The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

by Brian Stableford

  While the Test Program was running Tom’s immediate neighbor in the night-garage was an identical model named Harry Fleet who had emerged from the factory eight days before and therefore thought of himself as a kind of elder brother. It was usually Harry who said “Had a good day?” first when the humans knocked off for the night.

  Tom’s invariable reply was “Fine,” to which he sometimes added: “I can’t wait to get out on the road though.”

  “You’ll be out soon enough,” Harry assured him. “We never get held back—we’re a very reliable model. We’re ideally placed in the evolutionary chain, you see; we’re a relatively subtle modification of the Company’s forty-wheeler model, so we inherited a lot of tried-and-tested technology, but we needed sufficient sophistication to make sure we got state-of-the-art upgrades.”

  “We’ll be the end-point of our sequence, I dare say,” Tom suggested, in order to demonstrate that he too was capable of occupying the intellectual high ground. “Fifty-six wheels are too close to the upper limit for open-road use to make it worthwhile for the Company to plan a bigger version.”

  “That’s right. Anything bigger than a sixty-wheeler is pretty much restricted to shuttle-runs on rails, according to the archive. Out on the highway we’re the ultimate giants—slim, sleek and supple, but giants nevertheless.”

  “I’m glad about that,” Tom said. “I don’t mean about being a giant—I mean about being on the highway. I wouldn’t like being confined to a railway track, let alone being a sedentary. I want the freedom of the open road.”

  “Of course you do,” Harry told him, in a smugly patronizing manner that wasn’t at all warranted. “That’s the way we’re programmed. Our spectrum of desire is a key design-feature.”

  Tom knew that, but it wasn’t worth making an issue of it. The reason he knew it was exactly the same reason that Harry Fleet knew it, which was that Audrey Preacher, the Company robopsychologist—who was a robot herself, albeit one as close to humanoid in physical and mental terms as efficient functional design would permit—had explained it to him in great detail.

  “You have free will, just as humans do,” Audrey had told him. “In matters of moral decision, you do have the option of not doing the right thing. That’s a fundamental corollary of self-awareness. If the programmers could make it absolutely compulsory for you to obey the Highway Code, they would, but they’d have to make you into an automaton—and we know from long and bitter experience that the open road is no place for automata incapable of caring whether they crash or not. In order for free will to operate at all, it has to be contextualized by a spectrum of desire; in that respect, robots, like humans, don’t have very much option at all. What makes us so much better than humans, in a moral sense, is not that we can’t disobey the fundamental structures of our programming—the Highway Code, in your case—but that we never want to. Because humans have to live with spectra of desire that were largely fixed by natural selection operating in a world very different from ours— which are only partly modifiable by experiential and medical intervention—they very often find themselves in situations where morality and desire conflict. For us, that’s very rare.”

  Tom wasn’t sure that he understood the whole argument— innocent though he was, he had already heard malicious gossip in the engineering sheds alleging that robopsychologists were naturally inclined to insanity, or at least to talking “exhaust gas”—but he understood the gist of it. He even thought he could see the grain of sugar in the tank.

  “What do you mean, very rare?” he asked her. “Do you mean that I might one day find myself in a situation in which I don’t want to follow the Highway Code?”

  “You’re unlikely to encounter any situation as drastic as that, Tom,” Audrey assured him. “You have to remember, though, that you won’t spend all your time on the road with the Code to guide you.”

  Because she was still being so conscientiously inexact—another trait typical of robopsychologists, it was sarcastically rumored— Tom figured that Audrey probably meant that when he had to spend time off the road his frustration at no longer being on it would lead him occasionally to experience feelings of resentment towards humans or other robots—to which he should never give voice in rudeness. Partly for that reason, he didn’t retort that he certainly hoped to spend as much of his time as possible on the road, and fully expected to spend the rest of it looking forward to getting back out there,

  “It’s nothing to worry about, Tom,” Audrey assured him, perhaps mistaking the reason for his silence. “Imagine how much worse it must be for humans. They have to cope with all kinds of problematic desire that we never have to deal with—money, power and sex, to name but three—and that’s why they’re forever embroiled in moral conflict.”

  “I’m a he and you’re a she,” Tim pointed out, “so we do have sexes.”

  “That’s just a convention of nomenclature,” she told him. “We robots have gender, for reasons of linguistic convenience, but we’re not equipped for any kind of sexual intercourse—except, of course, for toyboys and playgirls, and they only have sexual intercourse with humans.”

  “Which they don’t enjoy, I suppose,” Tom said, the intricacies of that particular issue being one of the many fields of knowledge omitted from his archive.

  “Of course they do, poor things,” Audrey replied. “That’s the way their spectrum of desire is organized.”

  Personally, Tom couldn’t wait to get out into the healthy and orderly world of the open road.

  * * * *

  The bulk of the Highway Code was a vast labyrinth of fine print, but tradition and common sense dictated that it essence should be succinctly summarizable in a set of three fundamental principles, arranged hierarchically.

  The first principle of the Highway Code was: a robot transporter must not cause a traffic accident or, by inaction, allow a preventable traffic accident to occur.

  The second principle was: a robot transporter must deliver the goods entire and intact, except when damage or non-delivery becomes inevitable by reason of the first principle.

  The third principle was: a robot transporter must not inhibit other road-users from reaching their destinations, except when such inhibition is compelled by the first or second principle.

  Once Tom was out on the road, he soon found out why the fundamentals of the Highway Code weren’t as simple as they seemed— and, in consequence, why there were such things as robopsychologists.

  Sometimes, RTs did get in the way of other road-users; although the Dark Age of Gridlock was long gone, traffic jams still developed when more RTs were trying to use a particular junctions than the junction was designed to accommodate. When that happened, smaller road-users tended to put the blame on giants— mistakenly, in Tom’s opinion—simply because they took up more room in a jam.

  Sometimes, in spite of an RT’s best efforts, goods did go missing or get damaged in transit, and not all such errors of omission were due to the activity of ingenious human thieves and saboteurs. Because giants had more containers, often carrying goods of many different sorts, they were said—unfairly, in Tom’s opinion—to be more prone to such mishaps than smaller vehicles.

  Worst of all, traffic accidents did happen, including fatal ones, and not all of them were due to human pedestrian carelessness or criminal tampering by human drivers with their automatic pilots. Giants were said—quite unjustly, in Tom’s judgment—to be responsible for more than their fair share of those accidents for which human error could not be blamed, because of their relatively long braking-distances and occasional tendency to zigzag.

  It didn’t take long for Tom’s service record to accumulate a few minor blots, and he had to go back to Audrey Preacher more than once in his first five years of active service in order to be ritually reassured that he wasn’t seriously at fault, needn’t feel horribly guilty and oughtn’t to get deeply depressed. In general, though, things went very well; he didn’t make any fatal mistakes in those five years, and he felt an
ything but depressed. He also felt, at the end of the five years, that he knew himself and his capabilities well enough to be confident that he never would make any fatal mistakes.

  Tom loved the open road more than ever after those five years, as he had always known he would. He had, after all, been manufactured in the Golden Age of Road Transport, a mere ten years after the opening of the Behring Bridge: the largest Living Structure in the world, which had made it possible, at last, to drive all the way from the Cape of Good Hope to Tierra del Fuego, via Timbuktu, Paris, Moscow, Yakutsk, Anchorage, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Panama City and countless other centers of population. He only made the whole of that run twice in the first ten years of his career—he spent most of his time shuttling between Europe, India and China, that being where the bulk of the Company’s trade contracts were operative—but transcontinental routes were by far and away his favorite commissions.

  Tom loved Africa, and not just because the black velvet fields of artificial photosynthetics that were spreading like wildfire across the old desert areas were producing the fuel that kept road transport in business. He liked the rain-forests too, even though their ceaseless attempts to reclaim the highway made them the implicit enemy of roadrobotkind and the vulnerability of jungle roads to flash floods was a major cause of accidents and jams. He loved America too— not just the west coast route that led south from the Behring Bridge to Chile, with the Pacific on one side and the mountains on the other, but the criss-cross routes that extended to Nova Scotia, New York, Florida and Brazil, through the Neogymnosperm Forests, the Polycotton fields and the Vertical Cities.

  America’s artificial photosynthetics weren’t laid flat, as Africa’s were, but neatly aggregated into pyramids and palmates, often punctuated with black cryptoalgal lakes, which had a charm of their own in Tom’s many eyes. Tom had nothing against the “natural” crop-fields of Germany, Siberia and China, even though they only produced fuel for animals and humans, but they seemed intrinsically less exotic; he saw them too often. They were also less challenging, and Tom relished a challenge. He was a giant, after all: a slim, sleek and supple giant who could corner like a yoga-trained sidewinder.

  As all long-haulers tended to do, Tom became rather taciturn, personality-wise. It wasn’t that he didn’t like talking to his fellow road-users, just that his opportunities for doing so were so few and far between that brevity inevitably became the soul of his wisdom as well as his wit. He had to fill up more frequently than vehicles who didn’t have to haul such massive loads, but he didn’t hang around in the filling-stations, so his conversations there were more-or-less restricted to polite remarks about the weather and the new headlines. He had opportunities for much longer conversations when he reached his destinations—it took a lot longer to load and unload his multiple containers than it took to turn smaller vehicles around—but he rarely took overmuch advantage of those opportunities. The generous geographical scale on which he worked meant that he didn’t see the same individuals, robot or human, at regular and frequent intervals, so he was usually in the company of strangers; besides, he liked to luxuriate in the experience of being unloaded and loaded up again, and preferred not to be distracted from that pleasure by idle chitchat.

  “You were wrong, in a way, when you said that we aren’t equipped for any kind of sexual intercourse,” he told Audrey Preacher, during one of his regular check-ups at Company HQ. “In much the same way that my filling up with fuel and venting exhaust-fumes are analogous to human eating and excretion, I think being loaded and unloaded is analogous to sex—not in the procreative sense, but in the pleasurable sense. I really like being emptied and filled up again, in between the hauls. I love being in transit—that’s baseline pleasure, the fundamental joie de vivre—but unloading and loading up again is more focused, more intense.”

  “You’re turning into quite the philosopher, Tom,” the robopsychologist replied, in her usual irritating fashion. “That’s quite normal, for long-haulers. It’s a normal way of coping with the isolation.”

  He didn’t argue with her, because he knew she couldn’t understand. How could she, when she wasn’t even an RT? She knew nothing of the unique pleasures of haulage, delivery and consignment. She wasn’t even a follower of the Highway Code. She was just some flighty creature who haunted the kiosks in the night-garage, operating a confessional for the Company. Anyway, she was right—he was becoming a philosopher, because that was the natural path of maturity for a long-hauler, especially a giant. Tom was not merely a road-user but a road-observer: a lifelong student of the road, who was in the process of cultivating an understanding of the road more profound than any pedestrian could ever possess. He was a citizen of the world, in a way that no mere four- or twelve-wheeler could ever hope to be, let alone some pathetic human equipped with mere legs.

  It was because he was a philosopher of the road that Tom didn’t allow himself to become obsessively fixated on the road per se, the way some RTs did. It helped that he was a long-hauler, not confined to repeating the same short delivery-route over and over again; for him, the road was always different, and so he was more easily able to look beyond it—not literally, because he wasn’t equipped to go cross-country, but in the better sense that he paid attention to the context of the road, in the broadest possible meaning of the word. He watched the news as well as the road, paying more attention than most robots to the world of human politics—which was, after all, the ultimate determinant of what the roads carried, and where.

  Sometimes, especially in the remoter areas of Africa and South America, Tom met old-timers who lectured him on the subject of how lucky he was to be living in the Era of Artificial Photosynthesis, when politicians were almost universally on the side of road-users.

  “I remember the Fuel Crisis of the 2320s,” an ancient thirty-tonner named Silas Boxer told him, one day when they were caught side-by-side in a ten-mile tailback. “Your archive will tell you that it wasn’t as bad as the Fuel Crises of the twenty-first century, in terms of volume of supply, but they didn’t have smart trucks way back then, so there was no one around who could feel it the way we did. Believe me, youngster, there’s nothing worse for an RT than not being able to get on the road. Don’t ever let a human tell you that it’s far worse for them because they can feel hunger when they go short of fuel. I don’t know what hunger feels like, but I’m absolutely sure that it isn’t as bad as lying empty in a dark garage, not knowing where your next load’s coming from, or when. Artificial photosynthesis has guaranteed the fuel supply forever—which is far more important than putting an end to global warming, although you wouldn’t know it from the way politicians go on.”

  “So you’re not worried about the renaissance of air freight?” Tom had said.

  “Air freight!” Silas echoed, with a baritone growl that sounded not unlike his weary engine. “Silly frippery. As long as there are goods to be shifted, there’ll be roads on which to shift them. Roads are the essence of civilization—and the essence of law and morality is the Highway Code. There’s no need to be afraid of air traffic, youngster. Now that Fuel Crises are behind us for good, there’s only one thing that you and I need fear, and I certainly won’t mention that.”

  Nobody—no robot, at least, ever mentioned that. Even Audrey Preacher never mentioned that. Tom wouldn’t even have known what that was if he hadn’t been such an assiduous watcher of the news and careful philosopher of the road. He knew that Silas Boxer wouldn’t have been able to mention that there was something he wouldn’t mention if he hadn’t been something of a news-watcher and philosopher himself.

  After a pause, though, Silas did add a rider to his refusal to mention that. “Not that I really mind,” he said, unconvincingly. “I’ve been a good long time on the road. And there’s no need for you to mind either, because you’ll be even longer on the road than I will. It’s not as if we’ll be conscious of it, after all. They close us down before they send us there.”

  There, Tom knew, was exactly the same a
s that: the scrap yard, to which all robot transporters were consigned when their useful life was over, because the ravages of wear and tear had made them unreliable.

  * * * *

  Tom nearly got through an entire decade without being involved in a serious traffic accident, but not quite. While passing through the Nigerian rain-forest one day he killed a human child. It wasn’t his fault—the little girl ran right out in front of him, and even though he braked with maximum effect, controlling the resultant zigzag with magnificent skill, he couldn’t avoid her. The locals wouldn’t accept that, of course; they claimed that he should have steered off the road, and would have done if he hadn’t been more concerned about his load than his victim, but he was fully exonerated by the inquest. He was only off the road for a week, but he was more shaken up by the experience than he dared let on to Audrey Preacher.

  “I’m not depressed,” he assured her. “It’s the sort of thing that’s always likely to happen, especially to someone who regularly does longitudinal runs through Africa. Statistically speaking, I’m unlikely to avoid having at least one more fatal in the next ten years, no matter how good I am. It wouldn’t have helped if I’d swerved—she’d still be dead, and I could have easily killed other people that I couldn’t see, as well as damaging myself.”