A government worker, clad in all black and wearing hospital gloves, carefully maneuvered around Larry in the driver’s seat. Leaning over Larry’s lap, the older mustachioed man carefully pressed the ignition button, turning on the car. Larry could smell the other man’s cheap cologne, some immoderately used brand of canned masculinity. Larry imagined the brightly colored can on sale at a local Dollar General, in the clearance rack.

The worker input a command in the small control panel Jerry-rigged into the center console and a countdown appeared on the LCD screen. After giving the interior of the car a final assessment, the pot-bellied man extricated himself from the driver’s seat without so much as a glance at Larry. Then he shut the the car door, irrevocably trapping an invisible cloud of acrid cologne inside the cabin.

Larry sat there sweating, the only sound his own anxious breath. Sweat beaded down his forehead and Larry felt his heart clanging around his chest. His arms were shackled to the driver’s seat and the rest of his body was affixed to it as well, like a seated gurney.

A voice came over the car’s speaker systems, stoic and unemotional.

Mr. Powell, you have been condemned to die by the state of Michigan. Do you have any last words?

As Larry contemplated his final words, he could not help but run his mind back over the seemingly impossible events which led him, inexorably, to this outlandish end.

When he bought the used sedan from a friend of a friend online, Larry had no idea that the firmware had even been tampered with. Hell, Larry had no idea how to tamper with firmware. He wasn’t even really sure what firmware was.

When the car proved more than capable of exceeding the speed limit, Larry had nonetheless tried to keep it within legal limits. He only used the extra speed when it was absolutely necessary, as it was on August 2nd, 2032, when he was late for work for the fourth time that week and at risk of losing his job.

When the officer pulled Larry over and – rather than giving him one of the ubiquitous speeding tickets handed out all over the country – asked Larry out of the car and placed him under arrest, Larry was dumbfounded. When he asked the officer why he was being arrested, and the officer cited to a newly enacted statute, P.L. 901, subsection A, Larry had no idea what the man was talking about.

At Larry’s arraignment he was absolutely astounded when the Judge, apparently restricted by the new law, remanded Larry without bail during the pendency of his case. As Larry was carted out of the court room to a waiting department of corrections van, he was positively amazed to discover a hoard of journalists waiting for him outside, pummeling him with questions and flashing lights.

As the case dragged on toward trial, Larry simply could not believe the news reports he saw on the televisions in the local jail. How unlucky, Larry thought, that he would be the first person in the state – the first in the country – to be arrested under the new draconian anti-speeding laws, aimed at curtailing the rampant deaths caused by unlawful firmware tampering of automated vehicles.

At the end of Larry’s trial, when the Jury of twelve random people off the street came back and found Larry guilty of going 10 miles over the stated speed limit, he could do nothing but look down at the table in front of him. As the Judge issued the only sentence the law would allow, Larry could only watch as his tears hit the smooth wood of the table top.

There was a brief reprieve, the only one, when the Supreme Court granted certiorari on Larry’s case. When Larry saw the transcripts from his Lawyer’s arguments, supported by the ACLU and other think tanks, that the state’s punishment was cruel and unusual, and beyond the pale of the crime charged, Larry felt briefly that things might turn out OK.

But then came the Supreme Court decision – Powell v. Michigan – in which the Court ruled that: (a) the punishment of death for the act of speeding, a crime of extraordinary public harm in modern society, was not unduly severe; and (b) based on the medical testimony of doctors for the state of Michigan, the state’s method of execution was entirely humane and, they concluded, ‘subjectively experienced as similar to lethal injection.’

That was two months ago. Since then Larry had waited, day by day, for a pardon from the Governor. Larry had a fleeting hope that it might come, but the chances, he knew, were slim – it was the Governor himself who had signed the bill into law less than a year after his election.

Finally, the day arrived, and Larry was taken out of his cell and brought to a large car with an oversize engine block, the whole thing set on rails which stretched several miles forward in a straight line. There was no last meal – the doctor’s said it would cause Larry undue pain – and so Larry was gently placed into the strange vehicle on an empty stomach. He was strapped in, the pot-bellied man started the engine and the timer, and then a voice asked him what his final words were.

Larry considered.

"It was only ten miles over the speed limit." He muttered, almost to himself.

The voice on the radio did not return. The countdown clicked toward zero, and when it got there, Larry shut his eyes.

The human body is quite resilient. It can survive g-forces far beyond what a layman might initially believe. Some naval officers, in controlled tests, have survived over 45 Gs of force, briefly making their bodies weigh over 7,000 lbs, without any lasting harm.

In order to compensate for this resilience, the engineers behind the Very Fast Car (Or V.F.C for short), had to be certain to achieve many, many times more than 45 Gs.

In the blink of an eye, as the countdown hit zero, the custom built electric engine broke into a feverish, high pitched hum, assisted by the magnetic acceleration system built into the track, and plummeted Larry Powell down the stretch of train track at an impossible speed, almost instantly plunging Larry into unconsciousness.

Then, after about a mile, traversed in a matter of a few seconds, the car decelerated to a full stop in under 100 feet.

When they went to retrieve the body, the mess in the cabin was so intensive that the worker’s vomited at the sight of it. The press was not allowed anywhere near the car.

A senatorial committee was conducted to determine the efficacy of the method of execution. A team of medical professionals concluded that Mr. Powell’s death had in fact been near instantaneous and painless. The bureaucrats, meanwhile, were satisfied by the ease and low cost of the methodology. Moreover, the incidence of speeding in Michigan dropped by 70% in the immediate aftermath of the execution of sentence.

In the end, the senate committee gave the execution method it’s firm backing and suggested that it be expanded to every state in the Union.

The only suggested change was that the "condemned wear a full body woolen suit and a heavy cowl, to assist in clean up."