I always use the maps app to get home from work. Not because I don't know the way, but to avoid traffic. By now I trust that calm, metallic voice blindly.
Last night, though, the voice started giving strange directions. "In two hundred meters, turn right into an unnamed alley," it said. I looked at the screen: the blue line veered toward an abandoned industrial zone I didn't even know existed.
Thinking it was a new route to avoid construction, I turned.
The deeper I went among the dark warehouses, the more precise the app became. "In fifty meters, turn off your headlights," the voice whispered. I stopped. Why would I turn off my headlights? I looked at my smartphone: the map no longer showed roads, but a floor plan. The floor plan of my house.
The GPS pointer, the little blue arrow that represented my car, was sitting right in front of my living room door.
"You have arrived at your destination," said the voice. But it was no longer the app's voice. It was the voice of my wife, who died three years ago.
At that moment, on the back seat, I heard the unmistakable sound of a notification: a metallic ping. I looked in the rearview mirror. On the seat behind me was another phone, old, with a cracked screen. It was the phone we had buried with her.
A message had just arrived on the screen: "Look out the window. I found you a parking spot right next to me."
I looked up and realized I wasn't in an industrial zone. I was in the cemetery driveway, right in front of her headstone. But the earth was churned up, as if something had dug its way from the inside out.
The phone spoke one last time, with a digital distortion that sounded like a strangled scream:
"Recalculating route... Destination: Below. Turn the key and descend."
The doors locked with a simultaneous *clack*. And the back seat began to give off the smell of wet earth and rotting flowers.
Do you feel your GPS recalculating your position? Are you sure the "home" it's guiding you toward is made of bricks and not of earth?