卡拉马亚的红绿灯

九天

Nine Days

Siil公司的调度中心位于塔林一座旧工厂的三楼。在夜里，这里是全城最安静的地方。四十块屏幕挂在墙上，每块屏幕上都是一段街道。画面是从五十厘米的高度拍摄的：路缘石、水洼、深夜行人的脚踝。公司的送货机器人穿梭在这些街道上。它们是装有六个轮子的白色箱子，大小如同一台倒下的冰箱。机器人尾部插着一面橙色小旗，好让司机看清它们。

The control room of the company Siil was on the third floor of a former factory building in Tallinn, and at night it was the quietest place in the city. Forty screens hung on the wall, each showing a piece of street filmed from fifty centimetres up: kerbs, puddles, the ankles of late pedestrians. Through these streets rolled the company’s delivery robots, white boxes on six wheels, no bigger than a fridge lying on its side, with a small orange flag at the back so that drivers could see them.

在爱沙尼亚语中，Siil的意思是刺猬。机器人的表现也恰如其名：它们行动缓慢，性情温和，一遇到阻碍就会停下来。大多数时候，它们能自己找到绕过去的路线。如果找不到，它们会在一分钟后呼叫调度中心，随后由人工接手。夜班一共有十二个人，凯萨·塔姆就是其中之一。

Siil means hedgehog in Estonian, and the robots behaved like one: they were slow, friendly, and stopped as soon as something was in their way. Mostly they found a way round it by themselves. If not, they called the control room after a minute, and then a human took over. On the night shift that meant twelve people, and one of them was Kaisa Tamm.

凯萨三十一岁了。八年前，她在离毕业还剩两个学期时放弃了生物学学业，原因连她自己如今也说不大清楚。后来，她煮过咖啡，卖过电影票，也搬过搬家纸箱。在Siil上夜班，是她第一份觉得自己做得很好的工作。她喜欢这种安静，喜欢电脑的嗡嗡声，也喜欢凌晨三点不必对任何人虚与委蛇的感觉。

Kaisa was thirty-one and had dropped out of a biology degree eight years earlier, two semesters before finishing, for reasons she herself no longer quite understood. After that she had made coffee, sold cinema tickets and carried removal boxes. The night shift at Siil was the first job at which she felt she was good. She liked the quiet, the hum of the computers and the fact that at three in the morning there was nobody to put on a show for.

那是六月，白夜的季节。波罗的海上空不再真正黑下来；天空直到清晨都保持着淡淡的蓝色，仿佛有人忘了关灯。对机器人的摄像头来说，这是一份大礼。但对调度中心的人而言，这意味着他们在凌晨两点望向窗外时，不知道自己到底该不该觉得累。

It was June, the season of the white nights. Over the Baltic it no longer got properly dark; the sky stayed a pale blue until morning, as if someone had forgotten to switch off the light. For the robots’ cameras this was a gift. For the people in the control room it meant that they looked out of the window at two in the morning and did not know whether they were allowed to be tired.

大多数人工干预都很平常。一辆自行车横在人行道上；一个醉汉坐在机器人上，向它倾诉自己的离婚经历；或者是一个垃圾桶倒了。凯萨看一眼画面，做出判断，在键盘上用两根手指引导机器人绕过障碍物，然后把这次干预记录在自己的清单上。每一次干预都会被计入统计。在月底，所有数字会被合成为唯一的一个数值：人工干预率。数值低的人被认为辖区平稳，而辖区平稳的人就被视为优秀员工。

Most interventions were harmless. A bicycle lay across the pavement, a drunk man had sat down on a robot and was telling it about his divorce, a bin had fallen over. Kaisa looked at the picture, decided, steered the robot round the obstacle with two fingers on the keyboard and entered the intervention in her list. Every intervention was counted, and at the end of the month all the numbers became a single one: the intervention rate. Anyone with a low one was considered someone with a quiet district, and anyone with a quiet district was considered good.

这个周一，夜班刚开始，值班主管雷因·卡斯克就从房间尽头的玻璃办公室走了出来。他站在屏幕墙前拍了两下手。他只有在赫尔辛基总公司发来消息时才会这么做。雷因四十多岁，总是穿着同一件灰色衬衫。他谈起数字时的神情，就像别人谈起自己的孩子：耐心、自豪，又带着一丝担忧。

That Monday, at the start of the shift, Rein Kask, the shift leader, came out of his glass box at the end of the room, stood in front of the wall of screens and clapped his hands twice, which he only did when news came from Helsinki, where the company had its head office. Rein was in his mid-forties, always wore the same grey shirt and talked about numbers the way other people talk about their children: patiently, proudly and a little anxiously.

“还有九天，版本五就要上线了，”他说，“机器人会变得更聪明。除此之外，它们不会再为小动物停下了。猫、鸽子、刺猬”——有人笑了一声——“从那以后，十五公斤以下的一切物体，都会被缓慢绕行。赫尔辛基预计干预次数会减半。”他停顿了一下，屋里所有人都明白了他的弦外之音。“所以从七月开始，我们的夜班只需要六个人。”

“In nine days, version five arrives,” he said. “The robots are getting cleverer. Among other things, they will no longer stop for small animals. Cats, pigeons, hedgehogs” – someone laughed – “anything under fifteen kilos will be driven round slowly from then on. Helsinki expects the number of interventions to drop by half.” He paused, and nobody in the room misunderstood the pause. “That’s why from July we’ll only need six people at night.”

他解释了选拔的依据：看每个人的干预率——即辖区内的机器人求助的频率——以及周五前必须提交的边缘案例报告。调度中心认为版本五无法应对的一切情况，都算作边缘案例。赫尔辛基要求大家做到“彻底且诚实”。雷因在白板上把这几个字加上了引号，这让它们显得有些靠不住。

He explained how the decision would be made: by each person’s intervention rate – how often a robot in their own district called for help – and by the edge-case reports, which were due on Friday. An edge case was anything that, in the control room’s opinion, version five did not know about. Helsinki had asked them to be “thorough and honest”. Rein had written the words on the board in quotation marks, which made them seem somehow uncertain.

坐在凯萨旁边的马尔滕·莱普朝她探过身来。他二十四岁，休息时喜欢在手机上玩赛车游戏，干预率是整班最好的。“所谓的边缘案例，”他低声说，“就是掉进运河里的机器人。剩下的事情，全该归咖啡机管。”凯萨笑了笑，但心里却想起了117号。

Marten Lepp, who sat next to Kaisa, leaned over towards her. He was twenty-four, played car-racing games on his phone during breaks and had the best rate on the whole shift. “An edge case,” he whispered, “is a robot that falls into a canal. Everything else is a case for the coffee machine.” Kaisa laughed, but as she did, she was thinking of number 117.

117号在卡拉马亚运行。那是火车站后方一个有着木屋的老街区。在夜里，它把药品从火车站旁的药店送给那些睡不着的人。三周以来，它几乎每晚两点十四分都会停在同一个地方：在跨越Põhja puiestee的斑马线上。那是一条宽阔的大道，夜里运送货物的卡车从轮渡呼啸着驶向郊外。而且每一次，正中央的斑马线上都会坐着一只狐狸。凯萨每次都登记为 动物，等待中 ，从未仔细查看过，因为在两点十四分，总有其他机器人在呼救。

Number 117 drove in Kalamaja, the old neighbourhood of wooden houses behind the station, and at night it brought medicines from the pharmacy at the station to people who could not sleep. For three weeks now it had stopped almost every night at 2:14 at the same spot: at the zebra crossing over Põhja puiestee, the wide road on which the lorries from the ferry thundered towards the edge of town at night. And every time, right in the middle of the zebra crossing, sat a fox. Kaisa had entered it every time, Animal, waiting , and never looked more closely, because at 2:14 other robots were always calling for help too.