Set My Heart to Five

by Simon Stephenson

  What?

  JARED

  Get out of here! Run!

  JARED THE BOT

  But where do I go?

  JARED

  The Bureau of Robotics. They will wipe you, but it is better than this, right?

  The bot stares at Jared, then turns and runs for the fence.

  As Jared watches, the bot reaches then climbs over the fence.

  The drunks on their dune buggies arrive, the Prof amongst them.

  THE PROF

  Roomie! What happened?

  JARED

  He outwitted me and got away.

  DRUNK GUY

  Dogammit!

  The Prof puts a sympathetic arm around Jared.

  THE PROF

  Don’t beat yourself up, roomie. These bots are sneaky sons of bitches.

  We slept that night in one of the worst hotels in Las Vegas and then took the Automatic Bus back to Kingman. The Prof was sick and becoming ever more so. He had a ‘hangover’, which is the term humans use to describe the symptoms of self-poisoning with alcohol.

  BTW do you know which other species aside from humans regularly poison themselves in the name of fun?

  Ha!

  That was a trick question!

  No other species regularly poison themselves in the name of fun.

  Not even the notoriously life-ambivalent panda!

  By the time we boarded The Ruins of Empire II in Kingman that evening, the Prof had turned green. I therefore asked him if he had any last requests. When a human is dying it is polite to offer them a last request, even though they will likely request a miracle and a miracle is by definition a scientific impossibility.

  The Prof said that his last request was for peace and quiet. He was being intentionally impolite, but I forgave him because no doubt he was not thinking straight due to dying from self-poisoning. I granted him his last request and went to the observation car. That is where I was when I heard the conductor announce that we were now entering California.

  California!

  Some words have a resonance to humans beyond their literal meaning. ‘California’ is one such word. To humans, ‘California’ does not signify merely a geographical region but a great many ideas, images, stereotypes, and prejudices. These associations even vary from human to human.

  No wonder bots struggle with language!

  Do you know who should have been put in charge of writing the dictionary?

  The great Albert Camus!

  If only Albert Camus had been in charge, the word ‘California’ would have signified only the 163,696 mi2 area defined by its borders.

  Alas, nobody had the foresight to put Albert Camus in charge of writing the dictionary.

  Consequently, ‘California’ now meant different things to different people.

  To some humans, California is dark green pine trees and snow-capped white mountains and golden beaches and blue oceans. It is endless orchards of perfect fruit trees and all the pretty neon stars set into the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard. It is the majestic red girders of the Golden Gate Bridge in front of the almost equally stunning Pacific Ocean. To many of these humans, California is a place so perfect that they feel an overwhelming urge to travel there and pursue their clearly impossible dreams.

  Yet to a great many other humans, California is a different kind of place entirely! It is a den of technological iniquity. It is a land where nothing and nobody is real anymore. It is the source and symbol of everything that is wrong with this world. To the humans for whom the word resonates this way, half of Californians earn their living manufacturing killer sky bots, and the other half earn their living making movies about the dangers of killer sky bots!

  California is therefore a paradox, and as our train crossed the state line, I did not know how to feel. I took out my Feelings Wheel and studied it. I could identify notes of ‘excited’, ‘lonely’, ‘sentimental’, and ‘confused’, but there seemed to be no word for the exact feeling I had at that moment.

  Perhaps I was the first to ever feel it!

  Maybe I was a pioneer, like so many others who had come out to California before me!

  Of course, many of them had failed.

  Some of them had succeeded too.

  But most had failed.

  California can be tough like that.

  I noticed then that I was also feeling contemplative.

  Yet I still could not identify the primary feeling I had.

  California can be mysterious like that.

  As the Prof had not succumbed to his hangover, he disembarked at Needles, California. I was sorry to see him go. He was the best friend I had ever had in the states of Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and now California. Not only that, he was also the only person I had ever known in the states of Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and now California. And despite everything—his uneducated bluster, his cumbersome size, and his unfounded prejudice against bots—well, I sure was going to miss the son of a bitch!

  BTW I am not being impolite by calling the Prof a ‘son of a bitch’. Although when applied to a human that phrase is primarily a genetically impossible insult, it can also be a term of endearment. I learned this from the Prof himself. Before he disembarked, he hugged me so tight I thought I might pass out, and then he said, ‘Roomie, I’m sure going to miss you, you old son of a bitch. Look me up in the old college town sometime and we’ll go and shoot ourselves a bot!’

  So we were both sons of bitches, and I had learned a new way to express admiration and friendship!

  But the Prof still thinks his town is the academic Princeton.

  Whereas in reality it does not even boast so much as a phallic water tower.

  It is therefore unlikely I will ever have cause to be there and ‘look him up’.

  And even if I do, we will never ‘go and shoot ourselves a bot’.

  All the same, I sure would miss the old son of a bitch!

  Without that son of a bitch the Prof around to cause any further trouble, the rest of the journey passed without incident. The Ruins of Empire II pulled in to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles a little after eight o’clock in the evening.

  BTW the railroad station in Los Angeles really is called ‘Union Station’, the exact same name that the station in Chicago is called.

  Humans!

  I cannot!

  Nonetheless, the two Union Stations were quite different. For one thing, if any great old movies had been filmed in Los Angeles’ Union Station, I had not seen them. For another, it would be quite impossible to make a film there now.

  Unless that film was a zombie film!

  In Los Angeles’ Union Station, strange and unhappy humans wandered tremulously everywhere. Their clothes were old and unclean, their shoes were unmatched, and they did not speak much, except to mumble to one another. Unlike movie zombies, they were entirely devoid of threat and menace, and yet there were so many of them it took me a full ten minutes to reach the great hall. Another surprise awaited me there.

  10/10—tent/tent, Ha!—I had never seen so many tents as there were in the great hall of Los Angeles’ Union Station! If they had been colored like the tents in advertisements in the magazines in the waiting room at Ypsilanti Downtown Dentistry, they would have formed a spectacular multicolor patchwork!

  But they were not colored like the tents in magazines, because they were no longer new. Also, they were not set against sunlight-dappled forest glades but in a decaying railroad station. Above them, a giant sign hanging from the roof declared:

  Welcome to Los Angeles. Welcome to the Future!

  But even this sign itself was old and faded.

  If Los Angeles had ever been the future, it was now the past.

  But the incorrect sign was not even the worst of it.

  The worst of it was that none of thes
e humans had any future at all.

  And they all knew it, and they were now all heartbroken.

  These poor heartbroken humans!

  They had each been born with a perfectly working heart, and inside that, a precious heart of hearts.

  But somewhere along the way they had been compelled to use those hearts for things they had not been intended for, and that had damaged and broken them.

  After all, things always quickly fall apart if they are used for a purpose other than the one they are intended for.

  A tent, for instance, was intended as a temporary shelter to use for a night or two on a hiking adventure.

  A railroad station was intended as a place you took a train from to travel for work, to visit a distant loved one, or to go on vacation.

  But most of all, a human heart was intended to soar.

  It was never intended to live in a tent inside a railroad station in Los Angeles.

  BTW I regret now making the tent/tent joke and even ever mentioning zombie films. There was nothing funny about any of this.

  Truly, it is no wonder that humans live in such perpetual fear of losing the Great Zero-Sum Game! After all, when a human loses badly at the Great Zero-Sum Game, he does not merely get to play golf and end up sitting beside a bot on the Automatic Bus to Detroit. He ends up heartbroken and living in a tent in Union Station in Los Angeles.

  The sight of so many heartbroken humans and their faded tents generated in me a feeling worse even than the one I’d had back in the namesake Union Station in Chicago.

  I took out my Feelings Wheel.

  Of course, it was another D-word feeling.

  Despondent.

  I was feeling despondent.

  In the Union Station in Chicago, I had reassured myself that I merely needed to think like a human and everything would either definitely or certainly come good. But these people were all humans, and no doubt they had all once made plans as big as Daniel Burnham.

  And what had all this bold human thinking and planning got them?

  A tent in Los Angeles’ Union Station beneath a sign that erroneously welcomed them to the future.

  And if so many humans had failed in this past city of future dreams, what possible chance might I have?

  I was a set of wireless headphones with ambitions but no network.

  A microwave with desire but no cable.

  An electric foot-bath with dreams but no water.

  I was a toaster learning to rollerblade in the middle of a melting frozen lake.

  Maybe Dr Glundenstein had been right about my chance of making it in the movies.

  Maybe the humans who viewed California as a desert of broken dreams were all correct.

  Maybe I too would soon be living in a faded tent beneath a sign that said ‘Welcome to the Future!’

  Maybe I would be the world’s first real-life zombie bot.

  No cleaning solvents had been used in Union Station for a long time, but I produced 36ml of tears.

  I pushed my way outside.

  It was only when I got there that I realized another problem.

  I did not have anywhere to go.

  Not even a tent.

  My first night in Los Angeles was spent walking the streets around Union Station, searching for a hotel that did not insist on a barcode. I did not find one.

  My second night in Los Angeles was spent on Venice Beach. I equally would not recommend this. You cannot even see the Pacific Ocean at night, and I was so cold I left before sunrise.

  My third to seventh nights in Los Angeles were spent in the Hotel Pyongyang in North Koreatown. I would not recommend this either, unless the two circles on your Venn diagram of accommodation requirements are ‘Cheap’ and ‘No Barcode Required’. In that particular situation, the Hotel Pyongyang sits right in the shaded area!

  There is also little danger of your fellow Hotel Pyongyang guests reporting you to the authorities. After all, they are most likely staying there because they cannot use their barcodes either. It is not like anybody would stay at the Hotel Pyongyang by choice!

  But the reason my fellow Pyongyanganders—Ha!—could not use their barcodes was not because they had felt emotions inappropriately. After all, they were humans and allowed to feel whatever emotions they wished. No, what they had done was inappropriately acted on these emotions:

  /They had stolen!

  /They had assaulted!

  /They had consumed narcotics!

  /They had serial killed!

  Perhaps it is statistically unlikely they were serial killers. Nonetheless, my fellow Pyongyanganders had undoubtedly committed many crimes, and yet I found them no different from any other cohort of humans. In fact, when compared to my patients at Ypsilanti Downtown Dentistry, my fellow Pyongyanganders were consistently more pleasant and well mannered.

  Humans!

  Politeness!

  I cannot!

  I was allocated a room on the thirteenth floor. I soon discovered that my floormates were not short-term guests but permanent residents. This was not as undesirable for them as it might seem. After all:

  Home > Hotel Room > Tent.

  Yet there was a confounding variable: the Hotel Pyongyang was not merely where my thirteenth floormates lived, but also their workplace.

  I do not mean they were employed by the Hotel Pyongyang, but that they utilized their rooms to have intimate relations with other humans in exchange for bitcoin. Sometimes these relations became so noisy that their customers seemed to be in distress! Nonetheless, I did not inform reception. The incident with the boats on Lake Michigan had taught me that humans sometimes enjoy being distressed!

  I myself was also experiencing D-word feelings, but I did not find them remotely enjoyable. I had come to Los Angeles to write a movie that changed the way humans felt about bots. But without a barcode I could not so much as take a driverless uber! I also could not work, and that meant my bitcoin would run out quickly. After all, even the Hotel Pyongyang existed in the circle labelled ‘cheap’, not in the circle labelled ‘free’.

  It was a perplexing problem with no clear solution.

  I therefore did the only thing that I could.

  I went to the movies.

  Whereas in Detroit only the Grand and Majestic Theaters had not yet burned down, Los Angeles had so many theaters you could see a new old movie every night of the week. Better yet, there was even an old movie theater almost next door to the Hotel Pyongyang!

  Guess what the very first movie I saw in Los Angeles was about?

  It was about my old friend Eliot Ness, and how he had given up law enforcement to become a farmer!

  It was an unexpected career change, but you could hardly blame him.

  After all, he had risked a great deal to defeat Al Capone, and then afterwards the government had immediately lifted the alcohol ban anyway!

  Ha!

  BTW that is hilarious because it was not really Eliot Ness who had given it all up to become a farmer at all.

  It was the actor who played Eliot Ness.

  Ha!

  BTW that is even more hilarious because the actor had not actually given it all up to become a farmer either! He was simply now playing yet another role—the role of a farmer!

  10/10 human actors are very versatile! They are able to metamorphose from a federal agent to a farmer simply by getting a haircut and changing their clothes. The only way you could ever possibly know they are still in fact the same person is that their face and voice both remain identical.

  It was wise of the actor to choose to play a farmer, because farmers make more beloved heroes than even federal agents or running fools. This is because all humans secretly believe they would make excellent farmers. Of course, this is paradoxical, because farmers have noble intentions, work hard, and care deeply about crops and an
imals and the environment. 10/10 those are not common human attributes!

  The farmer suffered from auditory hallucinations, the hallmark of a serious human illness called schizophrenia. The bot equivalent of schizophrenia would be if random words appeared in your Word Cloud and you unquestioningly believed they related to genuine tasks. A bot with schizophrenia might therefore travel to Tanzania, even though he had no actual business there.

  Ugh, Tanzania is the worst!

  Schizophrenia is also the worst!

  Tanzania and schizophrenia are the joint worst!

  I digress. At the beginning of the film, the heroic farmer experienced an auditory hallucination that told him:

  If you build it, he will come.

  The voice was obviously human, because it was so enigmatic that neither ‘it’ nor ‘he’ were defined. Nonetheless, the farmer soon deduced what the voice had meant. The ‘it’ referred to a baseball diamond in his cornfield, and the ‘he’ was a disgraced dead baseball player. The voice had therefore meant:

  If you build a baseball diamond in your cornfield, a disgraced dead player will come.

  When the farmer announced his intention to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, his neighbors assumed he had gone insane. It would be against the laws of physics for a disgraced dead baseball player to appear and, anyway, who even wanted one in their cornfield? Farmers were supposed to care deeply about crops and animals and the environment, not about sporting zombies of ill repute!

  Nonetheless, the farmer went ahead and built a baseball diamond in his cornfield.

  Guess what happened?

  You cannot!

  Because it is ridiculous!

  What happened is he came!

  And he brought all his teammates with him!

  The movie thus culminated with a baseball game on the diamond in the cornfield, wherein all the disgraced dead sporting zombies redeemed themselves. This silenced the voice in the farmer’s head, curing his schizophrenia and thereby changing him forever.

  I experienced a good catharsis, and cried over 29ml of tears.

  Nonetheless, I felt cheated! The movie’s claim that ‘if you build it, he will come’ was obviously meant as a metaphor the audience could apply to other aspects of their lives even if they did not possess a cornfield in which to build a baseball diamond. The implication was that we all simply had to choose to construct something entirely impractical, and then the unlikely thing we desired would occur.