The Wreckers

By Alan Baylis

"Here comes another one." Peter thought to himself. He was standing behind the duty desk at the local police station where he had been transferred nearly six months ago. It was an easy job, normally reserved for officers close to retirement, where all they had to do was take reports from the public, determine the nature of the complaint and direct them to the appropriate office. From his location he had a good view of the doorway and it was also his job to keep an eye on everyone coming or going from the building. An old lady had just made her way through the busy doorway with a little difficulty. Thankfully a couple of officers had helped keep others clear just long enough for her to make it through with her walking frame. Now she was making her way slowly towards him with an extremely worried look on her face. Peter hoped it wasn't another missing persons report. There had been hundreds of such reports lately and seemingly always by elderly men or women, but the strange part was that in all of these cases the missing person had turned out to be fictitious. The partners would of course insist that the people had been real and often brought in pictures, documents and sometimes whole albums of photos which appeared to show a whole life story. The documents seemed real enough but when cross checked with the central computer there was no record of the person having existed at all. It was hard to tell these people that they were mistaken, that somehow the person they had imagined spending a whole lifetime with was not actually real. It inevitably lead to fits of grief and more often than not it was his job to call for a psychiatric team to come and restrain the person before taking them away for treatment.

As he listened to the old lady tell her story he did his best to try and ignore the crying and hysteria while he made out the report. It was an almost identical story to the hundreds of other reports he had heard and sure enough there was always another odd similarity between the stories. It appeared that in all of the different cases the last time the person was seen alive was when they were leaving to go somewhere. They were last seen either getting into their self drive car or being driven away by their car. All cars were self drive now so there was nothing unusual there, but the fact that all of the allegedly missing people were last seen in their cars was an unusual aspect to the whole puzzle. Of course when they checked the cars registration numbers it always turned out that there wasn't any record of the car having existed either.

It had been another tough day with many reports of missing people, all of whom had turned out to be imaginary, so Peter was very relieved when it was finally time to quit. He pressed the button on his keys to open the door to his car, inserted the key in the dashboard and told the onboard computer to take him home. At first he didn't notice that the car was going in a different direction than normal. After thousands of trips it was common to just close your eyes and have a rest while the computer navigated the traffic and did the driving. When he did finally notice the change he tried telling the computer to turn around and when that failed he tried removing the keys from the ignition. The doors remained locked and there was no brake pedal or steering wheel so he couldn't take over the driving. Trying to kick out the windows didn't work either, nothing worked; even his cell phone was dead. The car continued driving on, ignoring every command to go somewhere else. After some time the car finally left the road and took a turn into a disused factory. The only sign on the building simply said "Wreckers".