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
