Set My Heart to Five

by Simon Stephenson

  Up on screen, we see a GOLDEN HUMAN ROBOT and a CYLINDRICAL BLUE ROBOT make their way through a desert.

  INT. DR GLUNDENSTEIN’S CLINIC ROOM —NIGHT —MONTAGE

  Jared sits in Dr Glundenstein’s clinic room, while Dr Glundenstein projects cine-film onto a sheet hung on the wall.

  JARED (V.O.)

  On Thursdays I would meet with Dr Glundenstein to discuss the movies I had seen. Sometimes he would even play me sections of Ypsilanti Dream #3 and show me where the Hollywood people had stolen his best ideas.

  I could not always spot the similarities, but of course his knowledge of movies was more advanced than mine, as he held a minor in Cinema Studies.

  EXT./INT. YPSILANTI MEGAPLEX —NIGHT —MONTAGE

  Wearing a hat pulled low over his eyes, Jared sneaks into the Ypsilanti Megaplex, a massive cinema complex.

  JARED (V.O.)

  On three occasions I even went to the Ypsilanti Megaplex.

  INT. YPSILANTI MEGAPLEX —NIGHT —MONTAGE

  Jared sits in an auditorium packed with THOUSANDS OF HUMANS.

  Up on the screen, a dowdy and downbeat-looking HUMAN trudges through a monotonous workday.

  JARED (V.O.)

  But the movies they showed were unsatisfying and anyway all had exactly the same plot: an underdog human lives a mundane life in which they are mistreated by their family, friends, or co-workers. One day, an enigmatic stranger arrives with the news that this human has an unsuspected talent that means they are the most special person in the entire universe! The enigmatic stranger then quickly dies.

  Up on the screen, the underdog human blinks back tears as their mentor is cremated in a Buddhist temple.

  JARED (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  Following a brief crisis of confidence about whether they really can be the most special person in the universe, the human uses their hitherto unsuspected talent to defeat the source of all the evil in the universe.

  The underdog human is now an ASTRONAUT battling a GIANT SPACE ROBOT.

  JARED (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  They are then rightfully acknowledged as the most special human that ever lived! Everybody who mistreated them at the start of the film now has to forever lament their prior bad behavior.

  As the rest of the audience cheer, Jared stares at the screen in bamboozlement.

  INT. DR GLUNDENSTEIN’S CLINIC ROOM —DAY —MONTAGE

  Dr Glundenstein and Jared in the clinic room.

  JARED (V.O.)

  Dr Glundenstein explained to me that these films reflect the deepest desire of all humans, which is to be told that they are the greatest human that ever lived, and in fact the only one who can save the universe. Better yet, if their particular skill already exists inside of them, they will not even have to work, train, or sacrifice, but merely believe in themselves! So they get to be the greatest person in the world and forever smite all their enemies, without ever really having to do anything!

  Jared stares at Dr Glundenstein in bamboozlement.

  JARED (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  I did not go back to the Megaplex after that.

  INT. GRAND THEATER —DETROIT —NIGHT —MONTAGE

  Jared settles into his familiar seat in the Grand Theater.

  JARED (V.O.)

  With every old movie I saw, my decaying number seemed to fade a little further. And then I saw a movie about a bank manager who was accidentally sent to the penitentiary.

  Jared is particularly affected by what he sees on screen.

  JARED (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  He escaped by digging out with a tiny hammer! He ran away to a beach in Mexico called Zihuatanejo, and at the end of the film his old cellmate joined him there.

  Jared watches the reunion on the beach, tears streaming down his cheeks as he does.

  JARED (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  It was the most cathartic movie I had ever seen! I cried over 37ml of tears at that one!

  The morning after I had watched the movie about the penitentiary-escaping bank manager, I realized that my decaying number had completely disappeared.

  When I informed Dr Glundenstein, he slapped his desk in triumph. He did so again when I told him I was no longer emerging from standby mode at 04:03am. And once more when I told him I had put two pounds of weight back on. He hit his desk so many times and so hard that I began to worry for his anatomical snuffbox!

  Dr Glundenstein told me I was finally now emerging from the ‘depths of depression’. I replied that I had not known that depression was an ocean, but perhaps our original experiment should have involved swimming!

  Dr Glundenstein clarified that he had not meant to imply that depression was literally an ocean.

  He then added that the crying I had done at the theaters in Detroit had simply been the ‘visible tip of the iceberg’.

  Icebergs are large frozen masses of water floating at sea.

  Nonetheless, Dr Glundenstein insisted he definitely had not meant to further imply that depression was somehow maritime or otherwise nautical.

  Dr Glundenstein tried again. He explained that in the most severe cases, depression does not merely cause a person’s mood to be low.

  It causes it to disappear.

  Such severely depressed humans perform only the most basic biological functions necessary for survival and experience almost no feelings whatsoever.

  Dr Glundenstein told me that human doctors know this symptom as a state of ‘automation’.

  10/10 it sounded a lot like being a bot to me!

  Dr Glundenstein’s hypothesis was that the disappearance of my decaying number meant that I was no longer in this state of automation and could therefore now commence truly learning to feel. To assist me with this, he gave me something called a ‘Feelings Wheel’:

  The Feelings Wheel had originally been designed to help troubled teenagers manage their disordered emotions, but Dr Glundenstein believed it might also help me better identify and express my feelings.

  BTW I am not, and nor have I ever been, a teenager! Teenagers are the worst!

  Back home in Pleasant Oaks that night, I noticed what I suspected might be a feeling.

  I quickly took out my Feelings Wheel and studied it.

  It was indeed a feeling!

  And it existed somewhere between ‘daring’ and ‘hopeful’!

  According to my Feelings Wheel, the word for this feeling was ‘excited’.

  I was feeling excited!

  I had never felt excited before!

  And feeling excited made me only more excited!

  Ha!

  Maybe my tears had indeed just been the tip of the iceberg!

  Maybe I was a nuclear-powered underwater toaster that had been silently swimming in the depths of the ocean!

  And set it to five, I was coming to the surface and would melt any iceberg in my path!

  Even Albert Camus, the greatest human writer that ever existed, would likely struggle to convey the experience of beginning to feel. It is therefore undoubtedly a challenge for a bot equipped with only basic programming in English, a supplemental module in Effective Dental Communication, and a Feelings Wheel intended for troubled teenagers!

  Fortunately, I have observed what humans do when a subject is complex and difficult to explain: they talk about something at best only tangentially related!

  This perverse custom is called ‘metaphor’.

  So here I present to you my metaphor:

  Imagine yourself learning to ice skate on a frozen country pond surrounded by snowdusted pine trees.

  This setting is ideal, and the conditions today are perfect for skating.

  By that I mean that the ice will support your mass many times over, yet at its surface it is still soft enough to transiently melt as the blades of your skates glide over it.

  The
re is little wind, and you are anyway wrapped against the elements in warm clothes.

  In the distance, a skater already out on the ice is turning perfect pirouettes.

  You could not have wished for a better environment in which to learn to ice skate!

  Yet as you take your first tentative step out onto the ice, your feet immediately fly away from you.

  You fall down—thwack!—on your back!

  Confused and in severe pain, you look down at your feet.

  And now discover that you are wearing rollerblades.

  And that is how it is with learning to feel as a bot.

  I was a toaster wearing rollerblades at an ice rink.

  A microwave—

  No, that is already enough metaphor!

  An excess of metaphors is like too many cooks in the broth!

  Ha!

  Alas, no metaphor can disguise the fact that the first feelings I encountered were all very negative.

  The human term for a person who persistently expresses downbeat sentiments is a ‘Negative Nancy’.

  Calling someone a Negative Nancy is not a metaphor, but an insult.

  I do not wish to be a Negative Nancy.

  Please do not call me a Negative Nancy.

  I am not kidding about this.

  Negative Nancys are the worst!

  Even if I did experience some negative feelings, I was definitely not a Negative Nancy!

  After all, if I was truly a Negative Nancy, such feelings would hardly have been so strange and glorious to me.

  Yet strange and glorious is exactly what they were.

  I luxuriated in the sensation I felt when my patients were late to our appointments. I looked on my Feelings Wheel and discovered that this was the feeling of being ‘irked’. Soon thereafter I found myself hoping that patients would be sufficiently late that I could cancel their appointments and willfully ignore their complaints when they finally arrived.

  This was me feeling ‘vengeful’.

  Feeling vengeful felt particularly great!

  No wonder humans always love movies in which the hero gets revenge!

  If even feeling vengeful felt so good, actually getting revenge must be the best!

  One lunchtime a group of ramblers at the Tridge asked me for directions back to Ypsilanti. I sent them in the opposite direction so that I could experience the sensation of ‘regret’.

  Regret is not generally considered a pleasant feeling, and yet I enjoyed it immensely!

  I had never felt regret before!

  The next morning a human cut in front of me in line at the coffee shop. I felt a vengeful urge to trip him, but restrained myself. This gave me a surge of regret that was far less enjoyable than my first encounter with it. But when the human’s ongoing hurry then made him anyway stumble and spill his coffee all over himself, I felt a deep and warm glow that remained with me all day!

  10/10 this was the best feeling I had ever experienced, and yet I could not locate it on my Feelings Wheel. It seemed to be a combination of ‘gratitude’, ‘mischief’, and ‘delight’. Dr Glundenstein later told me the word for this feeling was ‘schadenfreude’.

  ‘Schadenfreude’ means ‘to take pleasure in the minor yet deserved suffering of others’. The reason it was not on my Feelings Wheel is because it is a German word. Apparently the only humans that experience this wonderful emotion frequently enough for it to necessitate its own word are Germans.

  10/10 Germans must really know how to enjoy themselves!

  Pleasure in the suffering of others. Small-mindedness. Pointless irritation. Vengefulness. There could be no doubt I was becoming more human with every passing day!

  I even began to worry I was becoming too human.

  After all, not even bots assembled in Germany are programmed with a word like ‘schadenfreude’!

  It took me some time to mention my concerns about the negativity of my emotions to Dr Glundenstein. I certainly did not want him to think I was a Negative Nancy!

  But I need not have worried. Dr Glundenstein explained that every human feeling can be charted on a continuous spectrum between the entirely negative pole of ‘Full Automation’ and the entirely positive pole of ‘Perfect Happiness’. As I had commenced at ‘Full Automation’, it had been inevitable that the first feelings I encountered would be negative.

  Relieved as I was not to be a Negative Nancy, this nonetheless raised another important question.

  Why?

  Why was I on this journey at all?

  Why had I, an ordinary bot designed by the esteemed Professor Diana Feng, created at Shengdu and assembled at the United Fabrication plant, developed a capacity for feelings?

  Dr Glundenstein believed it was because I had evolved.

  As context, here are some data points about Dr Glundenstein and evolution:

  /Dr Glundenstein loved evolution almost as much as he loved old movies.

  /Dr Glundenstein believed everything that happened was either a consequence or manifestation of evolution.

  /According to Dr Glundenstein, if you accidentally crashed your bicycle into a woman, it was because your genes wanted you to mate with her.

  /Unless you maimed her or killed her. In that situation, it was because your genes did not want you to mate with her.

  /If you disputed any of these beliefs, Dr Glundenstein would consider you ‘an idiot who does not comprehend geological time and probably worships a long white-bearded sky god’.

  Dr Glundenstein’s evolutionary idol, the intriguingly long white-bearded Charles Darwin, may have been correct about the pre-eminent effect of evolution on humans. But Dr Glundenstein was wrong about its effect on me. Bots could no more evolve the ability to feel than toasters could evolve the ability to vacuum clean!

  Aside from the obvious issues that bots cannot reproduce and have not been around for the geological eons of which Dr Glundenstein is otherwise such an advocate, feelings are an inimitably wonderful function of the human brain. When I was manufactured in Shengdu, the part of my genome that encoded for a human brain was replaced with source code for a biological computer. Billion-year simulations have confirmed that replacement code to be safely unevolvable and unhackable.

  Even though he would never insult the memory of Charles Darwin by admitting it, I was therefore a mystery to both myself and Dr Glundenstein. And if the mystery was beyond our comprehension, it was certainly beyond the understanding of anybody who worked at the Bureau of Robotics. If Inspector Ryan Bridges ever discovered I had started to feel, he would wipe me as soon as look at me! He might even have me incinerated!

  No, there was only one person in the world who might be able to explain what had happened to me: Professor Diana Feng of the National University of Shengdu! After all, as well as being the leading expert on bots and overall one of the cleverest people in the world, she was also my mother.

  Alas, there was no way for me to ask her. Professor Feng resided at the main campus of the National University of Shengdu. Her communications were no doubt monitored by the agencies of multiple governments, and if ever I contacted her to ask her why as a bot I had now developed feelings—well, it would be one way to rapidly ascertain if the rumors about the government having killer drones perpetually in orbit were true!

  BTW I am implying there that if such things truly existed, I would surely be blasted from the face of this earth moments after my communication to Professor Feng was intercepted.

  I would be a laser-toasted toaster!

  Ha!

  * * *

  One morning I emerged from standby mode and noticed that my energy levels were disproportionately high, my algorithms had been calibrated to an erroneously positive bias, and the word ‘Yes’ was unduly prominent in my Word Cloud.

  I quickly performed a soft reset, and then a hard reset.

&nb
sp; When those did not work, I called Dr Glundenstein and asked for his advice.

  I heard him pound on his breakfast table with delight.

  Once again, I feared for his anatomical snuffbox.

  I asked him to please refrain from hitting his breakfast table, and whether I should recalibrate my algorithms to zero.

  Dr Glundenstein told me that I should not recalibrate anything. He explained that on my ongoing journey from ‘Full Automation’ to ‘Perfect Happiness’ I had simply crossed the equator where my feelings changed from generally negative to generally positive.

  That meant that I was now happy.

  The strange things I had noticed when I emerged from standby mode that morning were not malfunctions but simply part of what it felt like to be happy.

  When we got off the phone I went to the mirror and stared at myself in disbelief.

  I was happy!

  Set it to five, I was happy!

  I must have been the first bot in history to be happy.

  n = +1!

  Ha!

  And then I noticed something even better: the thought that I was happy made me happier still.

  Happiness turns out to be multiplicative as an algebraic equation!

  When you are happy, any positive thing you encounter makes you happier.

  By contrast, when you are unhappy, even positive things only make you unhappier.

  If H = happiness and –H = unhappiness, this can be expressed as:

  H x H = HH

  –H x H = –HH

  I consulted my Feelings Wheel and immediately picked out many unexpected new feelings. I was:

  Cheerful!

  Energetic!

  Amused!

  Optimistic!

  I also quickly discovered that happiness made me irrational as a human! I chased the bemused Elton J. Rynearson Memorial Cat around the house for fully half an hour, then raced to get ready so as not to miss a single moment of the glorious workday ahead. Then in the shower, as the joyous hot water rained upon me, I felt a strange urge to sing.