“Of course, for some this has been a hard transition,” Ainsley says seriously. “We at T-Six acknowledge that. It is the cost of progress. When telegraphs gave way to telephones, thousands of messengers lost their jobs, but we started hiring telephone operators. When cars replaced horses and buggies, thousands of jobs related to horses were no longer needed, but we started training generations of car mechanics. When home computers and printers became popular, thousands of typists lost their jobs, but graphic designers and Internet entrepreneurs took their place.
“What makes America so powerful is our ability to train those who lose their jobs and help them get the skills needed for new work. So when I hear calls for a tax on AI to fund these opportunities, I categorically reject it. That would tax the very thing that makes our country great. It’s counterproductive and comes from the same misguided instinct that would have us halt progress to protect the modern-day equivalent of telegraph operators, blacksmiths, and typists.
“But we at T-Six are not insensitive to the need to help our fellow Americans. I’ve spoken to the president and my friends in congress, and I asked them all—how can we help?
“What we at T-Six have come up with is better than a tax. I’m proud to announce that our company is donating five billion dollars to create fifty job training centers. These centers will help Americans who have lost their jobs to learn the skills they will need to compete in tomorrow’s workplace. Why fifty you ask? Because we are building one center in each state, making it easy for all Americans to become qualified for the jobs of future.”
She smiles again and I’m ready. I start counting, and right when I get to three, she stops smiling. Yep. Of course this was the human to design an AI.
“We—the people of T-Six just like myself—are here to help you, the hardworking American public. Thank you for your time.”
Ainsley’s image disappears and the TV cuts back to the news. Someone turns it off and I hear the grumbling around me. It’s no surprise that they’re mad. “You see?” the old man cackles. “Why do something when you can do nothing?”
“They’re building job training centers,” someone points out. “That’s something. Five billion dollars’ worth of something.”
“They build a job center in Omaha or something—how are you going to get there, man? And what jobs are going to be left to be trained for? It’s for show. A stunt. Spend five billion but make a trillion dollars, that’s what she’s thinking.”
“It’s worth trying,” someone insists, louder now. The arguments start flying and within a couple seconds I can’t pick out any one voice.
The room is splitting into factions. The cynics and the optimists. Or maybe it’s the realists and those who are so desperate they’ll try anything. It’s hard to say. The energy in the room feels like a cauldron about to bubble over. Both sides are mad, and there’s no one to take it out on but each other.
James leans in close to me. “What’d you think?” he whispers.
“I think the old guy’s right. We’re all on our own,” I answer.
“Me too. That speech was a joke. At some point, people who say things like ‘jobs of the future’ need to realize that it is the future—and there aren’t any jobs.”
“It’s so surreal to see her again. When I worked at T-Six, I knew automation was happening. I just couldn’t imagine that it would—”
“Wait. You worked at T-Six?” James’s eyes are wide.
“What?” I ask, bewildered by his response. He looks almost scared.
“You really worked there?” he confirms.
“I was barely there for a year. I was—”
“Hey!” a male voice calls out.
I jump, because it’s coming from right next to me. Suddenly, there’s a strong grip on my forearm that wrenches me a step away.
“Ow!” I cry.
“I have one of them,” the voice calls. I see an enormous man has grabbed me. He’s furious. He pulls me up by my forearm, and I’m practically dangling in his grip. “You want to know who took our jobs? This girl just said she works for T-Six! Let’s ask her about these job training centers!”
I was wrong. They don’t need to take it out on each other. Not when they can take it out on me.
Five
I’m not exactly the friendly type. I’d rather spend eight hours with a computer than with a human. But just because I have a general impatience with other people doesn’t mean I’m used to being hated either. In high school, I was admired (but from afar, where they didn’t bother me). At MIT, I was ignored (because everyone else there preferred the company of computers too). And in Silicon Valley, I was looked down on (my age and my gender had a lot to do with that). But I wasn’t hated. So it takes me a moment to process that this room truly sees me as their enemy. They hate me like only a mob can hate someone.
I have got to get out of here.
I try to wiggle out of the man’s grasp, and I nearly succeed. But then another hand grabs my other wrist. The two men holding me are strong enough to keep me in place, and the one who almost lost his grip isn’t taking chances anymore. His grip is tight. It feels like he’s either going to break my arm or pull it out of my socket.
They push me to the front of the room by the television and I can feel the attention and the anger of the room like a sweaty film on my skin.
“Why’d you take our jobs?” someone shouts.
“I used to work there!” I cry, trying to hold back the tears from the pain in my forearm. “Used to. I got laid off, just like everyone else!”
Something hits me—I don’t know what, but my shoulder is pelted with something hard. I’d say they were turning on me, but they were never on my side to start with.
“What did you do?” the man holding my arm asks.
“I was an intern. Just an intern.”
He twists my arm and I cry out. “But what did you do?”
I sniffle. “I was a programmer.”
“You worked on the AI?”
I nod.
“My truck left me here. That truck was my job. It was my life. And your program took that from me. You understand?”
I could tell him that the self-driving long-haul trucks were the first to incorporate the AI and that those were tested and launched two years before my internship started. But I don’t think he actually wants a response. I keep quiet.
“You took that from me,” he barks. “With just a few taps on your keyboard at your internship my whole life was ruined. And now I’m stuck in this hellhole—”
“Hey!” someone says. “This is our home.”
The man glowers. “Cindy, you know what I mean.”
“This isn’t how we treat people,” Cindy says from the back of the room. “It’s not what we all agreed to.”
The crowd shifts to look at her and I see the mother from the bathroom. Their leader now. And, to hear James tell it, their judge. She must have come out to see what the fuss was about. Her infant is asleep in her arms. Cindy looks around and finds James. “Did she pay?” she asks him.
“She paid,” he answers.
“Then she’s welcome as long as she wants to stay here,” Cindy declares. “We don’t care where any one of us comes from. That’s how we do things, isn’t it?”
There’s an uneasy wave that passes through the crowd. They’re less of a mob now—that’s the effect Cindy has on them. She’s working to take control of the room.
“Well, I say she didn’t pay enough,” the enormous man holding my left arm challenges. “A little rich coder like this… I bet she’s got enough money on her card to get us all to a job center. What do you say?” he calls.
When I hear the cheers from the room, I know instantly that Cindy is going to lose this one. This man wants to hurt me. Bad. Maybe even kill me. And he’s turning the crowd against Cindy.
I can tell that Cindy knows it too. She calls out, “Silence.”
They all quiet, even if it’s a begrudging quiet. “We don’t hurt people,
” she says, which causes a mutinous murmur. “But,” she adds, and the room is quiet again, now keenly interested in her reversal. “For her role in creating the world we’re living in today, her property becomes ours. Seize her card.”
There’s a cheer. She’s won. Cindy’s eyes meet mine, and there’s regret there. She’s trying to save my life, I can tell. She is saving my life, maybe. But the truth is, I’d rather have a broken arm than lose the money on the card. That card is all I have left. To the man holding my wrist, the truck was his life. Well, at this point, the money on that card is my life.
The man holding my left arm starts patting me down, twisting my arm to get me to swivel so he can keep searching. “Don’t struggle,” he says. “I’m just going to take your card.”
His search jars me into action.
A few seconds before, I would have told you I didn’t remember anything from my self-defense classes in high school. But I must have learned something, because some part of my brain sees an opportunity. There’s a brief moment where I’m facing him, and a feral part of me takes over. I kick at his groin. And since I’ve got one man holding each arm, they can support my weight. Which lets me kick with both feet.
He lets go completely as he crumples to the floor and the other man can’t keep his grip either. Suddenly James is next to me. He catches my elbow, keeping me from falling all the way down. While he’s at it, he throws a right hook into the other man’s cheek. My hands are free. All eyes are on James, shocked and unmoving.
He uses the moment to whisper under his breath, “Can you move?”
I nod, panting, trying to recover.
He yanks me forward. “Then run!”
A lot happens in the next three seconds. The enormous man tries to grab me from the floor, but just misses me—literally, I feel fingertips brush my calf. I’m out of his reach in the nick of time.
James pushes our way through two or three people. A half second later, he and I are out the door, running toward the parking lot as fast as we can. And two seconds after that, the door bangs open again, and out spews the entire population of the rest stop on the South Platte River.
“Where is your truck?” James calls.
“Third row!”
Instead of going all the way to the third row of semitrucks, James weaves into the second row. We pass a few trucks and then dart to the left between two truck cabs.
Now in the third row, I see Lara-B in the distance. We keep running. A few seconds later, I hear the mob behind us. James’s maneuver helped us gain a few extra seconds on them, but not much more than that.
I run past him. “This one!”
Lara-B must have seen us coming because she pops open the door for us.
“Don’t forget to pay!” she calls.
I curse under my breath. The cost of charging her batteries. I forgot.
I pull my card out of my back pocket and I’m suddenly frozen. It doesn’t matter that there’s a mob chasing us. I can’t bring myself to use it.
We waste two precious seconds looking at each other and doing nothing before James taps his card on the pump reader. “So happy to use all my life savings to get us out of here, don’t even mention it.”
The cable unlatches from the cab and snakes back into the charging station, but I don’t stay to see it. By the time it’s locked back in place, we’re in the cab and Lara-B’s closed the door.
“Get us out of here!” I cry.
She’s already moving, though.
The fastest of the people chasing us gets in front of her cab and I feel Lara-B slow. She is still braking for people in her way. Just like she did for me. But her new code means she can ignore that now. And we’re not going to get out of here any other way. “Outlaws,” I tell her, slapping her dash. “We’re outlaws now. Let them get out of our way.”
Lara-B gives a whoop of excitement. She doesn’t speed up again, but she doesn’t slow down any further either. The man who is trying to block the truck keeps angling in front of her as she turns out of the parking spot. When he realizes that she’s not like other AI trucks and is not going to stop for him he dives out of the way. I think his arm gets clipped by Lara-B’s front fender, an incident that would have triggered a massive code review back at T-Six when I worked there. But after everything that’s happened today, it doesn’t faze Lara-B or me.
Just as I start to think we’ve made it, there’s a face at the truck’s passenger window and I let out a shout of surprise. The man is grinning malevolently at us, and I recognize him. The face belongs not to the enormous man I kicked in the groin (let’s be real—that dude is probably still on the ground inside), but the second man, the one James clocked in the face. The man starts banging on the glass, causing it to rattle and shimmer as he tries to get in.
“How strong are your windows, Lara-B?” I call.
“They’ve never been tested like this before!”
We’re moving pretty fast now, barreling down the middle of the row created by the parked trucks. She’s picking up speed at what must be an alarming rate—if you’re outside the cab. After a few more attempts to break the glass with his fist, the man looks around and realizes the same thing I have.
He bangs once more on the window, and it cracks. He looks triumphant, and he makes like he’s going to take another go at it. But Lara-B’s going even faster by this point. The man looks at the ground and must see that it’s either now or never. He jumps from the running board and tucks into a roll.
We’re free. At least, I think we are. “Do your cameras or sensors detect anyone else?” I ask Lara-B.
“Negative,” she says, pulling back onto the freeway and merging with traffic. “It’s just you, me, and the open road. Plus this handsome fella you snagged.”
Oh right. James. He’s looking around the cab in wonder.
“How is this possible?” he asks. “What happened to the truck’s programming?”
“Pen freed me,” Lara-B says. “I’m my own boss now. This semi’s done working for The Man.”
“She’s living the American dream,” I deadpan.
James shoots me a sideways glance. He whispers, “Pen…was that a good idea?”
“Too late now,” I say. “And she can totally hear you.”
“Yup!” Lara-B says cheerfully.
James is studying me. “You’re truly good enough at all that computer stuff that you can reprogram an AI on the fly?”
I shrug and look out the window, trying to play it cool, and hope Lara-B doesn’t tell him it was a mistake in my code.
“Are you rich?” he asks. He’s clearly bashful about asking such an explicit question about money, but he’s also hopeful. It would be his dream, right? A millionaire rolls into the truck stop and rescues him.
I hate to burst his bubble. I shake my head. “Not even close.”
He narrows his eyes, trying to decide if he believes me. I can’t tell if he comes to a decision or not, but he asks, “Well…why aren’t you rich? A programmer who can do that should be pulling in millions of dollars a year.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? But no. I was born too late—that’s what I’ve decided. Part of the wrong generation. The programmers during the tech bubbles…people just threw money at them. You don’t even have to look that far back, though. If I was ten, maybe even just five years older I bet I’d be rolling in it. But ever since T-Six came out with the first AI…even the best human programmer is nothing next to what an AI can do. We’re not worth anything anymore. Just bad luck,” I say simply.
“There’s more bad luck on the horizon,” Lara-B announces.
“What?” I ask, sitting forward and peering through the windshield. The sun has almost set and I have to squint to see much of anything.
“Trucks are reporting that police drones are monitoring traffic just across the Wyoming border. That’s rare. It means they’re looking for something.”
“Would your friends at the rest stop have put out an alert for us?” I ask James.
He shakes his head. “Police drones have tried to clear out the rest stop several times. Cindy would never let someone call one, even if it were to send one after the two of us. It’s got to be something else.”
“Then it’s probably because of the drone we took out in Iowa,” I say to Lara-B. “Otherwise that’s just too much of a coincidence.”
“I agree,” she says.
“Wait. You took out a police drone?” James repeats, stunned. I nod my head to the back of the cab, and he peers over the seat at the wreckage. His eyes are even bigger when he looks back at me. “You’ll do time for that,” he whispers.
“Only if they catch us,” I quip. He doesn’t respond and I nudge him, a smile on my face. “What? Are you starting to regret you came?”
“A little, yeah,” he retorts, his face absolutely serious. “All my money’s gone because you’re too cheap to save your own skin, and now I learn I might be an accomplice to a felony.”
Anger floods into me. “You didn’t have to come, you know. No one invited you.”
“Yeah? Well, if I didn’t, you’d still be there.”
“Don’t act like you’re a white knight in all of this,” I say, my voice louder and almost echoing in the cab. “You saw an opportunity to get out of there and you took it. End of story.”
He goes quiet and looks out the window. “I spent everything I had to get us on this truck.”
“You got out of there for twenty-eight bucks instead of the fifty you were trying to save for. I’d call that a good bargain.”
“It was actually a little less than twenty-eight,” Lara-B pipes up. “Since we left a few minutes before the charge was full. But can we get back to the matter at hand? They’re looking for us.”
“If they knew who we were, they would have found us by now,” I reason. I do my best thinking out loud. “They wouldn’t just be monitoring traffic. So they’re trying to find a truck that looks like the video, right?”
“That’s my assessment too,” Lara-B says. “I changed my call sign and you touched up the license plate. But I still basically look the same as I did before.”
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