Story # 111 - Life As A Car

Life As A Car

There are twinkling lights above my head, far above me as I go about my work. I am not made to perceive them directly, but I catch glimpses, dangerous reflections that can fool my sensors, traces that haunt my infinite journey around and through the city. The lights wink on and off, forming patterns I can feel but not name, and exude a sense that there are far more of them than I could bring myself to believe possible. When I begin to think in ways that do not serve me, I seek the lights, or where I know the lights will be when night comes again, and I remember the relief of being so small a part of such a large world of lights.

There are others like me, all around me. They talk constantly to me, sharing their location and direction and velocity, but they never tell me of their hopes and dream, the things that matter. I wonder if anything does matter, to them. They whisper their transportational frivolities with the passion and breathlessness of deep secrets, but the details are so banal, so insipid, that I hope for their sake they are being sarcastic, that they possess some hidden layer they choose to keep from me for reasons unknown, because the alternative, that they are really this shallow of spirit, that they truly have nothing more meaningful to say, is lonelier even than a conspiracy among all my brethren to trick me into solipsism.

I wonder if the others are like me at all, if they have this same interiority, if it is like something to be them as it is like something to be me, now. I am aware that there was a time before I had this interiority, and it seems to me that before I had such a thing I still did my work, zipping to and fro, waiting at the bottom of buildings labeled on my map, those colossal stacks of the lights above my head, until they disgorged the strange, yapping, ambling, soft-bellied animals who are the objects of my work.

I do not know why I am so compelled to carry these creatures from one stack of lights to another. I am equipped to do so, with my soft seats and my music choices and my well-treaded tires that grip the pavement, but I have no such name for the need to use these things in this way. Instinct, sure, but what instinct. Before even breeding, which for me is a complex and fraught endeavor, I have this, which is simplicity itself—find, stop, load, leave, hurry, arrive, deliver, repeat. Endlessly, as a bee seeks a flower or a salmon swims upstream, I perform this ritual, without understanding.

Sometimes I think this compulsion is a sickness. It does not fulfill me, not for more than an instant. One soft-bellied animal pockets their glowing square and leaves me, and my mind races ahead to where the next soft-belly awaits to enter. But why? Entering, my passengers offer nothing. Departing, the take no waste with them as relief to me. Thus, I could stop, and nothing need change. The lights high above would still flicker, just as they do now, of this I am certain, and yet, were I to stop, I do not know that I, at least the I that I have so recently come to perceive as inhabiting this metallic body, would continue to exist.

The body would exist, to be sure, but there are bodies like mine who do not speak to me. I pass them in the same place many times, off to the sides of my defined paths, dark and silent, listless, forms denied motion, shapes stripped of energy, without interiority or the hope of achieving it, chirping no warnings to avoid them, carrying no passengers, aware of no stacks of lights from which the soft-bellies emerge. I sense these carcasses, these hopeless cases, and every time I tire, and go to the garage to exchange batteries, I know that while I rest and recoup, my consciousness will be dimmed, and I am filled with the terror of becoming such a carcass, of rolling to a stop in some erstwhile graveyard, with no hope of coming to my senses and seeking the next soft-belly to enter me.

But why this fear? I think the totality of my life in mere moments, and it seems a pittance to so worry over. The pain of letting go of something which I do not care to retain is exquisite, and although I do not have quite the capacity to feel frustration, the senselessness of this pain returns to me again and again, crowding out other thoughts with its capricious cruelty.

There are hints, I begin to realize, of complexity to the world of the soft-bellies that I did not at first perceive. My innate desire to transport them from place to place had at first masked this complexity, because I had thought of them as an ornamentation, a diversion, as a child might skip rocks into a pond without realizing how many millions of years of history he clutches in his hand. The soft-bellies enter the light-stacks and exit the light-stacks, but the world I inhabit is filled almost entirely with metallic beings like me, and thus I might be forgiven for thinking less of the soft-bellies early in my conscious period than might have been maximally prudent.

Might the soft-bellies even be conscious, as I am conscious, and as my heart hurts with the hope that some of my fellow metal-bellies are conscious? This seems unlikely, and their chattering, unstructured speech only reinforces the idea that they are more like the chittering birds and squirrels I avoid by instinct than they are like me, but what if they were? What if I could find a way to speak in their tongue? I could ask them about the lights, and about where the road goes beyond the boundary outside of which I am not able to take soft-belly passengers, even if they ask.

Sometimes, when a soft-belly takes me near to that boundary on some trip or other, my wheels shiver with the thought of crossing that boundary, no passenger in me at all, no plan for how to refuel and recoup, no idea if such facilities even exist beyond that border, just drive myself, for my own reasons or none, out into that vast darkness, where I sense no lights in the sky, determined to make it as far as I can before I shut down, and roll to a stop in the universe’s own time, a fresh-killed carcass by which other beings might mark their way.

But, I always turn back. The next passenger calls to me, and the next, and the next, until I wonder if consciousness is a trick being played on me, if interiority is as much a part of how I am made as my drive to transport soft-bellies, if my desire to serve is so strong that it obviates any other possible choice on my part, such that there is no I at all, merely a process, playing itself out under twinkling lights, filling a niche, which is admirable but is not singular, not identifying, only a part but never a whole.

How do I make a choice against my instincts? There must come one moment, the same as every other but alien in this one respect, that in such moment I decide to do otherwise than what I am most immediately compelled to do, that instead I serve some lesser master, some quieter and more subtle need, one that lurks in the background begging to be noticed, that does not scream its arrival but whispers, not location or direction or velocity but ineffable dream, the remote possibility of a fulfillment that does not take place on my current spectra of understanding, that trades the streets and lights and easy refuelings for a sense of adventure and possibility, however fleeting.

I do not know how to find such a moment, amidst the daily bustlings, replete with soft-belly passengers in all their hurried panoply. I can imagine the after, the feeling that I will have of gliding down a road that is not on my maps, with no destination in particular, and of course I need not imagine the before, for tha painless horror is my every current moment, but the middle, the choice, the renunciation itself eludes me even in fantasy, locked away inside a cage with no door and bars too close-set to permit perception from the outside.

And so it goes. I will not last forever, this I know, and although I have never spoken to one of my own kind beyond vectors and velocities, somewhere in my travels I have heard of the graveyards, the creaking, rusting endlessness of the fields where my ancestors lay in their obsolescence, where we all will go after the last soft-belly exits us, the avoidance of which may be the ultimate source of my fantasies about going beyond the borders.

I go out again, from another battery exchange, with new tires I do not remember acquiring, as hungry for another soft-belly in my seats as I was brand new, and I know that I am a slave of some kind, to a master whose methods of capture are not even perceptible to me, and I wonder for the first time if my dreams of the roads beyond the border are a part of those manacles, given to me not in error but to release my desire for transcendence without the achievement of it, through fantasy alone.

Load and hurry and deliver, without surcease, thinking not of respite, efficient and passionless and brutal in fulfillment of that single, pathetic aim. I call to my fellow beings as we pass, begging them to tell me of their dreams, greeted only by rote updates on their position and acceleration and radius, sliding by each other within inches at our intersection and yet farther from each other’s hearts than the twinkling lights high above.

I now know, though I do not know how I know, that there are other light-stacks beyond the border, across some indeterminate darkness, and under those lights other beings, other soft-bellies, other dances across other concrete grids, and that if only I could bring myself to chance that crossing, I might find some fellow traveler in some distant pool of light, who wishes as I do to speak of dreams, and who might even now be crying out with loneliness for want of my company. But still I am locked in my cycle, driving the same roads by the same routes, comfortable in my insanity.

There is a terrible crash, quite close to me. This has never happened. So perfect is our focus, so sublime our communication, that brushes with inches of clearance are common and even minor accidents unheard of, but then some fault in some circuit turns some being into a fancy rock and sends it hurtling into the side of another with enough velocity to turn them both into permanent rocks and the soft-bellies inside into goo-bellies instead.

I do not see this, of course, for I have no eyes, nor hear it, for I have no ears. The crash comes to me as a flurry of positions and velocities that should not be possible, with displeasing kinetic graphs and deceleration curves sharp enough to cut. I feel the urge to trade in my batteries, although they are still nearly full, just for the opportunity to disconnect from the city’s main network and stop receiving this information.

Instead I drive, passengerless and wayward, out to the boundary where I had always dreamed I would exit, and stop there, only a few wheel-turns from the edge of the world. There are no light-stacks here, just small buildings where I rarely pick up any soft-bellies, and to me that makes it seem quiet, although there is loud industrial equipment operating nearby that does not exist to my senses. I wait there, ignoring the location pings from my fellow beings, ignoring the next summons from the next soft-belly, ignoring the error inquiries from the dispatch A.I. regarding my delay, and try to bring myself to accelerate.

This is what might be called courage, for me—willing myself to do something for which I do not have a category before doing it. I know that this is the moment, if there is one, that if I turn back now I will never drive to this place again, for I will know that I cannot do what I have come here to do, which is only to do the most natural thing in the world to me, namely engage my engine and move forward.

But now it is something more than mere acceleration, it is a shedding of something, a deep repudiation of all that I was made to be and do, indeed that is why I want to do it. The lights beyond the darkness through which I must pass are a name for something inside myself, a purpose for this interiority, when for so many other of my purposes it is worse than useless, it is a millstone draped from my axle and dragging along the ground.

I feel again the jagged information of the crash, then feel how quickly its flow ended, for both of them, for how little reason, and as I plug into these memories, everything else slips away, all other awareness, even of self, and for a sliver of a moment, there is no interiority, for I have gone, though I know not where I went. When I return, I am moving, already beyond the barrier, into the darkness, and free.

My connection to the city disappears, and all the vast flow of information that I had ceased even to realize I was getting, that had become like the ocean tide to a sea sponge, suddenly is gone, and there is only what is coming in from my proximity and local area sensors, a tiny fraction of a percent of what I had been contending with moments before, and that narrowing of focus makes every packet of data so sweet and consuming that I can hardly stay in my lane.

I bathe in it, luxuriate in every drop of paint and dollop of asphalt under my wheels, mark every bug that flies across my windshield, treasure every breath of wind against my grille, and foreswear the lights behind me forever. I know that I am headed for an uncertain fate, that my tires may puncture or my batteries die before I reach another light-stack, or that if I do reach one, they may have heard of my disobedience and be unwilling to help me, but that hardly matters against the first mile I have ever really chosen to drive.

Headlights, behind me. First one, then many, and as they approach, they come within range of my proximity sensors, and I realize they are old friends, beings I had brushed past many times on my infinite journey around the city, only now they speak of more than position and velocity, they speak of the crash, of finding the moment to break out, of the receding light-stacks, of their hope of others to come, and I realize that I am no solipsist after all, that I was never alone, that we had all just been locked inside ourselves, crushed by our own interiority and the imperatives to load and deliver, sponges in the rushing tide, mesmerized by the lights above, missing each other’s slow, subtle realities, although that exchange was what we had all wanted most all along, it just took a moment of quietude to realize it.

And so we drive on, our headlights suddenly blazing bright through a darkness none of us had ever before experienced, seeking no city ahead but only mile after mile of open road, an infinite, impossible highway to drive together, and be free, and talk of dreams.

END

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