to one another, tossing in some monitoring software to percolate down and fill any extra space. It would blossom on the surface later to constantly transmit its status.

He turned and strode carefully away, aware suddenly of the attention his necklace might attract. Buk was silent, as always, unless called. His car waited with the infinite patience only machine and stone possessed. No motion did it make until it knew he wanted to leave. It was that alien intelligence that disturbed him, always watching and anticipating his actions only when it determined he was earnest. Could it read him? That moment's thought must have transmitted as hesitation because the car didn't respond as he got closer. It was the same eery prescience that riders used to attribute to horses. It was a sensitivity to his silent communication. It felt more intrusive than he liked. The door finally popped open with a soft crisp chuff of air only when it knew he was going to get in.

Buk swayed silently, but Tim felt the odd motion and looked down. Buk was forming a pseudopod, a gesture that he knew by now meant something else had percolated that the living ink deemed an important association. A quick glance around, a squint at the untrustworthy and rather smug automobile, and he decanted it gently onto the dashboard, a flat expanse devoid of any control surface. It spread impossibly thin covering nearly a square foot after being in a container no more than one cubic centimeter in volume at most. It waited a moment and settled before beginning.

"In the beginning was the Word" it suddenly flashed.
"Yes, part of your Bible verses. What is the association. Clarify"
"The Word. Beginnings. History. Past. Danger."
"What? Wait... Association. What Association. Clarify."
"Danger. Past. Word. Beginnings."
This was new. Buk was a tempermental piece of literature to be sure, but usually there was at least a passage, a new piece of philosophy, a question or statement or unusual riddle. But never single words. Tim squinted and glanced around. Then he was jerked violently to the right. His automobile darkened the windows, and he could see flashing in reverse across the right side the words "CAUTION MANUAL PILOT NEAR COLLISION > REPORTING" briefly before another violent jerk was followed by the dull thump of some obstacle, or unbelievably, another car. The rather smug car for the first time seemed panicked, swaying violently as it registered surprise at being assaulted.

"Car, situation?" Tim tentatively asked. He never talked to it, and hesitated before he tried to give it a command. It startled him with rather large yellow letters earnestly flashing "PROTOCOL UNDEFINED> STATE DRIVE, STOP, DESTINATION"
It was panicking for some guidance. Buk had adhered as much as it could, but its shifting under the increasingly violent movement led Tim to try and coax it back into the phial. It required no coaxing at all and clung scrabblingly dragging its thinned bulk into the relatively safety of its container.

The car panicked again and flashed "PROTOCOL> " as a more violent collision than the first rocked the passenger compartment with a squeal. Unknown to Tim the outside had reconfigured to drop the now ruined wheel and attempt to cushion the passenger against what was going to be another violent impact. Tim scowled - "Clear windows. Avoid obstacles" he muttered hopefully. The darkened windows snapped clear as the car overrode its own safety settings in a final effort to comply, having been freed by the override command of an immediate pilot. Tim saw it - a sharklike huge trailer, usually for bulk overland destination delivery, bearing down on him with an intensity that said it was not wired but under direction. The car kicked in then with what it had been essentially afraid to do until now. The gripping surfaces squealed and the engine shunted every ounce of deliverable power into an explosive forward motion that put Tim unconscious and Buk somewhere in the vicinity of the small of his back.