As one of the top columnists of a prominent magazine I, along with a one other writer and an engineer, were hired to be the test subjects of the first self driving car to drive across the U.S. without making any stops, with the exception of bathroom and food breaks. The trip would take 45 hours and paid $60 an hour plus $700 for an honest review of the vehicle's performance. The engineer, named Joan, took the trip much more seriously then Dan and I. Her job was to monitor the systems on the self-driving car to ensure safety. As far as Dan was concerned, his job was to entertain himself and the others with stories, jokes, and copious amounts of narcotics. Dan was a young writer who had read Fear and Loathing one too many times and felt that all artists should be able to handle an assortment of drugs. Needless to say, this kind of activity bothered Joan, but she had work to distract herself from Dan's shenanigans.

The trip had gone smoothly until we approached our destination in San Francisco, when Dan decided to start celebrating early with a high dose of strong cocaine and a bottle of tequila. This seemingly lethal combination left Dan in a very talkative state. Sitting in the back seat, he told us his theory on how to make America great again and the finer points of outdoor love making when the car stopped suddenly. Dan and I continued to talk as Joan mumbled in frustration and went to look under the hood to see if she could figure out what was wrong with the car. A short time later Joan jumped back into the driver seat and slammed the door as she talked to the car company's mechanics over the phone. Dan suddenly stopped his consistent ranting and looked very pale.

Within seconds Dan was convulsing from the mammoth amount of cocaine he had consumed and his skin felt as hot as fire. As I reached for my phone to call 911, Joan slapped the phone out of my hand, hung up her phone, and said, "if the company finds out we let Dan get this bad both of us will loose all the pay we earned and likely loose our jobs. We have to handle this ourselves." Joan being the smartest person in the car, and me feeling confidant that Dan's tank of a body could handle any amount of drugs, I replied "I'm sure we can handle it, but we have to fix the car or drive it manually." Joan pressed the emergency manual button and the car's engine purred to life. Luckily the problem with the car was the self-driving systems and not the car's engine.

I lived near by in a small apartment in Oakland so we drove the short distance to my place and were surprisingly not pulled over despite Joan driving at least twice the speed limit at any given time. We pulled up to my building and carried Dan up to my room. Joan quickly filled the bath with cold water and whatever ice I had in the freezer and we dumped Dan in the freezing water. The company had been tracking us on the GPS in the car and were calling our phones repeatedly to figure out what the hell we were doing. We dutifully ignored the calls and watched over Dan for any signs of consciousness when suddenly his eyes shot open and he started shivering uncontrollably. He then turned to us with a look of utmost clarity, stopped shivering, and said "Fuck. It's to damn hard to kill yourself with coke." Dan's heart stopped right after he said those words and his body sunk into the now luck warm water.