Set My Heart to Five

by Simon Stephenson

  Her plan was that I should attend a special screening of the serial-killer movie that Dr Glundenstein and I had watched win the award. Afterwards, there would be a question and answer session with the screenwriter. This screenwriter was famously good with emotion—and hence magic—and Maria Salazar thought it would be helpful for me to hear her talk about her craft.

  Set it to five, I agreed to go immediately! After all, that serial-killer movie had been one of the reasons I had set out in pursuit of my mission in the first place. Maria Salazar MFA suggesting I attend a screening of it seemed like a very good omen!

  As a token of my gratitude, I gave Maria Salazar a Gordito’s

  T-shirt. This gift seemed to puzzle her, and I worry now that she might have thought I got it for free. But I did not get it free! I had to pay full price, as our staff discount did not extend to merchandise.

  10/10 it was the misunderstood dental checkup that I had offered to Dr Glundenstein all over again!

  Even the expert opinion of Maria Salazar MFA that my work lacked magic did not disappoint me too much. Who even cared about magic when there was love?

  Love > Magic.

  And also:

  Love > Experiments.

  Love > Formulae.

  Love > Algorithms.

  Love > Old movies.

  Love > Popcorn in the dark.

  Love > Everything else in the world!

  Even mundane activities become better when you are in love! When you are in love, you do not shop at the store but go to the farmers’ market, even though it stocks the same produce but costs far more and is only open a few hours a week. When you are in love, a driverless uber failing to arrive is not an irritating inconvenience but a hilarious adventure. When you are in love, bad pop songs become poetry and good pop songs become unbearable. And of course, who can forget the greatest advantage of all: when you are in love you never have to say you are sorry.

  Yet if being in love is the best, being in love with somebody who does not know you are a bot is the worst. It might even be the worst of the worst!

  Because my terrible secret was always there, waiting to ruin everything.

  It was a rotten apple at the bottom of the farmers’ market display, slowly emitting a chemical that turned all those around it rotten too.

  It was a driverless uber that cheerfully transmits its metadata to the Bureau of Robotics.

  It was a minor chord in a pop song.

  It was a wild dog amidst sea lions.

  It was a pterodactyl amongst pelicans.

  I had heard the pterodactyl a mile off. It sounded a lot like the fact that humans demonstrate love by being sexually intimate with one another, whereas bots are incapable of being aroused. Amber and I had held hands and watched the sun set into the ocean, but from old movies I knew that bout of hand-holding would be unlikely to satisfy a red-blooded young human like Amber for long.

  I was a toaster lacking a bagel setting!

  A microwave without the power to even defrost anything!

  A panda without a libido!

  BTW that is hilarious because a panda without a libido is just an ordinary panda.

  I digress.

  Sure enough, one night at Gordito’s I saw the pterodactyl begin its swoop down towards me.

  To be clear, I did not see an actual pterodactyl.

  I was continuing an earlier metaphor, the way a great human writer such as Albert Camus might.

  What actually happened is that Amber came to my dishwashing station and whispered to me that the Kelseys were all going to a hot yoga party and she had the house to herself that night. I pretended to misunderstand and reassured her that there had been no reports of killer bots in the neighborhood, so being home alone was nothing to be frightened of.

  Amber looked puzzled, but nonetheless thanked me for the reassurance and walked away.

  I did not need to consult my Feelings Wheel to know that I had made her sad.

  Sure enough, after that moment, our evenings all ended the same way. Which was with bewilderment and sadness.

  BTW bewilderment is an advanced state of bafflement, which is itself worse even than bamboozlement.

  B-words cluster together in the same way that D-words do.

  I digress again.

  Late one night Amber even asked me if I did not like her.

  I indignantly replied that of course I liked her!

  But I did not need to consult my Feelings Wheel to know what I felt.

  I felt agony.

  It was no good.

  I had been wrong.

  Even if love meant never having to say you are sorry, there was no logical reason that could be extrapolated to mean that love also meant never having to admit that you are a bot.

  I had willfully misinterpreted that part for my own purposes.

  I had been unscientific in the extreme.

  10/10 I had to admit to Amber that I was a bot, whatever that did to the cat sleeping next to the radioactive source that was my heart.

  The only question now became how to tell her.

  R. P. McWilliam’s sixth golden rule stated:

  Location! Location! Location!

  As this was not actually a rule but merely a noun followed by an exclamation point repeated in triplicate, I had not known what he meant. Fortunately, Maria Salazar MFA was a far more skilled teacher than R. P. McWilliam and she had explained to us that it is the screenwriter’s job to make important moments in a story feel as big as possible, and that one way this can be achieved is by paying careful attention to location. Important movie moments do not occur in living rooms or on sidewalks! They take place at the top of the Empire State Building or in Chicago’s Union Station or on the Golden Gate Bridge, preferably as it is collapsing into the Pacific Ocean.

  Setting up a spectacular location aids foreshadowing and can also ensure the characters arrive suitably equipped to take part in something important. For example, if you are a federal agent and you intend to arrest an accountant at his office in downtown Ypsilanti, you might not even take your gun. But if you are going to arrest him at Union Station in Chicago, well, you already know there will be trouble.

  I therefore decided I needed a spectacular location to reveal to Amber that I was a bot. It would create a fitting sense of occasion and the inevitable foreshadowing would help prepare her to receive bad news. She would know something was up before I even opened my mouth!

  Unfortunately, the only spectacular location I knew was Malibu. I did not want to tell Amber I was a bot at Malibu. It was her favorite place and I might ruin it for her forever. But as I did not have a spectacular or favorite place of my own, I therefore needed somebody else’s.

  Mrs Minassian told me the most spectacular place she knew was The Cascade Stairway.

  The Cascade Stairway is in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

  On a Venn diagram with one circle that represents Europe and another that represents Asia, Armenia would exist in the shaded area.

  10/10 taking Amber to Armenia would have been too much foreshadowing!

  Julio said the most spectacular place he knew was Jalisco, the desert he comes from in Mexico. I asked him what it was like there and he explained it was just like the inside of our men’s customer restroom. I had never been in there before, so I visited it on my break that night. The wall had been printed with a life-sized black-and-white photograph of the Jalisco desert.

  It was a vision! In the foreground lay the bleached skull of a cow. Further back there were cacti. Beyond those, the desert stretched far into the distance. It was sublime and mesmerizing, and how I would have loved to see it in the moonlight! After I had stared at it for a while, even the urinals disappeared. It took a customer emerging from the cubicle and giving me a suspicious look to snap me out of my reverie.

  BTW very old
movies are sometimes in black-and-white too, and they are also beautiful! They are wistful and stunning, and the simple color scheme means that the focus is entirely on the action. Black-and-white movies are the best! Except when they are the worst! When black-and-white movies are the worst, they are truly the worst. Bad black-and-white movies are more excruciating even than pulling out wisdom teeth. The worst ones might even be more excruciating than having your own wisdom teeth pulled out!

  I digress. Back at the dishwashing station, I told Julio the desert was indeed spectacular. I would have loved to take Amber there, but unfortunately, even Mexico was too far away for my purposes. Julio laughed and informed me that most of California is a desert. He said it was of course not as spectacular as Jalisco, but Joshua Tree was nonetheless one of the best second-class deserts around.

  Julio was a genio! The Joshua Tree desert was the perfect place to reveal to Amber that I was a bot! It was close enough for a day trip, but even the word ‘desert’ would foreshadow to her that something ominous was coming! Also, if she did decide to inform the Bureau of Robotics, I would already be halfway out of California to Bismarck or Miami!

  BTW ‘genio’ is the Spanish word for ‘genius’.

  When our shifts crossed over that evening, I invited Amber to come to the Joshua Tree desert with me at the weekend.

  She seemed excited and immediately agreed.

  I do not think she had seen enough movies to understand how foreshadowing works.

  That night I went to the screening Maria Salazar MFA had told me about. The screenwriter had done an excellent job and had certainly deserved her award. In every other serial-killer film I had seen, the screenwriter had lazily and stereotypically made the serial killer the villain. In this film, the screenwriter had innovatively made him the hero!

  We knew he was the hero because he was very good-looking, and he only ever killed people who had it coming. And he certainly never killed them by poisoning them!

  Nonetheless, when the cops finally caught up with this good-looking hero, they insisted on punishing him. He had killed people, and the cops were adamant that they could not let such a serious crime pass unpunished.

  Guess how they punished him?

  By killing him!

  With poison!

  I cannot!

  The entire audience also could not. They erupted! First people screamed and threw things at the screen, and then everybody wept. I personally cried over 42ml of tears.

  And guess what happened after the credits had finished?

  Everybody was so moved that they even gave the blank screen a standing ovation for its steadfast contribution. It was a rare moment of humans appreciating technology!

  BTW I had only ever been the recipient of a standing ovation before. Being a participant in one was even more fun, as it gives you a powerful feeling of community!

  I digress. When they brought the screenwriter out, she apologized that the director was not here, but explained that he was already busy filming the sequel. Somebody asked how they could make a sequel when the main character had been killed. The writer said she had no idea, as she was not involved. She speculated that perhaps the serial killer returned from the dead and started killing people as a zombie serial killer.

  Sarcasm!

  I think!

  Ha!

  Like me, my fellow audience members were all screenwriters-in-waiting. Here is a representative sample of the questions they asked:

  /Had you already seen my short film about a heroic serial killer when you wrote this?

  /I liked the ending. Did you get the idea for it from my screenplay?

  /I am better than you at dialogue. Would you like some assistance with your next film?

  When the moderator wearily announced there was time for only one more question, I heard a voice shout one out. I thought it was a surprisingly excellent question, and then I realized that my own mouth had just finished moving. I had experienced an urge, and it had made me shout out a question! This is the question I asked:

  How can you make an audience love a character they are instinctively prejudiced against?

  The screenwriter smiled. She too seemed to appreciate my question! She then said that she always relied on some advice an old mentor had given her. The advice had been:

  You have to F-word them in the heart!

  The screenwriter herself did not say ‘F-word’ but actually the word that abbreviation signifies. As that word is impolite, my programming permits me to write it only if the abbreviation does not sufficiently convey the required emotional intensity. This particular circumstance does not meet that criterion.

  My fellow audience members diligently wrote her old mentor’s advice down in their notebooks. I must have experienced another urge then, because I now heard myself ask another excellent question! This one was about how specifically the screenwriter went about F-wording the audience in the heart.

  ‘Personally—’ she smiled ‘—I always find the simplest way to do it is just to kill your main character right at the end of the movie.’

  The audience all laughed and nobody wrote this in their notebooks, but I was not sure that the screenwriter had been joking. After all, at the end of her own movie she had indeed killed the heroic serial killer. And anytime I had wept in excess of 30ml of tears in a movie, it had been because a main character had died at the end. It went all the way back to the very first person I had seen die in a movie: Jenny.

  This gave me another brainwave, or biological computer wave: the way to make my audience experience a catharsis profound enough to make them weep was to kill Sherman!

  And that is exactly what I would do!

  Right at the end of the movie, I would kill Sherman!

  And his death would be tragic and noble, but it would not be in vain.

  It would teach the people around him a life lesson that they could all carry into their futures.

  And his death would ultimately allow other bots with feelings to live!

  10/10 it was all settled.

  Sherman was toast.

  And this would F-word them all in the heart!

  * * *

  When I got home I found another postcard waiting for me. This one bore a picture of Ypsilanti’s famous Tridge.

  The Tridge! And there was the bench where I used to eat my lunch in order to avoid seeing excess patients! And there was the River Huron I used to stare at to make me seem more human! And there were those true Michiganders, the geese!

  I experienced a new feeling then. It reminded me of wistfulness but there was something less pleasant about it too. When I looked it up later I discovered it was homesickness, a close cousin to nostalgia and no doubt its fellow traitor. The feeling did not last long, however, because the postcard did not even bother with any of our usual deceptions but simply read:

  He is heading your way and plans to look you up when he arrives!

  Ugh!

  Inspector Ryan Bridges was on his way to Los Angeles!

  10/10 any human fugitive receiving a message that a federal agent was coming to find them would have panicked.

  Fortunately, I am a bot and bots do not panic, because panic is purposeless.

  It is the feelings version of a software crash!

  Panic attack = Kernel attack!

  Ha!

  BTW, if you know what a kernel attack is, that is truly a hilarious joke!

  I digress. I told myself there was either definitely or certainly nothing to panic about. Inspector Ryan Bridges could not even locate his own nametag, and I had a new nametag and anyway 10 million people lived in Los Angeles. Looking for me would be like searching for a needle in a haystack, except that needle now had a label on it saying that it was a piece of hay.

  Anyway, I had other things to worry about.

  Such as taking Amber to Joshua Tre
e and confessing to her that I was a bot.

  * * *

  I picked Amber up early on Saturday morning. The Kelsey that answered the door seemed displeased with me. Even asking her about yesterday’s audition and then hot yoga did not improve her demeanor!

  In the driverless uber, Amber explained that Kelsey cubed believed people only ever went to the desert for an exclusive party and were therefore upset that we had not invited them. I assured Amber that was not why we were going to the desert. After all, Cinderella does not go to a party while the ugly sisters remain at home. Ha!

  The journey to the desert took hours yet paradoxically passed in a seeming heartbeat. Humans are fond of telling each other that ‘time flies when you are having fun’, but of course this cannot be true. Time must decay at a steady state, regardless of whether or not you are having fun. If it did not, the entire universe would implode every single time a human did hot yoga.

  Anyway, I was not having fun. A more apt phrase would therefore have been ‘time flies when you are about to reveal to your girlfriend that you are a bot who is by definition incapable of physical affection’.

  Still, the journey was scenic! We passed first through cowboy-movie mountains and then through vast fields of wind turbines. I told Amber that before us humans had learned to harness the abundant power of the sun and wind, we had manufactured electricity by burning the decomposed remains of dinosaurs. Amber assumed I was joking. I could not blame her. Humans had done some truly bizarre things over the years!

  And then the hours-long heartbeat was over and we came to the Joshua Tree desert! We stopped the driverless uber and got out. I had to consult the reverse of my Feelings Wheel to discover what I was feeling.

  Awestruck.

  I was feeling awestruck!

  Even the giant black-and-white photograph of Jalisco in the men’s restroom at Gordito’s had not prepared me for the spectacular majesty of the Joshua Tree desert.

  If standing on Point Dume in Malibu was a vision of a perfect day in heaven, the Joshua Tree desert was a vision of a nuclear apocalypse in hell.