Three Laws Lethal

by David Walton

  It wasn’t that he thought their software was flawed. On the contrary, it performed perfectly in millions of test cases in the Realplanet driving simulation Naomi had built. But when two-ton buckets of steel were hurtling around in real life, it made him feel better to know that he could stop them if he needed to.

  “They’re perfect!” Abby shouted over the engine noise of the Accords. “You couldn’t crash these babies if you tried!”

  Brandon looked at her, and something in his eyes told Tyler he was about to do something stupid. “Now that’s an idea,” he said.

  “What is?” Tyler asked. “Brandon . . .”

  Brandon pressed a few buttons on his tablet. One of the Accords peeled away from the pack and came toward him, then pulled up next to him and stopped. Brandon opened the driver’s side door and reached for the equipment controlling the car.

  “What are you doing?” Tyler asked. “A little test,” Brandon said. He disconnected the solenoids from the accelerator and brake pedals, and then shifted the whole mechanism over to the passenger seat. He sat down behind the wheel and shut the door.

  Tyler stepped forward and rapped on the window with a knuckle. Brandon pressed the button to open the window. “Come on, man,” Tyler said. “What are you up to?”

  “An important role of these cars will be their ability to share the road with human drivers,” Brandon said. “Abby said we couldn’t crash them if we tried. Well”—he grinned—“I’m going to try.”

  “Not a good idea!” Tyler said, but it was too late. Brandon peeled away and swerved toward the rest of the fleet.

  Tyler looked helplessly across at Naomi. She gave a miniscule shrug. “Give it a chance,” she said. “I don’t think he can touch them.”

  She was right. Brandon drove straight for the formation, but they danced aside, letting him pass unscathed, only to close ranks again after he had passed. He came at them broadside, but they swerved and veered, missing him again. Abby and Naomi shouted and cheered, but Tyler just watched, his finger hovering over the kill switch on his tablet, every muscle in his shoulders clenched.

  Brandon whooped through the open window and circled for another pass. When the cars avoided a collision yet again, he drove back to join the three of them, a grin splitting his face wide. “Wow, what a rush,” he said.

  “My turn next!” Abby shouted.

  Tyler made a noise of surprise and frustration. “No,” he said. “Come on, we haven’t tested for this . . .”

  “Duly noted,” Brandon said. He held open the door and swept Abby a bow, like a coach driver making way for an aristocrat.

  “Naomi, what do you think? Will I be able to hit one?” Abby asked.

  Naomi spoke softly, but a small smile played around the corners of her mouth. “Bring it on,” she said.

  Tyler groaned, betrayed, and gripped his tablet tightly. He couldn’t stop Abby’s car, but he could use the kill switch to stop the others. He was tempted to do it and put an end to this, but he didn’t want to be a killjoy. Especially since Naomi had sided with them. And she knew the algorithm better than anyone. She wouldn’t risk injury to her sister unless she was pretty sure.

  Besides, he had to admit, as he watched the cars dance out of the way, it made a pretty impressive show. And Brandon was right; avoiding reckless human drivers was part of what their fleet had to be able to do. Let them do it once and get it out of their system.

  After several passes, Abby circled back around and parked in front of them. She jumped out of the car, face flushed and eyes sparkling.

  “That was incredible,” she said. “We so need to do that in the demo.”

  The demo. The day swooped on them like a bird of prey, faster than they expected and with no mercy. The weatherman’s augury of blue skies and perfect temperatures proved accurate, and Tyler woke early, bouncing with nerves. Today would make their fortune.

  They had rented the Bridgeport Speedway’s quarter-mile track for the event. It hadn’t been cheap—Brandon had resorted to begging his father for more money to cover what was left after Aisha’s funds had been exhausted—but it was the right place, a venue already set up to stage an exciting show with racing automobiles. They arrived to find a crowd already gathering, mostly students bused in from Penn, but families with children as well, and a TV crew setting up cameras by the track. Tyler felt like his stomach was trying to claw its way up out of his throat.

  Their project had been getting a lot of “local kids ready to take the world by storm” kind of publicity, which of course they encouraged. Abby had slipped into the role of spokeswoman, a role she thrived in. Every media phone call she fielded left her giddy, and she skipped around the apartment or the quad, talking about how they were all going to be famous.

  Abby had chosen the colors for their cars, an intense neon green with a wide black stripe down the middle. When Brandon complained, she insisted the color had to be a trademark. “It’s got to be like nothing else out there. Whenever anyone sees one of our cars, no matter the make or model, they have to know instantly that it’s a Yotta car.”

  Yotta. The name had been Abby’s idea, too, and although both Brandon and Tyler initially hated it, it had stuck. Abby argued that it was short and memorable, and in keeping with the running tradition of giving silly names to technology companies. “Yahoo” and “Etsy” and “Hulu” and “Uber” had sounded ridiculous too, until they became household names. So Yotta it was. They had applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the name and a logo—a simple, chubby automobile, green and black, with a trail of zeros floating up out of its exhaust pipe. Brandon had designed it. The zeros were meant to evoke the “yotta” decimal prefix, which stood for a one with twenty-four zeros after it, as well as to give the idea of zero emissions. The two Accords still burned fossil fuels, of course, but once the company got off the ground for real, they would switch over to all electric.

  Brandon, Tyler, Abby, and Naomi had each driven one of the Yotta cars from the Penn lot to the demo location the night before. Bridgeport Speedway, across the river in New Jersey, was still an operational dirt racetrack, with regular weekend races and a full schedule of special events and promotions, but there wasn’t much happening there on a Tuesday night. The dirt track had been a much smoother ride than Tyler had anticipated. They had put the cars through their paces, and then left them in position, four abreast, ready to drive the next day. Tyler had double-checked the kill switch mechanism on each car, making sure it was tightly attached and ready to go.

  Today, the four of them arrived in Brandon’s Prius, jittery with nerves and astonished by the gathering crowd. Tyler wondered how many of the onlookers were just race enthusiasts from the area, frequent customers of the speedway who were curious enough about them to attend a free event. With half an hour to go until showtime, Abby dragged them all over to the TV crew and gave an impromptu interview, in which she mercifully did most of the talking. All Tyler had to do was smile.

  After that, Aisha found them and introduced her investor friends, three women and a man, all white, all middle-aged, all wearing watches and jewelry and casual clothes that probably cost more than Tyler’s entire wardrobe. They shook hands all around. Once again, Abby was the charming one, welcoming them and complimenting their good taste in investment opportunities. “I hope you brought your checkbooks,” she told them. If Tyler had said something like that, it would have sounded crass, but Abby pulled it off with grace.

  Finally, seven o’clock rolled around, and it was time to start. Tyler hadn’t eaten a bite for dinner—his nerves had been too tightly strung—but now he was suddenly starving. He would have killed for a granola bar and a Coke, but it was too late for that now. The four of them walked out onto the track.

  Abby stepped forward and faced the gathered crowd. Although she had passed on the bikini, she was dressed for a show, in a short black skirt and a sleeveless green top that matched the vivid hue of the cars.

  “Welcome to the premier d
emonstration of the innovative automation of Yotta Autocars,” Abby declared. She wore a collar mic synced with the raceway’s sound system, and her voice boomed back at them from all directions. She raised her hands high like she had just done a magic trick, and indicated each of the team members with a flourish. “This is Brandon Kincannon from Long Island, New York; Tyler Daniels from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania; Naomi Sumner from Scranton, Pennsylvania; and I’m Abby Sumner.

  “We’re here to show you the future. You’ve seen the first generation of autocars from Mercedes and Tesla, Audi and GM—impressive vehicles that can avoid the hazards on the road . . . some of the time. They’ve paved the way, and we applaud their efforts. But we’re looking farther ahead. At Yotta, we don’t think getting your family from A to B should cost you tens of thousands of dollars. We don’t think you should be risking your children’s lives every time you bring them to piano lessons or soccer practice. We see a future where there are no drunk drivers or distracted drivers or reckless drivers, because there are no drivers. We see a future where transportation is affordable, available on demand, and safe.”

  Abby had told them many times how important this part was, showing their potential investors not just that they could build the product but also that they could sell it. As her words echoed away across the field, the audience gave no response, not even polite applause. A light breeze ruffled Abby’s hair. Tyler wondered how receptive an audience of car racing enthusiasts was going to be to a message that encouraged people not to drive. Maybe they should have paid a few people to come and cheer.

  Brandon, Tyler, and Naomi took their seats. Some of the onlookers sat in the grandstands, but many just stood at the track and leaned over the rails. Tyler and Naomi pulled out their tablets and got to work. Somewhere along the way, Brandon had ceded his role at the controls to Naomi. She had written much of the software and had a better idea of how the controls worked now than he did. He had settled into his job as hardware engineer and seemed quite happy to give up the software part of things to her.

  Abby stood on a small platform on the inside of the track, where she could be seen and could point to things as they happened. “I give you Yotta Autocars,” she said. “A driving experience unlike anything you’ve seen before.”

  The fleet growled to life, and the four cars took off down the track in perfect tandem, raising a cloud of dirt behind them. This prompted a cheer from the crowd and probably resembled the start of a race in some respects. These cars would not be racing, however. As they took the turn on the far side of the track, accelerating to fifty miles per hour, Brandon jogged out onto the field with three flat objects, which he set up on the dirt at various points on the track. As he put them down, it was easy to identify them as cardboard cutouts of people from various films, the kind movie theaters put on display in their lobbies.

  “Look out!” Abby said over the microphone. “We seem to have some celebrities crossing the road.”

  The track could just barely fit all four of their cars driving side by side. As they roared around the bend, their front bumpers formed a wall from one side of the track to the other, bearing down with barely an inch between them. When they came into view of the “people” standing on the track, however, the cars reacted smoothly, dancing into a new formation and slaloming around the obstacles. Brandon had weighted the cardboard movie stars down with cinder blocks, so that when the cars flew past, they fluttered violently in the wind, but didn’t fall down.

  The audience cheered more enthusiastically this time, enjoying the spectacle. Tyler found himself relaxing. He had little doubt that the cars would perform as intended. Not only had they tested them over and over with these scenarios in the real world, but Naomi had generated a driving world in Real-planet, training the software on literally millions of randomly generated traffic situations and accepting as seeds for the next iteration only those versions that performed the best.

  Tyler and Naomi didn’t even have that much to do. They simply cued the start of each scenario as Abby announced them. The cars darted, swerved, braked, and spun, perfectly evading all dangers. Even the weather was perfect, a cloudless blue sky with just the hint of a breeze. Tyler wanted to reach out and take Naomi’s hand, but he didn’t want to jinx it. Time enough for that later.

  On the next pass, one of the cars pulled away from the group and turned around. The three continued, one behind the other, driving on the right side of the track as if it were a public road. The single car drove in the opposite direction. On the long stretch of the oval, the cars prepared to pass each other.

  “Let’s say the car driving on its own has a human driver,” Abby said. “The driver was up late last night and is having trouble keeping himself awake.” The solo car started to drift onto the other side of the track, into the path of the oncoming traffic. “Only the Yotta car in front can see the danger unfolding,” Abby said, “but it communicates to the cars in back, letting them know of the problem.” It had actually been difficult to program this part, because the Mike driving the solo car refused to drift. He recognized it as a dangerous maneuver and always corrected, overriding their commands. In the end, they had to disconnect Mike entirely from the car and control it directly.

  The solo car turned broadside, blocking the left side of the road. The three remaining cars reacted immediately, braking and swerving in different directions, each finding a safe route while leaving room for the other two. The three screeched to a halt within a few feet of each other and of the solo car, throwing up a cloud of dirt, but leaving all four cars unscratched. The crowd cheered.

  Abby climbed down from the platform and stepped onto the track. “Finally,” she said, “we wanted to show you what it feels like to experience these cars from the inside. It’s one thing to see a little car choreography. It’s another thing to trust them with your lives.”

  Her delivery was perfect. Tyler found that his heart was thudding in his chest, even though he knew what she was going to do, and had seen her do it dozens of times. It was the showman-ship. She was like the magician’s beautiful assistant, willing to be locked in a box that would be sawed in half or run through with spikes or swords. You knew she wouldn’t be harmed, but it sent your heart up into your throat all the same.

  The cars tore around the far side of the track. “I’m going to climb into one of these cars and take the wheel,” she said. “Then I’m going to drive around this track like a maniac, in the wrong direction, trying to collide with one of these cars. As you will see, they won’t let me. No matter how reckless I am, they can see me coming, anticipate my every possible maneuver, and be ready for them all.” She touched her glasses. “Not only that, if you tune your glasses to the raceway’s public channel, you’ll be able to see it all from my eyes.”

  Tyler switched to the screen on his tablet from which he could access the kill switch for each car, just in case. He had never needed it before, and they had practiced this so many times, it had begun to seem boring. Even so. Better to be safe.

  Abby lifted her slim arms high, and Tyler thought of the scene in the film The Prestige, where a young woman was dropped into a tank of water with her hands tied together as part of a magic show. With his finger on the kill switch, Tyler was like Michael Caine’s character, waiting behind the curtain with an ax in hand, ready to break the glass if things went wrong. He remembered Caine’s line from the film, about audience-goers for dangerous acts: “People hoping for an accident, and likely to see one, too.”

  The cars rounded the final corner and headed toward them. They would slow and then stop, one of them rolling forward next to Abby to let her climb in and take control. Any moment, they would slow. He checked their speed on his screen. Fifty-five miles an hour. Fifty-six. Fifty-seven.

  It wasn’t right. He hesitated, not wanting to blow the demo, but the cars shouldn’t be speeding up.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “They shouldn’t be going this fast.”

  Naomi glanced at the screen, and th
en at her sister, eyes wide. “Stop them!”

  Tyler jabbed the button to activate the kill switch on all four cars. Nothing happened. He jabbed each of them in turn. Nothing.

  Tyler leaped to his feet. “Abby, get out of there!”

  They didn’t stop. Abby realized something was wrong and tried to run, but it was too late. Four abreast, the cars slammed through her fragile body with barely a pause, an ocean wave sweeping away a pebble. A moment later, they ground to a halt. For a tiny part of a second, nothing made any noise at all.

  When Naomi screamed, it was the most terrible sound Tyler had ever heard.

  CHAPTER 8

  Time moved in slow motion. Naomi knew she was screaming, but she couldn’t hear it, as if the air around her had turned to water. She stood frozen, unable to move. Abby lay facedown on the dirt track, motionless. Tyler said something, but his words were drowned out by the pounding of her heart in her ears. She saw Brandon touching his glasses, calling 911.

  Naomi had expected blood, but she couldn’t see any. Abby’s legs looked crushed, but she could survive that, couldn’t she? She had to get to her, help her. She ran forward, but Tyler threw his arms around her, stopping her at the edge of the track.

  He shouted at her, and this time she heard him. “The cars!”

  She looked. The four green-and-black cars had made a neat, coordinated U-turn, and were now idling, facing them, their engines purring. Naomi felt a stab of fear, like stepping into a lion’s cage at the zoo and realizing that, despite their lazy demeanor, they were lethal, three-hundred-pound predators. Then she saw Abby’s hand move, and it didn’t matter anymore.