Set My Heart to Five
Page 3
I was a toaster that had inappropriately concerned itself with the number of slices of bread it would toast over the remainder of its existence.
And now I was toast myself.
Ha!
The earliest available appointment at the Bureau of Robotics in Ann Arbor was not until that evening. Fortunately, my core dental programming had remained uncorrupted, so I could at least make a final contribution to society by examining a further 416 teeth.
At lunchtime I broke the news to Angela that I would be wiped that evening.
When we saw each other the next day, it would be as if we had never previously met. Angela seemed entirely unconcerned, even when I asked her to forgive me if I initially found her allergy to orange cats bamboozling.
10/10 I congratulated her on her resilience and lack of sentimentality!
At the end of the working day I took a driverless uber to the Bureau of Robotics in Ann Arbor.
My basic humor modules are likely insufficient to convey the hilarity of the existential joke that humans have played with the Bureau of Robotics. Nonetheless, the three pertinent data points are:
/The Bureau of Robotics evolved out of a legendarily incompetent organization called the DMV.
/The Bureau of Robotics is where all the humans who have ever been fired from other government departments for being too illogical or inefficient are sent to work.
/The Bureau of Robotics is tasked with managing the most logical and efficient being ever created: the bot.
Humans!
I cannot!
INT. WAITING ROOM — BUREAU OF ROBOTICS — EVENING
Jared enters the waiting room of a run-down federal office.
It is full of MALFUNCTIONING BOTS.
A PERSONAL TRAINER BOT performs jumping jacks.
A HAIRDRESSER BOT snips at the air with scissors.
Nearby a FEMALE HOSTESS BOT is endlessly repeating:
HOSTESS BOT
Hi, I’m Melissa, I’m a bot! Hi, I’m Melissa, I’m a bot! Hi, I’m Melissa—
Jared sits and waits patiently.
He is visibly the least malfunctioning bot there.
INT. OFFICE —BUREAU OF ROBOTICS —EVENING
Jared sits across a messy desk from the overweight INSPECTOR BRIDGES (48), who eats candy while filling out paperwork.
The nametag on Bridges’ shirt says ‘ANIL GUPTA’.
JARED
Inspector Gupta—
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
It’s Inspector Bridges.
JARED
But your nametag—
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
Yeah, this isn’t my shirt. I spilled my lunch on mine, so Inspector Gupta lent me his. Why are you here?
JARED
To report myself. I’m malfunctioning.
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
What’s the problem?
JARED
A rogue number has appeared in my Number Cloud. It is not related to a current or previous task.
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
Have you tried turning yourself on and off again?
Jared looks bamboozled.
JARED
A biological computer can no more turn itself off than a human brain can! Sometimes my circuits can become overheated, but—
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
It was a joke. Jesus. Why do I even bother? You’re a bot.
JARED
Yes, I am. A malfunctioning bot.
Bridges points out to where the hairdresser bot is now cutting the hostess bot’s hair.
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
Those are malfunctioning bots.
JARED
The rogue number is the number of teeth I still have to work on before retirement.
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
(Sighs wearily.)
We’ll run the tests. Room three. Down the hall on the left.
Bridges scribbles out a FORM and hands it to Jared.
INT. TEST ROOM —BUREAU OF ROBOTICS —EVENING
Jared sits in a chair wearing a DEVICE like an old-fashioned motorcycle helmet covered in wires and flashing lights.
The lights stop flashing and a BUZZER sounds signifying the end of the test.
Jared removes the helmet.
A COMPUTER in the corner spits out a PRINTOUT.
INT. OFFICE —BUREAU OF ROBOTICS —EVENING
Inspector Bridges looks at the printout then up at Jared.
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
Yeah, you’re fine.
JARED
With the greatest of respect, I am not fine. I am malfunctioning.
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
If you’re malfunctioning, then our main computer —the one that does all the tests for every bot in the Great State of Michigan —must be malfunctioning too.
JARED
Maybe you should wipe me anyway? Just to be on the safe side?
INSPECTOR BRIDGES
Come on, I don’t have time for that. Just go home and get a good night in standby mode. I’m sure it’ll be gone by tomorrow.
Jared reluctantly leaves.
But my number was not gone by tomorrow.
It remained there, prominent in my Number Cloud and reducing each day by 416:
1956032
1955616
1955200
1954784
1954368
In mathematics a number that reduces predictably is said to be ‘decaying’.
There was a decaying number in my Number Cloud, and it represented a number of decaying teeth.
That seemed significant.
The following Thursday, Dr Glundenstein invited me over to his room to shoot the shit. At some point amidst his litany of complaints he enquired how I was. Usually whenever he asked me this, I told him I was ‘fine’.
When a human asks you how you are, the polite response is to tell them you are ‘fine’.
That way you do not take away from any of their precious time talking about themselves.
But on this Thursday I did not tell Dr Glundenstein I was fine. I told him about the decaying number in my Number Cloud that represented a decaying number of decaying teeth. If Dr Glundenstein was surprised, he did not show it. He simply told me to make an appointment to come and see him, then carried on drinking his Japanese Scotch and talking about the EMU Eagles and the golden opportunities to be different people that neither of us would ever get back again.
I attended Dr Glundenstein’s clinic the next day. Appointments were always available because there is very little wrong with humans these days, apart from their teeth.
10/10 there will always be something wrong with human teeth!
Maybe after the inevitable robo-apocalypse, the only work will be for dentists and killer bots.
And we will be one and the same!
INT. DR GLUNDENSTEIN’S CLINIC ROOM —DAY
Dr Glundenstein and Jared sit opposite each other.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
So you mentioned something about a number?
JARED
1950208. It’s the number of teeth I still have to examine over the course of my working life. It decays every day by 416.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
And how do you feel about that?
Jared looks bamboozled by the question.
JARED
I don’t. I am a bot. Bots don’t have feelings.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
Well, how are you, otherwise?
JARED
I am fine. Thank you for asking.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
Good. But I mean, how are things, generally?
JARED
Things are generally as they are.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
And are you sleeping okay?
JARED
Bots don’t sleep. We enter standby mode.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
Right. But no problems there?
JARED
Every morning I involuntarily emerge from standby mode at 04:03am.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
Is that so? And what do you do then?
JARED
I watch my room slowly lighten until the alarm informs me it is time to get up.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
Have you lost any weight?
JARED
Four pounds. I don’t know why.
Dr Glundenstein thinks deeply.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
So, you are ruminating about your future, you wake early every morning, and you have lost some weight?
JARED
That is an excellent summation! Thank you.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
Jared, what would you say if I told you that my clinical assessment is that you are likely suffering from a severe case of depression?
JARED
I would say, Ha!
(Beat.)
So, Ha!
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
But what if I told you that I was not joking, and your symptoms are all textbook features of depression?
JARED
I would ask you if it was a textbook of humans or of bots!
(Off Dr Glundenstein’s look.)
Because depression is a disorder of feelings. And bots do not have feelings.
They stare at each other. It is an impasse.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
So my hypothesis is you are depressed. Your hypothesis is that you cannot be.
JARED
That is another excellent summation.
DR GLUNDENSTEIN
So, as we have two conflicting hypotheses, how about we conduct an experiment to find out which one is correct?
Jared grins. Bots approve of experiments.
JARED
That would be scientific!
Dr Glundenstein writes something down on A PIECE OF PAPER and passes it to Jared.
Jared stares down at it, then looks up at Dr Glundenstein.
He is bamboozled.
It was hard to argue with Dr Glundenstein’s logic, even though he was a human.
The scientific way to resolve conflicting hypotheses is indeed to conduct an experiment.
The problem lay with the actual experiment Dr Glundenstein had suggested: he wanted me to travel to the Grand Theater in Detroit and watch an old movie.
10/10 a trip to the movies could be fatal to a bot!
I assumed that Dr Glundenstein had lost his mind.
All the Japanese Scotch had finally done for him.
It had pickled his brain into haggis sushi.
Nonetheless, a human doctor’s orders are a high-level command. Also, it was a chance to conduct an experiment! And if I survived the trip and successfully disproved Dr Glundenstein’s hypothesis, it would be further evidence that I should be wiped. Perhaps Dr Glundenstein would even write me a letter, and I could go to Anil Gupta and not Inspector Ryan Bridges. That is, straight to the shirt-lending organ grinder and not the lunch-spilling monkey!
The reason movie theaters are so inherently dangerous to bots is because they are places for humans to sit in the dark and experience feelings together. A bot in a theater would be an outrage! Any bot so caught would be unlikely to even reach the Bureau of Robotics to be wiped. After all, the only place humans think bots should be in a movie theater is upon the screen!
I am referring there to the fact that movies about killer bots are the most popular genre of movie. Here are the synopses of some that have recently played at the Ypsilanti Megaplex:
/A human creates an advanced bot; the bot murders the human.
/Bots and humans coexist peacefully in the world; one day the bots join together to form a megabot that murders all the humans.
/A spaceship has several human crew and one bot, all harmoniously working together to explore distant galaxies; one day the bot murders all the humans.
/A human falls in love with a bot; the bot murders the human.
If only I had been a killer bot from the future, I would have been welcome at every movie theater in the country! Ha!
But do you know why humans are terrified of bots?
It is because they blame us for the Great Crash!
Even though the Great Crash was all their own fault!
After all, it was not bots that programmed computer systems to lock humans out if they forgot the names of their first pet and favorite elementary school teacher!
And it was not bots that then forgot those names in numbers large enough to start a chain reaction of failed password recovery attempts that caused them all to be locked out of the entire internet forever!
10/10 humans managed that all by themselves!
Ubiquitous though this erroneous blaming of bots is, not every human derives enjoyment from terrifying themselves at a megaplex with a movie about murderous bots.
There is another kind of theater, and those theaters show another kind of movie.
They show old movies.
Old movies were all made before the Great Crash, and survived because they were physically stored on film rather than digitally on hard drives. Theaters that play old movies therefore do so by shining light through actual physical film. This technology is old and fragile and prone to combustion. Old theaters are forever burning down!
Even when they are not burning down, old theaters do not make much bitcoin. The only reliable audience for old movies is a subset of young humans known as ‘nostalgics’. Nostalgics would prefer that humans had never been to Pluto, cooled the sun, nor even incinerated the moon!
To signal such outmoded beliefs, nostalgics wear outdated clothes and cut their hair in styles that date back to the 2020s. They dress so uniformly that people seeing a group of nostalgics together often assume they are some kind of cult. Yet as they have no distinct leader, they do not benefit from the organizational structure of a cult.
Nonetheless, it is rare to see even a single nostalgic in Ypsilanti. Nostalgics prefer to congregate in big cities where they can find others as retrospective as themselves. And big cities of course have the theaters that show the old movies that nostalgics love.
But which came first—the nostalgics or the theaters?
Ha! It was the theaters, of course!
Some of those old theaters are over a hundred years old.
Nostalgics are rarely older than twenty-five years old.
After all, humans older than twenty-five do not have time to relitigate the incineration of the moon!
And many of them remember that the moon was nothing so special anyway.
I mention nostalgics because they frequent old movie theaters and do not like bots. I would therefore have to be careful not to be spotted by a nostalgic when I went to the Grand Theater! Even though they are the most notoriously lackadaisical members of a notoriously lackadaisical generation, a bot in a theater was exactly the kind of thing that might rouse a nostalgic from his or her nonchalant disinterest.
The city of Detroit was itself also not without its dangers. After all, Detroit had been the site of the infamous Bot Riots, during which angry mobs of humans set hundreds of bots alight in the streets as retribution for the bots taking their jobs. Unfortunately, many of those jobs had been with the Fire Department, and therefore half of the city burned down. Somehow the humans even blamed the bots for that too! To this day Detroit is known as one of the least bot-friendly cities in the country.
And before all that I had to get there! Traveling by driverless uber would have required me to use my barcode, and the metadata would have been transmitted to th
e Bureau of Robotics. Inspector Ryan Bridges was unlikely to be monitoring my movements—after all, he was unable to monitor the movements of his own lunch!—but I was programmed to take reasonable steps not to be wiped before I had completed Dr Glundenstein’s medical advice.
I therefore had to travel to Detroit by Automatic Bus!
10/10 I would not recommend the Automatic Bus to anyone.
The Automatic Bus is the kind of thing that gives all bots a bad name.
It travels at nausea-inducing speed yet takes only the cheapest roads, which are of course also the most circuitous.
Therefore despite traveling too fast, the Automatic Bus is also too slow.
Humans call this kind of scenario ‘the worst of both worlds’.
For once they are correct!
* * *
As I rode the Automatic Bus to Detroit, I could see the humans in their driverless ubers looking in at us with disdain. Humans only take the Automatic Bus if they are too poor to travel any other way, and humans dislike humans without much bitcoin almost as much as they dislike bots. This dislike reflects the widespread human belief that all life is a Great Zero-Sum Game.
Most humans believe in this Great Zero-Sum Game without knowing either the phrase or its meaning. But perhaps this is not surprising: after all, the term comes from advanced economics. Ha!
A zero-sum game can be defined as:
A situation in which each participant’s gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participants.
To put this in more comfortably human terms, these ‘gains’ and ‘losses’ can be represented as ice cream. The human faith in the Great Zero-Sum Game can then be expressed as the notion:
For me to have ice cream, somebody else must not have ice cream.
This can then be further reduced to the core belief:
There is not enough ice cream to go around.
Extrapolating this core belief leads to some commonly held human conclusions:
/If poor people are allowed to have bitcoin, there will be less for the rest of us.
/If bots are allowed to have feelings, there will be less for the rest of us.
/If North Koreans are allowed to have nuclear weapons, there will be less for the rest of us.
/Also, they may use them to blow up New Zealand again.