Unfolding (part I)

***

Wednesday morning tasted of stale coffee and metal. Nothing about the day suggested anything unusual — except Adrian’s irritability. The ventilation fan in his secluded house had lurched to life and rattled him awake; he lay for a moment, ears ringing with the steady whine, then fumbled out of bed to slap the switch off. His summer dreams dissolved like smoke as he swung his legs over the mattress and padded across the cold floorboards.

Better to start work early: scan the overnight reports, schedule the boring follow-ups, then erase it all with a pint — Wednesday beer, he told himself, as he opened his work email. The viewer interface glowed a clinical, washed-out gray; the interface’s sterile light made the apartment feel smaller, the weekday monotony heavier.

A single gull cried. Then the secure line bled into the room with a hard, insistent ring — the one reserved for transport engineers and accident experts. Adrian's jaw tightened. He had the habit of thinking the call would be about another stupid scrap of broken precision kit; it gave him something solid to grumble about.

“Good afternoon. Adrian speaking,” he answered, voice automatic but alert now.

“Adrian, this is — this is the case of the century. You need to get here ASAP. Request a copter energy credit and fly out — urgently,” Mikko’s voice came clipped and thin over the scramble of network compression.

Adrian’s stomach flipped. “What the hell happened?”

After a breath, Mikko said, “There’s been a death. A bloody accident on an almost empty road.”

The words hit the apartment like a gust of cold air. He felt the room tilt for a second, the big ceramic mug rattling in his kitchen sink.

“Okay — send coordinates. I'm on my way,” Adrian barked, forcing his tone back to business.

He was still groggy, eyelids thick, but the caffeine thin coffee waiting in the mug downstairs suddenly mattered less than getting moving. He snatched a pack of cigarettes and a thin toolkit from the hall shelf — set of lens , a multi-bit driver, a compact scanner — the small rituals that steadied him. He pulled on boots, shrugged into a jacket that smelled faintly of tobacco smoke, and locked the door behind him.

The drive from Landenpohja to Lahti was long enough for his thoughts to clear but not for the unease to dissipate. Morning snow clung to hedgerows and the glass of peripheral monitors; the landscape slid by in hilly, domesticated fields and the occasional pinetree forests. Traffic was light — the regional planning and population distribution policies had kept the main arteries unclogged — so he kept a steady pace. Through the windshield the road looked deceptively calm, an empty ribbon of tarmac promising nothing and possibly everything.

***

Lizzie had become obsessively preoccupied with her appearance and with staying young. After three hundred years of life, her mind was fraying at the edges. Assets, capital, and energy credits surrounded her like guardians — and, most intoxicating of all, the absence of familial responsibility. No children to answer to; no messy obligations. Thirty years earlier a reform had allowed citizens to retain voting privileges if their assets met a threshold, and Lizzie had been among the first to take advantage of the rule.

Beneath the surface, though, she nursed a single fanatic desire: to roll her body back to the beginning of life — to look twenty five or even younger again — but without the strain of painful procedures, or years of rehabilitation. She wanted youth as a consumer product: instantaneous, effortless, and socially acceptable.

At dawn she stood naked before an antique mirror, the glass rimed faintly with condensation from the bathroom. She lingered there, studying the barely noticeable hollows at her temples, the faint lattice of veins at her wrists, the patchy paleness of skin where age and indulgence had left marks. Today’s question was practical and performative: what to wear, how to present herself, what animal she intended to embody. Her public persona was brash and go-getting — theatrical in its hunger — but behind the bravado she regularly pushed illegal, near-lethal doses of gene therapy to sculpt that persona into reality.

Finally — the thing she'd been rehearsing for days - today would be a public show. She needed to arrive in Lahti early, before the event, to visit an old friend and gene therapist who was working on advanced life‑extension technology. The appointment was important: the summit featured many technology presentations, and one of the items being showcased was credited to both Lizzie and this therapist.

Her journey of a few hundred kilometres should been mechanically uneventful. The car’s limited driving AI and automatics removed the variable of human error; a copter would have constrained her movement in the city, so she’d left that option off the table. Glass and chrome reflected the pale morning as the vehicle ate up the kilometres: few service stops, coffee mugs, science and commercial reports, the steady hum of tires over watery tarmac. Nothing to worry about.

Yesterday had been consumed by fights with the Medical Circle — a phalanx of exasperated experts who had tried to curb her self-experimentation. The arguments had rattled her, but prescribed neurotransmitter modulators kept her moods from unravelling completely. Now her thoughts orbited the coming public appearance: the introductions, the cameras, the ritual applause. She had one trump card left in the debate over her gene therapy - an argument she believed would silence dissent — and she planned to use the event to press her advantage.

The summit itself was a new trade and engineering pact between the German and Finnish commercial clusters. Lizzie was a mandatory attendee by virtue of her holdings in German enterprises and her technology presentation. The official sessions bored her — bylaws, signatures, bland speeches — but the social hours afterward promised exactly the kind of staged spectacle she lived for: flattering lights, hungry faces, an audience to impress.

***

Nick Etalainen - a massive broad-shouldered dispatcher for the high-speed highways — sank into the control-room chair like any other morning, trusting the automation to hold the lanes steady. He let the silence wash over him, punctuated only by the soft susurrus of the ventilation and the distant hum of servers.

His twelve hour shift suited him tonight; the cooling quiet was a welcome refuge after another fight with his wife.

The Lahti County dispatch office monitored every highway artery and entrance in the region. Though the center was largely automated — like the thousands of control hubs scattered across the planet — human operators still sat shifts to handle the two to three percent of incidents that the algorithms couldn’t resolve. Human labor was expensive, but the cost of a mismanaged traffic disaster — stranded vehicles, cascading delays, financial losses for transport firms and builders — could be far higher.

Nick’s quiet enjoyment ended in an electronic klaxon: a rare incident demanding immediate human attention.

“Damn — what the ...” he muttered, jolted upright.

For a heartbeat he froze, still half in that meditative drift. Then the automation took over: incident data exploded onto the main screen, crisp and uncompromising — coordinates, vehicle details, sensor feeds, timestamps. Police and ambulance had already been dispatched; a tireless emergency drone was cutting through thick, falling snow toward the scene.

Within seconds Nick was buried in readouts, manuals, and step-by-step protocols as updated telemetry streamed in.

“Survival rate: zero... fatality confirmed,” he read aloud, voice hollow.

His palms slick, he initiated privacy protection protocols — reflexes honed by years of handling sensitive incidents.

“Not on my watch” his tired brain insisted.

Questions crowded him: Do I have to go? Who else can or even should? How did this happen? He toggled through checklists, sent urgent reports to transport services, summoned specialist teams. The system logged and redistributed the data; dispatched squads acknowledged.

Nick had hoped to remain invisible, to let the automation blur him into the background. But some incidents were too big to hide from. The facts were now out of the machine; what had happened was irreversible, and staying in the shadows felt suddenly impossible.

***

Adrian trusted the car’s automation and thumbed through the urgent update that had arrived mid-journey. The snowfall was thick, powdering the windshield and softening the landscape, but the regional crews had kept the main arteries passable; the trip was shorter than the weather promised. Warm airflow fogged briefly on the glass as the car glided over slushy tarmac.

He liked incident responses — not for the drama, but for the rhythm of work. Most incidents were painfully routine: a crushed bumper, a skittish driver, an afternoon of tow trucks and polite insurance statements. Those scenes made tidy television: engineers explaining a clever root cause, commentators blaming a human lapse. Fatalities were rare. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to a scene with confirmed deaths for years; the most recent fatality on his list had been a silent heart attack at the wheel, the ambulance few minutes too slow.

The automated console had painted the new incident in clinical detail: coordinates, vehicle telemetry, impact vectors, survival probability flagged at zero. The map tile pulsed a single cold pin where the empty road bent beneath low pines.

His car stood on the emergency shoulder beside a police vehicle, hazard lights stuttering like warning eyes. Snow clung to the wheel arches; frost traced the chrome. He stepped out into the clean, crispy air. Each breath burned slightly; the wind peeled across his face and tugged at his collar. The muted thump of distant traffic was a thin comfort.

He pulled his favorite battered fur hat down against the blast, feeling the familiar stiffness of the hat's leather material. His boots sank with a soft crunch into the packed verge. Around him, the automated drones droned faintly overhead, their navigation lights ghosting through the snowfall. He adjusted the toolkit at his belt, checked the compact scanner’s battery with a practiced flick, and headed for the bend where the map had marked everything that had gone wrong.

“Well, well, well — let’s take part in this creepy show ..." Adrian muttered under his breath.

“There isn’t much information, and what there is isn’t designated for our service. Specifically: today’s unlucky person is from Germany,” his thoughts continued.

He was interrupted when Mikko appeared out of nowhere and began reporting in his slightly booming northern accent.

“At the moment, all we know is that privacy protection protocols were triggered. The victim is Lizzie Wolters. I couldn’t get many details about her, but she looks very young — possibly a newborn,” Mikko said.

Adrian objected, “Hm ... so why a newborn?”

Mikko snapped in reply, “You know gene therapy is prohibited until age 35, and she looks too young to be 35 or older.”

“Guess this doesn't concern us, Mikko. Let’s focus on what we do best. Hell — we need to request permission to access the telemetry of this dawn car. Mikko, contact the manufacturer. Meanwhile I’ll work with a screwdriver and other tools, just to be part of this creepy show,” Adrian said, voice low against the wind.

Snow squealed against the car’s body as Mikko moved to follow instructions.

Adrian pried a telemetry module from the car’s driving AI unit and slipped it into his bag. No sooner had he done so than a small copter cut through the white out and representatives of the German Cluster landed nearby, rotors kicking up a flurry of powdered snow.

A lanky agent approached, his coat dusted with snow, voice clipped with a German accent and an orderly tone.

“Please hand over the telemetry media.” He seemed coldly composed, though his gloved hand trembled just enough to show the strain.

“We’re not in Germany, you know,” Adrian began, forcing a wry tone, but the agent cut him off without smiling.

“We have the necessary permissions,” the agent said, holding out a mobile terminal. Steam rose from his breath in the cutting air.

Adrian and Mikko took the device , fingertips numb as they checked signatures, certificates, and the terminal’s contents.

“Fine. Drone footage, highway sensors, and other records are yours,” Adrian said. “But car telemetry belongs to us. I don’t think the automakers union will accept a blanket ban on investigations involving their telemetry. You won’t get a copy without the proper warrant — we know our rights.”

“Okay, but you’ll receive orders about the data. Engineer — introduce yourself,” the German insisted, teeth briefly clenched against the cold.

“Porinen. You should have my ID;if you were issued broad permissions,” Adrian replied.

He grabbed Mikko’s arm and they hurried to his car, snow hissing under their boots.

“We need that data. Even if this clown’s right, nothing's simple here. This is a chance to learn — call Virta and tell her there’s work in Landenpohja today,” Adrian said as they shoved into the vehicle and shut out the wind.

“Nice — haven’t seen anything this intriguing in forty years,” Mikko said, voice thin with cold but bright at the same time.

“Then go on, my friend,” Adrian said, and they drove back to the city of Landenpohja through a highways blurred by falling snow flakes.

Adrian’s mind already sketched accident models, hunting engineering flaws and human-factor errors. There wasn’t much room for error: the driving AI was a mature, well tested system. Still, the agent's timing — arriving precisely while the module left the car - and the way they’d staged their approach in the storm suggested they’d been waiting on that corner for a reason, or at least it felt that way. The cold bit at his neck and the world narrowed to his curious mind and the data on the telemetry module in his bag. Those small, tense details made his pulse climb.