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