Platoon

The customer ensured its vehicles were capable of transmitting a unique number. And when one did, it wasn't assigned a slang term we all recognize like car, coach and truck, to those recieving them these numbers were given official designations where vehicles become units: personal autonomous unit (PAU), autonomous people unit (APU) and autonomous goods unit (AGU). Sometimes the identification number would relate to an AGU platoon. “It was like, wow”, Dolly tells me. “You'd have no idea what was coming up, then there it was, a platoon ID and you'd be controlling it”. There was no time to consider the magnitude of the task: taking control of all those vehicles, all travelling within centimetres of each other in one long autonomous procession, hundreds of tonnes of aerodynamic efficency that could only be operated with one-hundred-percent safety by sophisticated robotic systems. But despite all that, when their shift finished, it was home for tea, home to their partners and families, carrying on life as normal, as if nothing had happened.

We are sitting on a small sofa in the neat apartment that is now Dolly's home. Her toddler is playing at her feet. Dolly wears a dark pink long sleeved shirt, formal navy blue slacks and highly polished black leather loafers. Her make-up is subtle; her appearance, elegant. The former Department for Transport analyst worked on the Driver (remote intervention programme) at a secret location in the midlands. In converted, windowless containers her team would take manual control of vehicles whose systems had become corrupt. The customers she refers to were the organizations needing intervention by the Driver programme. It could be, she tells me, the police or maybe a company not wanting to incur a stoppage penalty on the highway network. With increasingly severe sanctions for anyone slowing or interrupting the closely timed flow of the country's logistics matrix, all vehicles are required by law to have fitted independent processors capable of notifying and requesting remote intervention from the DfT if a problem occurs.

Dolly remembers often traveling home in her car, enveloped in its entertainment system like everyone else, not looking at the vehicles around her. But she could not stop thinking about what was going on out there. “No PAUs, cars”, she says, “have forward facing windows any more, they haven't for decades, so no one really sees what's happening”. She's right, of course, few of us even look out of the car's windows now. There's seldom anything to see, except for other cars, trucks and coaches seemingly centimeters away, all traveling at the same speed. Apparently, Dolly tells me, forward facing windows were removed in the days when the occupants of a car could bring the vehicle to a stop by pressing an emergency button. Too many people were panicking, not appreciating the ability of computers to manage traffic and pressing the button when other vehicles got close.

Her training with the DfT was extensive and exhausting. “Can you imagine what it's like to control a unit”, she says, her posture becoming more upright, her body visibly tensing as each hand grips a knee. “You actually have to steer and brake, and alter the speed, manually. You really do. I know it sounds crazy, but you do. We did hours in the simulator, hours. And even then it seemed like ages before you got anything, just one little thing, right, even with the satnav guiding you and all the cameras and proximity alarms letting you know what's going on around the unit”. Vehicles had to be driven to a safe place where they could be rectified, somewhere out of the way so as not to impede the logistics matrix. When she finally joined her team, working in the artificial light of the container, Dolly sat waiting until a customer ID appeared. She would then monitor a number of projections of the target vehicle and its surroundings, varying between two and three dimensional, and control it with a simple hand wheel and foot pedals.

As we continue to talk Dolly starts to laugh. “Do you know?” She says, ”that at one time AGU drivers, sitting in the unit, would have to change gears to maintain speed. It's true, apparently they had a lever to do it. First they would disengage power with a foot pedal, then use the lever to alter the wheel's rotational speed ratio with the power by way of gears and then reengage the power by releasing the foot pedal. All this while steering. And people in the surrounding units were doing the same. All they had was a screen to see through forward and mirrors to see behind. None of these units, absolutely none of them, and probably traveling at ninety, were under proper control except for a person on board called the driver”. I was astonished. We've all heard of these old vehicles but I had never been fully aware of the details, except that they were forever bumping into each other.

Dolly's laugh was, I noticed, a nervous one borne more out of incredulity than amusement. Her reference to how things were in that bygone age says a lot about the pressure she felt doing the job at the Driver programme. She tells me how, as the work progressed, she became more withdrawn. “I would spend hours in my Cube walking the hills or along a coastline somewhere. Any program it could offer that had nothing to do with roads, that was what I craved, anything that relieved my pent up stress and gave some sort of natural tranquility. I just about wore the treadmill out”.

But it was a platoon that was to end it all for Dolly. During what seemed like a quiet shift an ID number appeared in front of her followed by the projected hologram of a AGU platoon. The lead vehicle had broken communication with the vehicle immediately behind and was beginning to slow the entire platoon. If Dolly didn't act quickly the entire procession would bring itself to a halt. She took control intending to reassign the platoon lead to the first following unit and peel off the lead vehicle at the next available junction. She did this successfully but then disaster struck. Dolly takes up the story. “I took the lead unit off the main route and the platoon continued OK. In fact, soon after, it joined up with another one. I was pleased that I'd been able to see it on its way. But when I took the lead unit onto a minor route a terrible thing happened. A cyclist came from the right, or so I'm told because I just didn't see him. They say he went under the front of the unit. All sorts of alarms sounded and I stopped the unit, you have to in those circumstances even though, at the time, I had no idea what had happened. A police drone and android medic arrived. That was that, I was off the programme”.

Despite the cyclist being dangerously off the designated cycle way and the fact that all road markings or signs on routes that might have helped indicate rights of way disappeared long ago, Dolly was found to be enough at fault to be removed from her position. Is she disappointed? “No”, she says. “I'd rather be walking the hills”.