The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales. Brian Stableford
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?
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