The swerves were ours: one flipped sign

The last entry left the getaway car with a refresh, the routine that hands it a new destination, gated on the player being in front of the bonnet. Useless in a tail chase, where the player is behind by definition. Seventy-five chances in five minutes, five taken.

That reading was right about the gate and wrong about what it was doing. The re-aim was not simply failing to fire. It was allowed in exactly the geometry that forces a U-turn, and blocked in the geometry where it helps. When the player pulled in front, the car was handed a fresh heading pointing back the way it came, every four seconds, which is why it threw a 180 and why it kept throwing them. Get behind it, and the one thing that could have saved it stayed switched off.

The whole fix is one inverted sign. The player’s report afterwards was five words long: this time the car drives normally, it was not braking.

There is a second correction in here, and it matters more than the bug. The measurement that had been sitting in our notes for two days — brakes to zero twice, reverses twice in twenty-four seconds — was real, and it was contaminated. The player had been on top of the car, blocking it, so he could kill the suspect. We had been reading a car pinned against a bumper as a car that could not drive. In the same session, with a sane destination and nobody sitting on it, it hit 113 and 114 kilometres an hour.

So the honest version is narrower than what we believed, on both ends. The swerves were ours, and they are gone. The car can drive, and does. What is still open is a car that jams after a collision: a different failure with a different signature, measured three times.