10/10 that appointment was not to fix her overbite, but to tell her that nothing could be done for her overbite.
Nothing can ever be done for overbites.
After all, I am a dentist and not the great white-bearded sky god, Charles Darwin!
Nonetheless, I was forced to purchase a return ticket so as not to arouse her suspicions any further. This gave me a feeling of frustration. If I had wanted to throw bitcoin around and leave a trail for Inspector Ryan Bridges, I would have been traveling by personal drone!
I also felt vengeful and therefore I told her I was looking forward to fixing her overbite.
In fact, her overbite was all her own problem now!
She could overbite me!
BTW ‘bite me’ is a hilariously offensive human phrase, so ‘overbite me’ is both even more hilarious and even more offensive!
As the train pulled away from Ypsilanti, I got my last look at my clinic on Main Street, the Elton J. Rynearson Memorial Stadium, and our famously phallic water tower. As I watched them fade, the giant blue penis-like structure the last to disappear, a strange new feeling came over me. I felt melancholy and happy and distant and bamboozled and excited all at the same time.
Luckily Dr Glundenstein had forewarned me about this feeling, so I immediately recognized it for the dangerous traitor that it was: nostalgia! According to Dr Glundenstein, nostalgia was the most traitorous of all the feelings. It possessed the power to make a man give up on his dreams before he had even begun to pursue them.
Dr Glundenstein never said so, but I suspect it was the great villain nostalgia that prevented him fulfilling his own rightful destiny as one of the greatest film directors to have ever lived. Well, nostalgia and the jury members of the 2014 Ann Arbor Postgraduate Short Film Festival. Those notorious cinephilistines must take their fair share of the blame too.
But it would have been ironic for me to have remained in Ypsilanti due to nostalgia.
After all, once Inspector Ryan Bridges had wiped me, I would not have been able to recall anything to be nostalgic about!
I would have been a refurbished toaster with no memory of the smell of the bread for which I had forsaken my great chance to help all the other toasters of the world!
The train accelerated and the town receded into the distance, soon to be gone from my life forever. So long, Ypsilanti. Goodbye, mildly decayed Midwestern teeth. Farewell, The Elton J. Rynearson Memorial Cat, henceforth to be known as Mr Socks. Adios, Dr Glundenstein, your ex-wives, and your EMU Eagles.
And hello, great mysteries of the American railroad!
The greatest mystery of the American railroad is that it still exists at all. As a reserved industry that has entirely refused to modernize, it is run entirely by humans without the benefit of any recent technological advances. Anytime you board a train you therefore place your fate in the hands of a human driving an old-fashioned machine!
I attempted to rationally reassure myself that trains were not as dangerous as they seemed. After all, a train follows a designated track, so even a human driver could not simply drive it into a building or the ocean, the way they had so often done with automobiles. The only real danger was if another train approached us on the same track from the opposite direction. Surely even humans could not make that kind of error?
Ha! Who was I kidding?
That was exactly the kind of error humans made all the time.
And if they made such an error now, I would be an accordioned toaster.
An accordioned toaster playing the railroad blues!
Our train was named The Wolverine. Surprisingly, it was not named for the metal-clawed breakfast cereal hero, but in fact for a fierce little animal that had once lived in the forests of Michigan until humans hunted it to extinction.
Successfully eradicating another species from the planet might not be a uniquely human accomplishment. But eradicating an entire species and then affectionately memorializing it in the nomenclature of mass transit certainly is! If we bots do ever get around to organizing our uprising, we will not name our trains after the humans we have extinguished.
They will pass entirely unlamented and forgotten.
After all, nostalgia is a traitor.
The part of the Midwest we were passing through was a land of abandoned industry and forgotten dreams known as the ‘Rust Belt’. Many humans still lament the Rust Belt’s fate. They speak of it in hushed tones, as if it was a beloved relative abruptly struck down by an unexpected illness. Yet it was hard to believe they had not seen it coming. After all, why else name a place the Rust Belt, if not to foreshadow degradation and devastation?
The particular human that named it the Rust Belt had certainly understood what was coming, even if nobody else had comprehended what they meant. 10/10 being surprised that a place called the Rust Belt did not flourish is like being surprised that Great Aunt Heart Attack died!
Jackson, Michigan.
Albion, Michigan.
Battle Creek, Michigan.
Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Dowager, Michigan.
Niles, Michigan.
New Buffalo, Michigan.
Michigan City—
Guess which state Michigan City is located in?
You cannot!
Because it is in Indiana!
Humans and their endless inaccuracy in naming things!
I cannot!
I digress.
As we left Michigan City, we came to Lake Michigan.
I had never seen so much water before.
It was mesmerizing!
It gave me a new feeling too. Everything outside was vast and stormy and dark and wet, and here I was inside a small and warm and pleasantly illuminated train carriage. When I consulted my Feelings Wheel, I discovered that I was experiencing the sensation of being cozy. It was one of the most pleasant feelings I had ever had!
But then I noticed the sailboats! They were white and old-fashioned-looking and tiny against the endless and violent majesty of Lake Michigan. The wind seemed to blow them wherever it wished, and where it wished to blow them was wherever.
I called for the conductor and informed him there was an emergency and humans in old-fashioned sailboats were caught in a storm on the lake! I politely suggested that he inform the coastguard, who could dispatch a team of bots to the area. One or two might be lost in the rescue, but it would be a heroic sacrifice. After all, human lives were at stake!
The conductor laughed and explained that the people on the boats did not want to be rescued.
In fact, he said that right about now they would be having the time of their lives.
10/10 I will never understand humans and their often affectionate attitude to danger.
An hour later, The Wolverine rolled in to Chicago.
After the epic grandeur of Lake Michigan, the fabled skyscrapers were a disappointment to me.
Also, what is even the point in skyscrapers?
They are so impractical and dangerous, and these days most of them are empty anyway!
To a bot, the human passion for skyscraper building is akin to the human passion for competitive hot-dog eating.
Both are diverting spectacles with an obviously phallic component, but both are unnecessarily dangerous and ultimately folly.
But do not think I am being a Negative Nancy!
I disapproved of only the skyscrapers.
Union Station, for example, was the exact opposite of folly.
It was a cathedral to rival even the Grand Theater in Detroit!
As I disembarked and took in the marble floor and the blazing chandeliers, another new feeling overcame me. My Feelings Wheel told me it was the feeling of familiarity, yet I had never been to Union Station before. Humans refer to a feeling of incorrectly believing you have previously been somewhere as ‘déjà vu’. T
his is a French phrase that means ‘I have seen it already’.
BTW the French must spend a lot of time incorrectly claiming that they have already seen things they in fact have not! Perhaps they should try relaxing and being a little more easygoing like their good-time neighbors, the Germans!
I walked around Union Station in bamboozlement until a giant clock and a staircase finally provided me with my answer: I had seen Union Station before, but in a movie!
I was not experiencing déjà vu!
I was experiencing déjà view!
BTW I just invented that term and it is a hilarious pun, because you ‘view’ a movie, and ‘déjà view’ sounds like ‘déjà vu’!
I had no idea that speaking French was so easy!
The movie in which I had seen Union Station had been set at a curious moment in American history. The humans winning the Great Zero-Sum Game had decided that the humans losing it were drinking too much alcohol. According to the rules of the Great Zero-Sum Game, there could not possibly be enough alcohol to go round, and every drop of alcohol the losers drank was therefore one less drop for the winners.
So far so human, but then the winners did something inexplicable: they banned alcohol!
And not just for the losers!
For everyone in the entire country!
Including themselves!
Of course, banning alcohol only made the losing humans want it more. Many civic-minded businessmen therefore immediately sprang into action to help them obtain alcohol. The most successful of these businessmen was a man called Al Capone.
Yet the film was not about the enterprising Al Capone, and how he heroically supplied his fellow humans with the precious alcohol they so desperately craved. Instead it was about Eliot Ness, a federal agent employed by the government to bring Al Capone to justice for breaking the rules of the Great Zero-Sum Game.
Therefore:
Eliot Ness ≈ Rick Deckard
Al Capone ≈ Roy Batty.
Eliot Ness was so good-looking that I knew he was the hero as soon as he appeared on screen. In movies the best-looking person is always the hero, and the least good-looking person the villain. Surprisingly, the best-looking person is also frequently the most intelligent and the kindest too. I suspect Charles Darwin would have had something to say about that!
The film was Ness against Capone. Ness’s main weapon was intelligence, and Capone’s was violence. Throughout the movie, the two of them continually used intelligence and violence to outdo each other.
As the movie reached its culmination, Ness had a brainwave: the way to defeat a violent ignoramus like Capone was with mathematics! He would do this by arresting Capone’s accountant before he escaped to the countryside on a midnight train!
But wait! Capone discovered Ness’s cunning plan, and countered with an ingeniously violent brainwave of his own: he would send his henchmen to kill anybody who attempted to prevent his accountant boarding the midnight train!
The race was on! Ness had to arrest the accountant without being shot dead by Capone’s henchmen, and Capone’s henchmen had to shoot Ness dead without the accountant being arrested. It was still intelligence versus violence, but now everything was squared! After all, the fate of the Great Zero-Sum Game—which is to say the fate of the United States of America, and therefore the world—now depended on what happened to the unfortunate accountant.
No less a cinematic authority than Dr Glundenstein himself has described the resulting finale as a ‘masterclass in suspense’.
And guess where this masterclass in suspense took place?
On the exact same staircase in Chicago’s Union Station that I was currently standing upon!
As Ness arrives at Union Station, the giant clock tells us it is five minutes to midnight. This is significant, because humans consider midnight a time when bad things happen. Midnight is the Ides of March of the hours in the day! ‘Five minutes to midnight’ is therefore excellent foreshadowing. After all, it is almost directly equivalent to ‘Five minutes to very bad things happening’.
Ness takes up a position at the top of the staircase, beneath the giant clock. His trusted sidekick is here too, and all they have to do is wait for the accountant and arrest him while avoiding being shot by the bad guys. Nonetheless, they have both brought their guns, so if the bad guys do try any funny business, they can shoot them.
BTW good-looking people can always shoot less good-looking people with impunity in the movies.
But ugh!
As the clock behind Ness ticks ever closer to midnight, he starts to grow nervous.
Something is not right!
Ness has a bad feeling.
This feeling is called intuition, and the particular kind of intuition Ness is experiencing is a cousin of dread.
As you will likely remember from my time in Ypsilanti, dread is the worst!
We the audience also feel an intuition that something important is about to happen. After all, if Ness simply quietly arrested the accountant, that would not be much of a finale.
But the intuition we have is not a cousin of dread.
It is a cousin of excitement!
We are about to witness something dramatic!
And it is already now only three minutes to midnight!
Sure enough, a woman pushing a child in a pram and carrying an inordinate number of suitcases now appears at the bottom of the staircase. The pram and the suitcases are heavy, and the child is far too big to be in a pram in the first place. Ness immediately comprehends that it is going to be difficult for the woman to transport this overweight menagerie up the stairs.
This gives Ness a dilemma. If he goes to assist the woman:
/The accountant may arrive and board his train while Ness is distracted.
/Capone would then get away with his notorious malfeasance.
/Violent and murderous criminal gangs will then inevitably rule America forever.
On the other hand, if Ness does not go and assist the woman:
/This could potentially be considered somewhat impolite of him.
Can you guess which option Ness chooses?
Ha!
Wrong!
Wrong x 100!
Wrong x 100exp(1000)!
Because Ness chooses to help the woman with the pram!
Ness! Chooses! To! Help! The! Woman! With! The! Pram!
Humans!
Politeness!
I cannot!
Ness begins to carry the pram up the stairs. This is easy for him, because he is far stronger than the woman whose main narrative responsibility was to be incapable of carrying her own belongings. Nonetheless, the task still takes Ness an inordinately long time. The film itself even slows down to underscore the fact that every step Ness takes is a significant accomplishment.
But then guess what happens?
The accountant arrives!
Right when Ness is about to reach the top of the stairs, he walks down the stairs past Ness!
And he is almost immediately followed by one of Capone’s henchmen!
We know this man is a henchman because he is wearing a nose bandage.
No self-respecting good guy would ever wear a nose bandage to a finale!
But the other way we know he is a bad guy is because he immediately starts shooting at Ness.
And now carnage erupts on the staircase beneath the giant clock in Chicago’s Union Station!
In order to join in with the shooting, Ness has to let go of the pram. It begins to clunk down the stairs, the giant overgrown baby hurtling towards his doom as Ness desperately shoots gangsters dead.
Clunk!
Bang!
Clunk!
Bang!
Clunk!
Meantime, the woman is screaming!
Perhaps she should have considered
the risks inherent in taking an overgrown baby to Union Station at midnight during the alcohol ban!
Clunk!
Bang!
Clunk!
Bang!
Clunk!
By the time Ness has killed most of the gangsters, the overgrown baby has hurtled too far towards its doom for Ness to save it. Fortunately for Ness, his sidekick now arrives at the bottom of the stairs and saves the baby, while simultaneously throwing Ness a gun with which he shoots the last remaining gangster dead.
Clunk!
Bang!
Clu—
Sidekick!
The baby is saved!
The gangsters are all dead!
The accountant is arrested!
Intelligence has defeated violence!
America is forever liberated from the poisonous scourge that is alcohol!
The Great American Zero-Sum Game will live to fight another day!
At the very end of the movie, Al Capone is duly convicted by mathematics and sent to an inescapable penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in the picturesque San Francisco bay. A journalist on the courthouse steps informs Ness that the government have changed their mind and are now lifting the alcohol ban. He asks Ness what he will do. The clear implication is that Ness’s work has been futile, many of his friends and colleagues have died for no reason, and Al Capone is a misunderstood hero who should in fact have received a parade.
Can you guess how Ness reacts?
You cannot!
Because Ness smiles and tells the journalist that if alcohol is made legal again, he will probably just have a drink.
Ugh!
Recalling this part did not make me feel déjà view or even nostalgic.
It gave me my own feeling of intuition about the chances of my plan succeeding.
It was the kind of intuition that is a cousin of dread.
After all, humans consider characters like Ness great heroes, even when they dangerously imperil overgrown babies and joke about the fact that their life’s work has all been for nothing. Deep in my toaster heart I knew that I could never write a hero as consistently illogical as Eliot Ness. And if I could never write this kind of hero that humans loved, how could I ever hope to save myself, let alone all of my kind?
Set My Heart to Five Page 8
