Red sky met a flat horizon of dry salt and scrub as Sam tightened the lug nuts on his flatbed trailer. He didn’t look up when the truck pulled in behind him. He knew the sound of that engine: a late-model diesel with a rattling fan belt.

“You’re late,” Sam said, sliding the wrench into his back pocket.

“Traffic outside the terminal,” Sarah replied, stepping out of the cab. She wiped her forehead with the back of a gloved hand. “They’ve got three lanes closed for the automated freight lanes. Everyone else is squeezed into a single strip of asphalt.”

Sam stood up, his knees popping. He looked at the three heavy crates sitting on the back of Sarah’s truck. They were unmarked, painted a dull gray that looked like it would absorb light rather than reflect it. They weren’t heavy enough to sag the suspension, but Sarah had driven like they were made of glass.

“We moving these tonight?” Sam asked.

“No choice. The permit expires at midnight. If we’re caught on the secondary roads after that, the sensors will flag the load and we’ll have a drone over our heads in twenty minutes.”

They worked quickly. Sam used the hydraulic lift to transfer the crates to his trailer. He preferred his equipment old—pre-network, pre-tracking. It was manual, clunky, and reliable. He threw heavy nylon straps over the crates and ratcheted them down until the metal frames groaned.

“Where is the drop?” Sam asked, climbing into the driver’s seat of his own truck.

“Grid forty-two,” Sarah said, pointing her chin toward the north. “Past the old relay station. There’s a pit there. We leave the trailer. Someone else picks it up tomorrow.”

“You coming?”

“I’ll follow a mile back. Keep your lights on low.”

Sam pulled out onto the gravel road. The vibrations of the road traveled through the steering wheel into his palms. He liked the feeling. It was physical. Real. The world was becoming a series of signals and data points, but a truck hitting a pothole was a fact that couldn’t be argued with.

He drove for two hours. The landscape didn’t change much. It was a vast, flat expanse of nothingness. Occasionally, he saw the blinking red lights of a communications tower on a distant ridge, but otherwise, the world was dark.

About halfway to the grid, the radio in his dash crackled. It wasn’t Sarah. It was a rhythmic, clicking sound. He turned the dial, but the clicking followed the frequency. He shut it off.

His mirrors showed Sarah’s headlights, two pinpricks of yellow in the blackness. Then, they vanished.

Sam slowed down, tapping his brakes to signal. No response. He pulled the truck onto the shoulder, the tires crunching through brittle weeds. He waited. Five minutes passed. Then ten.

He reached for his flashlight and stepped out into the air. It was cold now, the heat of the day stripped away by the lack of cloud cover. He walked back toward where he had last seen her.

He found her truck three hundred yards back. It was idling in the middle of the road. The driver’s side door was wide open. The interior lights were on, casting a pale glow over the empty seat. Sarah’s phone was still in the charging cradle.

“Sarah?” he called out.

No answer. He checked the ground. There were no signs of a struggle, no skid marks, no footprints other than the ones Sarah had made when she stepped out. He looked into the surrounding scrub. The brush was too thin to hide a person for long.

He walked to the back of her truck. Nothing seemed out of place. He went back to her cab and checked the dash. The GPS was blank. Not just “no signal” blank, but “no software loaded” blank.

A sharp metallic clang came from the direction of his own trailer.

Sam turned, shining his light toward his truck. The beam hit the gray crates. One of the straps had snapped. It hadn’t frayed; it looked like it had been sliced by a razor. The crate it was holding had shifted. It was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, its corner digging into the wood of the trailer bed.

He ran back to his truck. He didn’t look for Sarah anymore. A primal instinct told him that Sarah was gone in a way that searching wouldn’t fix. He reached his trailer and grabbed the loose strap.

The crate was vibrating. It wasn’t a mechanical vibration, like a motor. It was a high-frequency hum that he felt in his teeth.

He reached out to push the crate back into place. As his hand approached the gray surface, the air around the crate felt thick, like pushing through water. He forced his hand forward.

His fingers touched the metal.

The world didn’t change, but his perception of it did. The truck, the road, and the stars didn’t go away, but they became secondary. He felt a sharp, cold sensation crawl up his arm. It felt like needles of ice under his skin. He tried to pull away, but his palm was stuck to the surface.

He looked at the crate. The gray paint was bubbling. Beneath the paint, there wasn’t metal. There was a flickering, shifting substance that looked like liquid television static. It was pulling at him. Not his body, but something deeper.

He kicked the side of the trailer, trying to use the leverage to tear his hand free. His boots slipped on the metal. He fell back, and for a second, he thought he was free, but the substance stretched like taffy, still connected to his skin.

He grabbed the wrench from his back pocket with his free hand and slammed it into the crate.

The wrench didn’t bounce off. It sank into the gray mass. The humming stopped instantly.

The tension snapped. Sam fell hard onto the gravel, his hand finally clear. He scrambled away from the trailer, breathing hard.

The crate was different now. The gray paint had settled, but the shape was wrong. It was no longer a perfect rectangle. It was slumped, like a melting block of wax. The wrench was gone, swallowed by the object.

Sam looked at his hand. There were no marks, no burns. But he couldn’t feel his fingers. He moved them, saw them twitch, but the sensation was gone. It felt like someone else’s hand was attached to his wrist.

He heard a sound behind him.

He turned. Sarah was standing ten feet away. She was standing perfectly still, her arms hanging at her sides.

“Sarah? What happened?”

She didn’t speak. She didn’t blink. She looked at him, but her eyes weren’t focusing on his face. They were looking at the crate.

“We have to go,” Sam said, moving toward her. “The load is compromised. We’re leaving the trailer and getting out of here.”

He reached for her shoulder.

When he touched her, she didn’t feel like a person. She felt like the crate. Her jacket was cold, and beneath it, her shoulder was hard as rock.

Sarah turned her head toward him. Her movement was jerky, like a film missing frames.

“The delivery is on schedule,” she said. Her voice was flat. It didn’t have her accent. It didn’t have any emotion at all.

“Forget the delivery,” Sam said, pulling back. “Look at you. Look at the truck.”

“The grid is four miles ahead,” she said. She started walking toward his truck. She didn’t walk like Sarah. She walked with a stiff, heavy gait, her feet hitting the gravel with more force than necessary.

She climbed into the driver’s seat of Sam’s truck.

Sam stood in the road, watching her. He looked back at her truck, still idling in the distance. Then he looked at the slumped crate on his trailer.

He realized then that the crates weren’t cargo. They were the drivers.

He watched his own truck pull away. The trailer swayed slightly, the broken strap flapping in the wind. Sarah, or whatever was wearing Sarah’s skin, steered the vehicle with perfect precision toward grid forty-two.

Sam looked at his hand again. The numbness was spreading. It was past his wrist now, moving toward his elbow. He tried to rub his arm, but he couldn’t feel the friction of his palm against his sleeve.

He walked back to Sarah’s idling truck. He climbed into the cab. He looked in the rearview mirror.

His eyes looked the same. His face looked the same. But when he tried to smile, the muscles in his cheeks didn’t respond the right way. His mouth moved in a slow, mechanical line.

He put the truck in gear. He didn’t go to grid forty-two. He turned the steering wheel, aiming the truck south, back toward the terminal.

As he drove, he watched the fuel gauge. He watched the oil pressure. He monitored the RPMs. He found he could calculate the exact distance to the next town based on his current speed and the friction of the tires. The numbers were clear in his head, bright and sharp.

He didn’t feel the cold anymore. He didn’t feel the vibration of the engine.

He passed a sign for a rest stop. He didn’t feel the urge to stop. He didn’t feel tired. He didn’t feel hungry.

He looked at his hand on the steering wheel. The skin was starting to turn a dull, matte gray. It looked like paint.

He wondered how many other trucks were on the road tonight. He wondered how many of them were heading to grids he had never heard of.

He reached the highway. The automated lanes were busy. Long lines of trucks moved in perfect unison, spaced exactly ten feet apart. They moved at seventy-five miles per hour, a long, metal snake cutting through the dark.

Sam merged into the line. He felt a click in his mind, a sense of alignment. The truck’s computer tried to interface with the network, and for the first time, he let it.

Data flooded in. He saw the locations of every vehicle on the coast. He saw the cargo manifests. He saw the expiration times for a thousand different permits.

He wasn’t Sam anymore. He was a component.

He kept driving south. The sun would be up in a few hours, but it wouldn’t matter. The light wouldn’t change the way the road felt. The light wouldn’t change the grayness of his skin.

He focused on the road ahead. There was a delivery to be made in the city. He checked the manifest for Sarah’s truck.

The manifest was empty.

He looked at the rearview mirror one last time. He saw a man sitting in a truck, but the man wasn’t moving. The man was just a shape holding a wheel.

Sam turned his eyes back to the asphalt. He pressed the accelerator, matching the speed of the truck in front of him.

The gray spread to his neck.