But the shadow of the future made all the difference. Day in and day out, you drove into the same traffic jam, with the same basic population of players. If you therefore played the game as if playing with the same opponent every time, which in a sense you were, with you learning them and them learning you, then more elaborate strategies would gain more points than “always defect.” The first version of the more successful strategy was called “tit-for-tat,” in which you did to your opponent what they last did to you. This outcompeted “always defect,” which in a way was a rather encouraging finding. But tit-for-tat was not the perfect strategy, because it could spiral in either direction, good or bad, and the bad was an endless feud. Thus further trials had found successful variously revised versions of tit-for-tat, like “generous tit-for-tat,” in which you gave opponents one defection before turning on them, or “always generous,” which in certain limited conditions worked well. Or, the most powerful strategy Frank knew of, an irregularly generous tit-for-tat where you forgave defecting opponents once before turning on them, but only about a third of the time, and unpredictably, so you were not regularly taken advantage of by one of the less cooperative strategies, but could still pull out of a death spiral of tit-for-tat feuding if one should arise. Various versions of these “firm but fair” irregular strategies appeared to be best if you were dealing with the same opponent over and over.
In traffic, at work, in relationships of every kind—social life was nothing but a series of prisoners’ dilemmas. Compete or cooperate? Be selfish or generous? It would be best if you could always trust other players to cooperate, and safely practice always generous; but in real life people did not turn out to earn that trust. That was one of the great shocks of adolescence, perhaps, that realization; which alas came to many at an even younger age. And after that you had to work things out case by case, your strategy being then a matter of your history, or your personality, who could say.
Traffic was not a good place to try to decide. Stop and go, stop and go, at a speed just faster than Frank could have walked. It had been a bad mistake to get on the Beltway in the first place. By and large Beltway drivers were defectors. In general, drivers on the East Coast were less generous than Californians, Frank found. Maybe this only meant Californians had lived through that many more traffic jams. In California cars in two merging lanes would alternate like the halves of a zipper, at considerable speed, everyone trusting everyone else to know the game and play it right. Here on the Beltway, on the other hand, it was always defect. That was what all the SUVs were about, everyone girding up for a crash. Every SUV was a defection. And so it was slow: unnecessarily, unobservantly slow. It made you want to scream.
And from time to time, Frank did scream. This was a different primate satisfaction: in traffic you could loudly curse people from ten feet away and they did not hear you. There was no way the primate brain could explain this, so it was an example of the “technological sublime.” And it was indeed sublime to lose all restraint and curse someone ferociously from a few feet away, and yet suffer no ramifications from such a grave affront.
So he crept forward in traffic, cursing. The Beltway was badly overloaded at this hour. It was so bad that Frank realized he was going to be late to work. And this was the morning when his bioinformatics panel was to begin! He needed to be there for the panel to start on time. The panel members were all in town, some would be gathering at this very moment in their third-floor conference room, ready to go, feeling that there wasn’t enough time to judge all the proposals on the docket. Frank had crowded the schedule on purpose so they would not have time to properly evaluate every proposal. To arrive late in this situation would be bad form indeed. There would be looks; he would have to make excuses. It might even interfere with his plan.
So coming to Route 66, he impulsively decided to get on it going east, even though at this hour it was reserved for High Occupancy Vehicles only. Normally Frank obeyed this rule, but now he took the turn and curved onto 66, where traffic was indeed moving faster. Every vehicle was occupied by at least two people, of course, and Frank stayed in the right lane and drove as unobtrusively as possible, counting on the generally inward attention of people in vehicles to keep too many people from noticing his transgression. Of course there were highway patrol cars on the lookout for lawbreakers like Frank, so he was taking a risk that he didn’t like to take, but it seemed to him a lower risk than staying on the Beltway, in terms of getting to work on time.
He drove in great suspense, therefore, until finally he could signal to get off at Fairfax. Then as he approached he saw a police car parked beside the exit, its officers walking back toward their car after dealing with another miscreant. They might easily look up and see him.
A big old pickup truck was slowing down to exit before him, and again without pausing to consider his actions, Frank floored the accelerator, swerved around the truck on its left side, using it to block the policemen’s view, then cut back across in front of the truck, accelerating so as not to bother it. Room to spare and no one the wiser. He curved to the right down the exit lane, slowing for the light around the turn.
Suddenly there was loud honking from behind, and his rearview mirror was entirely filled by the front grill of the pickup truck, its headlights at about the same height as the roof of his car. Frank speeded up. Then, closing on the car in front of him, he had to slow down. Suddenly the truck was now passing him on the left, as he had passed it earlier, even though this took the truck up onto the exit lane’s tilted shoulder. Frank looked and glimpsed the infuriated face of the driver, leaning over to shout down at him. Long stringy hair, mustache, red skin, furious anger.
Frank looked over again and shrugged, making a face and gesture that said, What? He slowed down so that the truck could cut in front of him, a good thing as it slammed into the lane so hard it missed Frank’s left headlight by an inch. He would have struck Frank for sure if Frank hadn’t slowed down. What a jerk!
Then the guy hit his brakes so hard that Frank nearly rear-ended him, which could have been a disaster given how high the truck was jacked up. Frank would have hit windshield first.
“What the fuck!” Frank said, shocked. “Fuck you! I didn’t come anywhere near you!”
The truck came to a full stop, right there on the exit lane.
“Jesus, you fucking idiot!” Frank shouted.
Maybe Frank had cut closer to this guy than he thought he had. Or maybe the guy was hounding him for driving solo on 66, even though he had been doing the same thing himself. Now his door flew open and out he jumped, swaggering back toward Frank. He caught sight of Frank still shouting, stopped and pointed a quivering finger, reached into the bed of his truck, and pulled out a crowbar.
Frank reversed gear, backed up and braked, shifted into drive, and hauled on his steering wheel as he accelerated around the pickup truck’s right side. People behind them were honking, but they didn’t know the half of it. Frank zoomed down the now-empty exit lane, shouting triumphant abuse at the crazy guy.
Unfortunately the traffic light at the end of the exit ramp was red and there was a car stopped there, waiting for it to change. Frank had to stop. Instantly there was a thunk and he jerked forward. The pickup truck had rear-ended him, tapping him hard from behind.
“YOU FUCKER!” Frank shouted, now frightened; he had tangled with a madman! The truck was backing up, presumably to ram him again, so he put his little Honda in reverse and shot back into the truck, like hitting a wall, then shifted again and shot off into the narrow gap to the right of the car waiting at the light, turning right and accelerating into a gap between the cars zipping by, which caused more angry honks. He checked his rearview mirror and saw that light had changed and the pickup truck was turning to follow him, and not far behind. “Shit!”
Frank accelerated, saw an opening in traffic coming the other way, and took a sharp left across all lanes onto Glebe, even though it was the wrong direction for NSF.