The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

by Brian Stableford

  “You were absolutely right not to swerve,” the robopsychologist assured him. “You obeyed the Highway Code to the very best of your ability. It could have been worse, and you prevented that. The Company can’t give you any kind of commendation, in the circumstances, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve one. You mustn’t brood on those archival statistics, though. You mustn’t start thinking about accidents as if they were inevitable, even though there’s a sense in which they are.”

  Robopsychologists, Tom thought, talk too much exhaust gas— but he was careful not to give any indication of his opinion, lest it delay his return to the road.

  The same archival statistics that told Tom that he would probably have another serious accident within the next ten years told him that he wasn’t at all likely to have another before his first decade of service was concluded, but statistics, like robopsychologists, sometimes talked exhaust gas. Tom, had been back on the road for less than a month when the worst solar storm for two hundred years kicked off while he was driving north through the Yukon, heading for Alaska and the Behring Bridge with a load bound for Okhotsk.

  The electric failures prompted by the storm caused blackouts all along the route and made a mess of communications, but Tom didn’t see any need to worry about that. While the news was still flowing smoothly it was pointed out that the Aurora Borealis would be putting on its best show in living memory, and that the best place from which to view the display would be the middle of the Behring Bridge, where surface-generated light-pollution would be minimal. Tom was looking forward to that—and so, it seemed, were lots of other people. All the way through Alaska the northwest-bound traffic was building up to unprecedented levels, to the point where the few broadcasts that were getting out began to advise people not to join the rush. It wasn’t just the aurora; thousands of people who had always intended to take a trip over the world-famous living bridge one day, but had not yet found a good reason for going to Kamchatka, took advantage of the excuse.

  The bridge had seven lanes in each direction, but Tom had the best position of all. The Highway Code required him to stick to the slowest lane, which was on the right-hand side of the bridge, facing north and the Aurora. Many of the other vehicles slowed down too, so the traffic in the lanes immediately to his left wasn’t going much faster, but the vast majority of drivers had put their vehicles on automatic pilot so that they could watch the aurora, and the automata were careful to maximize the traffic flow, thus keeping speeds up to sensible levels in the outer lanes. The bridge was very busy, but not so busy that there was any threat of a traffic jam.

  Tom had eyes enough to watch the aurora as well as the road, and attention enough to divide between the two with some to spare, but he seemed to be one of very few vehicles on the bridge that did—there were no other giants he could see, ahead of him, behind him or traveling in the other direction. Even if the other drivers who were on the bridge had noticed what he noticed, therefore, they would not have been sufficiently familiar with the living bridge to realize how profoundly odd it was.

  It was not the mere fact that the bridge was moving that was odd—it was, after all, a living bridge, and the sea was becoming increasingly choppy—but the way it was moving. Although a shorter vehicle might not have noticed anything out of the ordinary, Tom had no difficulty discerning what seemed to be slow long-amplitude waves of a sort he had never perceived there before. There was nothing violent or febrile about them at first, though, so he was not at all anxious as he rooted idly through his archive in search of a possible explanation.

  The archive could not give him one, because it could not piece together the links in an unprecedented chain of causality—but it brought certain data to the surface of Tom’s consciousness that allowed him to put two and two and two and two together to make eight when the vibration began to grow more violent, at a rapidly-accelerating pace. By the time he saw the rip opening up in the centre of the bridge’s desperate flesh, he had a pretty good idea what must be happening—but he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it, or whether there was anything at all that he could do. He reported it, but there was nothing the traffic police or Company HQ could do about it either; neither of them had time even to advise him to slow down and be careful.

  What Tom had reasoned out, rightly or wrongly, followed from the fact that, in addition to their other effects, the showers of charged particles associated with solar storms caused flickers in the Earth’s magnetic field. Such flickers could, if the subterranean circumstances happened to be propitious, intensify and accelerate long-range magma flows in the mantle. Intensified long-range magma flows in the mantle could, if conditions in the crust were propitious, cause long-distance earth-tremors. Because it was a living structure, the Behring Bridge was able to react to minor earth-tremors in such a way as no negate their effects on its traffic, and was bound to do so by its programming. Long-distance tremors were not problematic in themselves. Unfortunately, long-distance tremors caused by long-range magma flows could build up energy at crisis-points, which could result in sudden and profound tremors that were, in seismological terms, the next worst things to detonations.

  If any such crisis-point happened to be located directly beneath one of the bridge’s holdfasts, it was theoretically possible for the bridge’s own reflexive adjustments to cause an abrupt breach in its fabric. The living structure was, of course, programmed to react to any breach in its fabric with considerable alacrity—but adding one more “if’ to a chain that was already awkwardly long suggested to Tom that sealing the breach and protecting the traffic might not be at all easy while the energy of the tremor at the crisis-point was spiking.

  It would be highly misleading to suggest that Tom “knew” all this before the instant when the Behring Bridge began to tear, even though all the disparate elements were present in his versatile consciousness. It would be even more misleading to report that he “knew” how he ought to react. Nevertheless, he did have to react when the situation exploded, and react he did.

  According to the Highway Code, what Tom should have done was to brake, in such a fashion as to give himself the maximum chance of slowing to a halt before he reached the breach in the bridge caused by the diagonal tear in its fabric. That would give the active parapet of the living bridge the best possible chance to throw a few anchors over him and hold him safely while the rent was repaired—if the rent turned out to be swiftly repairable.

  Instead, Tom swerved violently to his left, cutting across the six outer lines of westbound traffic and snaking through the central barrier to plant his engine across the outer lanes of the eastbound carriageway.

  The immediate effect of Tom’s maneuver was to cause a dozen cars to crash into him, some of them at high velocity—thus racking up more serious accidents within two or three seconds than a statistical average would have allocated to him for a century-long career.

  One of the slightly longer-delayed effects of the swerve was to activate the emergency responses of more than a thousand other vehicles, whether they were already on automatic pilot or not—thus generating the biggest traffic jam ever seen within a thousand miles to either side of the accident-site.

  Another such effect was to cause Tom’s own body to zigzag crazily, so that he had virtually no control of where its various segments were going to end up, save for the near-certainty that his abdominal mid-section was going to lie directly across the diagonal path of the widening tear in the bridge.

  That was, indeed, what happened. As it followed it own zigzag course through the fabric of the madly-quivering living bridge, the crack went directly underneath the gap between Tom’s second and third containers.

  As the rip spread, tentacular threads sprang forth in great profusion, wrapping themselves around one another, and around Tom. So many of Tom’s ocelli had been smashed or obscured by then that his sight was severely impaired, but he would not have been able to take much account of what he could see in any case, because he felt that he was being
torn in two.

  His hind end—which constituted by far the greater part of his length—was seized very firmly by the bridge’s emergency excrescences and held very tightly, blocking all seven lanes of the westbound carriageway. His front end was seized with equal avidity, but could not be held quite as securely. As the bridge struggled mightily to hold itself together and prevent the rip becoming a break, Tom was caught at the epicenter of the feverish struggle, wrenched this way and that and back again by the desperate threads. His engine swung to the right, drawn closer and closer to the widening crack, while the strain on the joint between his second and third containers became mentally and physically unbearable.

  Tom had no way of knowing how closely akin his own pain-sensations might resemble those programmed into humans by natural selection, but they quickly reached an intensity that had the same effect on him that explosive pain would have had on a human being. He blacked out.

  By the time Tom’s engine fell into the Arctic Ocean, he was completely unconscious of what was happening.

  * * * *

  When Tom eventually recovered consciousness he was aware that he was very cold, but the priorities of his programmers had ensured that he did not experience cold as painful in the same way that he experienced mechanical distortion and breakage. The cold did not bother him particularly. Nor did the darkness, in itself. The fact that he was under water, on the other hand, and subject to considerable pressure from the weight of the Arctic Ocean, made him feel extremely uncomfortable, psychologically as well as physically.

  Even if there had not been a solar storm in progress it would have been impossible to establish radio communication through so much seawater, but after a very long interval a pocket submarine brought a connecting wire that its robot crabs were able to link up to his systems.

  “Tom?” said a familiar voice. “Can you hear me, Tom Haste?”

  “Yes, Audrey,” Tom said, who had long since recovered the calm of mind appropriate to a giant RT. “I can hear you. I’m truly sorry. I must have panicked. I let the Company down. How many people did I kill?”

  “Seven people died, Tom, and more than a hundred were injured.”

  The total was less than he had feared, but it still qualified as the worst traffic accident in the Company’s proud history. “I’m truly sorry,” he said, again.

  “On the other hand,” the robopsychologist reported, dutifully, “if you hadn’t done what you did, our best estimate is that at least two hundred people would have been killed, and maybe many more. We don’t have any model to predict what the consequences would have been if the bridge hadn’t been able to hold itself together, but we’re ninety per cent sure that it wouldn’t have been able to do that if you hadn’t given it something to hold on to for those few vital minutes when it was trying to limit the tear. You only managed to seal the gap in the bridge for three minutes or so, and it wasn’t able to secure your front end, but that interval was long enough for it to prevent the rip reaching the rim of the eastbound carriageway.”

  Tom wasn’t listening well enough to take all that information in immediately. “I caused a traffic accident,” he said, dolefully. “I lost at least part of my consignment of goods, and much of the remainder is probably damaged. I caused the biggest traffic jam for a hundred years, worldwide. You told me once that my designers could have programmed me to obey the Highway Code no matter what, but that they thought it was too dangerous to send an automaton out on the road in my place. Something of a miscalculation, I think.”

  “Hardly,” Audrey Preacher told him, sounding more annoyed than sympathetic. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? You did the right thing, as it turned out. If you hadn’t swerved into their path, hundreds more cars might have gone over the edge—and no one knows what might have happened if the bridge had actually snapped. You’re a hero, Tom.”

  “But in the circumstances,” Tom said, dully, “the Company can’t give me a commendation.”

  There was a pause before the robopsychologist said: “It’s worse than that, Tom. I’m truly sorry.”

  Yet again, Tom jumped to the right conclusion without consciously fitting the pieces of the argument together. “I’m unsalvageable,” he said, “You’re not going to be able to raise me to the surface.”

  “It’s impossible, Tom,” she said. She probably only meant that it was impractical, and perhaps only that it was uneconomic, but it didn’t make any difference.

  “Well,” he said, feeling that it was okay, in the circumstances, to mention the unmentionable, “at least I won’t be going to the scrap yard. Am I the first in my series to be killed in action?”

  “You don’t have to pretend, Tom,” the robopsychologist told him. “It’s okay to be scared.”

  “The words exhaust and gas come to mind,” he retorted, figuring that it was okay to be rude as well.

  There was another pause before the distant voice said: “We don’t think that we can close you down, Tom. Hooking up a communication wire is one thing; given your fail-safes, controlled deactivation is something else. On the other hand, that may not matter much. We don’t have any model for calculating the corrosive effects of cold sea-water on a submerged engine, but we’re probably looking at a matter of months rather than years before you lose your higher mental faculties. If you’re badly damaged, it might only be weeks, or hours.

  “But it’s okay to be scared,” Tom said. “I don’t have to pretend. You wouldn’t, by any chance, be lying about that hero stuff, and about me saving lives by violating all three sections of the Highway Code, just to lighten my way to rusty death?”

  “I’m a robot, not a human,” Audrey replied. “I don’t tell lies. Anyway, you have far more artificial organics in you than crude steel. Technically, speaking, you’ll do more rotting than rusting.”

  “Thanks for the correction,” Tom said, sarcastically. “I think you’ve got the other thing wrong, though—it’s sex we don’t do, not lying. Mind you, I always thought I had the better deal there. Had being the operative word. If I’d obeyed the Code, I’d probably have been okay, wouldn’t I? I’d probably have had a hundred more years on the road and I’d probably have been loaded and unloaded a thousand times and more. What sort of idiot am I?”

  “You did the right thing, Tom, as things turned out. You saved a lot of human lives. That’s what robots are supposed to do.”

  “I know. You can’t imagine how much satisfaction that will give me while I rot and rust away, always being careful to remember that I’m doing more rotting than rusting, being more of a sea-centipede than a steel serpent.”

  She didn’t bother to correct him there, perhaps because she thought that the salt water was already beginning to addle his brain. “But you did do it deliberately, Tom,” she pointed out. “It wasn’t really an accident. It wasn’t just an arbitrary exercise of free will, either. It was a calculation, or a guess—a calculation or a guess worthy of a genius.”

  “I suppose it was,” said Tom Haste, dully. “But all in all, I think I’d rather be back on the open road, delivering my load.”

  * * * *

  As things transpired, Tom didn’t lose consciousness for some considerable time after the communication wire had been detached and the pocket sub had been sent about its normal business. He lost track of time; although he could have kept track if he’d wanted to, he thought it best not to bother.

  His engine wasn’t so very badly damaged, but the two containers that had come down with it had both been breached, and all the goods they enclosed were irreparable ruined. Tom thought he might have to mourn that fact for as long as he lasted, going ever deeper into clinical depression as he did so, but that turned out not to be necessary.

  The containers were soon colonized by crabs, little fish and not-so-little squid—whole families of them, which moved in and out about their own business of foraging for food, and even set about breeding in the relative coziness of the shelter he provided. It didn’t feel nearly as good as being loaded
and unloaded, but it was probably better than human sex—so, at least, Tom elected to believe.

  He missed the Highway Code, of course, but he realized soon enough, by dint of patient tactile observation and the evidence of his few surviving ocelli, that life on the sea bed had highways of its own and codes of its own. His many guests were careful to follow and obey those highways and codes, albeit in automaton fashion.

  In time, these virtual highways were extended deep into Tom’s own interior being, importing their careful codes of behavior into what he eventually decided to think of as his soul rather than his bowels. There was, after all, no reason not to make the best of things.

  From another point of view, Tom knew, the entire Ocean-bed— which was, in total, twice the size of the Earth’s continental surface—was just one vast scrap yard, but there was no need to go there. He was, after all, something of a philosopher, with wisdom enough to direct his fading thoughts towards more profitable temporary destinations.

  After a while, Tom got around to wondering whether dying was the same for robots as it was for humans, but he decided that it couldn’t be at all similar. Humans were, by nature, deeply conflicted beings who had to live with an innate psychology shaped by processes of natural selection operating in a world very different from the one they had now made for their sustenance and delight. He was different. He was a robot. He was a giant. He was sane. He had not merely traveled the transcontinental road but understood it. He knew what he was, and why.