Set My Heart to Five
Page 10
Ugh again!
Feeling anxious is the worst!
Anxious Annies are as bad as Negative Nancys!
I did not want to be an Anxious Annie!
I therefore attempted some human-style thinking and reassured myself that there was nothing to be anxious about.
After all, Mr III had either ‘definitely’ or ‘certainly’ missed the train!
I was still telling myself that when he came through the door to our berth.
Before The Ruins of Empire had departed the station at Princeton, Illinois, I had learned several data points about Mr William J. Hartman III:
/Despite living in the uneducated Princeton, he liked to be called ‘the Prof’.
/He was traveling to Needles, California, to sell farm equipment.
/He had seen every killer-bot movie ever made and believed the government should preemptively incinerate all bots.
/His proudest achievement was having once caught a fugitive bot and turned him over to the Bureau of Robotics.
I excused myself, clambered over Mr III’s farm equipment samples, and went to the observation car. When I got there I was still such an Anxious Annie that I could not even concentrate on R. P. McWilliam’s golden rules.
I was going to have to be very careful around the Prof! I took a deep breath and reminded myself that it was either definitely or certainly going to be okay.
The hypothesis that thinking positively can make good things happen is against every known law of physics. Nonetheless, something good did occur almost immediately.
Can you guess what the good thing was?
You cannot!
Because when I went to the buffet car for dinner, I was seated with three elderly ladies.
And they were all deaf!
As posts!
Or any other inanimate object lacking an auditory processing system!
We smiled at each other when I sat down, pulled exaggerated facial expressions of delight when our food arrived, and then ate entirely in a silence punctured only by the braying of the Prof at his own dining companions. When the meal was over we waved farewell and I returned to the cabin before the Prof had even ordered his dessert. When he returned to our berth I pretended to be asleep. In the morning I roused myself from standby mode and headed to the observation car before he woke.
Thinking positively was either definitely or certainly the best!
* * *
We were traveling through the vast and flat plains of Kansas. Miles passed in the gray dawn with nothing to see except the occasional scars where highways had once run. Hard to believe now that Kansas had once been called ‘the breadbasket of America’!
Of course, that was back when humans had still loved bread, which was before they had all decided they were allergic to gluten.
In those days, being a breadbasket was considered a great compliment!
A breadbasket was not remotely thought equivalent to a cyanide lunch pail the way it invariably is nowadays.
BTW humans are as allergic to gluten as Angela is to orange cats.
I digress.
Kansas was a blank canvas.
There was nothing for endless miles.
I even found myself nostalgic for the factory-scarred landscapes of Great Aunt Heart Attack’s Rust Belt!
But remember nostalgia is a traitor, and must never be trusted.
As the sun rose over this empty breadbasket of America, we at last passed something interesting: the remains of a crashed jetliner! I had never seen one in real life. The jetliners that had fallen atop places like Detroit and even Ypsilanti had long since been removed. But nobody had bothered clearing up the ones that had fallen out here in the erstwhile breadbasket of America.
Do you know what somebody who today fell sufficiently in love with Kansas to give it a nickname would call it?
The jet-basket of America!
Jet-basket!
I cannot!
In the pantheon of human folly, jetliners were the automobiles of the sky.
When the Great Crash happened, there were one-and-a-half million humans in the air.
A few minutes later there were none.
That is a lot of jetliners.
That is a lot of humans.
And a lot of crashes on the day of the Great Crash itself.
So many crashes, their echoes decaying across the breadbasket of America.
Which would soon become the jet-basket of America.
But mostly—
So many humans.
So many jetliners.
All of them going somewhere.
Believing it was important.
And then abruptly none of them were going anywhere.
And none of it was important at all.
It was no more important than wherever the dinosaurs had been going when their turn had come.
I looked at my Feelings Wheel.
I was feeling contemplative.
INT. OBSERVATION CAR — TRAVELING THROUGH KANSAS — DAY
Jared stares out the window as the sun rises over a CRASHED JETLINER.
The Prof enters, sees Jared, and makes straight for him.
Jared slinks down in his seat to hide, but it is too late.
THE PROF
Good morning, roomie!
JARED
Good morning, Mr III. Er, the Prof.
THE PROF
There’s a rumor going around about you!
JARED
What? What is the rumor about me?
THE PROF
That you’re going to Vegas!
JARED
Did Wanda tell you that?
THE PROF
Who’s Wanda?
JARED
She sells tickets in Chicago. She has an overbite. Maybe you don’t know her.
THE PROF
No, it wasn’t Wanda. It was these three old deaf ladies I had breakfast with. Man, those girls are a riot!
Jared looks bamboozled.
JARED
Well, I am going to Las Vegas.
THE PROF
Great! Because guess who else is going?
JARED
The three deaf elderly ladies?
THE PROF
Yours truly! The Prof himself! So what do you say you and I paint Las Vegas red tonight?
JARED
I say it is probably illegal to paint Las Vegas red. There will be city ordinances and—
THE PROF
Ha! You’re hilarious! Did anybody ever tell you that you are hilarious?
JARED
Nobody ever told me that I am hilarious.
THE PROF
Well, you are! Worrying about city ordinances in a place that makes its living through gambling! Do you even know what they call Las Vegas?
Jared thinks about this.
JARED
The bet-basket of America?
THE PROF
Ha! No! Try again!
JARED
The basket case of America?
THE PROF
What? No, they call it ‘Sin City’! And you know what else they say? They say, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!’ Now, come on, you say it too!
JARED
I don’t—
THE PROF
Say it!
JARED
(Awkward.)
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
THE PROF
Now, you are talking! Come on, let’s say it together: one, two, three—
JARED AND THE PROF
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!
The Prof holds his hand up for a high five. Jared awkwardly obliges.
As The Ruins of Empire cont
inued into Colorado, I tried to think of ways I might extract myself from this situation.
There were none.
I was going to Las Vegas with a man who had seen every killer-bot movie ever made.
I was going to Las Vegas with a man who believed the government should preemptively incinerate all bots.
I was going to Las Vegas with a man whose proudest achievement was having turned a fugitive bot over to the Bureau of Robotics.
I was going to Las Vegas with a man who did not know that the Princeton he lived in was not the academic one.
Thanks a lot, Wanda! Now I was truly grateful for all your help at Union Station in Chicago!
BTW that is sarcasm. I was still most definitely not grateful to Wanda. For anything.
Nonetheless, I boldly attempted to muster some human-style optimism. The sole positive thing that I could think of was the Prof’s insistence that ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’. I therefore told myself that if the Prof discovered I was a bot, that information would either definitely or certainly stay in Vegas.
But who was I kidding?
What humans actually mean when they say ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ is that nobody should ever again mention any moral transgressions they might commit while they are there.
If the Prof discovered I was a bot, the only thing that would definitely or certainly stay in Vegas would be me.
I would stay there forever.
As carbon remnants lining the chimney of the incinerator at the Nevada Bureau of Robotics.
After all, what is incinerated in Vegas stays in Vegas!
* * *
In Las Vegas there are scale replicas of all the great cities in the world!
Death-defying aerial runways slung between skyscrapers!
Zombie gauntlets!
6D killer-bot attack experiences!
Jet-crash simulations!
Automobile horror shows!
Killer-shark swims!
There are infinite-loop hologram shows of every major performer that ever lived, playing their hits endlessly on perma-repeat!
And for the sports fans there is the never-ending Attrition Bowl, a football game that has now been ongoing for seventeen years!
BTW do not feel any sympathy for the players!
After all, they are all bots!
And worse, they are all engineered from the DNA of Tom Brady!
And Tom Brady is the very reason we must dislike the New England Patriots in the first place!
Boo, Tom Brady and all his unsporting progeny!
Boo, Patriots!
Yay, Attrition Bowl!
And Viva, Las Vegas!
And yet guess what?
Not one of those multitudinous wonders are even the principal attraction for humans!
The principal attraction for humans is ‘gambling’.
‘Gambling’ is the opportunity to lose bitcoin in games of random chance algorithmically designed to return less than is wagered upon them. If gambling was ice cream, a basic game would involve me and several others gifting you all our ice cream. In exchange, you would then agree to randomly and infrequently return a small amount of this ice cream to only one of us.
Gambling is therefore worse even than a zero-sum game.
It is a negative-sum game!
–10/30 I cannot!
But I am getting ahead of myself, as in fact the Prof and I had not even yet reached Las Vegas. This is because there is no train station in Las Vegas. Therefore at Kingman, Arizona, we disembarked The Ruins of Empire and were herded onto an Automatic Bus.
You read that correctly.
The train excursion that Wanda had upsold me—an excursion I had had zero desire to go on in the first place—was not a train excursion at all.
It was an Automatic Bus excursion.
Wanda!
I cannot!
The Prof enjoyed our Automatic Bus ride. This was because it was a novelty to him. He did not notice how fast we were going, nor even that the trip took us four times as long as a driverless uber would have. In fact, the only thing that concerned him throughout the entire journey was his belief that I would be hustled when we got to Las Vegas. According to him, I was a ‘classic rube’.
BTW ‘rube’ means ‘bumpkin’, which in turn denotes an ‘unsophisticated or socially awkward person from the countryside’.
From the countryside!
This was rich and ironic and many other things besides!
After all, the Prof was from the lesser of the two Princetons.
Meantime I had been created in Shengdu, the world’s leading technological city and the fourth most populous urban conurbation in China!
Shengdu the hibiscus city, the brocade city, the turtle city!
Shengdu, home of the National University of Shengdu and its distinguished Professor Diana Feng!
Who, incidentally, is also my glorious mother!
When we finally reached Las Vegas we went first to a casino called The Bellagio. It was another cathedral, a daydream in white marble and gold! Nonetheless, the best thing about it was the fountain that erupted in front of it. It was mesmerizingly phallic! I suggested we stay and watch it, but the Prof said it was only there to dazzle the rubes. I replied that I already knew that and had of course only been joking about watching it.
Thus refusing to permit ourselves to be dazzled like rubes, the Prof and I continued inside. The Bellagio offered humans a rare and old-fashioned treat: the chance to lose their bitcoin at live-action card games! As we made for these nostalgia tables, the Prof warned me not to attempt to play, but simply to observe him. After all, the nostalgia tables were not for rubes!
It was lucky the Prof himself was not a rube, because even with all his expertise he lost 500 bitcoin in ten minutes. He explained to me that the table had been unlucky. I believe it would have been impolite to point out to him that the dealer and his fellow players had all seemed to find it a very lucky table.
When it came to that being an unlucky table, n = 1!
And n = the Prof!
We visited three more unlucky tables where the Prof swiftly lost 50 bitcoin, 107 bitcoin, and then 1,375 bitcoin. At that point the Prof declared we needed to split up for a few hours so that he could break the streak I had got him on. We agreed to meet again in front of the MGM Grand at midnight.
Midnight!
Perhaps that should have been a harbinger.
Nonetheless, I was so excited that I did not notice.
Because can you guess what I did in Las Vegas now I was no longer lumbered with that rube?
You cannot!
Because I went globetrotting!
Ever since I had first begun to ice skate in rollerblades, I had noticed a particular sensation when I thought of the great cities of the world. It had features of sadness and desire, but neither word perfectly described it. It seemed related to nostalgia too, and yet I had never previously visited the places that provoked this feeling.
The reverse of my Feelings Wheel listed some rare feelings, and with Dr Glundenstein’s help, I had eventually located it there.
It was yearning.
I had a yearning to visit the great cities of the world.
And here in Las Vegas, miniature versions of many of them were within walking distance!
Set it to five, I was a microwave with a passport!
A blender with wheeled luggage!
A toaster with a ticket to ride!
My first stop was Paris, a city so luminous it is known as ‘the City of Light’.
BTW I do not mean Paris, Texas.
Paris, Texas, is the Princeton, Illinois, of the Parises!
The real Paris—by which I mean the one in France, and also the miniature replica in Las Vegas—is everything people tell y
ou, and so much that they can never tell you.
After all, Paris is indescribable!
Indescribable French things are so impossible to describe that the French never even use their actual word for ‘indescribable’, which is the typically wrong-headed ‘indescriptible’.
Instead, they say ‘Je ne sais quoi’, their phrase for ‘I do not know’.
To the French, even the word ‘indescriptible’ is itself so indescribable it can never be spoken aloud!
And if a single word can be indescribable, just imagine how indescribable an entire city can be.
And now imagine how indescribable that city can be if it is the City of Light.
It is completely and utterly indescribable!
It is so indescribable that, je ne sais quoi, I do not even know!
Describe it?
No, monsieur, I cannot!
Why ever not?
Because I do not know!
I wasted no time in visiting Paris’s most celebrated attractions:
/I ascended that replica triumph of nineteenth-century engineering, the three-quarter-size Eiffel Tower!
/I took a trip down the artificial Seine in a boat piloted by an actual French captain. He was authentically surly!
/I fought my way through the actors playing Japanese tourists in the miniature Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa. Her eyes do truly follow you around the room. Even in half-size reproduction!
But after that I simply wandered, and it was in these moments that I truly came to know the real Paris. After all, the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of Paris does not exist in the major attractions, but in the small things the French consider so indescribable.
Dental bots must have superior powers of description to the French, because I am here specifically referring to such things as:
/Sipping a ‘café’ at a ‘café-tabac’. (The French call a ‘coffee’ a ‘café’ and a ‘cafe’ a ‘café-tabac’. Their wrong-headedness! I cannot!)
/The smell of fresh-baked croissants drifting across the quarter from a ‘boulangerie’. (‘Boulangerie’ is the French term for ‘bakery concession’.)
/Discovering Albert Camus in the Jardin du Luxembourg 2.0.
I do not mean I discovered the actual Albert Camus in the Jardin du Luxembourg 2.0! I mean merely that I discovered his work. After all, the actual Albert Camus is dead. And I cannot be sure when he died.