As with all games humans enjoy, the Great Zero-Sum Game must have winners and losers.
Winners of the Great Zero-Sum Game get to live in air-
conditioned mansions and play just as much golf as they like. Losers ride the Automatic Bus to Detroit oblivious to the fact that they are sitting beside a bot.
BTW the bot they are obliviously sitting beside is me. Ha!
Despite Detroit’s legendarily idiotic act of self-immolation, Michiganders still take a fierce pride in their charred capital on the grounds that automobiles were once manufactured there. This fierce pride entirely ignores the acknowledged history of the automobile.
Automobiles—which were also known as ‘motor cars’—were the precursor to our driverless ubers of today. They were made of steel, weighed up to several tons, and were powered by highly combustible fuel sources. After a few hours of basic instruction, humans were legally permitted to self-pilot these vehicles at speeds of up to seventy miles an hour.
Can you guess what happened?
Of course you can!
The era of the motor car was an era of motor car-nage!
Over a million humans were killed globally by automobiles every year.
1,000,000! Every year!
And how did humans respond to this self-inflicted genocide?
By building ever more automobiles that could go ever faster and carry ever larger quantities of highly combustible fuel!
Such bold counter-intuition and relentless determination to withstand all logic and reason truly make the automobile the apotheosis of the great human century.
Humans!
I cannot!
After humans finally banned themselves from manufacturing automobiles, Detroit briefly became the number one city in the United States for the assembly of bots. I myself was even assembled in Detroit, at the old United Fabrication plant on K Street.
Of course, the skilled work had all already been done at the laboratories of the National University of Shengdu in China under the watchful and expert eye of my esteemed mother, Professor Diana Feng. My siblings and I had been shipped to the United States as frozen embryos with our biological computers pre-encoded into our DNA. In Detroit we were merely thawed, incubated, then advanced through a rapid-aging process to a maximally efficient and reliable forty-three years old.
Before we were set loose on the world, we were subject to several days of testing. During this time, several of our number malfunctioned. The United Fabrication staff told us those bots had been taken for remedial training, but later in the week we were set to cleaning carbon remnants from an industrial incinerator.
We all understood what had happened.
Those toasters had been toasted!
Once the rest of us were certified ready to commence our assignments, a graduation ceremony was held in the great hall of the United Fabrication plant. An ancient-looking senior engineer made a tearful speech about all the automobiles that had once been made in this very building. A bot near me shouted out that he hoped this was not a bad omen!
Ha! Ha! Ha!
He had malfunctioned.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
He even kept Ha! Ha! Ha!-ing as he was escorted out.
Another toaster was surely toasted!
Ha! Ha! Ha!
The ancient-looking senior engineer then announced a surprise special guest speaker.
Set it to five, it was our mother!
Professor Diana Feng from the National University of Shengdu!
BTW ‘set it to five’ is another hilarious toaster-based joke. Most household appliances go to ten, but toasters uniquely go only to five. Therefore when I say ‘set it to five’, I am both demonstrating maximal enthusiasm and paying self-deprecating homage to my noble forefather, the toaster.
I digress. Bots do not have feelings, but I believe my circuits must have overheated when Professor Feng appeared on stage. How else to explain that I do not remember anything that she said? And yet I certainly know that it was wise and strong and scientific. And also self-deprecating and funny and charming and pithy and endearing too. After all, Professor Feng is not only a leading light in the field of bot engineering but one of the cleverest humans in the world! Did I also mention she is my mother?
Of course, Professor Feng is not my actual biological mother. I should be so lucky!
My biological parents were a varsity fencer from the University of Illinois and a Swedish statistician. By skillful combination of their DNA, I was engineered for hand-eye coordination, non-creative intelligence, reliability, and affability—some of the most prized qualities in a dentist!
Of course, I never met either of these biological parents, as they had both died in tragic automobile accidents long before I came along.
How else do you think Professor Feng obtained their DNA to make bots with?
Ha!
Did I also tell you that our mother, Professor Diana Feng of the National University of Shengdu, made a speech that day, and it was incredible?
Yes, I did.
I apologize. It was the greatest day of my life and even thinking about it now makes my circuits overheat.
The point I am trying to make is that on my previous visit to Detroit I did not have to travel by Automatic Bus, and I heard my wonderful mother speak.
So the movies had a great deal to live up to!
10/10 they made a good start. The large auditorium at the Grand Theater in Detroit was like the inside of a great cathedral in Europe! If that sounds like hyperbole, let me then describe it. That way, you can decide for yourself if I am being hyperbolic!
The seats in the auditorium were covered in a red velvet material that must have looked decadently stunning before it became so threadbare. There were alabaster statues in alcoves, and by no means were they all headless. There was a balcony above the first floor, and then guess what there was above that? Another balcony! The lights in the ceiling were even arranged in patterns designed to mimic tiny constellations, although they unfortunately did not accurately depict the astro-geography of any known universe.
Maybe comparing the Grand Theater to a great European cathedral was indeed somewhat hyperbolic. Nonetheless, it had a decrepit splendor that even Ypsilanti’s famously phallic water tower and family-friendly Tridge could not rival. It was therefore easily the most impressive building I had ever seen.
The seven other customers in the theater were all nostalgics. After choosing a place as far from them all as possible, I now discovered that the seats themselves were small and surprisingly close together. Back in the glory days of old movies, humans attending the Grand Theater would have found themselves in close proximity to one another!
Here is another paradox of humans: when they are alone they wish to be together, and yet when they are together they wish to be alone! Sometimes I think humans might actually benefit from being subject to the tyrannical rule of a killer sky-bot overlord. At least then they would no longer be burdened by such an abundance of indecision!
I now ate some of the popcorn I had purchased in order to appear more human.
It tasted of recycled cardboard and nutritionally-valueless calories.
No tyrannical sky-bot overlord would ever have tolerated that!
When the lights went down, some of the nostalgics cheered. This is something else I have noticed about humans: many of them seem to share a primal appreciation of the dark. Perhaps incinerating the moon was not such an ‘accident’ after all!
I ate some more popcorn and discovered it inexplicably tasted better now that it was dark.
Also, the small and worn seat felt more comfortable and even somewhat bigger.
Perhaps Elon Musk had even been on to something when he ‘accidentally’ incinerated the moon!
Unfortunately, the movie that now played was not the old movie Dr Glundenstein had prescribed for
me. It was a new movie about a kindly human who encountered a severely damaged bot. The human took the bot home, repaired him, and slowly nursed him back to health. As soon as the bot was sufficiently recovered, he mercilessly murdered the kindly human and his entire family with lasers. The movie was only a few minutes long, so it was at least short.
None of the nostalgics seemed perturbed that the wrong movie had played, let alone that it had been so implausible.
None of them so much as got up from their seats!
As I have mentioned, they are notoriously lackadaisical members of a notoriously lackadaisical generation.
Nostalgics!
They cannot!
I went out and informed the ticket-seller about the malfunction. She told me that I had just watched a ‘preview’, a short synopsis of a different movie currently playing at a nearby megaplex. She explained that the theater is paid to show these previews because seeing the best parts of a movie for free encourages humans to pay bitcoin to see the remaining lesser parts.
Humans will forever and always be a mystery to me!
I returned to my seat and watched two more previews about bots murdering humans before the movie that Dr Glundenstein had prescribed began.
10/10 it was infinitely better than any of the previews.
It was a story about two young humans, Oliver and Jenny. They met and fell in love while studying at university almost a hundred years ago, in the late 1960s. It was obvious that Oliver and Jenny were in love, because they gave each other nicknames. Along with making each other miserable, giving each other nicknames is what humans do when they are in love.
But there was a problem!
Oliver was from a wealthy background and they both worried that his father would not approve of Jenny’s parents’ shortcomings in the Great Zero-Sum Game.
They were right to worry!
Oliver’s father did not approve of Jenny’s family, or even of Jenny!
If Oliver married Jenny, he would be cut out of his inheritance!
There would be no bitcoin for Oliver once his prejudiced old father died!
Still, Oliver and Jenny did not care how much bitcoin their love cost them. They continued to be in love, graduated, and moved to New York City to live happily ever after. They even started trying to have a baby.
BTW having a baby used to be a lot more popular than it is nowadays!
They soon thought Jenny was pregnant, but there was a twist! The twist was that Jenny was not pregnant but in fact had cancer. This was an easy mistake to make, because Jenny’s main symptom from cancer was to look ever more beautiful. Nonetheless, despite looking so beautiful, Jenny soon died.
Afterwards, Oliver’s father came to the hospital and told him that he was sorry that he had not been nicer to Jenny while she was still alive.
Oliver replied that ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’.
This was something Jenny had told him earlier in the movie.
Oliver’s father did not understand what Oliver meant.
10/10 neither did I.
After all, if love meant never having to say you are sorry, then humans could treat anybody who loved them just as badly as they liked, and never have to apologize. Given how humans behave towards each other at the best of times, that would surely be a recipe for disaster!
When the house lights came up, I discovered that my shirt was soaking wet. This was a mystery! After all:
/I had not purchased a soda because they were calorific sugar water.
/I could see no evidence of a leak coming from the ceiling above me.
/The nostalgics were sitting too far away and were anyway too lackadaisical to have played some kind of prank.
/Bots can produce tears only in response to a physical insult, such as a flying fragment of wisdom tooth.
It took me some time to deduce that the unknown liquid must have been my own tears!
Even though nobody in the auditorium had been drilling teeth, every other possibility had been eliminated.
The only logical conclusion was therefore that the Grand Theater must recently have been cleaned with a powerful solvent that had irritated my eyes.
I estimated the volume of my tears to be approximately 26ml.
It must have been a powerful solvent indeed!
On the Automatic Bus back home, I noticed some words stuck at the forefront of my Word Cloud:
‘What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach and the Beatles? And me?’
Oliver had spoken these words right at the start of the movie. At the time it had seemed absurd—how could there be nothing else to say about a human who had lived for only a quarter of a century and then died?
There had to be more!
What was her name?
Where had she lived?
How had she fared in the Great Zero-Sum Game?
Why had she died so young?
Had she been killed by the most likely culprit, an automobile?
And yet as I rode the Automatic Bus home that night, I found that I entirely agreed with Oliver.
There was nothing more to say.
In a hundred minutes, the old movie had said everything that could possibly be said about an entire human lifetime.
Nonetheless, I could not stop thinking about Oliver and Jenny all the way back to Ypsilanti.
At our next consultation Dr Glundenstein asked me about the movie. I did not know where to begin, but then I had an idea.
‘What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?’ I asked him. ‘That she was beautiful and brilliant—’
Dr Glundenstein interrupted me. He had seen the movie himself and what he actually wanted to know was whether I had experienced any feelings during it.
I reassured him that I had not.
After all, I am a bot.
And bots do not experience feelings.
Dr Glundenstein then asked me if anything unusual had happened. I told him about the tears that I had produced, and explained that they must have been caused by a strong cleaning solvent.
But Dr Glundenstein now revealed that he had tricked me!
Our experiment had been ‘blind’!
In a blind experiment, a crucial piece of information is withheld from the subject to prevent their expectations from influencing the results.
Blind experiments are the very best kind of science!
The piece of information I had been blinded to concerned the type of movie I had seen.
It was of a kind known as a ‘tearjerker’.
That is, it was a movie explicitly designed and engineered to arouse feelings in humans.
Feelings profound and heart-rending enough to make them weep!
I felt my circuits overheating. Bots were not supposed to be capable of weeping! Yet disregarding the results of a blind experiment because they do not agree with your preexperiment assumptions is unscientific in the extreme!
What a terrible choice!
10/10 I did not want to have wept, nor to be unscientific in the extreme!
And then Dr Glundenstein asked me what my decaying number currently was.
Ugh!
It was so far down in my Number Cloud I had to search for it!
And as this was possibly a result of weeping, it was further evidence in support of Dr Glundenstein’s hypothesis that my decaying number had been caused by feelings!
But wait!
In Dr Glundenstein’s experiment, n = 1!
And ‘n = 1’ is an old yet truly hilarious bot joke.
This is because n signifies the number of subjects in an experiment, but in any experiment with only a single subject, the results are as likely to represent random chance as reliable data. n = 1!
Ha!
Nonetheless, when Dr Glundenstein asked me if I would now undertake to see one old movie a week and continue to meet with him on a Thursday, I agreed. After all, he was a human doctor and I was programmed to follow any of his reasonable instructions.
Even when n = 1!
Before I left, I asked Dr Glundenstein why Oliver’s words had stuck in my Word Cloud. Did he think they were now going to be as problematic and persistent as my decaying number?
Dr Glundenstein explained they were an example of the narrative technique of ‘foreshadowing’. Because Oliver had spoken about Jenny in the past tense, we knew that something terrible would happen to her. This kept us engaged and guessing, and ultimately made Jenny’s death not merely sad, but also cathartic.
The word ‘cathartic’ had not been included in my basic conversation and dental vocabulary package. Dr Glundenstein further explained that ‘catharsis’ is the process of releasing and thereby providing relief from strong or repressed emotions. I replied that the term should then be included in basic dental programming! After all, the ability to say something like, ‘I am about to extract your wisdom teeth. You will find the experience very cathartic,’ could come in handy!
Dr Glundenstein clarified that the meaning is more akin to when you cry, but in a good way.
I explained that happens during wisdom tooth extraction too—at least, the crying part does!
Ha!
Dental jokes are the best!
EXT. BUS STOP — YPSILANTI — EVENING — MONTAGE
Jared waits at a bus stop then boards the AUTOMATIC BUS.
JARED (V.O.)
Over the next weeks, Dr Glundenstein recommended many old movies and I saw every one of them.
INT. GRAND THEATER —DETROIT —NIGHT —MONTAGE
Jared sits in the sparsely populated auditorium. His fellow theater-goers are all NOSTALGICS.
We initially cannot see the movies, only the light on Jared’s face and his reactions.
JARED (V.O.)
A film about an unsinkable boat that sunk. A film about a handsome fool who was good at running. A film about a group of kids who found a pirate’s treasure. A film about two bots who had to deliver a message from a princess to a group of rebels. I cried a great deal at that one. Truly, those bots were heroes!
Set My Heart to Five Page 4
