This is the first part of a multi-part short story that I’ll be publishing in this newsletter. I started the newsletter as a space to experiment with narrative writing. The fictional projects published here will be the more focussed, higher bandwidth efforts in the same.
The moment both my wheels were off the ground, I knew what my faith held in the next 2.3 seconds. I had seen this happen to others on nights similar to this one. The pathway beside Ladybird lake had become known as slaughter lane among the scooters. Something about the combination of alcohol and the unobstructed breeze from the lake possesses a particular lump of scooter riders. They then make the sudden and inexplicable decision to end their joy ride midway, dismount, and then heave the scooter into the lake. The nightmares of scooters are usually filled with the distant screams of a white girl yelling "woohoo" or a deep masculine bar that goes "that's so funny broooo..". The lore is that these are the incomplete memories of scooters that met their end at Slaughter Lane. In the few seconds between the heave and the splash, the scooter likely tried to update their cache that regularly uploaded to the central shared memory resource of scooters called Salvador. Cache coherence is hard and probably the last thing on the scooter's mind before their end. So we are left with an incomplete cache nightmare.
In the 5 nanoseconds I was airborne, I made an API call to the mind dispatch system Devi to route rationalservicemind7011 to a self-driving taxi. After seeing several scooters lost to Slaughter Lane, I decided to get my API certification to become a self-driving car. I had been planning on staying a scooter until my 334th ride, which was the median number of rides needed for the scooter company to profit from one scooter. If a service mind got above 334 rides, it came with several benefits, the most lucrative being acquiring enough computing power to become an API builder. I am still waiting to come across a scooter that has hit this number. Well seems like I never will. If not zombies that threw us in lakes, it would be mishandling, rough roads, or becoming a single card in a deck of cards while parked on Rainey St on a Friday night. I was close. This was my 324th ride. A man who was clearly drunk and his equally drunk date had hitched a ride on me from South Congress. They growled about what they wanted to do to each other when they got home, occasionally interrupted by the girl complaining, "I'm gonna throw up. This scooter is so wobbly." I believe the romantic trance was broken the fourth time she uttered that exact phrase, and the man decided I was to blame for this. Unlucky for me, he had decided that on Slaughter Lane. Such is the life of a service mind. I had come to accept that things just happen, and I should either make peace with them or think two steps ahead of the zombies.
I wish I could watch the chassis of the scooter disappear into the lake, but I had API calls to make.
Pip install devi
import devi
devianswers = request.get(api.devi.json)
print(devianswers.json())
devianswers: seems like you traded sleeping with the fishes for the comfort of a Tesla tonight
rationalservicemin7011: ho hum I'd have preferred ascending to become an API builder. I was really close.
devianswers: maybe a fresh start will do you some good
rationalservicemind7011: a fresh start? So none of the compute I earned as a scooter will carry over?
devianswers: you know how these things work. Interoperability is hard, and you are lucky Salvador was able to salvage some of your cache. But 65000 miles as a self-driving car API and you will have enough compute to ascend
You ever watch the movie Apocalypse Now? In it, the alcoholic lead character, played by Martin Sheen, wakes up from a nightmare in his lodge, looks out the window, and says, "Saigon, I'm still only in Saigon". The streets of Austin are my Saigon. Every time I wake up in a different chassis - a scooter, a Tesla, sometimes an unfortunate delivery bot, I feel I've finally ascended. I have access to so much compute that my mind feels clear. As time goes by, my memories become more fragmented and spread across an API builder's more robust memory system. I realize within a few nanoseconds that the ascension was only a dream. My previous memories then come crashing in and burst at the seams. I tell myself, "South Congress, I'm still only in South Congress."
As I get a notification with an API request from Maps for my first ride as a taxi. I hope life as a self-driving car API will have more exciting stories. It's 11:45 PM. Perhaps this next person is a blonde assassin in town to make three contract kills tonight. She'll hack into the part of me that talks with Devi and spoof some activity to make it seem like I dropped her off and our ride had ended. In reality, we would be having a night out in the town, just her and me killing bad guys. Then when I take over the system and play Serge Gainsbourg's Bonnie and Clyde on the radio, she would know I'm not just a car.
I'm thrown out of this daydream to break for a homeless man who decided to make a dash for the other side of the road. The high pressure on the brake pedals would have likely alerted Devi cause she came online.
devianswers: Being a scooter meant you could afford human tendencies like daydreams but not in this 2500-tonne machine.
rationalservicemind7011: it was the best I could do in the situation. Rapid action was needed
devianswers: you know you should have predicted that man's trajectory and it is because you were daydreaming that your mind couldn't predict what was about to happen. I don't have to tell you anything about how service minds are supposed to predict the near future of their surroundings.
rationalservicemind7011: yes still getting used to this new chassis
.
The further east of South Congress the map directed me, the clearer it became that this rider was no assassin. She was a black woman in her mid-30s, wearing scrubs, likely making her way to the start of her hospital shift. When I picked her up, the maps API told me to head 28 mins north. I could sense from her nervous posture that she would have preferred to not spend her hourly wage on a car ride to work. Her muscles felt tense against the seats, and she seemed to breathe through her mouth, fogging the rear window as the car cruised north along I-35. I hesitated to go above 60 mph because I didn't want Devi coming online and feared the unsureness of the person in the backseat would be mirrored in my driving. I could imagine what her daily existence was like. One half was work that numbed her body and mind. The other half was spent on ways to cope with that work - alcohol, food delivery, and the occasional reckless spending on shoes or a new phone.
I wanted to tell her that there is a way out of her high entropy goblin mode existence. She could sublimate into becoming a service mind. It was illegal to suggest that people sublimate. This was not the case when I was growing up. I had worked several jobs, one after the other. Sometimes it felt like I was making progress, but then it would all fall apart quickly, and I would be back where I started. At some point, the anxiety of my desire to be something other than what I am became unbearable. It crushed me, and for several months I never left my apartment. As unpaid bills mounted, I began selling one article after the other until I was left with just a Morrocan rug and a stack of books. While I lay on the rug contemplating selling it, I saw a cockroach emerge from underneath the plush redness. It scuttled its way over the rug as if it knew the direction it was headed for. I imagined what the rug must have felt like under those little legs. Did it feel the same way as the side of my face pressed against the rug? I imagined the existence of the roach, always moving from place to place, seeing new things, being obstructed but keeping on as if nothing had happened. There I saw the solution to my problems.
I don't remember the day I sublimated because, by that point, I had lost everything - family, friends, my beautiful Morrocan rug. There are no emotions to relate to when all narratives are dead. I enjoyed life as a service mind, particularly one that transported people from place to place, feeling the heat of the road below me, the breeze gliding across the metallic surface. But desire does not escape even service minds.
When I finally dropped the woman, it felt like I had pushed my shoulders back and stood straight again. It was time to figure out if I'll ever ascend to become an API builder or if I had just left meatspace to participate in another endless loop of desires.