by Bryan Hurt
“Well,” I say. “Not a guy,” I say.
I tell her that she knows what I mean.
She does, she says.
“I’m an adult woman and you’re an adult man,” she says. “With adult responsibilities,” she says.
Then she lifts the baby from the high chair, wipes food off her face, and puts her in the crib for a post-breakfast nap.
She asks if I’m going to join her in the bedroom. But by then my pancakes are burning. I’m already late for work.
We’re standing in the parking lot outside of Google HQ. It’s overcast and there’s a flock of seagulls in the trashcans. You have to shout to be heard.
Clarke’s holding a baseball and is waiting for the Prius to come around again. We’ve rigged this one with a modified LIDAR. When it’s close enough, Clarke tosses the ball. It bounces off the Prius’s hood and the Prius keeps going.
Then Levandowski tosses a soccer ball. Tires screech as the Prius jerks out of the way.
We do the test several more times. Each time the Prius hits the baseball but swerves for the soccer ball. When we present the results to Page that afternoon we tell him that the Google Car can now calculate between catastrophic and non-catastrophic collisions. In the latter case, we say, the car can now decide that the less damaging decision is to collide.
AR Detection is how Clarke pitches the new feature.
AR meaning Acceptable Risk.
Page squeezes his stapler a few more times. It’s only when he puts it back on his desk that I realize that I’ve been holding my breath.
He tells us that he wants us to start doing road tests.
“This weekend,” he says.
Out in the hall I notice that the dent in the wall has been patched but not repainted. The plaster’s a different shade of white.
Levandowski’s upset about something. You can tell because he keeps making these “hrm” sounds and playing with the knot in his tie.
Clarke asks him what’s wrong.
“Acceptable Risk?” says Levandowski.
Clarke asks him what he’d call it.
Levandowski says, “Hrm.”
Then he says that baseballs and soccer balls are one thing but that he wants to know what happens to the kid who’s chasing the ball.
“Is that an Acceptable Risk?” he says.
Clarke says that nothing happens. He says that that’s the whole point.
By then we’ve walked across the campus and are at the garage and there’s the question of who’s going to sign the car out for the weekend. Clarke says that he will. But Levandowski says that he doesn’t trust him with it.
“Not with Mr. Acceptable Risk,” he says.
While they argue, I sign the waiver and pocket the keys.
Driving the Prius home, I detour through the suburbs. It’s evening and in each neighborhood there are kids chasing kids, kids chasing soccer balls, dogs, kids on bikes. It’s a lot of information to process.
I wonder, what if Levandowski’s right?
For humans there’s a tenth of a second lag between receiving and processing information. Computers are three hundred thousand times faster.
That means that by the time I’ve seen a kid running into the street, have sent the electrical signal to my foot telling it to the hit brake, and have received the signal back from my foot saying that the brake has been pressed, a computer would have done all of it three hundred thousand times.
And yet, even for computers, there are gaps in the information.
Blind spots.
Thousandths of a second when the information is still traveling, when it’s neither been processed nor received.
As I continue driving I find that I’ve detoured my way into San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge, once hulking in the distance, is now the dominant part of my skyline. Its two towers, like pyramids on either side of the bay, are shining brightly, orangely, in the sun’s remaining light.
Soon I find myself outside Julia’s apartment. I idle on the curb and watch the sun set. The streetlights blink on.
I kill the engine.
I press the intercom and ask Julia to let me inside.
At Google, in the lab, we literally have a checklist of things we want to make sure the technology can handle before it’s ready for the public.
The list goes:
Left turns: check
Stop signs: check
The list is pretty mundane but at its bottom is the meta-category city driving. Because not only are city streets the most difficult type to navigate, but also because people in the city are the most unpredictable.
The litmus test of our litmus test is San Francisco.
I mean, look at a street map.
It’s like someone traced over a Pollack painting.
When Julia opens the door, she’s wearing a dress. It’s a short, shiny, tubelike thing that’s designed to show off, among other things, her breasts.
I ask what the occasion is.
She says she’s going to dinner.
I ask if she wants a ride. Then we’re in the backseat of the Prius. There’s the glow of the LIDAR’s GUI and we’re watching the screen’s little hourglass, waiting for the AI to boot up.
I ask Julia where we’re going. My fingers are poised over the touch screen, ready to punch in the address.
“I’m going on a date,” she says.
Which, of course, is obvious. Besides the dress, she’s wearing a honey-and-something perfume that I’ve never smelled before.
I’m not surprised, but still I feel something.
Gutted, I guess.
She asks me what I ever expected. “I mean,” she says, “have you even thought about this? Our situation,” she says and gestures between the two of us as if what we have between us is a situation.
“About how unfair this is to me?” she says.
Out the window the Golden Gate’s towers are lit up. There’s black water in between them. Cars driving across the expanse.
“I’m not breaking up,” says Julia. “If you could even call it that. We can still keep doing what we’re doing.”
I make a noise of assent.
She names a restaurant on Embarcadero. The car starts driving. We go past other parked cars, under streetlights, up a hill.
After I drop Julia off, I let the car drive me home. I sit in the backseat and watch the moonlight on the water. Even in the dark you can see the waves breaking toward the shore.
There are other cars on the road though not that many. As we pass each other, my car and the other cars, I wonder what this looks like to them, the other drivers in the other cars. This driverless Prius, with its steering wheel jerking itself, and its man in the backseat gazing out the window, his forehead pressed against the glass? What will it look like in ten years when all the cars are like this?
All those autonomous cars with their LIDAR masts, AR augmentation, collision detection units, lasers, radars, HUDS, GUIs, infrared cameras, inertial measurements, and 6-D stereo-vision systems? Cars that never get lost and can drive themselves, down to the millimeter, exactly in the middle of the lane? What will it be like for us when we we’re no longer driving ourselves?
I think about Tracy and the baby and myself riding safely in the backseat of a driverless car just like this one. I think about how tomorrow we can all be taken for a ride.
For a while I’m buoyed by the thought.
One of the first things that Julia taught me is that science is the expression of what we’ve learned to keep from fooling ourselves.
“Poetry,” she said, “is also the expression of what we’ve learned to keep from fooling ourselves.”
We were naked in her bed and I’d asked why she was studying what she was studying. Why poetry and machines? I asked if she ever read just for fun.
I told her that when I was a kid I used to read for fun all the time.
“When I was a kid,” I said, and she put her finger on my lips, shushed me. “You’re not a child,” she sa
id.
She began reading to me.
She read me that Emerson poem.
She said, “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
She said, “Go, blind worm, go.”
And I did, eventually.
SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE
We were surprised, of course, that when we built our time machine it turned out to be a DeLorean. We took it apart, put it back together, didn’t matter. Looked at the blueprints, looked at the silver car. Scratched our heads. A joke? A prank? Sabotage? If sabotage, then it had backfired. The DeLorean worked.
We drove it out of the laboratory, into the parking lot, set the chronometer, and stepped on the gas. When we arrived, we were exactly when we wanted to be. Thirty minutes earlier, our own past.
We parked the DeLorean behind a dumpster, hid in the bushes, and spied on ourselves. There we were, earlier Dr. Hu and earlier me, lab-locked and bending over our blueprints, scratching our heads. After that we did pretty much what you’d expect anyone to do with a time machine. We killed Hitler. Smothered him in his crib.
We smothered lots of history’s evil people. Bin Laden, Mao, Cheney, Robespierre, Attila the Hun. Even though we had the moral imperative it wasn’t easy killing babies, so we saved people too to balance it out. We saved JFK, RFK, MLK. Saved Franz Ferdinand, Marie Antoinette. You’d be surprised how many people can be saved just by pulling up in a DeLorean and shouting Duck.
Also surprising was that there seemed to be no negative consequences. No double-occupancy problems, no grandfather paradoxes, no quantum entanglements. Fixing history was easy, like smoothing out the wrinkles in your bed.
This is how I explained it to my wife, the underwear model. I ran my fingers across our sheets. I told her that every time Dr. Hu and I returned to our time everything was pretty much as we’d left it except for a little bit better. History wasn’t something heavy that everyone had to carry around with them, a backpack full of broken parts.
For example, take you, I said. In another timeline you were you but not an underwear model. You were a kindergarten teacher. Your father died when you were twelve. In another timeline, I said, you were you but not someone you would recognize. You got pregnant in high school, drove drunk, got paralyzed below the waist. In another timeline you were never born.
What about you? she asked of me.
I listened to the cicadas singing their seventeen-year song.
I said that in another timeline Dr. Hu and I had won the Nobel Prize in physics. We went public with our time machine and now everyone had one parked in their garage. In another timeline Dr. Hu and I were villains. We did everything that we did in this timeline except exactly the opposite. Saved Hitler, killed Kennedy, ruled over all of creation from a throne of human skulls. In another timeline, I said, Dr. Hu and I were nobody. Our DeLorean turned out to be just a DeLorean. We blamed each other for our failure, stopped speaking.
In that timeline, I said, I’m married to you, the kindergarten teacher. We live in a house just like this one and are probably lying together in bed just like this. But in that timeline, I said, we are not happy. I’m a failure and you’re a kindergarten teacher. We just had a fight. It doesn’t matter what we fought about because the gist is that I’m a failure and you’re a kindergarten teacher and you’re happy enough with what we’ve got.
But in that timeline I’m aware that there are other timelines where I’m not a failure. I’m aware that there are timelines where I’m a time traveler, a Nobel Prize winner, an evil dictator, where you’re an underwear model. In those timelines we made all of the right decisions, somehow, and didn’t go off track.
And when I think about those timelines I get so mad. Because what if I had done something differently, married someone else, gotten a smarter lab partner, done better on my college admission tests, and ended up a success?
Or what if it had been a decision that I had made even earlier, something small, that had screwed everything up? Like when I was in elementary school and made fun of Margaret for being adopted. For not being white? What if I’d chosen not to join in with all of the other kids who were teasing her? Or what if I’d decided to stand up for her, told them to stop because we were neighbors, we were in homeroom together, and she had always been pretty nice? What if there was one small-hearted decision from which all of my other wrong decisions came, these decisions growing and growing the distance between what I wanted and what I got until it became so unbreachable that not even a DeLorean could cross?
SOME ZOMBIES
After Super Walmart, Charles and Kara came home and found zombies in their front yard. There were like one hundred zombies trampling their lawn. Zombies on the neighbors’ lawns and on all the lawns. Most of the neighbors were zombies. Some of them moaned. “Zombies are cool,” said Charles. Zombies stood in the driveway and in front of the garage. One was eating a cat. Kara honked the horn. Zombies stood. It was October, and yellow and orange-red leaves fell off the trees and onto zombies. Charles and Kara had been dating a year and a half. They were having relationship problems. Charles was five years older than Kara and had asked her to marry him. In a panic, she said yes. She was in her mid-twenties and unprepared for life’s vicissitudes. She had imagined that she would be able to sleep around until she was in her thirties. At least. Somehow, she felt, someone had tricked her. “Honk the horn,” said Charles.
“I honked the horn.” She honked again. Zombies found a living person. It was Mr. Lau. They pulled him off his bike and tore him to pieces. The blood sprayed ten feet in the air. Another thing that she disliked about Charles was his pushiness.
“I have to pee,” said Charles.
Zombies were on a killing rampage. “We can’t get married,” said Kara. “I can’t.” One of the zombies was the piano teacher, Mrs. Young. Her jaw hung from her face in a permanent gape. Off and on Kara had taken lessons for eight years but was never very good. “You have to practice your scales,” Mrs. Young used to say. “Play your scales. Play C minor, play C minor now.”
Now Mrs. Young threw a dismembered limb at Kara’s car. The limb landed on the car, left a blood streak, and rolled to the ground.
“What about our plans?” said Charles. “Our plans for a long and happy life. A life sanctified by the blessings of God.” Charles crossed his legs. When he bought his Coke, Kara told him not to super-size. He super-sized it anyway. The empty yellow wax-paper cup rolled beneath the seat.
“Pee in this,” said Kara. She reached under the seat and shoved the cup at Charles. “You never listen to me,” she said. “I want a secular service.” She felt sleepy and wanted take a hot bath.
Zombies broke into Kara and Charles’s house. They smashed down the door and carried out the television, the VCR, the stereo system. They flung clothing across the yard. A zombie ripped apart Kara’s favorite bra. Another wore Charles’s corduroy pants.
“My pants,” said Charles. He frowned and looked at his pants. There were dirt stains near the ankles. “Listen, maybe ifyou honk the horn longer. Press on it for a long time.” He reached across the seat and held down the horn. Kara’s father didn’t like Charles. He called him effeminate. Charles was a computer programmer. He programmed pop-up advertisements for the Internet. He had programmed more than one thousand. Whenever Kara was on the Internet and an advertisement popped up, Charles told her which ones were his. “I made that one,” he said. “I made that one and that one and that one and that one.”
“Not to Charles,” Kara’s father said when she told him about the marriage. He was in low-security prison for tax evasion. Kara told him during her weekly visit. “Don’t marry him just because you’re upset with me,” he said.
“I hate you,” said Kara. Charles turned away from her and a zombie pressed its rotten genitals against the car window.
“Okay,” said Charles. “Fine.” Another zombie leaned against the car and exposed itself, and then came another and another. Rampaging zombies crowded around the car. They pushed their
bodies against it and climbed on top of it until it was completely covered: a green-red, pukish, rotting, fleshy lump. “Hate me,” said Charles. “Fine. Fine. Fine.”
A few weeks later Charles and Kara went back to Super Walmart. They bought bed skirts, decorative pillows, down comforters and duvets, electric blankets, throw rugs, slip covers, panel curtains, floor lamps, wall lamps, touch lamps, ceiling fans, sectional sofas, microfiber ottomans and faux-leather chaise lounge chairs, bar stools, wine chillers, rice cookers, slow cookers, jug blenders, citrus juicers, electric can openers, sonic toothbrushes, oral irrigators, extra-wide hair straighteners, self-cleaning shavers, deep cleaners, wet/dry upright vacuums, yard rakes, garden claws, oscillating sprinklers, bamboo fencing, spade shovels, pick mattocks, corded and cordless screwdrivers, lithium-ion inflators, handheld GPS navigators, cellular telephones, digital music recorders, DVD players, sling boxes, flat-panel televisions, home entertainment systems. They bought ninety-day replacement plans. Three-year warranties, lifetime warranties, etc.
VICISSITUDES, CA
1
Brandon and Kara went hiking but were unprepared for the physical challenge. “Hiking is hard work,” said Kara. She cupped her hands and drank from a limpid mountain stream.
“But it’s awesome,” she said.
“Nature rocks,” said Brandon.
They were in the San Gabriel Mountains and from their elevation could see Los Angeles and the smog in the distance.
Nature, he thought, is good because it’s simple and expansive.
Brandon came to the mountains to find enlightenment. Enlightenment, he learned from his yoga teacher, could be found in nature.
Kara thought Brandon needed stimulation. She liked him, she said, but was tired of his moodiness and constant napping.
Kara took off her overshirt and sat on a rock in the sun. Underneath, she wore a tank top that Brandon admired on account of her breasts.
Kara has nice breasts, he thought, even if we are just friends.