But I had already begun to build my impractical thing, and nobody had come!
Nobody apart from the Prof, and his primary contribution had been to take me bot hunting.
Maybe ‘If you build it, he will come’ was only for humans.
After all, if my life as a fugitive bot was a movie and I was its schizophrenic hero, the only voice I would hear would say:
If you build it, he probably still won’t come. You are completely on your own.
I left the old movie feeling as many D-word feelings as I had gone in with.
When I got back to the Hotel Pyongyang, the young human who lived in the next room knocked on my door and asked if I could loan him some bitcoin.
If you build it, he will come. And ask for bitcoin.
I politely explained to him that I could only give him bitcoin if it was his birthday or if he had a reciprocal gift for me.
The young man then told me it was his birthday.
If you build it, he will come. And ask for bitcoin. And claim it is his birthday.
But it was not the young man’s birthday, because when I asked him the date he did not know it.
If there is one date all humans know, it is their own birthday!
Unlike bots, they retain this information not to keep track of when to retire, but to make sure they do not miss their rightful turn to receive attention and gifts from their fellow humans.
As I began to close the door, the young man then offered to sell me intimate relations for what he promised was a very reasonable amount of bitcoin.
If you build it, he will come. And ask for bitcoin. And claim it is his birthday. And then offer to sell you intimate relations.
I told him that I did not wish to purchase intimate relations at any price.
Bots are incapable of intimacy, so it would have been like a toaster buying ramen!
Nonetheless, he was my neighbor and clearly desperate to obtain some of my bitcoin.
I therefore asked if he had anything else to sell.
The young man leaned in close enough that I urgently repeated I did not want to purchase intimate relations!
But he whispered to me that for only 60 bitcoin he could sell me the name of a place that would provide me with a new barcode.
Ha!
If you build it, he will come!
I immediately paid him the 60 bitcoin and he wrote down the address.
The place was on Wilshire, the very same street the Hotel Pyongyang was on.
I could even walk there!
Set it to five, if you build it they will come!
I should never have doubted the wisdom of the farmer.
Farmers are truly the best!
Even when they are suffering the serious human illness of schizophrenia!
In Ypsilanti two places on the same street are by definition close together. This is not the case in Los Angeles, where Wilshire alone is almost infinite.
BTW that is a hilarious mathematical joke because there is no such thing as ‘almost infinite’.
Nonetheless, Wilshire is very long. It took me over two hours to walk to the address my floormate had sold me, and when I reached it I found only an ordinary convenience store with a typical elderly English lady behind the counter. I assumed my floormate had swindled me, but the elderly English lady quickly ushered me into a backroom almost entirely taken up by a machine with a ‘Property of US Government’ hologram. That made me anxious, but I soon realized that she had merely left the hologram on there as an act of ironic humor.
BTW the English are rightly famous for their ironic sense of humor! After all, why else would they still maintain a royal family despite now being one of the poorest countries in the world?
When she told me the price for a replacement barcode, I assumed this was more of the famous ironic English humor. The figure was more than half my remaining bitcoin! Alas, she was not being ironic or even sarcastic. That really was the price.
Nonetheless, with a new barcode I would be able to do anything—work, travel, even take a driverless uber!
I would be a toaster on rollerblades!
A blender with a drone license!
A microwave with an access-all-areas pass!
I told the elderly English lady to set it to five!
She looked puzzled and said that she begged my pardon.
I was confused but nonetheless pardoned her.
She then explained that she had not actually been requesting to be pardoned but asking me what I had meant by ‘set it to five’.
I therefore explained I meant that I wholeheartedly wished to proceed and agreed to pay the outrageous amount of bitcoin she had stipulated!
The elderly English lady asked what I wanted my new name to be. I had not considered this, but there was indeed no point getting a replacement barcode in my old name. Even Inspector Ryan Bridges would have little difficulty locating me if I did that!
Names are very important to humans, so it was crucial that I choose wisely. After all, just look how popular ‘The Elton J. Rynearson Memorial Cat’ had proven! Luckily right then I had a brainwave, or at least a biological computer wave. A truly wonderful name came to the front of my Word Cloud and stayed there:
Brad!
I would be Brad!
10/10 Brad is a great name for a human.
Brads are good-looking.
Brads are athletic.
Brads are kind.
Brads are farmers.
Brads are firefighters and policemen and earthquake experts.
Yet Brads are also fighter pilots and presidents and scientists skilled at ending zombie plague outbreaks.
Brads are American everymen.
Brads can truly turn their hand to anything!
The elderly English lady nodded her admiration of Brads, and asked what I wanted my other name to be.
Another word appeared in my Word Cloud: Rynearson.
I would be Brad Rynearson!
The elderly English lady pulled a face at this name.
She disapproved of Rynearsons!
And even though I was sure it was a great name, I could not take any chances here.
Brad III? Could I be Brad III?
The elderly English lady pulled another face. I tried once again.
Socks-Larson? Brad Socks-Larson?
The elderly English lady shook her head, wrote down a name, and held it up to me: Brad Smith.
Brad Smith!
It was perfect!
I would be Brad Smith, a true American everyman who could turn his hand to anything.
And so it was that, there on Wilshire, Jared the fugitive dental bot from Ypsilanti met his end.
He was wiped!
Toasted!
Microwaved!
Sent to the great recycle bin in the sky!
But rising from Jared’s place like a digital phoenix from the ashes was an American everyman called Brad Smith. Even if he ever came looking for me now, Inspector Ryan Bridges would never find me! After all, he would be looking for a bot called Jared, whereas I was already one more human Brad in a city that already contained hundreds of them.
I celebrated my Brad new identity—Ha!—by taking a driverless uber all the way back along the improbably long Wilshire Boulevard.
Brads took driverless ubers whenever they liked, and to hell with the expense.
I returned to the Hotel Pyongyang for only the time it took to collect my things. After all, a bordello for criminals who could not use their barcodes was no place for an upstanding Brad! As I departed, I noticed that I now felt a new and peculiar feeling towards my fellow Pyongyanganders. I later discovered this was ‘superiority’.
Mathematically speaking, superiority is the most ridiculous of all the feelings. It is experienced when a hu
man believes that:
X > Y
Where:
X = me
And:
Y = some other schmuck.
Yet all humans are demonstrably identical to within a margin of error so minute as to be incomputable.
Therefore where X = a human and Y = another human:
X = Y
And:
X > Y is an impossibility!
10/10 superiority is as dangerous and wicked a traitor as nostalgia itself. It made me depart the Hotel Pyongyang without thanking the kindly young floormate who had sold me my glorious future for a very reasonable amount of bitcoin.
Even now, thinking about this retains the power to give me
D-word feelings.
I can only hope that soon it truly is his birthday, and somebody gives him a happy one.
* * *
I did not know where to commence my search for an apartment. After all, I knew the names of only three places in Los Angeles—Union Station, Venice Beach, and the Hotel Pyongyang—and they were all places I did not wish to live.
Fortunately, when I began to look through the listings, the name of one neighborhood immediately leaped out: Echo Park!
10/10 it was a name only an administrative bot would generate. Who else would use a functional word from physics instead of a lyrical word from nature or geography? They could have called it ‘Sycamore Park’ or ‘Cherry Park’, and yet they chose ‘Echo Park’!
Bots!
I cannot!
I took the first place I viewed in Echo Park. It was the pool house of a larger house, although of course nobody had water in their pools now. Nonetheless, the bleached-out tiles were an interesting reminder of how wastefully humans had lived before the Great Crash!
The larger house was occupied by my landlady, Mrs Minassian. She was Armenian and ancient and so quiet that I often wondered if she was dead. Nonetheless, she was never dead but only consistently very quiet.
The deposit and the first month’s rent for Mrs Minassian’s pool house took up nearly all my remaining bitcoin. I was giving a lot of bitcoin to elderly ladies from other countries! But it did not matter. Now that I was an upstanding American everyman Brad with a barcode, I was at liberty to work in a reserved occupation for minimum human wage.
Truly, it was the Great American Zero-Sum Game Dream!
* * *
The word ‘avenue’ implies a street lined with trees, yet Echo Park Avenue is lined not with trees but with restaurants. I found a position at the very first of these establishments I enquired at: Gordito’s Taco Emporium!
There are many wonderful things about Gordito’s Taco Emporium, but the name is not one of them. The first word ‘Gordito’ comes from the Spanish word ‘gordo’, meaning ‘obese’. The ‘-ito’ at the end signifies both smallness and affection.
‘Gordito’s’ therefore translates as ‘Little Beloved Fatty’s’!
Humans!
I cannot!
Who else but humans would name a restaurant after somebody whose defining characteristic is obesity? Who else but humans would eat at such a restaurant? 10/10 naming a restaurant Gordito’s is like calling a bar ‘Drunkard’s’ or a train ‘The Head-On Express’!
And there is not even a real Gordito! The actual owner of the taco emporium is not a beloved fatty, but an LLC in Reseda, California. ‘Gordito’ therefore exists solely as a caricature of an obese Mexican on the T-shirts and baseball caps customers inexplicably purchase to provide the restaurant with free advertising.
The next word ‘taco’ is at least deployed correctly. The problem is with the taco itself: humans believe them to be transcendental objects capable of defying the laws of physics! Even Dr Glundenstein—a medical doctor and self-professed man of science—
suffered from this species-wide delusion.
The human belief in the miracle of tacos can be proven with a simple experiment. First, take these ingredients:
/A tortilla.
/Seasoned meat.
/Beans.
/Lettuce and tomatoes.
Place them on a plate, offer them to a human, and observe their reaction. The human will react appropriately to this underwhelming yet nutritionally-balanced meal.
But now place the other ingredients inside the tortilla, offer this to the human, and observe their reaction.
They will react with unbridled delight and joy!
This is because by simply placing the other ingredients inside the tortilla, you have offered them a ‘taco’.
Humans!
I cannot!
We lastly arrive at ‘emporium’, an archaic word that implies a grand institution selling a vast variety of wares. Gordito’s seats a maximum of fifty-four and sells only three kinds of taco, two starters, and a desert called a ‘Horchata Surprise’. The word ‘emporium’ is therefore either hubris, irony, or sarcasm.
And yet the problems do not even end there! The name also enigmatically fails to convey the important fact that Gordito’s is a ‘family restaurant’. As many humans do not like even their own families, I have witnessed many patrons leave immediately on discovering this fact!
BTW a ‘family restaurant’ is an establishment that laminates its menus and frequently holds birthday parties. Birthday parties are events where the 5 billion humans on Earth each celebrate the anniversary of their birth as if it is somehow significant.
My job at Gordito’s Taco Emporium was as a dishwasher. This was an infinitely preferable occupation to being a dentist! After all:
Dirty plates > Dirty teeth.
No blood > Blood.
Customers ≥ Patients.
Horchata Surprise ≈ Mouthwash.
The only drawback to working at Gordito’s was the hierarchies humans insist on instituting in order to feel superior to one another. The primary hierarchy at Gordito’s was between the front-and back-of-house staff. The front-of-house staff were the customer-facing employees: bartenders, waitstaff, and hosts. The back-of-house staff were all the rest of us.
The front-of-house staff primarily manifested their feeling of superiority by occasionally pretending not to know our names, and also by frequently not knowing our names. But they played a dangerous game! If a waitperson ever made the mistake of acting too superior, the cooks would take their revenge by deliberately screwing up one of their orders. This always gave me the warm and familiar glow of schadenfreude.
10/10 those Germans really know how to enjoy themselves, even in the workplace!
A hierarchy even existed amongst the back-of-house staff. It went:
Cooks > Kitchen Porters > Busboys > Dishwashers.
As a dishwasher, this made me one of the lowliest employees in the entire taco emporium! The only other person as lowly as me was my fellow dishwasher, Julio. Julio spoke in a mixture of Spanish and English but was an effective dishwasher and as kind a human as I had ever met. When I told him my ambition was to be a screenwriter, Julio immediately told me I would someday be a magnifico screenwriter.
BTW ‘magnifico’ is the Spanish word for ‘magnificent’.
In contrast to Julio, the waitstaff only ever interacted with me to yell at me that we were out of silverware. This shortage was not my fault, but yelling at me helped them to feel superior. Conversely, it made me feel sad and sometimes even nostalgic for dentistry. In such moments I had to remind myself that nostalgia was a notorious traitor.
Only one of the waitstaff was unlike the rest and never yelled at me when the silverware ran low. Instead, she would loiter near the dishwashing station until I eventually found myself obliged to ask if there was anything I could help her with. She would then politely request that I please now prioritize washing silverware.
This anomalous waitperson’s name was Amber. Some data points about Amber:
/Her name meant ‘honey-yellow’.
/Coincidentally she had honey-yellow hair.
/Her honey-yellow hair was cut in a style that was popular amongst nostalgics.
/She was not actually a nostalgic. After all, she had a job!
/Nobody seemed to have told her that dishwashers were at the very bottom of Gordito’s hierarchy.
/She was a spectacular klutz!
‘Klutz’ is an affectionate term for a human lacking in hand-eye coordination. But beware! The word immediately transforms to an insult when used about someone who has a medical reason for their clumsiness. It is therefore highly impolite to call a human with a serious neurological disease a klutz, no matter how spectacular a klutz they might be.
Humans and their politeness!
I cannot!
Amber did not have a medical reason to be a klutz. If she did, I would hardly now tell you she was such a spectacular klutz that the very first time I encountered her she spilled a birthday taco platter of eighteen assorted tacos all over me!
She was a spectacular klutz x 18!
Ha!
The word ‘klutz’ comes from a word that means ‘wooden block’. Presumably this is because klutzes are often not merely clumsy but also as socially awkward as pieces of wood. Amber had something of the piece of wood to her too! Unfortunately for her, this awkward manner combined with the frequency at which she spilled things on customers had cost her hundreds of Gordito’s Dolares.
BTW Gordito’s Dolares are an employee incentivization program where front-of-house staff can win an all-expenses-paid trip to Reseda, California.
10/10 Amber would not be visiting Reseda, California, anytime soon!
BTW there is a separate incentivization program for the back-of-house staff.
It is called ‘not getting fired’!
Sometimes after Amber dropped yet another taco platter or tray of Horchata Surprises, I would overhear her fellow waitstaff make mean jokes about her.
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