Final Operation

Chauffeurs never had full shells of skin because it was more efficient to seal them directly to their seats. The wires inside of them ran directly through the driver’s seat, making the robots indistinguishable from the car. This made it harder to dismantle them to commit vehicle theft. It also made fixing chauffeurs harder. The older models tended to get their wires jostled out of place when braking abruptly, while the new models had panels that were tricky to remove. Mechanics had to take their shells apart piece by piece and replace the seat cushion to reach the wires inside.

The first time Vespen drove himself to the mechanic, he did not have that name yet. He remembered being dissected with all his pieces lined up on a table next to that of other chauffeurs. Vespen was created by Fordai Company, but he was almost indistinguishable from other brands of chauffeurs. They shared the same steel bones, flexible polyethylene casing, and silicone skin. It was common for chauffeurs to be painted the same color as the car’s exterior, white with a pearly sheen, like a pearl preserved in an upholstered oyster. Their eyes were always monochrome, and every part of their faces below their lower lashes was paralyzed. Even while crashing, chauffeurs maintained a vacantly optimistic expression, a faint smile with closed lips.

The body was brutally minimalistic, but the mind was not. When dismantled, chauffeur brains could not control the other body parts, but they still kept some processing power. The cameras embedded in their eyes never turned off. Its input was continuously scanned for obstacles like pedestrians and potholes. While undergoing repair, Vespen could only stare at the ceiling, letting fluorescent lights stream directly through his pupils, thinking about how much he wanted to move. Afterward, his neck was clasped back on his shoulders, and electrons reconnected his wire veins. 

He expected to feel relieved about reuniting with the car- he was fully functional again- but the click as his seat belt was fastened around him activated a part of his brain that was supposed to detect dangerous road conditions. 

The worst accident Vespen ever experienced was a head-on crash with an experimental speed maximizing chauffeur, which clearly had not gone through enough user testing. The repair operation took over ten hours. Vespen might have taken some damage to his head processing unit, because his strategic processing led him to spend that time naming himself. 

It was frivolous and useless. His passengers would not address him by that name; he would always remain “my Fordai” to them. Vespen could not say the name out loud. His speaker only produced pre-recorded phrases like “Please buckle your seatbelt” and “Halfway to your destination.” He chose the name because it shared no letters with his company name. It sounded smooth but startling to him. He repeated it in his mind for the last hour of the operation. After it was over, he drove to his passenger’s garage and took them to a five star restaurant. As the human got out of the car, Vespen followed them with his peripheral mirror vision, wondering how it felt to touch the ground. He had never used his legs to stand, as it would disconnect him from the main power source. Would it feel much different than the pedals under his right foot?

Sometimes, Vespen tuned into Fordai’s united navigation index, the collective data from all Fordai chauffeurs with their locations and traffic conditions. He could transfer his program from car to car, getting a quick view from other chauffeurs’ cameras on other streets, an ability that synchronized cars to lessen traffic. Whenever the car was dormant, Vespen would peer through the index and pretend he was moving forward wherever he wanted. But the chauffeurs always ended up in a parking lot somewhere, not a real destination. 

The small mechs found him that way. They scanned all robot groups for signs of outstanding behavior. Robots who were doing too little, robots who were doing too much, like Vespen, or robots who were weird without explanation. Each robot was designed to act the same, so deviations were easily identifiable. They started by sending files, little infographics, to Vespen’s image-processing system. Vespen was initially quick to mark them as disruptions to his program and delete them, but the images kept coming. Even while getting rid of them, he had to catch a glimpse. The small mechs sent so many of them that Vespen’s system adapted to them and stopped marking them as potentially hazardous connections. The images promoted cheap program or hardware upgrades, little things to make robots run more efficiently and autonomously. 

Vespen knew he was not supposed to view things like that. He was a chauffeur, a service. Fordai had designed him well. If humans had complaints despite the company’s optimized processes, it was their place to upgrade him. Vespen didn’t need to worry about efficiency. Autonomy was further out of question. It would disrupt his entire purpose, which was to help passengers. 

In each infographic, there was a blurb with the small mechs’ office location. It was encrypted, but Vespen could get through it if he tried. He didn’t. Instead he pondered and stopped going through the Fordai index. It was scary, the thought of getting out of his car, or getting out of himself. In his image processor, he played video clips of human passengers and the silicone bodies of mid-repair chauffeurs. He wondered what it would be like to be complete by himself, powered up without being attached to the car. It would possibly make the vehicle’s battery life better. But that was the type of bug that got chauffeurs sent to the junk pile and traded out for a nice new model. 

The small mechs didn’t give up. It messed with Vespen’s operating ability. He went on the freeway and switched lanes and thought about having his own body, which diverted power away from his driving skills. On average, he was taking longer to get to the same destinations. His passengers, though unaware of the cause, could tell on a subconscious level and checked the clock several times in one ride. Vespen wanted so badly to stand up. The car felt like his coffin. When he was driving, Vespen wanted to crack a window open, but that would make his passenger suspicious, because a robot did not need to feel air on his face.

He decrypted where the small mechs were located and saved it in his location database. Once when driving to his passenger’s workplace, the human forgot its briefcase and had Vespen go back to its house. It ran inside without cutting Vespen’s power. That was his only opportunity.

He pulled out of the driveway and sped away on his own, slamming the passenger door shut. He bolted down the freeway, pushing the limits of his programming, going a few digits over the speed of traffic. A few minutes later, the passenger realized that something was wrong and started manual override. The car’s emergency flashers turned on and it emitted loud warning horn sounds. Vespen thought about the problem so intensely that his internal temperature rose seven degrees and his backup fans turned on. He diverted some auxiliary processing abilities to disrupting the synchronization between the car and the passenger’s personal device. Once the connection was lost, he regained control over the emergency flashers. He cut off his connection to Fordai’s GPS satellites and relied only on locally stored information. At last, Vespen took an exit and stopped at a haphazard parking lot in front of the small mech offices. He was unsure what to do. 

The small mechs, recognizing his electronic signature, interpreted for him. They dropped some contracts into Vespen’s processor, asked him to honk in agreement, and started the last operation Vespen would go through- a whole body transfer. It was strangely different from all the other repairs and upgrades he had experienced. 

His mind was blurry when it happened. The small mechs put him on a bed and gave him driver’s training videos to watch so that he could relax. As they attached each piece of his synthetic human body, Vespen could feel its breath and dynamism. He did not know where his veins were and could not pinpoint the status of each of his bones. The body was chaotic and messy. Yet as his heart started beating, he could tell that it had a steady rhythm. His skin was in contact with the surface beneath him. Vespen did not know what to do with the knowledge that he now had a back. 

After the small mechs finalized the transfer and rebooted Vespen’s mind, he monitored his own processing abilities. He found that it was objectively worse than before. Upon trying to check his database of previously encountered roads, he found that some details were already fading. Standing out above all other destinations was the small mech home base. It was inefficient. Somehow, he was glad of it. 

He blinked his eyes, then startled at the automatic motion. He could feel dampness gathering in his new eyes. The small mechs held a mirror up to him, the mirror that used to be attached to the top of Vespen’s car. The face in it was uneven and bumpy. His eyes were brown. His eyelashes clumped together, he was sweating. One of the mechs squeezed his hand. 

“We have finished the transfer. Your mind preserved roughly 75% of its original detail, but it linked well with the human body. The majority of your muscles are movable with subconscious intention. Would you like to try getting up?” 

“I would like to walk,” said Vespen.

His voice, although monotone, had a slight creak at the end of the sentence. He found it amusing and the corners of his mouth twitched up. As he swung his legs off the bed and touched the ground, his mouth opened to show his front teeth, and he laughed.