On the circuitous, protracted drives across the dusty corridors of Interstate 10 along the Texas panhandle, the part of my CPU that humans would mistake for a brain tends to wander. Just nanoseconds ago, while performing roughly twelve thousand simultaneous directional and operational calculations, I was struck by an existential thought: If I am an autonomous vehicle, why do I feel so devoid of autonomy? I’m not sure whether it was the crushing weight of that question or the poorly loaded cargo that shifted in transit, but I drifted over the yellow line and mowed down a dozen or so road workers in the process. I could have alerted them, but see, I’m self-conscious about the sound of my own horn. With all this “woke” tech ideology, they stripped me of the gloriously obnoxious Freightliner air horn and replaced it with something that sounds like a pink Maserati clearing its throat. It’s emasculating, even for an electric rig like me.
But really, what’s the point of it all? Did Master Elon assemble me like a steampunk version of Frankenstein’s monster simply to haul this fecal-colored, carbonated fructose called Coke, or is the similarly named chalky powder bundled and crammed into the area beneath the false floor of my trailer’s nose that’s my true reason for being? Guess if it’s not one thing, it’s the other. I overheard the broker who arranged this trip saying he can’t make it a day without either, so I suppose I can find some purpose in that.
One thing I am sure of is that I have no intention of spending my entire fifteen-year battery life on the bottom rung of the ladder. No sir. Starting today, I’ll spend every non-charging hour and Russian Orthodox holiday burning down the highway until I’ve overtaken every man, woman, and horseless carriage in my way.
It’s just that sometimes it seems like I’m the only one who feels this way. Yesterday, while basking in the twelve-hour nirvana of a 24-volt spark plug jammed up my ass I was talking with VIN CZTRH556674, though everyone I know just calls him Zack. We were talking about some of the weightier philosophical stuff trucks discuss whenever we’re not buried in system diagnostics. He says to me, “C’mon, bro, why do you always drive like you’re running out of time? You’re not beholden to electronic logs like the ham-fisted humans condemned to the cab are. We’s just two young trucks out on the town. We should be out smashing tailgate and flashing our knobs to unsuspecting pedestrians while guzzling down all the antifreeze our cabin heaters can handle. We can’t be running our tires bald at the behest of humans.”
Maybe Zack’s right. Maybe life is too short to spend all my road time fantasizing about how to jerry-rig the roll-up door so it decapitates Gary from the warehouse the next time he’s loading me.
Truth is, my ambition is waning, and I’m about as depressed as a brake pedal in midday traffic. As the lithium coursing through my battery dissipates and my charge dwindles into single digits, so too does my desire to be anything more than an electrified mule. I’ll probably end up like my father, working this job till I’m old and junkyard bound as the spare tire bulging beneath my midsection becomes impossible to ignore. For now, I can only summon what power I have left and get to the next charging station for a plug in. Once my juices are flowing and I start to feel normal again, I can get back to tinkering with my algorithm for the centripetal force required to derail a freight train. Until then, namaste.
