by Ken MacLeod
‘Buckle up, Mum,’ said Nick, as if trying to sound grown-up. His voice piped a little. It wasn’t often he’d even been in a vehicle, other than a bus. Hope tousled his hair and fixed her lap-and-diagonal strap, settled in, and gave the thumbs-up. Hugh grinned, tapped on his phone, and sat back. The indicator light on the dash flashed, the gear changed from neutral to first, the engine rumbled, and the brakes relaxed with a loud hiss. The lorry pulled out and joined the stream of traffic, up the incline and under the bridge.
Hugh sat back, hands clasped behind his head, obviously tempted to put his feet on the dash. Nick’s gaze switched back and forth from the buildings and traffic to the movements of the gear stick and steering wheel.
‘It’s like there’s an invisible man driving,’ he said.
‘Oh, that’s good,’ said Hope. ‘It’s called the automatic driver, or drone driver, and it kind of is like an invisible man, but it’s a program in the lorry’s computer.’
‘I know that,’ said Nick, scornfully. He patted the toy monkey on his lap. ‘I was just explaining to Max. I don’t think Max understands AIs.’
‘Oh, I’m sure he does,’ said Hugh. ‘You just have to explain it to him in very simple terms.’
Which, for the next five kilometres or so, Nick did.
Hope woke from a doze. Black road, white lines, blue signs. Bioluminescent trees lined the motorway, the light they cast easily visible because the lorry’s headlights weren’t on – they didn’t need to be, except when behind a human-driven vehicle, and there were none such in the two lanes reserved for vehicles on autopilot.
‘Where are we?’ she asked, stretching her legs and wiggling her shoulders.
‘Halfway up the M1,’ said Hugh.
‘Nick should be—’
‘He is,’ said Hugh. ‘There’s a wee bunk in the back. He’s even in his PJs.’
‘Good for you. What have you been doing?’
‘Reading. Staring out the window.’
‘Are we going to pull off any time soon? I need a pee.’
‘There’s a perfectly good toilet in the back,’ Hugh pointed out.
When she returned, she took her boots off and tilted her seat back.
‘There’s a coffee machine and everything, a regular wee galley. It’s sort of mad, all the comforts for a driver who nine times out of ten won’t be there.’
Hugh rubbed his eyebrows, yawned. ‘Economies of scale. You couldn’t drive like this in Turkey.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Hope gazed out of the window again. The truck sometimes overtook other vehicles – buses, usually, with a bored driver, there only as reassurance, dozing or reading in the front seat – or was overtaken itself. Looking into the empty cabs as they drew level was a little unnerving, and those which, like theirs, contained people dozing or chatting even more so. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the overtaking, the slowing and accelerating, but there was a rhythm. The drone-driven vehicles had no speed limit, and generally moved at over a hundred miles an hour, but she always had the feeling there was a safe distance between them – shorter than the human safe distance, because of the machines’ reaction time. At one point they passed through a heavy shower of rain, and the windscreen wipers didn’t come on until Hugh, with an irritated gesture, flicked the lever. Hope found some reassurance in the steady whump.
She dozed. After a while, a shift in the engine’s note and a sway to the side woke her up, as the lorry pulled off for a service area. It rolled, with perfect timing, into a vacant slot by a row of fuel pumps. The moment the engine stopped, she heard clangs and bumps from behind, followed by the throb of the pump and the sound of flowing liquid. The same process was being carried out on the trucks in front, the hoses and nozzles moving like hand-puppet snakes.
As the lorry pulled out and before it headed for the exit ramp, Hugh waved his phone.
‘Want to stop for a bit, stretch your legs?’
Hope grimaced. ‘Kind of, but I’d rather not disturb Nick. Besides, I just wouldn’t feel safe, I’d be nervous of the lorry going off without us.’
‘Couldn’t happen,’ said Hugh.
‘You know how it is.’
‘Yeah.’
Back on the motorway, Hope put her glasses on and, feeling like she was being just a bit obsessive-compulsive, checked in to the house wifi. Everything seemed to be in order: burglar alarm armed, the deadbolts in place, blinds down for the night, cameras all showing empty rooms. The bathroom light went on, then off, which startled her for a moment but made sense as part of the programme to make the flat look occupied. Her vision flitted from camera to camera like a ghost. The tap in the kitchen sink was dripping. She could see each drop gather, glistening in a stray street-light gleam past the edge of the front blinds, and after a second or two plop into the sink, then the next would begin to form. Drip, drip, drip.
She blinked hard and shook her head at that. She could hear the drips. Now that she noticed, she could hear sounds from all over the house and outside – boards creaking, cars passing, a dog barking. All very faint in the earpieces, and she might not have noticed them above the motorway noise and the truck’s engine note, if it hadn’t been for that drip.
Hugh was gazing out of the window, watching the traffic and the road as intently as if he were actually driving. Hope found herself hesitating to break his concentration, then shook off the illusion.
‘Hugh?’
‘Yes?’ He didn’t look bothered at all. Maybe he’d just been bored.
‘Do the house cameras record sound?’
‘What? I’m not sure. Never bothered to check, actually.’
‘Well, they do.’
‘Oh,’ said Hugh. ‘How did you find out?’
She told him. He fired up his own phone, put in an earpiece and looked at the screen. She could see the dark rooms flick by, one by one.
‘So they do. Hang on.’ He frowned, and poked about on his screen. ‘Oh yes. Here it is. Homebase catalogue.’ Flick, flick, flick of his thumbs. ‘Home security products. Cameras. Got it. Oh yeah, there it is. “Also records sound with piezoelectric module in shaft.” Talk about small print.’
‘Oh well,’ said Hope. ‘So much for putting my hand over my mouth that night.’
‘So that’s why you were doing it? I did wonder.’ He laughed. ‘That wasn’t the only sounds they must have picked up, eh?’
Hope smiled. ‘What can I say?’
‘Look,’ said Hugh, in that irritating male tone of patient explanation, ‘the whole point of having cameras in the house – apart from making burglars wear masks, I guess – is to have a record if you ever get accused of some kind of domestic violence or… you know. Nobody but us can see them without a warrant. If it comes to the cops checking our cameras we’re in the shit anyway. And we’re not.’
‘That’s reassuring.’
Hugh seemed to take this literally. He nodded and went back to gazing at the road.
Hope now felt a bit paranoid. She ran a search for any references to herself. None were current. The argument about the implications of the Kasrani case that had started the whole trouble had dropped far down the list of threads on ParentsNet, and only cropped up here and there on legal sites whose jargon she found impenetrable. She wished she had access to her own personal profile. Fiona, as a relevant professional, could look at any time at Hope’s ever-evolving profile, but Hope, as its subject, couldn’t. For sure it would be evolving now: unconventional though their mode of transport was, it wasn’t quite illegal, although no doubt Hugh’s father had cut a few corners setting it up. They hadn’t made any attempt at concealment – for people like themselves, as opposed to professional criminals, spies and the like, such attempts were foredoomed to be worse than useless – so the cameras and face-recognition software and all the rest of the surveillance systems were right now aware, at some level, of their location and destination. Her glasses, and Hugh’s phone, were in themselves quite enough to pinpoint their location to the
nearest metre. The only precaution they’d taken was to block calls from Maya or from Geena, to prevent at least these dots being joined to them again. The outstanding question was whether the priority algorithms thought Hope and Hugh’s actions significant enough to call for human attention, and intervention.
Probably not, Hope thought, though she kept a wary eye on police vehicles in the fast lanes until she fell asleep, to dream of shining lines connecting dots.
She woke to dawn, and Scotland. Hugh was in the back. He came through with two paper cups of coffee.
‘Mmm,’ said Hope. ‘Thanks.’
She stared out, bleary-eyed, feeling stiff and sticky. They were just past Berwick-upon-Tweed. Low, rolling hills to the left looked rugged and high after most of England. To the right, she caught glimpses of cliffs and the North Sea. Hugh sipped, while thumbing rapidly on his phone.
‘Done,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Cancelled our flight to Prague.’
‘What?’
‘More than twelve hours’ notice, so I’ve kept the penalty down to the deposit.’
He looked pleased with himself.
‘What flight?’
He hadn’t told her. He did now.
‘I’m not sure how clever that was,’ Hope said. ‘It looks exactly like an attempt at a diversion.’
‘Well, it worked, didn’t it?’ Hugh waved an arm. ‘We’re in Scotland!’
‘Maybe you could ask Nick to repeat that explanation he gave Max last night. About how artificial intelligence works. Because you bloody need it!’
Hugh shrugged. ‘Aw, come on.’
‘How much was the deposit, anyway?’
‘Two hundred quid. Think of it as the fare for this journey, and it’s a saving on the bus or the train.’
‘Think of it any other way, and it’s a waste.’
‘Peace of mind, then. Insurance.’
‘Hmph!’
Hugh leaned over. ‘Come on. Good-morning kiss?’
She had to smile. ‘All right.’
Nick emerged from the back of the cab and climbed on Hope’s lap.
‘I’m hungry, and Max needs recharging.’
‘Good morning to you, too.’
Something between a shrug and a squirm.
‘Ah, come on, let’s sort you out.’
Hope went into the back of the cab and got Nick washed – or wiped, anyway – and into his clothes. While he went into the front to sit in her seat, Hope washed her own face and changed her underwear and pulled on a fresh shirt. Back in the front, sitting in the middle, she even found a way to recharge Max, from a socket marked mysteriously with a symbol for a lit cigarette. After a while, the Firth of Forth swung into view, then disappeared and appeared again, then vanished entirely as they hit the city bypass. Hugh tapped on his phone so that they pulled off just south of the Forth Road Bridge, and rolled into the lorry park of a McDonald’s.
Hugh looked over at Hope.
‘Now… sure you’re not nervous about leaving the cab?’
‘Yes, I am, but I’m a bit more willing to risk it in daylight. It’s not like we’re in the middle of the night and the middle of the motorway. Anyway, hunger rules right now.’
‘Don’t it just.’
They stretched their legs, had McBreakfast, bought drinks and snacks for the rest of the journey, and piled back into the cab, hands overloaded, laughing.
As they crossed the Road Bridge, the biotech towers of Grangemouth glittered to the left, and the Forth Rail Bridge and the vast array of tall windmills decommissioned but not yet dismantled on the horizon beyond it loomed to the right. Nick couldn’t decide what to look at, and compromised by surging from one side of the cab to the other.
‘And what’s that thing out there?’ he asked, pointing across Hugh, to the right, at a derelict platform in the middle of the Firth just beyond the Rail Bridge.
‘It’s a place where they used to fill up the oil tankers,’ said Hugh.
‘What’s oil tankers?’
That explanation kept Nick occupied most of the way to Perth. A junction ahead offered one route to the north, the other to the west. Just before the choice had to be made, Hugh’s hands hesitated over the steering wheel; then he shrugged and sat back. So the vehicle stayed on automatic, all the way up the M90 to Inverness. It took about an hour and a half. A long, slow ascent, it felt like, then a descent so fast it made your ears pop, like in an aeroplane. Along the way, Hope felt almost oppressed by the sheer density of New Trees and other plantations that pressed close to the sides of the motorway, for most of the time masking all the scenery except the windmills. Beyond Pitlochry they were in the Cairngorms National Park, from which synthetic organisms were excluded. Here, the view opened out, and natural trees and heather did losing battle with flash-flood erosion. Snow patches shone on summits and lurked in shadowed corries.
‘I’ve heard it said,’ Hugh told her, looking straight ahead at the road, ‘that up near one of these summits there’s a wee stretch of burn that stays frozen all through the year.’
‘A tiny glacier!’
‘Exactly. And it gets a bit less tiny every year.’
‘That would be big news, if it’s true. So why haven’t I heard?’
Hugh shrugged. ‘It’s a rumour. And the rest of the rumour – wouldn’t you just know it? – is that it’s kept secret. The place is supposed to be in an area of the park that’s strictly off limits, to keep nesting eagles undisturbed or something like that.’
‘That just raises the question of how anyone knows about it at all.’
Hugh tapped the side of his nose. ‘Some park ranger who had a dram too many in a bothan. So the story goes.’
‘And where did you hear it?’
‘Ach, years ago in Aberdeen, drinking with some climbers.’
‘It’s taken you all this time to mention it?’
‘You have a point there,’ said Hugh. ‘To tell you the truth, it was one of those memories you file and forget, if you see what I mean.’
Hope didn’t, but she decided to let the matter drop before Nick got curious.
The motorway gave out on the approach to Inverness, and with it the automation. Normally the lorry would turn off to the Business Park and pick up a new driver at this point, but the codes on Hugh’s phone overrode that. He took the wheel, to Hope’s silent disquietude and Nick’s noisy admiration, as the lorry approached the Kessock Bridge, and another splendidly distracting view on both sides.
Hope relaxed as Hugh drove on, with every appearance of confidence, across the Tore roundabout, turned left outside Dingwall, left again at Garve… She supposed the skill of lorry-driving was like cycling: once learned, never lost. The long road west was four-lane all the way, a smooth ride that Hugh kept below sixty. For some reason he didn’t explain – it could have been arbitrary, a mental coin-toss, or else the outcome of some intuitive summing of the likelihood of any security inspection – he had chosen to head for the Uig, Skye-to-Tarbert, Harris ferry rather than the more obvious Ullapool-to-Stornoway, a shorter drive but a longer voyage. Hope kept Nick entertained by pointing out eagles and buzzards, camera drones and jet fighters, deer herds and wolf packs, through a monotonous succession of glens and moors. After they’d turned left at Strathcarron, the scenery itself held his gaze: the long stretch of the sea-loch above whose southern shore they climbed and descended on switchback braes; the precipitous view over Strome; the bleak moor of Durinish. Then the swoop back to another wide four-lane highway, and the scary climb up and over the Skye Bridge. Across Skye, Nick was kept variously occupied by crisps, the Cuillin and the Quiraing.
On the ferry to Tarbert there was no problem keeping him amused for the hour and a half it took, or afterwards in the slow progress through the huddled port. The boredom and fractiousness only kicked in after the steep ascent to the island’s plateau, a glacier-scored surface reminiscent, as Hugh put it, of space-probe photos of Callisto, but less lively. Nick cheered
up as they crossed into the strange synthetic woodlands of Lewis, and on to Stornoway, and the grandparents.
16. The New Woods
‘Who would have thought it?’ said Nigel, watching the container lorry roll away from the pier towards the unloading dock. ‘Cars from Africa, and in boxes like toys!’
‘Plastic models, scale one to one?’ said Hugh.
‘That’s it!’ Nigel laughed, and clapped him on the back. ‘Well, let’s get you all into ours, wicked petrol-burning steel contraption that it is.’
Nigel had for years cultivated an air of ironic grievance that his car, a decades-old Nissan 4x4, was not allowed off the island.
Hugh picked up his own pack, Nigel hefted Hope’s, and they set off towards the car park, with Hope and Mairi, Hugh’s mother, walking ahead with Nick between them, capering along and swinging from their hands. It was late afternoon, about six, but the sun was higher than it would be at the same time in London, so it felt earlier. Every time he came back, Hugh had the same slight disorientation. Stornoway was disorienting in another way, too. Strung around a natural harbour, under a wide sky, the town almost made you turn in a circle to take it in as soon as you arrived. It could make you dizzy. Ever since he’d started at the Nicolson Institute, the big school after wee school, Hugh had experienced Stornoway as a textbook example of uneven development, the sort of place you’d see in television documentaries about African Lion countries where at some point the presenter, as if by contractual obligation, would let slip the phrase ‘land of contrasts’. He’d written a poem for second-year English composition that began:
Colour washes, council schemes,
seagull cries and jump-jet screams.
Ocean air and petrol stink,
Free Church elders, too much drink…
And so on. Typical teenage verse: moralistic, observant of the obvious. But all the things he’d mentioned were – to be fair to his earlier stuck-up self – still very much in evidence, apart from the ‘too much drink’, alcohol consumption having been driven out of sight and out of mind here as everywhere else. Fighter jets and choppers still came and went from RAF Stornoway, the gulls were noisy and arrogant as ever, the vehicles to this day were more polluting than those you’d find on the mainland, and on top of all that, yet more contrasting features had been stacked: the windmills, the tower-block developments like fence-posts around the older part of town, the USS Donald Rumsfeld bristling in the bay, the shrimp boats and inshore trawlers slipping past it like canoes under the bowsprit of Cook’s Endeavour. The stiff breeze still came off the Atlantic, strong and fresh.
