For our meeting in October 2019 the challenge set was to take the following starting paragraph and write either what happened either before or after the situation.
The paragraph was:
12.30 in the morning, a dreich night. The little village slept quietly when an annoying noise of a car in the distance began to be heard. In no time the car was roaring through the sleeping village. It mounted the pavement missing the Hardware Store and stopped dead’……
Duncan Gray wrote:
The Strange Case of the Car in the Night-time
The car sped through the night, surely travelling faster in the darkness and sheeting rain than the limits of visibility from the headlights could safely allow. Always on the verge of skidding but never quite out of control, its wheels cut through puddles and left short lived dry lines on the wet road surface. Anyone standing near the road would have heard a fizzing noise as the tyres bit on the tarmac and sprayed water into the air. However, that bystander would also have noticed that there was no roar of an engine, no noise of internal combustion being piped and muffled out the rear. There was only a high pitched and almost inaudible whine. This was a modern vehicle, an electrically powered car, which was flying through the countryside in the style of Lewis Hamilton chasing pole position. But quietly.
By the time the car reached Lennoxtown its pace was much diminished. It got slower and slower as it rolled along the main street. Finally it made a sudden left turn, bumped up onto the pavement, narrowly missed the hardware shop and came to rest with its front bumper just touching the post box. There it stayed for the rest of the night. No one in the sleeping village had been disturbed.
It was discovered early in the morning by a man going to open up his newsagents shop a couple of doors down. He tried the drivers door handle and found it was locked. He then called Kirkintilloch Police Office where the staff on duty took a note of the registration number and said they’d investigate.
There was nothing of note on the car’s Police National Computer record. The registered keeper was a Donald Todd who had an address in Dundee and it hadn’t been reported lost or stolen. The night shift constable decided there was no point sending anyone to look at it until the day shift came on duty. Instead he phoned over to the CCTV centre and asked the staff to check for any sightings.
As it happened, the point where the car had stopped was also beside a bank cash machine. The CCTV camera had been pointing at it all night as thieves sometimes ripped those machines from the wall using a stolen digger. The camera operator soon called back to report that the car was seen entering Lennoxtown at 1247 hours and it had come to a halt in its finishing position at 1251. The policeman then asked for a description of the driver. “That’s a strange thing”, the CCTV operator replied. He’d watched the recording in fast-forward right through from the car stopping until the shopkeeper had arrived and tried the drivers door. No one had got out of the car.
A police officer in Dundee was sent to the address of Mr Todd, the registered keeper. She got no reply at his door but found a helpful neighbour who knew him well. The neighbour advised that the Todds had been away on holiday for almost two weeks and that the car had been on the driveway yesterday evening. He hadn’t seen or heard anything suspicious but he was able to provide Todd’s mobile phone number.
It turned out that Mr Todd was in Florida and it was still the early hours of the morning when he received a call from Police Scotland. He was surprised that the car had been taken but was very pleased to hear it had been recovered with no apparent damage. He explained that the car was very valuable as it was fitted with new generation self-driving technology which was being developed by his company.
In the middle of the afternoon a technician colleague of Mr Todd’s arrived in Lennoxtown with a key for the car. He opened it and found that the batteries were completely exhausted. He wasn’t surprised, he told the policeman who was there, this was probably as far as the car would get from Dundee on a full charge. A tow truck would have had to be called. The officer asked how it could be that apparently no one was driving the car. The technician said only that he had a theory and he’d get back to him once he’d checked the data on a disk drive which he’d just extracted from the dashboard.
In the end the story of this car became a global topic. There were reports in newspapers around the world, often accompanied by an editorial about the dangers of robot technology.
It took three weeks of analysis to find the flaws in the artificial intelligence that runs the car. The computer program had tens of thousands of separate instructions. Some reacted to events as sensors detected them, others anticipated events and acted before things happened. The explanation, when it was written up as a report, was almost long enough to fill a book. Simply put though, what had happened was that subtle conflicts between various parts of the program had given the AI a boredom threshold. The car had simply got fed up waiting to go somewhere, so it had taken off on its own accord and hadn’t stopped until it ran out of power.
Campsie Writers Group 