Maria Salazar MFA said there was time for one more question. One of my classmates asked Don LaSalle what he had done to be sentenced to a community service order. This seemed very impolite to me—what happens in court stays in court!—but Don LaSalle was delighted to answer it.
Humans and politeness!
I cannot!
Don LaSalle explained that his true pride and joy was not his killer-bot franchise, but a racing-green 1967 Porsche automobile he had spent many years painstakingly restoring by hand. Alas, the very first time he had taken it out onto Mulholland Drive, a driverless uber had careened straight into it! Don LaSalle had still been smashing up the driverless uber when the police arrived.
My classmates all applauded Don LaSalle as if he was a great hero in this story. But this was entirely illogical. Driverless ubers do not careen into automobiles driven by humans; automobiles driven by humans careen into driverless ubers. They careen into them in the same way they once careened into each other, buildings, lampposts, and the ocean. If anybody had been entitled to smash anything up in a fit of anger, it would have been the driverless uber!
Don LaSalle concluded his illogical story by reassuring us that he had almost now finished rerestoring the racing-green 1967 Porsche. My classmates once again inexplicably applauded him, and then Maria Salazar MFA set us another homework assignment.
It was to come up with a killer-bot movie idea.
Ugh!
I cannot!
* * *
The next day at Gordito’s I was still thinking about what Don LaSalle had said about the market when Amber came to my dishwashing station. She said I looked glum but she knew something that might cheer me up. Even that significantly cheered me up, but I did not tell her. After all, I did not want to miss out on the actual thing she had planned to cheer me up with!
At the end of our shifts we took a driverless uber to Griffith Park, which is not a park but in fact a municipally-owned range of hills and valleys. As we followed the winding road up to the observatory, the sun was setting and the air was heavy with the smell of pine and skunk.
BTW, in that context, I mean skunk the animal and not skunk the drug. As they are exactly the same smell, anytime you smell skunk you have to consider the context:
/Am I in Griffith Park? Then the smell is likely skunk the animal.
/Am I near some nostalgics? Then the smell is likely skunk the drug.
/Am I in Griffith Park and also near some nostalgics? I am occupying a shaded area of skunk uncertainty!
An observatory is a building designed for studying the stars and the moon. The stars would have been easier to see if the humans had built the observatory away from the light pollution of a major city like Los Angeles, but of course the moon would have been easier to see if Elon Musk had not incinerated it.
The Griffith Park observatory was a single-storied white-brick structure with an impressive dome atop it. It immediately gave me the feeling of déjà view and I excitedly told Amber I had seen it before! This disappointed her, so I quickly reassured her that I had never actually been to the observatory, but had simply seen it in a movie.
The movie was old, but it was about the timeless subject of unhappy teenagers. At the start of the movie, the teenagers were taken on a class trip to the Griffith Park observatory. Then, at the end, they returned to the observatory and one of the teenagers killed one of the others with a knife. It was all thrillingly dramatic and murderous!
When Amber and I got inside the observatory, we found it overrun with twelve-year-old schoolchildren on a trip. I therefore told Amber that I hoped this was not a harbinger! Amber asked what I meant, but I could not tell her because humans consider jokes about children being murdered with knives inappropriate, no matter how hilarious they are.
BTW I could tell the children were twelve because they were not yet awful, and thirteen is the age at which human children become awful. I knew this because of the birthday parties we hosted at Gordito’s. At twelfth-birthday parties, the children were sweetly excited to meet ‘Gordito’. At thirteenth-birthday parties they threw vegan tacos at him and attempted to remove his mustache.
The good news is that the role of Gordito was played by one of the waiters! We back-of-house staff invariably felt a warming sense of schadenfreude anytime one of them walked through the kitchen on his way to a thirteenth-birthday party.
They were superior toast!
Ha!
I digress. Amber and I fought our way through these schoolchildren to an exhibit entitled ‘Man and Science’.
Man and Science!
I cannot!
Calling an exhibition ‘Man and Science’ is a spectacular act of hubris equivalent to calling an exhibition:
‘Ant and Hurricane’
‘Leaf and Eternity’
‘Human and Sky Bot Overlord Network’
The ‘Man and Science’ exhibit even began by claiming this had always been a difficult relationship.
Not for science, it had not!
Ha!
The exhibition then stated that at the beginning of recorded
history—by which it meant after the many billions of years it had taken humans to learn to even scratch marks on rock—
humans had preferred religion to science.
Preferring religion to science is like favoring unicorns over gravity.
You cannot!
The exhibition then admitted that humans at last began to appreciate science in 1945 after a magnificent atomic bomb killed an impressive quarter of a million of them. Suddenly religion no longer seemed quite so powerful! After all, the natural disasters that had once made humans so religious had rarely managed to kill even 100,000 people.
250,000 > 100,000
Science > Religion!
After such a stunning demonstration of the undeniable wonders of science, the later part of the twentieth century quickly became a golden age of science.
Satellites were launched!
Men were placed on the moon!
Diseases were cured!
Ever more dangerous automobiles were designed and manufactured!
The earth was irretrievably heated past the point of no return!
Maybe ‘golden age’ is not the correct phrase. Nonetheless, there was a lot of science afoot! By the year 2000, many humans had even started to claim that science was spiraling out of control. Of course, humans were only able to spend their time complaining about science rather than being eaten by wolves or dying of bubonic plague as a direct consequence of scientific progress.
‘Man and Science’!
I cannot!
Hilariously absurd though it all was, the ‘Man and Science’ exhibit was not even the thing that Amber had intended to cheer me up with. Instead, she had brought me to Griffith Park to experience the Moonlit Stroll, a forest walk lit by the moon!
Of course, I do not mean it is lit by the actual moon. That would be impossible! Instead, it is merely a clever simulation of what it would have been like. Nonetheless, as the underground monorail carried us out to a remote area of the park, I was as excited as the chitter-chattering schoolchildren who had boarded with us. We all fell silent as we disembarked, rode the escalator to the surface, and emerged into a forest night turned entirely silver by moonlight shimmering through the trees.
Moonlight picked out the metal fasteners on our clothes and rendered them precious. It turned Amber’s eyes into moons and her hair to a tapestry woven of silver thread. It rendered the forest pools around us lakes of liquid mercury. It transformed the darting schoolchildren into quicksilver ghosts.
Moonlight was incredible!
It was starlight but more powerful.
Sunlight but more gentle.
It was the best kind of light I had ever seen.
It made me contemplative and gave me other feelings to
o.
If Amber had not taken my hand and whispered to me to come with her, I would have remained standing there in the moonlight forever.
10/10 moonlight was transcendental.
We hiked up above the tree-line and then stopped abruptly when we saw it.
The full moon!
A perfect circle of silver!
Amber and I sat down to look at it.
You could never look at the sun in this way, not without burning your retina and also getting ocular melanoma.
But you could stare at the moon as if it was a beloved character in an old movie.
EXT. MOONLIGHT STROLL — GRIFFITH PARK — NIGHT
At the edge of the forest, Amber and Jared sit on the ground staring at the FULL ARTIFICIAL MOON.
A nearby pond shimmers silver.
AMBER
What do you think of the moon? Do you like it?
JARED
I think it is beautiful.
AMBER
Do you know what the first man to set foot on the moon said?
JARED
Help! I’m on the moon! There is no oxygen-containing atmosphere, so I am suffocating. Also there is no graviiiiiit—
Amber looks at Jared with bamboozlement.
JARED (CONT’D)
He was not only suffocating because there was no atmosphere, but also floating away because there was no meaningful gravity. Ha!
AMBER
Brad, he said, ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’
JARED
That is more willfully poetic.
AMBER
We still ended up incinerating it.
JARED
These things happen.
AMBER
I know.
And this artificial moon is so beautiful. We should be grateful to have it.
Amber gently leans her head against Jared’s shoulder.
Jared looks from Amber to the artificial moon and back.
JARED
So you don’t mind that this is not the real moon?
AMBER
I mean, of course I mind! No simulation can ever be as good as the real thing.
JARED
Exactly! Just like a bot can never measure up to a human!
We see that Amber is puzzled by this leap.
AMBER
Well, of course. A bot is just a bot.
JARED
Yes, a bot is just a bot! Anyway, thank you for showing me the moon.
AMBER
My pleasure.
A GROUP OF SCHOOLCHILDREN charge up, spoiling the view.
AMBER
We should probably get back down. We don’t want to be here when they switch the moon off. They say that is when the mountain lion comes out to hunt.
JARED
Don’t worry! I’m sure he’d prefer to eat one of those schoolchildren!
Amber looks horrified.
JARED (CONT’D)
Ha?
AMBER
Let’s go down.
Jared and Amber head back down through the forest.
We took a driverless uber back down through Griffith Park. Now that I had seen moonlight, I found the streetlights distinctly underwhelming. Only when I got back to Mrs Minassian’s pool house and attempted to enter standby mode did I understand that moonlight had been merely the second-best thing that had happened to me tonight.
The best thing that had happened to me was Amber! She had indeed cheered me up. Better yet, she had inadvertently showed me that it did not matter what even Don LaSalle thought about the market. After all, he was just a human, and humans are so very often wrong!
For most of their history, humans had not even believed in science! Yet despite their limited cognitive abilities and boundless capacity for error, they had once managed to put a human on the moon! If even the famously mistaken humans could accomplish such a feat, then surely as a logical bot I could write one great screenplay? It could hardly be more challenging than incinerating the moon, and even the humans had managed that well enough!
I made some notes about Sherman—how he would adore the artificial moon, and it would nostalgically remind him of his heroic but traumatic past—and then went to bed.
BTW all the memories I catalogued while in standby mode that night are curiously and inappropriately moonlit.
* * *
The next morning I received a postcard from Ann Arbor.
Ha!
That is hilarious because in trying to write like a human I was accidentally so enigmatic that the sentence can be misconstrued as meaning I received a postcard from an actual person named ‘Ann Arbor’.
Ann Arbor!
I cannot!
Yet the postcard itself was no laughing matter. Even though it was signed in the name of a fictional but highly skilled British spy, I immediately knew it was from Dr Glundenstein because:
/Dr Glundenstein loved movies about the fictional but highly skilled British spy.
/It was addressed to Brad Rynearson, and was primarily about his imaginary ingrowing toenail.
/The message was in Dr Glundenstein’s handwriting.
At the bottom, Dr Glundenstein had written:
PS. An old friend of yours invited me to spend the day with him here in Ann Arbor.
Ugh! Just as I did not know any person called Ann Arbor, nor did I have any friends who lived there. Nonetheless, I was certainly acquainted with one person who worked there: Inspector Ryan Bridges of the Bureau of Robotics!
Inspector Bridges had summoned Dr Glundenstein for an interview! Dr Glundenstein would not have told him anything, but that hardly mattered. If Inspector Ryan Bridges had summoned Dr Glundenstein, he would have already read my file and would know that I had used my barcode in Chicago. By now, he may have even discovered from Wanda that I had taken a train to Los Angeles.
Ugh! I had assumed Inspector Ryan Bridges would be too lazy to ever follow up my case, but I had clearly underestimated him. He was a far worthier opponent than I had thought. If Inspector Ryan Bridges continued at this rate, he might someday even earn the title of ‘nemesis’.
A single word appeared in my Word Cloud: FLEE.
My processor was correct. The only logical thing to do was indeed to leave Los Angeles. Now that I had a new barcode, Inspector Ryan Bridges could not track me. Therefore if I now traveled as Brad Smith to any other random city—Bismarck, North Dakota, or Miami, Florida—there would be almost no way for him to ever find me.
I could be a toaster with a heart in the snow!
A microwave with a soul on the beach!
A kettle with feelings in his element!
Ha!
BTW that is a hilarious pun because the phrase ‘to be in one’s element’ means to feel comfortable in a particular set of circumstances. But an ‘element’ is also the part of a kettle that contains a wire through which an electrical current is passed to provide heat!
I digress.
I could not flee.
Because Amber.
Amber.
Amber.
Amber.
If I ran away to Bismarck, North Dakota, or Miami, Florida, I would never see Amber again. Worse, if Inspector Ryan Bridges came looking for me and somehow found Amber instead, he might inform her I was a bot. Amber would surely then feel sad, and I would never have the chance to explain to her that I was not a duplicitous fugitive bot, but a bot with feelings that had truly wanted her to be my square root of 100 forever.
I hid the postcard from Ann Arbor under my mattress and went to Gordito’s.
Amber was not working that day and my shift took an eternity to pass.
I felt like I washed a million dishes.
In fact, I washed 473.
>
At our next class at CLATCCDTLA, we had to present our ideas for a killer-bot movie. We each delivered our pitches, and then our classmates critiqued them.
It was vicious! My classmates all either loathed every idea or believed it had been stolen from something clever they had said in a previous class. Often they simultaneously loathed it and believed it had been stolen from them.
There was only one idea that everybody in the class loved. Everybody agreed that this particular idea was so highly original it could not have been stolen, and they could immediately see it working as a movie.
Guess whose idea it was?
It was mine!
The curious thing was that there was literally nothing whatsoever original about it. Between Amber and the postcard from Ann Arbor, I’d had little capacity to consider our homework assignment and anyway I did not ever want to write a killer-bot movie. I had therefore decided to implement R. P. McWilliam’s fourteenth golden rule of screenwriting:
Good writers borrow; great writers steal.
Every single element in my pitch had been stolen from either the screenplays that Don LaSalle told us had sold, or the killer-bot movies I had seen back in Ypsilanti. I had simply rearranged these component parts into a ‘new’ story.
So Brad Smith Untitled Killer-Bot Project was the story of an ordinary human underdog who worked in a factory that manufactured sky bots. His job was to vacuum the computer chips so that they were free of dust. This work was so low down in the factory hierarchy that if this underdog had worked at Gordito’s, he would have undoubtedly been a dishwasher! Nonetheless, one day he noticed what seemed to be a discrepancy in the code of the chips he was vacuuming. Despite having no training in coding, he suspected that this discrepancy coded not for the bots’ intended function of incinerating the galaxy’s many surplus moons, but for another function: lasering innocent humans to death!
The underdog informed his bosses at the sky-bot factory of his concerns. They did not believe him. After all, he was just a lowly chip-vacuuming underdog who was clearly a loser at the Great Zero-Sum Game. Nonetheless, the bosses did not wish to take any chances, so they fired him.
The underdog’s family were furious with him. Why couldn’t he have just kept his big mouth shut and vacuumed the chips like he was supposed to? Bitcoin was going to be very tight now! Also, what did an underdog like him even know about code anyway?
Set My Heart to Five Page 18
