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Frederick - What Drives Cars

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Frederick What Drives Cars

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3. Lyric and didactic: For a lady I know / Countee Cullen -- Art / Ambrose Bierce -- 4. Mask and Irony: Another grace for a child / Robert Herrick -- Oh no / Robert Creeley -- The workbox / Thomas Hardy -- Letter to accompany a submission of verse to Carave / Knute Skinner.;The river-merchants wife : a letter / Ezra Pound -- The eye / Robinson Jeffers -- A grave / Marianne Moore -- The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot -- Sweeney among the nightingales / T.S. Eliot -- Bells for John Whitesides daughter / John Crowe Ransom -- All in green when my love riding / E.E. Cummings -- When serpents bargain for the right to squirm / E.E. Cummings -- Next to of course god America I / E.E. Cummings -- Black tambourine / Hart Crane -- At the San Francisco airport / Yvor Winters -- Dirge / Kenneth Fearing -- Dream deferred / Langston Hughes -- Saturdays child / Countee Cullen -- In Westminster Abbey / John Betjeman -- Legal fiction / William Empson -- As I walked out one evening / W.H. Auden -- Muse des beaux arts / W.H. Auden.;Freedom and pattern: 1. Patterns of sound and rhythm: I remember / Stevie Smith -- On some South African novelists / Roy Campbell -- This living hand, now warm and capable / John Keats -- Song (Go and catch a falling star) / John Donne -- Fern Hill / Dylan Thomas -- Proud Maisie / Sir Walter Scott -- Yield / Ronald Gross -- Miss Farrow just smiled / Ronald Gross.;For review and further study -- You all know the story of the other woman / Anne Sexton -- What guile is this, that those her golden tresses / Edmund Spenser -- Delay / Elizabeth Jennings -- The definition of love / Andrew Marvell -- The fortunes of war, I tell you plain / Anonymous -- On a waiter / Davie McCord -- A divine image / William Blake -- Utopians / Keith Waldrop -- I sing of a maiden that makeless / Anonymous -- This skin / Knute Skinner -- Epitaph for a light lady / John Frederick Nims -- Another / John Frederick Nims -- Shall I compare thee to a summers day? / William Shakespeare.;Words and their order: 1. The right word: Mother, I cannot mind my wheel / Walter Savage Landor -- In the elegy season / Richard Wilbur -- Mouses nest / John Clare -- The last word / Peter Davison.;Sound: 1. Sound as meaning: Who goes with Fergus? / William Butler Yeats -- Rain / Emanuel diPasquale -- The watch / Frances Cornford -- How shall we mourn you who are killed and wasted / Charles Reznikoff -- 2. Alliteration and assonance: Lullay / John Skelton -- The splendor falls on castle walls / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- Eight oclock / A.E. Housman -- Epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton / Alexander Pope.;For review and further study -- As bad as a mile / Philip Larkin -- The Lady who offers her looking glass to Venus / Matthew Prior -- Cupid and my Campaspe played / John Lyly -- To daisies, not to shut so soon / Robert Herrrick -- Fire and ice / Robert Frost -- The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls / E.E. Cummings.;England in 1819 / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- Ode on a Grecian urn / John Keats -- Days / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Oft have I seen at some cathedral door / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- Crossing the bar / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- Ulysses / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- My last duchess / Robert Browning -- Soliloquy of the Spanish cloister / Robert Browning -- The Berg / Herman Melville -- I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing / Walt Whitman -- The city dead-house / Walt Whitman -- Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold -- Lucifer in starlight / George Meredith -- The woodspurge / Dante Gabriel Rossetti -- Because I could not stop for death / Emily Dickinson -- I started early took my dog / Emily Dickinson -- The soul selects her own society / Emily Dickinson -- Channel firing / Thomas Hardy -- The convergence of the twain / Thomas Hardy -- During wind and rain / Thomas Hardy.;Imagery: In a station of the metro / Ezra Pound -- The piercing chill I feel / Taniguchi Buson -- Study of two peas / Wallace Stevens -- Ode to a nightingale / John Keats -- The fish / Elizabeth Bishop -- Poem (as the cat) / William Carlos Williams -- Gods hands / Robert Herrick -- from Hitch Haiku / Gary Snyder -- Haiku ambulance / Richard Brautigan -- Heat / H.D.;2. Ballads and other poems to sing: Bonny Barbara Allan / Anonymous -- Still growing / Anonymous -- Squire and milkmaid, or, Blackberry fold / Anonymous -- Plane wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee) / Woody Guthrie -- Good mornin, blues / Anonymous -- Fear no more the heat o th sun / William Shakespeare -- The years at the spring / Robert Browning -- The unquiet grave / Anonymous -- The cherry-tree carol / Anonymous -- Frankie and Johnny / Anonymous.;For review and further study : Departmental / Robert Frost -- Anecdote of the jar / Wallace Stevens -- Lo, as careful housewife runs to catch / William Shakespeare -- Omen of victory / Mina Loy -- Night crow / Theodore Roethke -- A burnt ship / John Donne -- The silken tent / Robert Frost -- A noiseless patient spider / Walt Whitman.;Myth: Traditional myth: Barvarian gentians / D.H. Lawrence -- The Oxen / Thomas Hardy -- The world is too much with us / William Wordsworth -- Sonnet : To science / Edgar Allan Poe -- Personal myth: The second coming / William Butler Yeats -- A charm against the toothache / John Heath-Stubbs -- Leda and the swan / William Butler Yeats -- Archtypes: The rimer / Anonymous -- Le belle dame sans merci / John Keats -- For review and further study : Lycidas / John Milton -- I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra / Ishmael Reed.;There is a garden in her face / Thomas Campian -- A lecture upon the shadow / John Donne -- A valedicition : forbidding mourning / John Donne -- Batter my heart, three-personed God, for You / John Donne -- To everlasting oblivion / John Marston -- Madrigal / William Drummond of Hawthornden -- To the virgins, to make much of time / Robert Herrick.;Word order: Anyone lived in a pretty how town / E.E. Cummings -- Carrion comfort / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Age / Walter Savage Landor.;For review and further study: Thirteen ways of looking at a black bird / Wallace Stevens -- Atticus / Alexander Pope -- Remembering Kevan MacKenzie / Henry Taylor -- In just- / E.E. Cummings -- Gesture / Donald Finkel -- La chute / Charles Olson.;Full fathom five thy father lies / William Shakespeare -- When daisies pied and violets blue / William Shakespeare -- When icicles hang by the wall / William Shakespeare -- Let me not to the marriage of true minds / William Shakespeare -- Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth / William Shakespeare -- That time of year thou mayst in me behold / William Shakespeare.;For review and further study -- Fa, mi, fa, te, la, mi / Anonymous -- The silver swan, who living had no note / Anonymous -- Rose-cheeked Laura, come / Thomas Campian -- Swinging chick / Ern Alpaugh and Dewey G. Pell -- Song: the figure in the carpet / James Camp -- Suzanne / Leonard Cohen.;Speech and poetic diction: Reason / Josephine Miles -- Wheesht, wheesht / Hugh MacDiarmid -- Cobb would have caught it / Robert Fitzgerald -- The ruined maid / Thomas Hardy -- The fury of aerial bombardment / Richard Eberhart.;2. Subject, theme, and tone: The television / Anne Stevenson -- The author to her book / Anne Bradstreet -- To a locomotive in Winter / Walt Whitman -- I like to see it lap the miles / Emily Dickinson -- The fall of the House of Usher / Reed Whittemore -- To Lucasta / Richard Lovelace -- Dulce et decorum est / Wilfred Owen.;Alternatives: The Poet s revisions : The old pensioner / William Butler Yeats -- The lamentation of the old pensioner / William Butler Yeats -- My son, my executioner / Donald Hall -- Translation : La guitarra (Guitar) / Federico Garca Lorca -- Vorgefhl (Foreboding) / Rainer Maria Rilke -- Odes I / Horace -- Recueillement (meditations) / Charles Baudelaire -- What is poetry?: Air poetica / Archbald Macleish.;Poems for the eye: Word shapes: Easter wings / George Herbert -- Skeleton key / John Hollander -- Death of the day / Walter Savage Landor -- R-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r / E.E. Cummings -- Stone gullets / May Swenson -- Ascension hymn / Henry Vaughan -- Upon Prew his maid / Robert Herrick.;Other figures: The wind / James Stephens -- Elegy, written with his own hand in the tower before his execution / Chidiock Tichborne -- The pulley / George Herbert -- Tree at my window / Robert Frost -- On a girdle / Edmond Waller -- A hymn to God the Father / John Donne.;Symbol and allegory: Symbol: The Boston Evening Transcript / T.S. Eliot -- The lightning is a yellow fork / Emily Dickinson -- I heard a fly buzz when I died / Emily Dickinson -- The boarder / Louis Simpson -- Neutral tones / Thomas Hardy -- Allegory: The parable of the good seed / Matthew 13:24-30 -- What is our life? A play of passion / Sir Walter Raleigh -- You that with allegorys curious frame / Sir Philip Sidney -- Redemption / George Herbert.;3. Rime: Julius Caesar / Anonymous -- The angel that presided oer my birth / William Blake -- The hippopotamus / Hilaire Belloc -- Song for strangers in Wales / John Malcolm Brinnin -- Gods grandeur / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Opus 6 / Emanuel Morgan.;Elegy written in a country churchyard / Thomas Gray -- For I will consider my cat Jeoffry / Christopher Smart -- Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell / William Bake -- The sick rose / William Bake -- The tyger / William Bake -- A slumber did my spirit seal / William Wordsworth -- Ode: intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood / William Wordsworth -- Kubla Khan / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Lines inscribed upon a cup formed from a skull / George Gordon, Lord Byron.;The person in the poem: 1. The poets I: The end of the world / Archibald MacLeish -- Sir, say no more / Trumbull Stickney -- I wandered lonely as a cloud / William Wordsworth -- The unknown citizen / W.H. Auden -- Resurrection song / Thomas Lovell Beddoes -- The red wheelbarrow / William Carlos Williams.;Anthology : Western wind / Anonymous -- I have a young sister / Anonymous -- Edward / Anonymous -- Sir Patrick Spence / Anonymous -- The three ravens / Anonymous -- The twa corbies / Anonymous -- The complaint of Chaucer to his purse / Geoffrey Chaucer -- Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind / Sir Thomas Wyatt -- With how and steps, O Moon, thou climbst the skies / Sir Philip Sidney -- The passionate shepherd to his love / Christopher Marlowe.;Love / George Herbert -- Go lovely rose / Edmond Waller -- When I consider how my light is spent / John Milton -- To his coy mistress / Andrew Marvell -- To the memory of Mr. Oldham / John Dryden -- A paraphrase from the French / Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset -- The day of judgment / Jonathan Swift -- Epigram engraved on the collar of a dog which I gave to his royal highness / Alexander Pope.;Come into animal presence / Denise Levertov -- The cauliflower / John Haines -- In Bertrams garden / Donald Justice -- Kore / Robert Creeley -- In back of the real / Allen Ginsberg -- The midnight snack / James Merrill -- The operation / W.D. Snodgrass -- For the anniversary of my death / W.S. Merwin -- A blessing / James Wright -- The insusceptibles / Adrienne Rich -- Milton by firelight / Gary Snyder -- Morning song / Sylvia Plath -- Before bed / Keith Waldrop -- Preface to a twenty volume suicide note / LeRoi Jones -- Have you ever had a witch bloom like a highway / Richard Brautigan -- Subterranean homesick blues / Bob Dylan -- Flight / James Tate.;The brides / A.D. Hope -- Dolor / Theodore Roethke -- Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartz / Theodore Roethke -- The dirty word / Karl Shapiro -- Get the gasworks / David Ignatow -- The death of the ball turret gunner / Randall Jarrell -- Naming of parts / Henry Reed -- Written on the stub of the first paycheck / William Stafford -- After the funeral / Dylan Thomas -- Recruiting drive / Charles Causley -- Skunk hour / Robert Lowell -- American primitive / William Jay Smith -- The Goose fish / Howard Nemerov -- Junk / Richard Wilbur -- Church going / Philip Larkin -- Cherry log road / James Dickey.;Entrances: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / A.E. Housman -- Catch / Robert Francis -- In the morning, in the morning / A.E. Housman -- It was not death, for I stood up / Emily Dickinson -- Hair poem / Saint Geraud -- Not marble nor the gilded monuments / William Shakespeare.;For review and further study : Jabberwocky / Lewis Carroll -- Metamorphosis / Wallace Stevens -- As I was lying on the green / Anonymous -- Voyages (II) / Hart Crane -- My heart leaps up when I behold / William Wordsworth -- Mutability / William Wordsworth -- Scottsboro / Anonymous.;2. The sonnet and other fixed forms: My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun / William Shakespeare -- Since theres no help, come let us kiss and part / Michael Drayton -- Grief / Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- Clo / George Granville, Lord Lansdowne -- You serve the best wines always, my dear Sir / Martial -- Of treason / Sir, John Harrington -- Antiquary / John Donne -- Impromptu on Charles II / John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester -- An empty house / Alexander Pope -- Her whole life is an epigram / William Blake -- A politician / E.E. Cummings -- Visiting poet / John Frederick Nims -- Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas -- Petit, the poet / Edgar Lee Masters.;Telling good from bad: Imprecisions: O moon, when I gaze on thy beautiful face / Anonymous -- Life / Grace Treasone -- Madam lifes a piece in bloom / William Ernest Henley -- My wife is my shirt / Stephen Troop -- Sentimentality: John Anderson my jo, John / Robert Burns -- Love poems / John Frederick -- Betrothal / J.W. Scholl -- The bull calf / Irving Layton -- The old arm-chair / Eliza Cook -- Piano / D.H. Lawrence -- Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean / Alfred, Lord Tennyson.;Figures of speech: 1. Why speak figuratively?: The eagle / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- 2. Metaphor and simile: From the wash the laundress sends / A.E. Housman -- Flower in the crannied wall / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- To see a world in a grain of sand / William Blake -- Metaphors / Sylvia Plath -- It dropped so low in my regard / Emily Dickinson -- There was a man of double deed / Anonymous -- A civil servant / Robert Graves -- Very like a whale / Ogden Nash.;Knowing excellence Sailing to Byzantium / William Butler Yeats -- On the vanity of earthly greatness / Arthur Gutterman -- Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- Heraclitus / William Cory -- Elegy on Herakleitos / Dudley Fitts -- O Captain! My Captain! / Walt Whitman -- The little black boy / William Blake -- Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art / John Keats -- Fog / Carl Sandburg -- For review and further study: Rhapsody on a windy night / T.S. Eliot -- Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin / Mark Alexander Boyd -- Epitaph / J.V. Cunningham -- The preface / Edward Taylor -- Get up! / Joseph Skipsey -- Pats opinion of flags / Fred Emerson Brooks -- Japan / Anthony Hecht.;3. Free verse: Six variations (part iii) Denise Levertov -- Buffalo Bills / E.E. Cummings -- Victory comes late / Emily Dickinson -- The dance / William Carlos Williams -- Upon a child that died / Robert Herrick -- Poem (the only response) / Saint Geraud -- The heart / Stephen Crane -- Cavalry crossing a ford / Walt Whitman -- First practice / Gary Gildner.;Saying and suggesting: 1. Denotation and connotation: London / William Blake -- A short song of congratulation / Samuel Johnson -- Disillusionment of 10 oclock / Wallace Stevens -- Upon Julias voice / Robert Herrick -- The white stallion / Guy Owen -- Motto for a sun dial / J.V. Cunningham -- The jewel stairs grievance / Ezra Pound.;Parody: My garden / T.E. Brown -- My garden / J.A. Lindon -- What, still alive at twenty-two / Hugh Kingsmill -- The sun has long been set / William Wordsworth -- A sonnet / J.K. Stephen -- Mending sump / Kenneth Koch -- For review and further study : Little Libbie / Julia A. Moore -- Henry King / Hilaire Belloc -- Thoughts on capital punishment / Rod McKuen -- Traveling through the dark / William Stafford -- Mary and her dead canary / Alexander Kerr, Litt D. -- Janet waking / John Crowe Ransom -- Spring and Fall / Gerard Manley Hopkins.;For review and further study : Johnny, I hardly knew ye / Anonymous -- Secretary / Ted Hughes -- Life, friends, is boring, we must not say so / John Berryman -- The chimney sweeper / William Blake -- On the late massacre in Piemont / John Milton -- On Stellas Birthday / Jonathan Swift -- My papas waltz / Theodore Roethke.;Pied beauty / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- The windhoover / Gerard Maile Hopkins -- The old filthy beer pail / Katie V. Hall -- The harlots house / Oscar Wilde -- Terence, this is stupid stuff / A.E. Housman -- To an athlete dying young / A.E. Housman -- Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop / William Butler Yeats -- Easter 1916 / William Butler Yeats -- Long legged fly / William Butler Yeats -- The Magi / William Butler Yeats -- Mr. Floods party / Edwin Arlington Robinson.;2. Allusion: Friend, on this scaffold Thomas More lies dead / J.V. Cunningham -- On first looking into Chapmans Homer / John Keats -- Lines printed under the engraved portrait of Milton / John Dryden -- The tortoise / Cid Corman.;The listeners / Walter De La Mare -- Finnegans wake / Anonymous -- John Henry / Anonymous -- Design / Robert Frost -- Provide, provide / Robert Frost -- Mending wall / Robert Frost -- Stopping by woods on a snowy evening / Robert Frost -- The emperor of ice-cream / Wallace Stevens -- Peter Quince at the clavier / Wallace Stevens -- I hear an army charging upon the land / James Joyce -- Danse Russe / William Carlos Williams -- To awaken an old lady / William Carlos Williams.;Concrete poetry: Bird-singing stream / Wang Wei -- The horizon of Holland / Ian Hamilton Finlay -- She loves me / Emmett Williams -- Siesta of a Hungarian snake / Edwin Morgan -- Concrete cat / Dorthi Charles.;Meter: On the imprint of the first English edition of The works of Max Beerbohm / Max Beerbohm -- On seeing a hair of Lucretia Borgia / Walter Savage Landor -- For review and further study: They flee from me that sometime did me sek / Sir Thomas Wyatt -- Inversnaid / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Dark house, by which once more I stand / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- To freight cars in the air / William Carlos Williams -- Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air / George Peele -- Beat! Beat! Drums! / Walt Whitman -- The Gothic looks solemn / John Keats.;4. Reading poems aloud: For review and further study: It was a lover and his lass / William Shakespeare -- Delight in disorder / Robert Herrick -- Rivers arise; whether thou be the son / John Milton -- Rondeau (Jenny kissed me) / Leigh Hunt -- With rue my heart is laden / A.E. Housman -- Winter ocean / John Updike -- Lullaby / Bert Meyers -- To close / William Carlos Williams.;Song: 1. Singing and saying: To Celia / Ben Johnson -- The cruel mother / Anonymous -- Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting / Anonymous -- Richard Cory / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Richard Cory / Paul Simon -- On top of Old Smoky / Anonymous -- How do I love thee? Let me count the ways / Elizabeth Barrett Browning -- When I was one-and-twenty / A.E. Housman.;Rhythm: 1. Stresses and pauses: We real cool / Gwendolyn Brooks -- Never again would birds song be the same / Robert Frost -- Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears / Ben Jonson -- At the altar / Robert Lowell -- With serving still / Sir Thomas Wyatt -- Rsum / Dorothy Parker.

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WHAT DRIVES CARS

by Carl Frederick

* * * *

Peopleor thingsgood enough to do a good job are likely to have ideas of their own....

Paul Whitman stepped into his car and relaxed. Hed only had the vehicle, Victor-16, for a week but hed already become attached to iteven fond of it.

Shall I drive you to Central High School? said Victor.

Paul smiled. Victors voice, eager, youthful, enthusiastic, always reminded him of the kids at the school where he worked as a guidance counselor. Perhaps that alone explained why Paul felt a fondness for the vehicle.

The high school, yes, said Paul. But stop first at the CoffeeNuts drive-through.

Yes, sir. Victor rolled out into traffic. The family says theres congested traffic on Route 611. May I take an alternate route?

Yes. Thanks. Paul felt sheepish thanking a car, but it was hard not to think of Victor as a persona person with a family.

The Victor Class vehicles were a set of two hundred concept cars: voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and interconnectivity through the cell-phone network. They ran on ethanol and had very large fuel tanksnecessary, as there were only a few service stations with ethanol pumps in southeastern Pennsylvaniathe Victor Vehicle test region. Paul knew he was lucky getting one of them to test drivebut then again, having a brother who was the Head of Victor Programming certainly helped.

Paul, in the drivers seat, did nothing but watch as Victor negotiated through the traffic. His hands twitched involuntarily on the wheel; it was hard not being the driver. Ahead, he saw the CoffeeNuts and leaned with the motion as Victor swung into the drive-through lane. He pushed the control to lower the windowit was easier than asking Victor to do itand gave his order: a coffee and a cruller.

Wouldnt a banana be healthier? said Victor.

What? Paul glanced in surprise at the speaker grill. CoffeeNuts doesnt sell bananas.

Oh.

While Paul inhaled the aroma of fresh coffee intermingling with the smell of donuts and new car scent, Victor pulled back onto the road. Paul was sure the car maneuvered gently so he wouldnt spill his coffee. Paul shook his head in wonderment. Victor seemed not only intelligent; the car seemed considerateand actually sentient. Thats ridiculous! Its just software. He snapped on the radio to listen to the news over breakfast.

The hot news of the morning was from Harrisburg where, later that day, the State Legislature would vote on the ethanol proposal. If it passed, the ethanol plant in Ethantown would be tripled in size, making it the largest biofuel refinery in the nation. A heated floor debate had gone on for several days now, but Paul wasnt in the mood to listen to any more discordant sound bites. He rubbed his hands together to erase the thin pale patina of confectioners sugar, then flipped off the radio.

Do you think it will pass? came Victors voice.

What?

The ethanol bill, said Victor in an eager voice. Do you think theyll pass it?

Paul, again astonished at the mental capabilities of his car, was reminded of the kids he counseled; hed always strived to treat them as young adults and not children. Perhaps hed have to treat his car the same way. He gazed at the little Norwegian troll doll hed hung from the rear-view mirror to give a touch of individuality to his Victor.

Well, do you, sir?

The ethanol bill, said Paul. No. I dont think itll pass. It means the state borrowing a lot of money. And it would mostly benefit the Midwest corn producers. Their farm subsidies would go upalong with our taxes. So the bill isnt popular with a lot of Pennsylvania politicians.

But isnt it popular with people?

Paul chuckled. Im not sure it matters. Its the politicians who get to vote on it.

In Harrisburg?

Yes. Paul wrinkled his nose. Victor sounded very much like one of his high school kids: unfamiliar with the world, but alert and quick to learn.

After some silence, Victor said, Thats too bad. Wed really like it to pass.

We?

The family.

After a further few seconds of silence, Paul said, Victor. He spoke softly, trying to keep a troubled tone out of his voice. Phone my brother, please. You might try his home first.

Yes, sir. After a minute or so, Victor said, He isnt home. But his car, Victor-5, is in motion. Should I call him there?

Yes, please, andPaul glanced at the cabins front camera lensVideophone, if you would.

Dialing.

A video screen on the dashboard came to life, and showed the face of Pauls brother, Jonathan. After exchanging greetings and small talk, Paul broached his concernsbut with uneasiness as he knew Victor, the object of his concerns, could hear every word. You know, Jonathan, he said with forced lightness,

Victor here seems quite, um, intelligent.

What would you expect? said Jonathan with a laugh. My team does good work.

In fact, the car seems almost, well, self-aware.

It emulates self-awareness.

It emulates it very well, said Paul, feeling slightly less troubled now. In fact, I cant tell it from genuine sentience.

Im glad. But its only programming. Jonathan gave a snort of a laugh. John Searles Chinese Room idea argues that computation isnt even AI, much less sentience.

On the other hand, said Paul, Victor passes the Turing Testat least for me. Alan Turing might say the car is sentient. He chuckled. A Turing car, so to speak.

Jonathan smiled, but Paul could tell that something lay heavy on his mind. Come on, brother. Youre not telling me everything.

Well, said Jonathan. I have to admit the Victor cars are showing a lot more intelligence than I expecteda human intelligence.

How is that possible? Your team programmed them.

Jonathan nodded. Connectionism, maybe. We didnt take into account that the individual cars link together through the cell phone network. He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and gazed at it. And these phones are little computers in their own rightnot to mention the network computer system that controls them.

Paul gazed over Victors artificial leather upholstery. Are you saying that the networked Victors and cell phones have created a true sentient creature?

True synthesized sentience, said Jonathan, in a voice lacking conviction.

Ive got to say Im a little uneasy, said Paul, about machines showing sentienceeven if only simulated.

Get used to it, said Jonathan with a smile that seemed forced. Its coming. His smile turned more genuine. I think you should become a guidance councilor to the Victor family. You know I could get you a job here. He nodded out the window as Victor-5 pulled into the company parking lot.

Yeah, yeah.

Why work with your surly teenagers when you could work instead with smart cars? Smart surly cars, if youd like. I could arrange it.

Thank you, Jonathan, said Paul with a sigh. Hed had this conversation with his brother many times.

Talk to you later. He ended the call.

Paul polished off his donut and washed it down with lukewarm coffee. Then, casually glancing out the window, he noticed that the landscape had grown noticeably less urban. I must say, Victor, that you seem to be taking a rather out of the way route to Central High School.

The car didnt respond.

Why dont you answer? said Paul.

There is nothing to answer. You made a statement. It wasnt a question.

Come on. You know what I meant. Paul watched as the car took the Route 1 exit to I-76.

Again, Victor didnt respond.

Victor!

Im sorry, said the car, but the family has decided we will all drive to Harrisburg in order to pressure the legislature to vote for the Ethanol Expansion Bill.

What?

I said, Im sorry, but the family has

I heard what you said. Paul struggled to keep his voice steady. Are you telling me youre not driving me to the high school?

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