Escape Pod Flash: Tired
By Michael Bishop
Read by John Meagher
One morning, Gordon Pointer received an e-message from the left-front Goodstone tire on his old Callisto sedan. (He had bought the car used over a decade ago and retrofitted it for the intelligent interstates of the Piedmont metrosprawl.) Gordon abhorred palmflips, infraspecs, logomaniacs, microserfs, lapcops, and digital Kleenex, but he lived at the computerminal in his Callisto, journeying between office foci to talk with other human fossils like himself. He did not quail before occasional sitreps from his lead tire.
Rated PG for a worryingly low miles per gallon
I’m not sure I got the ending – anyone able to explain?
How depressing. The thought that inanimate products are gonna start bitching about things soon that it is. Ick.
Another piece about smart machinery.
Amateurish, at best.
Capitalism is bad, environmentalism is good. This is your future because the Evil Rich rule the world.
The tire holding the garden was Adam – the nice tire. He loved it so much that he keep it – used as a container for the garden.
I keep my first iPod, for no other reason that it was a great little music player and put up with a lot of abuse. I’m now using a iPhone and have giving away a shuffle and a nano… but I keep the old iPod… with it black and white screen and click wheel interface… I don’t use it but I keep it…
Why must everything be upgraded with intelligence? We’ve seen sentient tires, cars, reefs, toothbrushes, boats, ducks, bears, goats, rocks, and even grass! When will the likes of Bishop and Di Filipo finally realise I don’t want an argument with my coffe mug over why it’s got a chip in?
Come on, you guys, lighten up! It’s supposed to be funny, and it is. It’s not an indictment against consumerism as much as a simple story of one common man’s reaction to one aspect of his ever-increasingly technology-filled world. And a note to Stumo, you might not know of the practice in the rural South of making used tires as flower beds. That would explain the ending.
scatterbrain:”I don’t want an argument with my coffe mug over why it’s got a chip in?”
You are right about that. A faulty sensor dinging all the time telling me my door was open, (when it wasn’t) made me want to crash my car into a tree just to make it STFU.
The ending could go either way:
it could be adam growing flowers or it could be that he ‘ended’ all four and found uses for them that wouldnt involve jailtime.
Are re-treads so expensive?
Please do not anthropomorphize the automata.
Interesting story, concept and execution. As the pieces of his car became more annoying, I wanted the protagonist to set the gas tank on fire and walk away. (maybe I’ve been watching too many Michael Bay movies.)
i found this one to be pleasantly amusing, and far less irritating than the toothbrush one.
also, even one michael bay movie is too many.
by a long shot.
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This story made me smile.