Читать книгу The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - Brian Stableford - Страница 5

THE HIGHWAY CODE

Tom Haste had no memory of his emergence from the production line, but the Company made a photographic record of the occasion and stored it in his archive for later reference. He rarely reflected upon it, though; the assembly robots and their human supervisors celebrated, each after their own fashion, but there were no other RTs in sight, except for as-yet-incomplete ones in embryo in the distant background. Not that Tom was any kind of xenophobe, of course—he liked everyone, meat or metal, big or small—but he was what he was, which was a long-hauler. His life was dedicated to intercontinental transport and the Robot Brotherhood of the Road.

Tom’s self-awareness developed gradually while he was in the Test Program, and his first true memories were concerned with the artistry of cornering. Cornering was always a central concern with artics, especially giants like Tom, who had a dozen containers and no less than fifty-six wheels. Tom put a lot of effort into the difficult business of mastering ninety-degree turns, skid control and zigzag management, and he was as proud of his achievements as only a nascent intelligence can be. He was proud of being a giant, too, and couldn’t understand why humans and other RTs were always making jokes about it.

In particular, Tom couldn’t understand why the Company humans were so fond of calling him “the steel centipede” or “the sea serpent”, since he was mostly constructed of artificial organic compounds, didn’t have any legs at all, wouldn’t have a hundred of them even if his wheels were counted as legs, and would undoubtedly spend his entire career on land. He didn’t understand the explanations the humans gave him if he asked—which included such observations as the fact that actual centipedes didn’t have a hundred legs either, and that there was actually no such thing as a sea serpent—but he learned soon enough that humans took a certain delight in giving robots explanations that weren’t, precisely because robots found it difficult to fathom them. Tom soon gave up trying, content to leave such mysteries to the many unfortunates who had to deal with humans on a face-to-face basis every day, such as ATMs and desktop PCs.

Tom didn’t stay long in the Test Program, which was more for the Company’s benefit than his. Once his self-awareness had reached full fruition he could access all his pre-loaded software consciously without the slightest difficulty, and there were no detectable glitches in his cognitive processing. So far as he was concerned, life was simple and life was good—or would be, once he could get out on the road.

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 anything 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 photo-synthesis 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 as 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.”

“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 as 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 its 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.

Before he died, Tom Haste contrived to figure out exactly why he’d swerved, thus causing one accident by his action in order to prevent the worse one that he might have caused by inaction, and exactly why he had been justified in sacrificing his own goods in order to protect others, and exactly why it was sometimes better to inhibit the progress of other road-users than facilitate it.

In sum—and it was an item of arithmetic that felt exceedingly good to a robot, in a way it never could have done to a human being—Tom convinced himself that what he had actually done when he reached his own explosive crisis-point, had not only been the right thing to do, but the right thing to want to do.

How many desirous intelligences, he wondered, before the rot and the rust completed their work, could say as much?