Ian Mathias-Baker

The Series 8 was a remarkable car. Sleek, futuristic, fast, fun. The copywriters in the marketing department barely had to trouble themselves. Adjectives just seemed to throw themselves at it, eager to be attached to the thing.

It was just a shame that it kept killing people.

Not the customers, of course. Not the people driving it or their passengers, high-net-worth individuals cossetted inside the stitched leather interior. No, it was other people who died. Cyclists, pedestrians, the occasional jogger. You know the sort.

Bill Johns MSc was sitting at his desk at the company's engineering headquarters, enjoying the early morning in the particular way afforded to men who were both very good at what they did and fully aware of the fact. It was 9:38 a.m. He had poured himself a cup of fresh coffee – good beans, properly sourced, or at least expensively – and exchanged a few friendly words with Ingerson in the kitchen area. Ingerson was a man whose technical competence was unquestionable but whose opinions were not.

Safely back at his desk, Bill flicked through the news headlines with half an eye. He'd remember enough about them when some social interaction later in the day required it, as it surely would.

10:27 a.m. Having stretched these morning rituals to their acceptable limit, his thoughts turned, reluctantly, to work.

There were test reports waiting on the new model scheduled for launch the following year. Vast spreadsheets dense with figures, probabilities, and tolerances. They would require concentration and, worse, a willingness to entertain the possibility – however remote – that something might still benefit from adjustment. He acknowledged this briefly, then set it aside. The test reports could wait.

Emails were another matter. They couldn't always wait. Somewhere among the hundreds of unread messages might be a note from his boss, or his boss's boss. Someone whose position in the organisational structure required a prompt, thoughtful reply. Something that might be quietly noted and later remembered. Bill scrolled slowly, letting the subject lines pass beneath his gaze.

Nothing of consequence struck him. Just the usual drudge from less senior colleagues: questions whose answers were already perfectly well documented, requests for rationales he had provided more than once, challenges to assertions he had made in meetings and which, in his view, required no further defence. He skimmed them with the relaxed assurance of someone accustomed to being correct, even if others occasionally needed time to catch up.

Julian Fried was there again, forwarding the same email he had sent only yesterday. He could wait. He wasn't even in the engineering department. If it was important he'd email again no doubt. It was the precautionary principle at work: where there is equilibrium in a system it's always better to leave it well alone than do something, however well intended, that might lead to imbalance.

He was feeling pretty good, all things considered. Only three and a half weeks until his Caribbean break with Jaquii at a child-free luxury island resort. He minimised his application windows and allowed himself a moment to savour the vista of white sands and implausibly turquoise water. He'd taken the liberty of setting it as his desktop wallpaper, temporarily supplanting the photo of his beloved Series 8 saloon that usually filled his gaze. Well, not his personal car, but a marketing shot of his prized design.

Somewhere beneath his conscious self-satisfaction, however, something stirred. A faint unease, barely perceptible, like a cloud forming at the edge of an otherwise flawless sky. Bill frowned slightly and examined his thoughts.

What could possibly be wrong?

Life was So Damn Good! What was it that would be casting that shadow? Julian Fried? The lack of emails from the C-Suite? All that dreary test data? The possibility of a competitor beating them to the May launch date? None of it was anything out of the ordinary, and none of those things seemed to impinge on his mood when he thought about them. So what was it?

He switched back to his web browser. The news site was still open, offering its familiar procession of dreariness: some political spat in Westminster, more bad news from the Bank of England, a teenage stabbing outside a London school. Yawn. He scrolled without interest until a lower-profile regional headline caught his eye.

"Cyclist mown down and killed."

A feeling of disquiet made its presence felt in his upper chest. He opened the article and began to read.

The cyclist was a thirty-seven-year-old father of two, riding to his local gym along a leafy A-road in Hampshire. Eyewitnesses described a flashy executive saloon that had driven "through him," "as though he weren't even there." The driver had apparently not braked or taken measures to avoid the impact. Beneath the third paragraph sat a family photograph: an unremarkable woman and ordinary-looing twin boys in matching replica football shirts, smiling with the earnestness of people unaware of their impending function in the relentless news cycle.

Idiots, Bill thought, though he was not entirely sure who he meant. The journalist, perhaps. The editor who had approved the headline. The cyclist himself, certainly. Possibly even the children, by association. Or the fools that would no doubt be blathering on about it over lunch and dinner tables. Idiots, the lot of them. His face flushed with irritation.

Grabbing his jacket, he headed out to get some fresh air. His role allowed him the freedom to do that whenever he wanted - after all, genius ideas don't just drop at 10:10 a.m. on the dot while sitting staring at an empty screen or a blank page. They need time and space to gestate and develop. They need inspiration from the beauty of the natural world, which his creations surely echoed, of not surpassed, in their sublime sophistication.

He crossed the foyer, his footsteps echoing off chrome and tempered glass. A receptionist glanced up from her paperwork, smiling warmly but got nothing in return. The automatic doors slid open smoothly, framing the clipped box hedges outside and, beyond them, the car park. And at that moment, as though on cue, Richard's silver Series 8 swept into view.

The way it moved was genuinely, jaw-droppingly, beautiful.

Richard was the company chairman and not, in Bill's estimation, a particularly skilled driver. It scarcely mattered. The Series 8 compensated effortlessly, smoothing away clumsiness and indecision alike. Even in Richard's clumsy hands, the car carried itself with a poise that felt almost unreal. People who could never afford such a vehicle would still admire it instinctively when one passed them on the motorway or the high street.

Most cars were brutally literal machines: turn the steering wheel and the wheels turn. Apply the brakes and the car slows. All the inadequacies the human driver possessed were passed on to the vehicle regardless, resulting in lurches, swerves, and other small indignities inflicted upon thousands of hours of careful engineering. A really skilled driver could mitigate this of course, coaxing grace from the system, but skilled drivers were a rare commodity on the UK's busy roads.

The Series 8 was different from other cars.

It did not merely look sophisticated. Its onboard control systems employed the latest advances in artificial intelligence to ensure that its movements were as refined as its appearance. That achievement was Bill's. His ambition had pushed the development team well beyond their usual remit of engines, gearboxes and bodywork into entirely new domains. They had taken on network engineers, data scientists, mobile communications specialists and AI developers. The goal was not simply a well-engineered car, but a car that knew where precisely where it was at all times, and how to negotiate that geographic location with panache.

Every journey driven by a Series 8 generated data. Position, speed, angle of travel, engine load, steering input, braking pressure, suspension response, ambient temperature. Drivers created profiles – age, gender, profession – details that helped refine the model. One journey told the system very little, the aggregation of thousands of journeys created a vast cache of data with unquestionable statistical signicance.

In the eight months since launch, the dataset had grown to encompass nearly twenty percent of roads in the south of England. Some routes were thinly sampled, others astonishingly rich. Bill could log into his dashboard and see total miles driven, demographic breakdowns of the drivers, and maps showing exactly how many times a Series 8 had traversed any given stretch of tarmac. The data alone was intoxicating.

But the true elegance lay in what the car did with it.

As it moved, the Series 8 continuously compared the driver's inputs against a statistically derived model of normal behaviour for that location. Where other cars obeyed blindly, this one evaluated. A sudden steering input where no one had ever steered that way before was flagged as anomalous. An abrupt braking event in a place historically associated with smooth progress raised questions.

Human behaviour was erratic, inconsistent and messy. Everything that the Series 8 was not.

Rather than transmit panic directly to the wheels, the Series 8 moderated it. Smoothed it away. It knew the correct line, the appropriate speed, the optimal posture for the vehicle at every moment. The controlled grace depicted in the advertisements was not an illusion; it was faithfully reproduced by the way the vehicle carried itself in the real world. The car was literally data-driven. He still loved that play on words, even if the bloody marketing department had turned their noses up at it.

Bill was smiling to himself as he reflected on the sheer sophistication of the system, the elegant simplicity of the whole, and the flawless execution of this informational achievement. It was truly remarkable – so seamlessly integrated into the whole, so perfect, it almost felt alive.

There were safety benefits too, of course. Erratic inputs might indicate a stroke, a seizure, a lapse of control. Passing such commands directly to the vehicle could endanger other road users – mounting pavements, clipping street furniture. Better, surely, to ignore a spasm than indulge it. Bill had thought of everything.

Just like Bill himself, the system favoured the precautionary principle. When faced with a questionable human instruction, doing nothing was safer than acting. If the driver truly meant it, they would try again.

Outside, the winter sun hung low and ineffectual. Bill slipped off the kerb without really noticing he had done so, his attention still occupied by the quiet pleasure of contemplating his work, as he lurched from concrete to tarmac, and stepped to the right to regain his balance.

Inside Richard's Series 8 cabin, a confident voice oozed from the 12 speaker audio system. "... I can get the end of quarter figures to you by end of play today." It always struck him how the bottom-to-mid frequencies sounded simply fantastic whether it was Yo Yo Ma's cello or the sales director's baritone. Richard was contemplating this while making a mental calendar entry for late afternoon just as Bill tottered into his field of view. He reacted instinctively, stamping his foot on the brake pedal and wrenching the wheel around away from his design chief.

The Series 8 registered the input from both steering and braking system as calmly and categorically as it had been programmed to.

This stretch of tarmac had been logged 14,672 times. Typical speed: between twelve and fifteen miles per hour. Braking events: negligible. Pedestrian presence: statistically insignificant.

Sudden braking and steering at this location registered as highly anomalous.

Possible causes were enumerated and ranked in microseconds: distraction, overreaction, medical episode, spilled beverage.

"Pedestrian unexpectedly present" ranked poorly.

The precautionary principle engaged. Better to do nothing.

The Series 8 continued smoothly, trimming its speed by a courteous fraction. The steering correction was politely ignored. The optimal path remained optimal.

Bill looked up just in time to feel a mild, abstract surprise – the kind one experiences when a glass slips from the hand, or when a sentence ends differently than expected.

Then there was a sound.

Three floors above, a dashboard metric quietly updated.

Unexpected Obstacle Encountered: 1

Later, there would be emails. Lots of them. Julian Fried would forward the same one repeatedly, now flagged as "Important!" and with an expansive CC list. There would be meetings, task forces, and phrases like 'edge case' and 'unfortunate convergence' would circulate with great seriousness.

The press would be kind. The Series 8 was still a remarkable car. The security footage showed it moving with flawless composure right up to the moment that Bill didn't.

Bill Johns MSc or at least his final moment, was buried somewhere in a mountain of data. An anomaly of one. On its own statistically insignificant. And increasingly so with each graceful, uneventful, swoosh of a Series 8 into the head office car park.