Set My Heart to Five
Page 7
A Code 3 was a Recall Notice.
It meant that I was to be wiped.
Perhaps they had discovered that the machine that tested all the bots in the Great State of Michigan had indeed been faulty.
Or a patient had spotted me at the Ypsilanti Megaplex.
Or Angela had overheard me talking to Dr Glundenstein about old movies.
Or maybe wiping bots was just what Inspector Ryan Bridges did when he was bored.
It did not matter.
A Code 3 was a Code 3.
And a toaster was a toaster.
And I was toast.
A dead bot walking.
I sat down on the lawn and looked at my Feelings Wheel.
I identified that I was feeling ‘sad’ and ‘disappointed’ and also ‘contemplative’.
And then a number appeared in my Number Cloud.
It was 4160.
4160 ÷ 416 = 10.
10 was the number of working days I now had left at Ypsilanti Downtown Dentistry.
4160 was the number of teeth I would see before I was wiped.
Suddenly a number like 1950208 did not seem so bad at all.
I even briefly missed it.
There is a particular kind of old movie wherein at the start a human doctor so lacking in bedside manner that he might as well be a bot informs the hero that she will soon die. Nonetheless, after a short period of feeling sad and disappointed and also contemplative, the hero makes a bold choice to enjoy what little time remains to her.
Unfortunately, at the end of the film she still dies—dying is the ‘change’ her character undergoes, Ha!—but she at least does so having now taught all the people closest to her an invaluable life lesson.
10/10 her funeral is therefore always very cathartic!
Nobody holds funerals for bots, but nonetheless, I imagined Dr Glundenstein standing up to address the crowd at my own funeral.
INT. CHURCH — YPSILANTI — DAY — JARED’S FANTASY
An organ plays elegiac music as we pan across a coffin atop which are FLOWERS and a FRAMED PHOTOGRAPH OF JARED.
The music stops.
Dr Glundenstein stands up, walks to the lectern, and looks out at the MOURNERS.
We see Angela, a FEW PATIENTS, and JESSICA LARSON (7), who has THE ELTON J. RYNEARSON MEMORIAL CAT (3) in a carrier beside her.
Dr Glundenstein clears his throat.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
What can you say about a 45-year-old bot who died? That he was logical, and programmed in dentistry? That he loved hypotheses and experiments, and old movies?
Everybody in the entire church starts to weep.
Short though it was, Dr Glundenstein’s speech was the most moving thing they have ever heard.
It has provoked a tremendous catharsis.
And there is nothing more to say.
But I was getting ahead of myself!
Such a funeral scene only ever took place at the end of the movie, and I was not even dead yet.
Therefore, just like the hero in that peculiar genre of movie, I now decided to live.
To set it to five in the time still available to me!
After all, two weeks is not nothing.
It is fourteen days more than nothing!
BTW saying something is ‘not nothing’ is a bizarre human way not of stating that something ≠ 0, but in fact that it is > 0.
I digress.
Back when I first became happy, the world had turned beautiful.
Now that I was dying, it came alive.
That the world should come alive when you are dying is a paradox!
It is a truly heartbreaking paradox!
Yet truly heartbreaking paradox or not, I had committed to making the most of my remaining available time and now endeavored to do so.
I emerged from standby mode before dawn and hiked to the Lookout Point to watch the sun rise over our town.
I watched as the day’s first rays slowly illuminated our famously phallic water tower.
I visited the Tridge and was moved to tears both by its pragmatic simplicity and the realization that the male geese that lived beneath it had all along been true Michiganders.
For the second time in my life I saw the world through brand-new eyes.
After all, even brand-new eyes clouded by tears are still brand-new eyes!
And yet there was also the ache.
The closest emotion I could identify on my Feelings Wheel was ‘dread’.
‘Dread’ is a feeling defined as ‘great fear or apprehension of a real or imagined event’.
But there was nothing imagined about my appointment with the Bureau of Robotics.
I was going to be wiped, and all these beautiful memories would be lost like tears in rain.
* * *
A week after I received my Code 3, Dr Glundenstein invited me over to watch a movie awards show. Awards shows are spectacular occasions, because winning an award is the pinnacle of existence for any human. After all, if life is a Great Zero-Sum Game at which most humans lose spectacularly badly, there must by definition be some very big winners too!
It seemed the perfect occasion to inform Dr Glundenstein about my Code 3. Humans can become notoriously emotional about death, but movie awards are the biggest awards of all, and the winners are some of the best-looking humans on Earth. If my news did upset Dr Glundenstein, watching so many good-looking and glamorous people award each other prizes in Los Angeles would surely cheer him up!
Nonetheless, my news rendered Dr Glundenstein silent.
It is generally polite to wait for a human to speak when it is their turn.
After a while it becomes impolite.
After several minutes I reassured Dr Glundenstein that he should not be sad on my behalf.
Soon I would once again have no feelings whatsoever!
Being sad for me at that point would be like running a marathon for an amputee who does not even recall they had legs in the first place.
10/10 that would be a tremendous waste of energy, and the bamboozled amnesiac amputee might even take offense.
When that failed to lift his spirits, I attempted to cheer Dr Glundenstein up by informing him that I had made a decision to live, and I still had four full days left to enjoy. Better yet, as my closest friend, Dr Glundenstein would almost certainly learn an important and life-affirming lesson from my death! And hopefully it would be something more useful than ‘Love is never having to say you are sorry’!
Dr Glundenstein did not respond to that either, and we sat and watched the awards show in silence.
The winners each received a small gold statue, but their main prize was the opportunity to make a speech about themselves. Unfortunately, humans who are so famously eloquent in the movies can be surprisingly inarticulate when they do not have a script to follow! Even worse, the auditorium must have recently been cleaned with an industrial-strength solvent, because there was a great deal of unnecessary crying.
Only one of the winners spoke with any clarity, but the audience barely even applauded her when she went up to receive her prize. I had assumed this was because she had attended such a glamorous event dressed like a nostalgic, but Dr Glundenstein explained it was because her award was merely for screenwriting.
This bamboozled me! As the person who designed the structure of a movie, a screenwriter was analogous to a software architect. In the computing world, a software architect is rightfully always considered the most important person in any project!
Dr Glundenstein explained that in the movie business, the director is always the most important person. As this did not relieve my bamboozlement, Dr Glundenstein further explained that the director’s job was to select the camera angles, help the actors deliver their lines, and choose the locations and music. That is: the
director inputs data in the places that the screenwriter’s masterplan has instructed him to! In the manner that a junior coder follows the orders of a software architect!
Therefore to humans in the movie industry:
Junior Coder > Software Architect.
Humans!
I cannot!
The movie that this under-appreciated screenwriter had written was about a human who sequentially and deliberately murders other humans. This is a pastime so popular it even has its own name. It is called ‘serial killing’!
The screenwriter used her speech to explain that she had wanted to teach humans that serial killers are not all necessarily bad people. After all, they had probably just been hardwired to serial kill from birth. Or perhaps they had difficult childhoods. Or maybe they were simply ordinary honest Americans struggling to make the best of things since the Great Crash—maybe they’d had to become serial killers simply to get by! Whatever the reason, the screenwriter concluded by declaring that serial killers can be as clever and as smart and as misunderstood as all the rest of us. After all, she asked, didn’t we all feel a little murderous now and then?
At that, all the beautiful people stood up and applauded.
They had certainly all felt a little murderous now and then!
But they were not feeling murderous right now!
They were feeling that they loved serial killers!
Bots do not have brains.
We have biological computers.
It is therefore impossible for us to have brainwaves.
Nonetheless, sitting there in Dr Glundenstein’s clinic room, watching all the glamorous movie people applaud a woman who had taught them it was acceptable to murder humans, I had my first ever brainwave!
I mean, it was not a brainwave.
Because bots do not have brainwaves.
Maybe it was a biological computer wave.
Whatever happened, I suddenly knew exactly what I had to do.
It was as clear to me as a mathematical proof!
The mathematical proof went like this:
The movie about Rick Deckard and Roy Batty had failed to convince humans that bots could have feelings because it had been written by a human.
This can be expressed as:
If Screenwriter ≠ Authentic Bot
Then Character ≠ Authentic Bot.
Inverting this implied that:
If Screenwriter = Authentic Bot
Then Character = Authentic Bot.
And we already knew the data point that:
Jared = Authentic Bot
Therefore if:
Screenwriter = Jared
Screenwriter = Authentic Bot
And therefore:
Character = Authentic Bot.
If Screenwriter = Jared, then Character = Authentic Bot!
Ha!
Set it to five!
If the murderous-looking Roy Batty could change the opinion of a merciless bot hunter like Rick Deckard, and a human dressed like a nostalgic could teach humans to adore even serial killers, perhaps I could write a movie that changed the way humans felt about bots with feelings!
After all, movies followed algorithms.
And as a bot I was better at algorithms than any human alive!
And if I could change the way humans felt about bots with feelings, maybe I would not be wiped.
10/10 I did not want to be wiped!
Not when there were so many feelings on my Feelings Wheel I had never felt!
And so many old movies I had never seen!
And perhaps even, somewhere out there, other bots with feelings I could someday discuss my malfunctions with!
Set it to five, it was all decided!
I would not travel to Ann Arbor and be wiped by Inspector Ryan Bridges.
I would run away to Los Angeles and write a movie about a bot with feelings.
It would tell a story so powerful it might even forever change the way humans felt about bots with feelings.
And maybe somewhere a feeling fellow bot would see my movie in a theater or clinic room and no longer feel so lonely!
And maybe someday we feeling bots might no longer even have to tremble with fear at the idea of being wiped!
Best of all, perhaps one day my movie about feeling bots would even win an award!
And only when I was presented with my award would I then reveal myself as I truly am!
A toaster!
A toaster with a heart!
A toaster with a heart and a typewriter!
A toaster with a heart and a typewriter who had changed everything for all the toasters with hearts and typewriters still to come!
When I informed Dr Glundenstein of my ingenious plan, his first reaction was to check me for a fever. He then warned me that if I ran away and they caught me, the Bureau of Robotics would not merely wipe me but incinerate me. Next he asked if I had any idea how many humans traveled to Los Angeles every year to try to make it in the movies. Or how hard it was to write a great movie script. And then finally he asked me if I was aware that even if, despite having no training or experience, I somehow did write a brilliant script, that was no guarantee whatsoever of ever getting the script seen by anyone who mattered, let alone made.
These details were all entirely new to me, but I confidently reassured Dr Glundenstein that I had factored every one of them in to my calculations during my decision-making process.
Dr Glundenstein had been very good to me, and I did not want him to worry.
After all, even a toaster with a heart and a dream is still just a toaster.
And a toaster is not something any human should ever have to worry about.
The day before I left Ypsilanti, Dr Glundenstein came to my room carrying a battered old book. It was written by an R. P. McWilliam, and it was called Twenty Golden Rules of Screenwriting. I opened it up and read the first rule:
Your character must have a goal, and it should ideally be bigger than himself or herself.
Ha!
I already knew that rule.
Better yet, I even already had a goal, and it was far bigger than myself!
After all, I was going to write a movie that saved all bots!
And if my life was itself a movie, I was ahead of the game!
Dr Glundenstein had remained standing in my doorway, and I experienced a new feeling then. I looked it up later and discovered it was awkwardness. I believe I felt this awkwardness because Dr Glundenstein had brought me a gift, and I did not have a gift to reciprocate with. If ever a human gives you a gift, the polite thing to do is to immediately give them one in return. If it were not for such reciprocity, humans would have ceased giving each other gifts geological eons ago!
I therefore offered Dr Glundenstein the only thing of value I had to give: a dental checkup.
He declined.
This exchange only worsened my feeling of awkwardness.
Sometimes I still wonder if Dr Glundenstein believed I would have charged him for that dental checkup.
But I would not have charged him for it.
It would have been free.
A farewell gift from one being with feelings to another.
And also a reciprocal gift for the gift he had just given me.
I at least had a gift to leave for Jessica Larson: The Elton J. Rynearson Memorial Cat! Cats depreciate quickly, so he was not worth any bitcoin, but she would at least now be able to call him whatever she liked. I left his food, his carrier, and the cat himself on the Larsons’ doorstep, and snuck away from Pleasant Oaks as dawn broke.
If my own life was indeed a movie, we would now be at the end of Act 1. My goal was clear and yet there were many obvious obstacles ahead:
/I had very little bitcoin.
/I had no prog
ramming, modules, training, or experience in screenwriting.
/I had no contacts whatsoever in the movie business.
/I would not be able to use my barcode without that data being transmitted to the Bureau of Robotics.
/In Inspector Ryan Bridges AKA Anil Gupta, I even had what R. P. McWilliam’s Twenty Golden Rules of Screenwriting would later teach me is called an ‘antagonist’.
That was certainly a lot of obstacles! Nonetheless, do you know what R. P. McWilliam’s second golden rule of screenwriting is?
It is this:
There must be many obstacles between your hero and his or her goal.
Ha! It was yet another good omen!
From Ypsilanti to Los Angeles is a distance of 2,316 miles. Before the Great Crash, humans generally made such journeys by jet plane. Of course, we all know how that ended.
Ker-splat!
That is how that ended!
Ha!
Nowadays the options to travel 2,316 miles are Automatic Bus, personal drone, or train.
10/10 I would not be traveling to Los Angeles by Automatic Bus!
Imagine attempting to travel halfway across the country by Automatic Bus.
It would probably go via Tanzania!
I did not have sufficient bitcoin to charter a personal drone, and anyway I would have had to use my barcode to do so. Inspector Ryan Bridges was no Rick Deckard, but there was no point unnecessarily sharing clues with him. I would leave the unnecessary oversharing of things with Inspector Ryan Bridges to Anil Gupta. I would therefore travel to Los Angeles by train.
At Ypsilanti Station I pulled my EMU Eagles cap low over my eyes and waited in line to purchase my ticket. I was feeling secretive! Unfortunately, when I got to the ticket window, the clerk greeted me by name and asked me where I was traveling to today.
Ugh! She must have been a patient. This is one of the many problems of being a dentist in a small town: everybody recognizes you, but you only ever recognize them if they open their mouth wide and say ‘Aaaaa’.
And it got worse! The clerk told me that she hoped I was not going away for long, because we had an appointment to fix her overbite next Thursday.