The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [73]
She walked unhurriedly across the square, pausing again to let two hummingbirds take turns at her rose. “I’ve been a bird myself,” she murmured to them, “but only in my hood. It’s not like real flying. No speed trip at all. Someday, I’ll take a look at the world from your angle, and find out what a flower is like in your eyes.
Usually, she thought of getting into a cab for a homeward journey as the end of an excursion. She had been back and forth along the road so many times by now that everything lining it was perfectly familiar—but this time, it didn’t seem that her mission of exploration was over yet. This time, she looked out of the cab window with a sense of wonder she hadn’t been able to conjure up since her first trip into town eight years before. The world was the same—the liveried cabs, the convoys of trucks, the glittery stone facades, the distant skymasts, the bikers in their finery—but she seemed to be looking at it with new eyes.
“That’s the trick of it,” she said, aloud. “You just have to keep on finding things out, and the world will always look different, even when it’s exactly the same.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” the cab’s Artificial Intelligence replied, through the microphone mounted in the rear of the driver’s “seat”. “Do you wish to give me new instructions?”
Maybe I should, Sara thought. Maybe I should go home the pretty way, if there is one. Maybe I should turn around and head west to the sea, or north to Derwent Water, or east to the windfarms and the SAPorchards. Maybe I should go to see the ruins of London, or the Welsh mountains.
“No, thank you,” she said, aloud. “Just take me home.”
“Very good, miss,” the cab’s AI replied.
“Do you ever get bored?” Sara asked, on a sudden impulse.
“No, miss,” the AI assured her. “I am not programmed to experience boredom.”
“Nor am I,” she informed it. “But it happens anyway. It shouldn’t, but it does. How long have you been driving a robocab?”
“This robocab has been in service since January 2364, miss.” It wasn’t quite what she had asked, but robocabs had a limited conversational repertoire.
“You’re a teenager, then—just like me,” she said. She got no reply to that at all; the AI obviously had no subroutine set up to deal with comments of that kind. Sara had once thought that all AIs were as clever as adults, but she knew now why Father Gustave and Father Stephen were always calling them “artificial idiots”.
“Do you know how long you’ll be a robocab driver?” she asked, curiously.
“The current plan calls for the fleet of which this cab is a part to be kept in operation until December 2500, miss,” the AI told her. “If, however, there are significant technological advances in the meantime, which outstrip the capacity of its programming, significant aspects of its hardware and software may be replaced.”
“You’re Achilles’ robocab,” Sara said. “They’ll just keep chipping away, replacing one bit at a time, until you’ve turned into something else.”
“This is not an Achilles robocab, miss,” the AI told her. “It is a model 36J1, nicknamed Mercury, owned by the Blackburn Traffic Management Board.”
Sara laughed. Robocab AIs weren’t programmed to make jokes, either, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t play the comedian, with the aid of a sufficiently ingenious straight-person.
“It’s been a good day, Mr. Mercury,” she told it. “A really good day.”
“We aim to please, miss,” the cab assured her, as it rolled to a halt at the end of the drive leading to her hometree. “We hope to have the pleasure of your patronage again.”
CHAPTER XXI
As soon as Sara stepped across the threshold Mother Maryelle and Father Gustave descended upon her, having obviously laid elaborate plans for further discussion while she’d been out. She assured