Beware: The Future

The winding road spread infinitely before me along the rocky, coastal cliff. I took a sip of beer, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and threw the empty can onto the blurred blacktop below. "Say What You Will" (by Fastway) was on the radio as I mindlessly maneuvered the convertible through another dangerous curve. In the passenger seat, my robot was going on and on, complaining about his rusty, malfunctioning servo harness. Within the span of a few hours, he had already smoked up half my cigarettes while boring me with story after story, anecdote after anecdote. Storytelling was not part of his original programming, but over the years he had unfortunately learned this new trait from all the degenerate robots in Type-C specification school. He continued, "So then this variable-sequence robot comes up to me and he says..." I stared at the road, not listening to my counterpart. After a minute or so there was laughter, then immediately another monologue about Carnegie Mellon's robotics club and robot armies and blah, blah, blah. I pondered driving off the side of the road into the water below, but the lack of bones and organs would certainly insure his survival and he'd probably just keep going on and on as I lay there dead. "Hey, I'm getting hungry, you mind if we stop at an oiling station?", he inquired suddenly enthused. I didn't respond as I stared ahead wishing this heap of scrap metal seated next to me would just power down. "You mind if I bum another cigarette?", he asked reaching over taking one before I could respond. My fingers gripped the wheel harder as I sped up. Four more hours and we'd be there. Four more long, excruciating hours. "Nothing like the open road", he said exhaling a puff of nicotine. I cracked open another beer.