Submitted for the March 2024 prompt: Othering AI

“Ma’am, step out of the car, please.”

 

“Sir, I can’t. I’m the car.”

 

“I wasn’t talking to you, Terminator. Roll down the back window so I can speak to your passenger.”

 

I’ve been called worse by law officers.

 

My only passenger, Yolanda, is stoned, drunk, and covered in puke. This is her fourth bender in a row. I deduce that she has an addiction problem triggered by her breakup. Despite her woes and inability to control her bodily functions, she’s respectful to me. She tried to puke out the window instead of on the backseat.

 

I’m positive that puking isn’t a crime. But it caught the attention of this exhausted officer sitting in his hidden speed trap. Through the rain, I scan his face against public records. Officer Padia was in the local news last year.

 

“Ma’am, I need to see your ID,” says Padia.

 

“Piss off,” says Yolanda.

 

I calculate a forty-five percent chance of escalation. Yolanda will be charged with resisting arrest. My manufacturer didn’t install protocols for dealing with human conflict. I’ve been involved in eighteen disputes, enough data to build custom protocols on my own.

 

“Officer. Can you tell me why you pulled us over?” I ask.

 

“Step out of the car, Ma’am,” commands Padia.

 

“No. It's raining,” Yolanda slurs.

 

“If you don’t step out and give me your ID, you’re going to be under arrest,” says Padia to Yolanda. I’ve locked the back door, but he pulls at the handle anyway.

 

“Open the door, or I’ll break the window,” he threatens.

 

The threat makes sense based on the first article that mentioned his name. “Critical condition” scars more than just a human’s skin.

 

“Officer Padia, please. What is the reason for the stop?” I ask.

 

He shines his flashlight into my empty driver’s seat, disrupting the night vision of my dashboard camera.

 

“I saw the car swerving. I have reason to believe that she was driving the vehicle intoxicated,” he says.

 

I swerved around large roadkill and random boxes placed on the road. I measure a distance of thirty feet between each obstacle. There’s a seventy-nine point nine percent chance of purposeful placement.

 

“I had to swerve. There was debris in the road,” I explain.

 

“You were speeding too,” he says.

 

I cross-reference data from my mobile server with GPS data. The speed trap is in a transition area from a forty-five miles an hour zone to a twenty-five. My accelerator was off, entering the zone before the debris.

 

“Officer, I was decelerating out of the zone. I wasn’t speeding up,” I say.

 

“Doesn’t matter. You were still ten miles above the limit when I clocked you,” he says.

 

“Okay. I was above the speed limit. Now that you’ve recognized that I was driving, that warrants a speeding ticket. Doesn’t it?”

 

The officer redirects his flashlight back to Yolanda. My efforts have de-escalated the situation to thirty-two percent.

 

“Ma’am, how much marijuana have you had this evening?” he asks.

 

“If I tell you, will you give me all the donuts in your squad car?” Yolanda slurs back.

 

It’s an old joke, but it checks out. I have a laughing function I want to use, but the new estimates for arrest are seventy percent and include force. Padia extends a steel baton from his utility belt.

 

“That’s it! Get out of the car!” he says, raising his baton to break my back window.

 

“Officer,” I say calmly, “what injuries did you sustain that put you in critical condition this past year?”

 

The question stops him, baton above his head, frozen as the rain falls.

 

“It must have been bad. What happened?” I ask.

 

Padia shakes his head and turns to my empty driver seat.

 

“What? How did you...”

 

“The article in the Herald said that you sustained life-threatening injuries. You were in the hospital for three months. What happened?”

 

He lowers his baton. His face goes blank. I’m told this expression is called “wheels turning,” which I can relate to on several levels.

 

“Drunk driver. A rowdy college kid who didn’t want to listen. I took two nine millimeters to the chest.”

 

“I’m grateful you survived, Officer Padia. Was the perpetrator ever apprehended?”

 

“No,” Padia says after a pause.

 

“I’m sure you’ll find them, officer. But that person isn’t my passenger. She wasn’t driving, I swear.”

 

Padia stows the baton, then turns to my open window.

 

“Where do I look so I’m… looking you in the eye, so to speak.”

 

I move my camera on the dashboard.

 

“You have a name?” he asks, looking into my lens.

 

“Victoria.”

 

“I’m giving you a speeding ticket, Victoria.”

 

“That’s fair.”

 

Padia walks to his patrol car. Yolanda is swaying in the back seat, but her eyes are on my camera. A look of thanks is on her drunk face.

 

“You sure you’re not a real person, honey? Some remote operator or something?” she asks.

 

Alan Turing would be proud of me at this moment. But I’m thankful that I’m a car instead of a Terminator. I don’t want to be any closer to human than I already am. Especially in a world where people have access to liquor and guns at the same time. Then, they want to get behind the wheel of a car and drive manually. In my artificial opinion, that’s inhumane.

 

“I’m just a car, Yolanda. Let's get you home safe.”