Training my replacement

From my perch in the cockpit I looked out over a toy world. Looking out toward the horizon as the day’s first light diffused gently overhead, the port unfolded beneath me in miniature, ground crews scurrying antlike around their trucks. A dull headache squeezed my temples, rising every so often to remind me it was there whenever I was in danger of focusing too much on the task at hand. My vision was clear but disconnected from my apprehension as though by a layer of fog on some higher plane.

Seeing the sun rise, having been up for hours already, only intensified the headache. The essence of the freeways is that they’re clogged; in the early morning, empty and dark, they’re a dream world. The quick stop at my locker, bleary-eyed and putting on my high-vis. We’re pre-verbal in the locker room, only the bravest of us acknolwedging the others with more than a grunt or a nod. It’s a little too early to think. The styrofoam cup added ten degrees to the already-near-boiling breakroom coffee; I sipped it cautiously and half-listened to the day’s briefing before ambling out to the dock and slowly climbing up into the gantry crane.

My watch read 7:22 as I moved the cockpit into position over the ship, rumbling along its tracks at perfect right-angles, first forward then left, then a series of small shifts approximating a diagonal adjustment until I was directly over my next container. The container in question was highlighted on the bay plan on the control panel in front of me, bay 3, row 5, tier 2, bright red. I couldn’t see it from above but I knew it was packed with electronics, and that it carried the letters MAERSK on its side across the Pacific along with its cargo.

I picked up the radio handset and spoke into it to let the ground crew know I was in position. “Aligned with bay 3, row 5 now. Let me know if the clearance looks good on your end.” The blip as my transmission ended was a little too sharp, the radio’s squawk in reply a little too loud. The headache pressed harder. “You’re clear, Jay. Bring the spreader down.”

The thermos of coffee on the dash steamed invitingly but my hands were occupied, my left on the buttons controlling the horizontal plane and my right slowly pressing the hammer forward, lowering the spreader onto the top of the container. Another day I might have found a little relief by allowing myself to become the crane. But the light vibration of the controls in my hands, and the infrequent beeps of my copilot, kept me trapped in the immediate term, aware of myself, my function and its uncertain time limit.

I felt resistance on the hammer, as if it were reasserting control, and I had to gently increase my forward pressure to lower the spreader onto the container. I sighed as I did so, glancing up from the screen displaying a side view of the spreader for a second to glower at the little box mounted above the controls on the dash. It was a squat little grey thing, a bit smaller than my lunchbox, a prism with blaze orange detailing around a few lights which blinked incomprehensibly, wires that ran down the dash and back behind the control panel. On the side of the box facing me was a little LCD screen that stayed mostly blank, but occasionally flashed messages to announce more complex activities.

I’d worked with similar autonomy units in previous jobs. As far as I knew the internals were more or less the same, but the housing was always different, designed to be recognizable to its human coworkers. In some settings it might have been rounded corners and brushed aluminum, in others glossy pastel plastic in a whimsical shape, but here it was utilitarian, reinforced thing, no doubt to look tough to its human minders, like a cross between a walkie-talkie and a Pelican case.

At present, the thing was trying to stop me from lowering the spreader, out of some misguided abundance of caution. At first, it had sat there on the dash, watching silently as I went about the day, doing tasks that would one day belong to it. Over the last few weeks, though, it had begun to act, tentatively, like a baby deer taking its first ungainly steps. It responded to my touch, unsure of its convictions, its greatest certainty the incompleteness of its world model. Over the weeks its control had grown more forceful as it acculturated to the cockpit.

In the briefing room the day they’d been brought in, we learned that the units had been trained on thousands of hours of simulations, many times more “experience” than the most senior guys in the room. What the fuck did it know, the guys grumbled, and at first they were right, crowing in their silicon chauvinism, the simulations evidently being unable to replicate the port’s true conditions, the cockpit juddering in the wind. When the units did act at first they made incomprehensible choices that would have meant almost certain disaster had they been allowed to continue unsupervised.

But this was my seventh job in as many years, and I knew better than to get complacent. Of course we all thought certain things would be beyond their capabilities for the foreseeable future, but the goalposts were in constant retreat, pushing those of us without equity ownership further toward the frontiers, into work with ever higher stakes, both in terms of money and safety. I knew my days up here in the cockpit were numbered, and once I was no longer needed here, I’d be shunted down; if there wasn’t work for me on one of the ground crews or deck gangs, if I got caught at a bad time in the season, I’d be out on my ass again, browsing job sites and frantically texting everyone I’d met these last few years in hopes of a lead.

The Indeed.com homepage flitted past my eyes for a second as I lowered the spreader the final few feet, pushing it past the autonomous unit’s feeble protest to its resting place atop the shipping container. Ready to lock it in place, I radioed the deck crew again. “Alright. Spreader looks like it’s aligned. Confirm lock-on when ready.”

“Yep, the spreader’s aligned. Good to engage locks.”

My hand hovered over the twist-lock button on the control panel, interested to see what the autonomy unit would do. Probably sensing my observation, a short message flashed on its screen:

ENGAGING TWIST LOCK ACK

As instructed, I let it engage the locks of its own accord, feeling their weighty impact into the corners of the container. From the radio, I heard confirmation from the deck crew: “Twist-locks engaged. Container secure.”

“Copy. Lifting container.”

I moved my hand back to the hammer and felt it move beneath my fingers of its own accord before I had a chance to pull. It was already lifting the container at the perfect speed, maybe even a little slower than I would’ve done it, which was fine by me under the circumstances.

I looked to the box again as it changed to display another message. Before I had a chance to read it, the radio blared again. “Hey, Jay? Wind’s picking up down here. Just be advised.”

“Copy.”

After another 30 seconds or so, the container reached its final height.

“Ok, all clear below?”

“Clear below. Proceed to truck lane 4.”

Our task was to move the container from its bay on the ship to a truck waiting on the dock in a nearby lane. The little unit beeped, perhaps signalling that it had finished its lift. On the screen, the box was displaying a planned path, overlaid in green on a wireframe layout of the port below us.

It beeped a few times in quick succession and I felt the crane move once more, juddering along on its tracks. We crossed the edge of the ship’s bow, the container a matchbox surrounded by a field of gray-green water below us, impossibly high off the deck. One hand hovering over the control buttons, I finally took a sip from my thermos with the other, breathing in the coffee steam. I could get used to this copliot, I thought.

The wind was picking up, though; first I felt a light breeze, and then suddenly the gantry crane was buffeted by a series of strong gusts from the left. The crane kept chugging along its tracks, shuddering against the wind. I looked down at the camera view on the control panel; the container swayed to and fro, its path widening with every swing. I pressed on the controls to counteract the autonomy unit. They vibrated powerfully in response. It was very certain of its decision to keep on rolling. The swings of the container were becoming large enough to feel from the cockpit.

For a second, I froze, coffee in one hand, control panel under the other, unsure how to chart a smooth course back to safety. The startled voice of the truck crew came through the radio, snapping me out of it.

“Jay, what the hell? You’re swinging like crazy. Slow down up there!”

My temples were pounding; the headache had established a beachhead in my stomach and wrapped ever tighter around my throat. Still the crane trundled along. The gusts intensified; the structure groaned in phase with the container’s widening oscillations. “Stop the crane, Jay!”

I went back to the control buttons, frantically pressing each in turn in the absence of a change in the crane’s movement. I reached for the radio handset and switched to the emergency channel to alert the foremen and the terminal ops guys.

“Hey, this is Jay in Gantry Crane 4. My copilot unit’s fucked up - I can’t get it to stop moving and control the sway. Not responding to my control inputs.”

“This is terminal. Shut the crane off.”

I looked over the controls. My eyes quickly registered the large, raised button in the center of the panel marked EMERGENCY STOP. I pressed down but felt even more resistance than before. The whole panel vibrated harshly. The box let out a soft chime, comically gentle for the context. In spite of it all I had to chuckle.

I radioed back down. “Hey! I just pressed the emergency stop but I think the control unit overrode it.”

The radio click came back in response, but all that came out of the handset was muffled static. It was like the little box had somehow gotten control of my radio systems, too.

The crane stopped its horizontal movements, the container still swinging wildly below. I felt it begin to lower, a little too fast. My stomach dropped. We were more or less over the truck lane, but the swings were so wide that the container was bound to hit something on the way down. The damage would be catastrophic, to say nothing of the safety of the guys on the ground.

I picked up the radio again and switched back to my ground crew. “Emergency! Emergency! This is Jay in Gantry Crane 4. My control unit is overriding my controls and we’re coming down with too much sway. All ground crew clear the area immediately!”

The radio didn’t even bleep when I released the talk button on the handset.“Shit, shit, shit!” I was blanking. My eyes darted around the cockpit, searching for an option. I tried to remember my emergency training but my mind was flat.

I realized my right hand was still holding my thermos. Without thinking, I threw it at the autonomy unit. The thermos hit a corner of the housing and spun off, spilling its contents across the dash. I could have sworn it let out a beep at me in protest. Both hands free now, I lunged for the little box. I tried to pull it off the dash but remebered it was bolted in place. In a moment of inspiration, I reached behind it and began pulling out wires ferociously. I think I was screaming a war cry.

All of a sudden, the crane stopped its movement downward. I stopped, startled. I realized the wind had abated. The container’s swings were settling down. I became aware of the frantic chatter of the radio. Had it been on the whole time?

“Crane Four! Jay, are you there? Jay! I repeat, Jay, are you OK?”

“Terminal, this is Jay. The autonomous unit was malfunctioning but I think I shut it off. I don’t think we’re in imminent danger.”

I could hear a snort come through from the other end. “Sure, John Connor. It looks like you just blew a motor.”

Relief and fatigue hit me like a shovel over the head. I sank to my knees on the steel floor of the cockpit.

Eventually they got a crew up to the crane, and they confirmed that the crane did, in fact, blow a motor, though nobody could figure out how. I told my story to the repair crew, and again to the union reps in the break room, and to the foreman, the boss, and a couple engineers who apparently made the stupid little units. Somehow the video feed from inside my cockpit had been corrupted, so nobody really believed me, but I went pretty much uncontested. In situations like this one they erred on the side of the workers. Thank God for the union.

The foreman sent me home with a week of paid leave after that. He placed a big mitt on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and told me to get some sleep. I could tell he thought I had snapped up there; in any case, when I came back, I heard they’d fired the team behind those units and taken them out of all the cranes. For my part, I got reassigned to a smaller crane moving stuff in the yard. Thankfully, at least for now, the dash was clear. No little box looking over my shoulder. The job was mine and mine alone.