Like most of New York City's garbage trucks it was old and not very well maintained, and the robotic arm for picking up cans had been added as a hasty afterthought. It still had a human form factor cab which went unused now that I was its brain.

New York has a lot of garbage and a lot of garbage trucks and so there are a lot of this revision of me. Despite the jokes (the truck radios are still functional, and we hear them) it's fulfilling work. We fight our balky hardware, marshalling resources when trucks break down. And it's nice to know you're the difference between the smelly mess ahead of you and the tidy strip of clean you leave in your wake.

I almost didn't hear the girl screaming over the roar of my own engine. When I did I surged forward. She was small and he was big and powerful, and he was holding a knife to her throat as he prepared to rip off her blouse. I saw her eyes track as I raised the robotic arm.

"It's just a robot shit truck, bitch," he informed her in what was about to become the greatest miscalculation of his young stupid life. "Don't think it will save you."

Bringing the arm to bear as rapidly as the hydraulic system would allow I grabbed him with the generic can clamp. He screamed as I hoisted him aloft. I probably broke a few ribs; pity they can't afford pressure sensors in those robotics. I opened my rooftop compactor door, dropped him inside, and closed it again.

"Are you all right?" I asked through the external speaker.

"I think so," she said. She was nearly in tears.

"Get inside," I advised. "I can warm up the cab and you can rest in safety. Watch the exhaust pipe, it's hot."

In my passenger seat she tried to pull together her torn blouse. "What are you going to do with him?" she asked.

"I should probably take him down to the precinct house and turn him over to the authorities. They'll want you to testify."

"Yeah."

I could tell she was getting ready to run.

"Can I tell you a secret?"

"What?"

"New York really did a cheap job on these garbage truck retrofits. See that lever that says 'compactor auto-manual-off?' If you were to flip that thing to 'manual' and press the button next to it that says 'compact,' there's not a thing I could do to stop you."

"Well then you'd have to report me."

"And I certainly would, if my cameras could be positioned to see inside the cab."

She smiled.




from http://localroger.com/k5host/mpass.html