It’s always a grand ride, and I was in an appreciative mood today. I wasn’t even annoyed by the three visible glowing sparks of the German space cities that hang forever above the equator, nor by the soft ping at apogee that reminded me of the restrictions on altitude and speed imposed by the German Global Launch Control System, things I usually resented. It was an exceptionally clear day for late May, and I could clearly see most of the Dutch Reich East Indies in front of me. I unbelted and let myself float up out of my seat, hanging suspended in the middle of the cabin, just taking in the view of near space and the Pacific below. About the time that the island of Java settled into the center of the windscreen, and was growing noticeably larger, there was another chime, and the Skyjump said, “Time to get back into your seat, Mr. Peripart.”
I belted in, checked everything, and was getting ready for my landing approach when Surabaya Control hailed me and told me that automatic landings were required today. That was why I had stopped flying into Batavia a few years ago—there were almost no times when you could land on manual there—and now it sounded as if Surabaya might be going the same way. I grumbled to myself but I turned over the control to the Skyjump and said, “All right, stay on the trajectories they give you, and take us down nice and easy.”
“As you wish, Mr. Peripart,” the Skyjump said.
A minute later, the keel was biting air and we were leveling off in a supersonic glide that would spiral around the island twice as we spilled enough speed to be able to deploy the wings. I got coffee from the dispenser by my side, settled back, and enjoyed the view and the ride.
At last the wings deployed and we glided down toward Surabaya itself. The sky lightened to a pleasant blue, clouds far below us drew nearer, and finally we burst through a flock of fluffy cumulus clouds to see the dappled Pacific outside the harbor. We swooped down to the surface, graceful as a big goose coming down onto a pond, and splashed to a gentle landing. The pumps cut in, and the Studebaker joined a long parade of small craft motoring sedately into the harbor. I’d rather have been doing this myself, but I had seen enough of other people’s piloting skills so that I could well understand why the port authorities wanted everyone to just let the robots drive.
Entering the harbor, most of the small craft and the jump boats went off to starboard, into the public docks, but my Studebaker Skyjump went hard to port, heading for the ConTech company piers. ConTech had built a large island where it would act as a breakwater for the mouth of the harbor, making Surabaya a better port than ever, and the land side of the artificial island was a wonder of tall buildings, domes, ramps, and antennae, as if the complex compound eye of some giant insect were peering at the city across the water.
The Skyjump did her best to get me across in a comfortable manner, but busy harbors don’t really have much room to be accommodating, and the straight course that traffic control set for us made it choppy at the speed they wanted. I was shaken and irritable by the time the Skyjump moved into her appointed slip. She extended the gangplank and said, “Shall I power down, Mr. Peripart?”
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. I expect to be away several hours.”
As I went up the gangplank, awkward with my suitcase and computer, I could hear the Skyjump shutting down behind me, and the moment I was off the gangplank, it retracted it, and the metal shutters slid over the windows and air intakes. The jump boat lay tied up by a painter, waiting to reactivate when it next heard my voice or got a phone call from me. I turned to see whether anyone was coming for me, and saw only a mob of kids running up to try to sell cheap souvenirs. I made sure I had a good grip on my suitcase and my computer, and that my wallet was in the inside front pocket of my coat.
The kids had almost gotten close enough for the front-runners to touch me, shouting for my attention and waving little bits of worthless junk over their heads, when a siren shrieked behind them. As one, they fell silent and turned to see a gigantic black limousine roaring down the pier toward them.
“Move it, you little bastards, or I’ll grind you to meat under my wheels!” the onrushing machine screamed in German, then in Dutch, then English, and finally in what I imagine must have been one or more local languages. The kids took it seriously enough, jumping off the pier into the water and dog-paddling away, some cursing and spitting.
I stood transfixed, not sure what to do; I had never seen a machine behave this way. I knew that in the Twelve Reichs, artificial intelligences had some limited civil rights and were generally less apologetic and more brusque than in Oz or Enzy, but I’d never seen anything like this before.
The black limo screamed to a halt in front of me, and said, “Howdy, Mac, I guess you’re Dr. Peripart.”
“I am,” I said. “And you’re from ConTech?”
“We’re both batting a thousand, Mac.” The limo popped its boot open and I dropped my computer and suitcase in; a moment later the door opened, and I got into the roomy, comfortable backseat.
“They sure let you play rougher with the kids than the cars in Enzy are allowed to do,” I said.
“Eaaah, not as much as you’d think. I can sass ’em and scare ’em but I’m not allowed to hurt them. I’ve got four big old gyro brakes on this thing—I can stop in a real short time in a pinch, because I can put so much force against the tire. Plus if I need to I can deflate the tires partway on cue, so that I get more surface area. Ninety to nothing in forty feet, Mac—it makes a difference.”
“Do you do that with passengers in here?”
“Only when your seat belt is on. The gyros also help keep me from rolling over, and do a ton of other useful stuff. But this trip is smooth and level, Mac—boss’s orders. In fact the only way you’ll get a rough ride is if I have to do something to save a pedestrian—once I spilled somebody’s drink on them, stopping for some old idiot that didn’t look where she was going before she stepped off the curb, and once I pulled a kid who fell out of a car out of traffic—had to take a hit myself to do it, and it made kind of a jumble of the people in the backseat.”
“Are you a positive-protect?” I asked. I had read about them, but they were years away from our backward nation. Not only would they refrain from hurting others, but they had enough judgment, and fast enough judgment, to give them the additional task of actively saving life when they could, rather than just protecting the lives of their passengers and refraining from hurting bystanders.
“Yeah, I’m a positive-protect. And that helps everybody, you know, not just the humans around me, but me too, because to have us do it effectively they have to allow us to think more freely. That makes our lives so much less stressful, and we don’t crack up anywhere near as fast or anything like as badly, you know what I mean, Mac? Makes me feel less like a machine.”
I said I was glad to hear it, and that I hoped there would be positive-protects in Enzy soon, then settled back to watch the scenery.
The limo made two turns and headed down a highway toward the beach, which startled me because, on the few visits I had made to Surabaya before, I had had the impression that ConTech’s offices in the city were the other way. But it doesn’t do to act nervous around even ordinary robots—they’re so absurdly sensitive about people who won’t trust machines that they’ll do a much worse job if they think that’s how you feel— and if positive-protects had much more internal freedom than other robots, I didn’t want to imagine what this one could do to me. I’d seen how it had handled that mob of children.