by Bryan Hurt
“He,” I said. “I,” I said.
It seemed so unreal, so unfathomable. I couldn’t say anything.
The goat stood at the edge of the cliff and stared over the water. “Did you see?” she said. “He changed,” she said. She said that after the seagull had stepped off the cliff a real seagull, a bird, had soared up and toward the ocean. They searched the river from here to the city and on the third day found the body.
The goat and I kept seeing each other for a month after that. I touched her breasts two more times and once she put her hand down my pants, gave me a hand job. Her parents divorced and the goat moved to another town with her mother, further up the river. We emailed for a while, sent pictures, text messages. Then we stopped, which was a relief because every time we talked, texted, or touched I was reminded of the seagull. I didn’t blame the goat for what had happened even though she played a role. I played a role too. But I’m certain that he would have gone through with it, even if we hadn’t been there and encouraged him. What I couldn’t forgive her for was the lie she’d told about the seagull transforming and flying toward the ocean. A selfish and cruel thing to say, especially in front of his parents.
His parents were devastated, of course. They sold their house quickly and for a loss, moved away to a remote nowhere.
After what happened, the bullies in middle school left me alone. The beard and the rest of them found someone less tragic to pick on. I graduated middle school and went to a bigger high school where I was just a quiet kid, part of the scenery. Eventually my great-grandmother, the Volvo engine, stopped knocking. One muddy spring morning, my father turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened. A click. The engine wouldn’t turn over.
When I graduated high school, I moved to the big city. I was still looking for that feral community and had rented a studio apartment above a foul-smelling noodle shop in the Village. But by the time I got there, everything had changed again. All of the humans I met had human souls and if they didn’t, if they’d been animals in their past lives, most of them had jobs and families and had forgotten. Even the goat girl. We’re friends on Facebook. She lives in the Midwest and has two blonde and long-limbed children.
The other thing I don’t like about the city is that there’s no sky here. Sometimes I look up and expect to see open, untethered horizon, but instead can only see blue and clouds caught in sides of buildings. Sometimes there are birds in the buildings too. Seagulls because the ocean is close by even though I never go there. But I can’t tell if they’re real birds or just reflections, or if they’re flying toward the city or leaving.
MY OTHER CAR DRIVES ITSELF
In the nineteenth century, when Karl Benz pitched his car idea to investors, he tried to temper their expectations by telling them that demand would be limited because of lack of chauffeurs.
During the 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors predicted that cars would be driving themselves in twenty years.
My point is that for almost as long as we’ve been imagining cars, we’ve been imagining that someone else would be driving them.
We are Google’s chase team.
What we’re chasing now is the red Prius that’s approximately thirty feet in front of us. The Prius planes and curves on the California 1 as adroitly as any NASCAR. Around even the most rollercoaster-like turns, its speed is a steady thirty-five. Our van hurtles and weaves behind it, hugging the cliffs of Big Sur. More than four hundred feet below, waves break and churn against some very sharp rocks.
It’s Monday, midday, and the sky is set with tiny white clouds. Somewhere near Bixby Bridge, Levandowski points out the window, excitedly, at what he says is a whale. He tells us that its tail just breached the surface of the water and disappeared. He presses the binoculars to his chubby face and continues scanning.
Clarke and I refuse to look. Clarke’s behind the steering wheel. His knuckles are whiter than the clouds above and you can see the muscles in his jaw tense with concentration.
Levandowski points out the window again. “There it is,” he says.
This time we look. Clarke looks and I look.
Down in the bay, there’s a big spray of water, a black hump, and then the van’s wheels are crunching over gravel. Clarke slams the brakes but still we’re slung into the guardrail. Clarke starts yelling at Levandowski. I lift my laptop to make sure my pants aren’t damp.
A few minutes later we’re back on the road. Levandowski’s sulking because Clarke threw his binoculars out the window. The Prius is gone.
I log onto Google Maps and see that the blue dot that signifies “Prius” has stopped moving. When we catch up, we see that the car has driven itself into a cliff. The front end’s crumpled. There’s smoke pouring out the engine. The LIDAR mast, with its forty-two lasers and tens of thousands of dollars worth of navigation equipment, has snapped off the roof and is scattered across the road.
Levandowski puts on his gloves and starts collecting the technology. Clarke looks like he’s going to cry. I open the laptop and begin typing the incident report. The gist of which is:
We are fucked.
Next morning we’re called into Page’s office. That’s Larry Page, as in Google’s multibillionaire cofounder and CEO. He’s read my report and basically agrees with its assessment:
Totally fucked.
He digs into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone, which he tosses onto the desk and asks what we think it is.
What I think is that it’s exactly like that part in Star Wars where, during the Battle of Endor, Admiral Ackbar yells, “It’s a trap!”
Because obviously.
Page clears his throat.
Clarke finds a stain on his tie and begins rubbing the hell out of it. Levandowski focuses on a spot on the wall, just above Page’s head, and stares really hard. I slump in my chair. “It’s a cell phone,” I say.
“What?” says Page.
“Cell phone,” I say louder.
“Wrong.” Page picks up the cell phone and hurls it at us. It whizzes over our heads and explodes against the wall.
What that was, says Page, was a smart phone. And in terms of functionality, he says, it makes his Ferrari look like a retarded piece of shit.
Why, he wants to know, can’t we make a car that’s at least as smart as his smart phone?
Clarke looks at Levandowski.
Levandowski looks at me.
I look at my shoes.
Levandowski sighs.
“There was a whale,” he says, and stops.
“It won’t happen again,” he says.
Page doesn’t say anything. He picks up a stapler and begins squeezing. As we hurry out of his office, the stapler flies into the hallway and dents the wall.
Levandowski and Clarke want to go down to the lab to do another postmortem on the LIDAR. I tell them that I’m going to lunch. It’s not even ten o’clock.
“Whatever,” says Clarke. “Don’t be evil,” he says.
Google’s motto used to be something we took seriously, but now it’s something we say instead of saying something else.
“Don’t be evil,” I say back.
But instead of the commissary, I go to the parking lot and call Julia. Julia’s a graduate student at Stanford.
I’m sleeping with her.
She’s not my wife.
Julia and I met when we were demoing an early version of the Google Car. Both of us were in the Prius’s backseat, letting it drive us around Stanford’s campus. I was looking out the window. There were old brick buildings, green trees, the California sky.
It took me a while to realize that Julia was looking at me.
She was smiling.
“Things are in the saddle,” she said, “and ride mankind.”
She told me that that was Emerson. “‘Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing,’” she said. When we got back to her apartment, she told me that she was getting her doctorate in literature. She was writing a dissertation about representations of machines i
n poetry.
“Consilience” is what she wants to call her book. She says that it doesn’t matter that the title’s already taken. In fact, she says that’s kind of the point.
Julia doesn’t answer. I hang up before the phone goes to voicemail.
Instead, I press the icon on my phone that dials Tracy’s number. Tracy who is my wife. Even before the phone starts ringing, I know that she’s going to pick up.
Ten months ago she went on maternity leave and she hasn’t gone off. Whenever we talk about her going back to work because, you know, we’re making half of what we used to make, and so hard times, we end up getting in a big fight.
“Hello,” she says, and I hang up.
I’m in the car and halfway to Stanford before I realize that she’s calling me back.
When I knock on her office door, Julia looks up from her desk, first surprised and then disappointed.
“Oh,” she says. “It’s you,” she says.
There’s a catastrophe of papers spread out in front of her. She’s wearing these reading glasses that magnify her eyes.
I ask whom was she expecting.
She scans the hallway and closes the door. “These are my office hours,” she says. She asks what I want.
What I want, I tell her, is to take her to lunch.
She looks at the clock.
“Brunch?” I say.
We go to her apartment. It’s a one-bedroom in Pacific Heights. Out the window, you can almost see the Golden Gate Bridge.
“You’re sad,” says Julia. She’s holding my penis but she’s essentially right. What I feel most of the time is something like sadness.
My wife has noticed it too. “Do we make you unhappy?” Tracy says sometimes after we’ve put the baby to bed. “Do you realize you frown all the time?”
I tell Julia that we lost a car.
“Another one?”
She sounds truly disappointed. But then she really believes in the project. When we first met I gave her the investor’s pitch, the one that made them go nuts and give us all their money.
In America there are forty thousand automobile deaths per year. Ninety-three percent of those are caused by human error.
Every ten years that’s the population of Oakland gone, in twisted metal and burning rubber, just like that.
At Google it’s our conclusion that, when it comes to being drivers, people basically suck. The Google Car is our hands-on-our-hearts attempt to do something good.
The truth is that we’re developing the Google Car because the technology’s ripe. In ten years, autonomous driving is going to be the industry standard. Every car company, and most of the tech ones, has something in R&D. Drive around Silicon Valley for long enough and it’ll begin to seem like every third car is being chased by a black van.
Back at the lab, Levandowski and Clarke are yelling at each other.
It turns out that in a very technical sense there was no accident. The Prius crashed because it was supposed to crash.
Telemetrics show that something small, perhaps a small animal, ran into the road in front of it. Once the LIDAR picked it up, the car swerved, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do.
The question that Levandowski and Clarke are now debating is whether or not swerving is a good design feature.
Like is it better if the car swerves and crashes? Or if it continues plowing forward regardless of what’s in its way?
Levandowski has a big heart so, of course, votes for swerving. He wants to know what happens next time when it’s a kid or someone’s dog.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Clarke.
Clarke says that Levandowski’s argument is stupid. He says we can adjust the LIDAR so that it picks up bigger things like dogs and children.
The real question, he says, is if we’re going to let an eighty-thousand-dollar car crash itself every time a squirrel or whatever runs into the road. “What would a real person do?” he says. He says that’s how the car needs to react.
Levandowski heaves himself off his stool and begins pacing around the lab. He’s muttering to himself.
“I thought people were the bug,” is what I pick up.
Both of them want to know what I think.
What I think is that we’re the guys who drive behind the car that drives itself. You want to ask a moral question, go talk to our CEO.
I pick up a dissected piece of LIDAR and twirl it between my fingers. It’s a mirror attached to a long metal stem.
I say that I guess I’d choose swerve.
Clarke walks out of the room. “What?” I call after him. “I’ve got a kid,” I say.
Of the three of us, Clarke’s the youngest. Google hired him right out of MIT. But in terms of the technology, he probably knows more than Levandowski and me combined. In college he won some kind of big government award for designing a helmet that could mind-read mice. You put the little helmet on the mouse and then put the mouse in a maze. The helmet would tell you a fraction of a second before the mouse turned a corner if it was going to turn left or right.
Levandowski settles down next to me.
We begin picking through the guts of the LIDAR. There are wires and sensors and motors and motor parts. He asks me about lunch.
“A three-hour lunch,” he says.
Levandowski knows all about Julia and his stance is that he disapproves. This is because Tracy and I once invited him over for dinner and now he thinks that Tracy’s great.
The whole time they joked about me like I wasn’t there.
Tracy passed him the green bean salad. “You should see him with the diapers,” she said. She pinched her nose and held the other hand about three feet in front of her face.
“At the office,” said Levandowski, “you ask him a question and he practically dives underneath his desk.”
On average, Americans spend one hundred hours a year commuting back and forth to work. Stretch that out over a lifetime and that becomes eight thousand hours. Which is one full year of life.
Start adding in all of the other car trips you take and the number skyrockets. The conservative estimate is that by the time you die, you’ll have spent eight years behind the wheel.
The only things you’ll have spent more time doing are working, sleeping, and watching TV.
“If you hate your commute so much,” says Tracy, “get another job.”
She’s put the baby to sleep and we’re finally getting around to dinner. The microwave beeps and she puts chicken on the table.
“But who will provide us with our bounty?” I say. I gesture at the gray chicken that looks an awful lot like last night’s chicken.
“You’re resourceful,” she says.
This is pretty much how it goes every night. I complain about something and Tracy deflects it back at me.
“You wouldn’t let us starve,” she says.
I’d complain about the chicken, but I already know how that one goes. Tracy will ask me what did I expect, exactly. She’ll say that it’s hard work raising a kid. Then she’ll remind me that it wasn’t a decision that she made on her own.
She’ll talk about the long and frequent conversations we had, before we even started trying to make a baby, about pulling the goalie from the net.
I liked the idea. The metaphor I guess you’d call it. By pulling the goalie we were choosing to let fate decide.
“Who talks like that?” Tracy said when I told her this. “We’re deciding,” she said.
Later that night, as we undress for bed, Tracy asks me about the phone call from earlier. She wants to know why I called and hung up.
“Phone call?” I say. The baby’s sleeping in her crib at the foot of the bed. We’re whispering so that we don’t wake her.
“You called,” says Tracy. She shows me the Caller ID.
“Huh,” I say. I tell her that the phone must have dialed itself.
She wants to know, on a scale of one to ten, how would I rate that answer. “One being regular bullshit,” she says
, “and ten being complete bullshit.”
I tell her that I’d rate it zero.
“Zero’s not an option,” she says.
“Then how would you rate it?” I say.
She turns off the light.
So far, Google Cars have logged more than two hundred thousand miles and still they keep crashing.
For a while their biggest problem was stop signs. The cars couldn’t figure out that people were essentially aggressive drivers and that they rolled through intersections instead of stopping completely. In four-way situations the accident rate was something like seven in ten.
I was the one who came up with the workaround.
By making the AI a little more aggressive we could ensure that Google Cars would roll through stop signs before other cars. Human drivers would be forced to yield to them.
Focus groups basically hate them, and why shouldn’t they? They’re more like something from The Terminator than The Jetsons.
But accidents are down by more than 50 percent.
Next morning I’m standing over the griddle making pancakes when Tracy comes into the kitchen. Pancakes are Tracy’s favorite and are something I have a true talent for. Whenever I make pancakes they always come out perfectly round and perfectly thick.
Tracy puts the baby in the high chair and asks me “What’s the occasion?”
“Can’t a guy make pancakes?” I say.
“I’m not complaining,” she says.
She stands next to me and tugs on the collar of her bathrobe. She’s not wearing anything underneath.
We watch the butter deliquesce and the batter congeal. The smell of pancakes rises into the air. I put a short stack on Tracy’s plate and tell her that sometimes phones really do dial themselves.
“There’s an article on Google News,” I say.
“Are we still arguing about that?” says Tracy.
“Then what are we arguing about?” I say.
Tracy shushes me. She kisses me on the cheek and then on my lips. And before I know it my hands are sliding inside her bathrobe. “You know,” she says, my ear in her mouth, “you’re not a bad guy when you give it half a shot.”
“Neither are you,” I say. My hands are moving south and my palms are becoming sweaty. There’s heaviness of breath. Pancake batter spitting.