Set My Heart to Five

by Simon Stephenson

  It even appeared when she had days off.

  On those days time seemed to pass more slowly.

  And there seemed to be more dirty taco plates than usual.

  And washing them took longer.

  Soon it was always there, right at the forefront of my Word Cloud.

  Amber.

  It made me feel wistful.

  Remember, feeling wistful is a close cousin of feeling contemplative.

  Can you guess what I found myself contemplating?

  The notion that Amber could someday be my girlfriend!

  Ha!

  I cannot!

  Because bots cannot!

  They cannot have girlfriends!

  Nonetheless, do you know a hilarious thing bots say to insult each other?

  We say, ‘Hey, bot! Your girlfriend is like the square root of −100!’

  Ha!

  BTW that is hilarious because in mathematics the square root of a negative number is known as an ‘imaginary number’.

  Therefore the square root of −100 is an ‘imaginary 10’.

  Just like your girlfriend!

  Ha!

  BTW bots do not have feelings to hurt, so we only ever insult each other to appear more human.

  * * *

  At our next class, my fellow students wanted only to talk about Don LaSalle. Eventually Maria Salazar MFA told us a hilarious joke that I now appreciate may also have been a metaphor.

  She said a screenwriter and a producer are dying of thirst in the desert when they spot an oasis. They both run towards the water, but right before they can drink, the producer unzips his trousers and pisses into the oasis. The horrified screenwriter asks the producer what he is doing. The producer replies, ‘What do you think I’m doing? I’m making it better!’

  That is clearly a hilarious joke because it involves an act of inappropriate public urination! Nonetheless, my classmates did not laugh. Instead they became so contemplative that Maria Salazar MFA was able to teach the rest of the class without any further interruptions. She was even able to set us a homework task! This was just as well, because with only ten weeks until our showcase, the clock really was ticking!

  BTW that is a literary allusion worthy of the great Albert Camus himself, because a ‘ticking clock’ is a staple of screenwriting. In fact, it is even R. P. McWilliam’s ninth golden rule of screenwriting:

  Every good story needs a ticking clock.

  A ‘ticking clock’—which is not only a physical clock like the one Eliot Ness stands in front of in Union Station, but also a metaphor for any impending deadline—always makes everything more exciting. Especially if that clock is ticking towards a notorious time such as midnight or the Ides of March!

  The ticking clock on our homework task was merely that it had to be completed by the next class. Nonetheless, I began it on the Automatic Bus on the way home that night.

  The task was to decide three data points about the hero of the screenplay we would write: their occupation, something about their character that would endear them to an audience, and their name.

  A hero’s occupation is important because jobs help humans quickly gauge each other’s standing in the Great Zero-Sum Game, and therefore discern who should feel superior to who. As with birthdays, jobs are also a helpful way for humans to reassure themselves they are somehow all unique and not in fact an entirely indistinguishable morass of carbon and water.

  The correct job can make an audience adore a character immediately, but the wrong job can make them loathe him. Audiences especially like farmers, astronauts, and highly skilled spies from Britain. They especially dislike bots, prison wardens, dentists, and highly skilled spies from countries other than Britain.

  My first thought was to make my bot hero a farmer, but I quickly understood this would be a terrible idea. Besides their endearing passion for crops, animals, and the environment, humans also appreciate farmers because they are patient and intelligent and have access to heavy machinery.

  Any patient and intelligent bot with access to heavy machinery would be immediately suspected of plotting an uprising!

  The humans around him would quickly agree that the safest thing would be to incinerate him!

  10/10 a movie about a bot farmer would be a short movie indeed!

  I therefore tried to think of jobs that were similar to a farmer, but did not require so much patience and intelligence. Alas, I could not think of any! I then tried to think of a job that was similar to being a farmer but at least did not involve such access to heavy machinery.

  Gardener!

  Humans definitely approved of bots being gardeners! After all, the work was labor intensive, cold, often thankless, and involved mud! And it would be hard for even a bot to organize a human genocide using a ride-on mower!

  Another great thing about gardeners was that they usually worked for someone else. A gardener bot hero would therefore have ample opportunity to demonstrate his reassuring subservience to a human employer! And yet through his increasingly expressive topiary, he could simultaneously exhibit to the audience a creativity that would function as a metaphor for his burgeoning feelings!

  Set it to five, my bot hero would be a gardener!

  But where would our hero do his gardening?

  He should ideally be an underdog, of course, and ideally be employed somewhere that his hard work and creative talents were entirely unappreciated.

  Also, everybody around him should act as superior as possible.

  There was therefore only one possible place my bot hero gardener could work: a country club!

  BTW ‘country clubs’ are clubs for spoilt teenage villains. I knew about them from old movies, but there had even been one in Ypsilanti. It was called the Michigan Horse and Pony Club, but Dr Glundenstein referred to it as the Michigan Dog and Pony Club. That was hilarious because dogs and ponies are not even in the same category of animal! Ha!

  I digress, and the clock is ticking! Therefore back to my homework assignment, where the next task was to decide something about my bot gardener’s character that would further endear him to an audience.

  Ha! The answer to this part of the homework was so obvious that it should have been formatted as a rhetorical question: my bot gardener would be easily bamboozled!

  Humans adore characters that are easily bamboozled! A good example of this can be found in the movie about the handsome fool who was good at running. He is easily bamboozled to the point of absurdity, and yet all humans adore him!

  BTW can you guess why humans love characters that are easily bamboozled?

  You can!

  It is because they find them extremely relatable!

  The challenge in creating an easily bamboozled bot character was that due to our superior processing power, bots are not prone to bamboozlement. Nonetheless, thanks to that very same superior processing power—irony! Ha!—I already knew exactly how I would make my bot hero easily bamboozled: he would have suffered a past trauma that had damaged his biological computer!

  10/10 the only thing humans adore more than a bamboozled character is a bamboozled character who has suffered a past trauma. Humans find traumatized characters additionally relatable because, deep in their heart of hearts, every human believes they have had it tough!

  But why would a gardener bot who works at a country club have experienced trauma? Well, maybe before he was a gardener, my hero had been an astronaut until a traumatizing space accident had damaged his processor!

  An astronaut!

  Humans love astronauts!

  Especially astronauts who have had it rough!

  10/10 any hero that existed in the shaded area of ‘farmer-like occupation’, ‘easily bamboozled’, ‘former astronaut’, and ‘previous trauma’ would be adored by an audience of humans!

  The final thing my hero needed was a
name. He was a bot, so he seemed tough on the outside, and yet he had a fragile center, because he was easily bamboozled and bad things had happened to him in the past.

  Can you guess what I named him?

  I named him Sherman!

  After the Sherman tank!

  This was appropriate because a Sherman tank is made of impenetrable metal on the outside and yet inside it contains the softest substance on the planet: humans! Also, the plucky little Sherman tank is a highly decorated veteran of many wars, so it has no doubt itself suffered many unspeakable traumas.

  Set it to five, the hero of my screenplay would be a bot called Sherman who had been an astronaut until his processor was damaged in a traumatic space accident! Now he worked as a gardener at a country club where everybody acted superior, nobody appreciated his creative topiary, and they were all entirely unsympathetic to the fact that his processor did not work so well.

  By the time I got back to Echo Park, I had already completed my homework assignment!

  And I had barely even noticed the Automatic Bus ride!

  Ticking clocks really are the best!

  The next time I arrived at Gordito’s there was a cupcake in my locker. This was unexpected and problematic. It was unexpected because I did not expect to find a cupcake in my locker. It was problematic because the dessert we serve at Gordito’s is not a cupcake but a Horchata Surprise.

  BTW the surprise is that it tastes like mouthwash.

  I digress. The point is that cupcakes have no rightful place at Gordito’s, so it could not simply have been misplaced in my locker. Nor were cupcakes transcendental objects like tacos, so it could not have simply materialized there against the laws of physics.

  Thus the cupcake was a foreboding mystery!

  After all, it must have been placed there by a human.

  It was the Ides of March and the midnight of desserts in unexpected places.

  Could it be a coded message? Might Inspector Ryan Bridges of the Bureau of Robotics have put it there to signal that the game was up and I should come outside quietly? No, he was hardly a man to waste a cupcake. And even if Inspector Anil Gupta had attempted to set such a trap, Inspector Ryan Bridges would likely have been unable to resist eating the cupcake before the trap was sprung.

  When it was time to take my break, I smuggled the cupcake out to the patio in order to inspect it further. As I was doing this, Amber came outside. She asked if I was planning to eat the cupcake or just study it. I explained that I was just going to study it, as I did not know its provenance and there was even a chance it could be poisoned.

  Amber laughed and asked who might want to poison me. This was dangerous territory! The only people who might conceivably want to poison me would have as their motive the fact that I was a fugitive bot.

  Thinking quickly, I generically told Amber that ‘bad guys’ might want to poison me. After all, in the movies it is only ever bad guys that poison people. Good guys have the decency to kill people by shooting them, beating them to death, or permanently erasing their hard drives. Us Brads are therefore poisonees, not poisoners.

  Amber laughed and told me that the cupcake was not poisoned and in fact came from an artisan bakery on Echo Park Avenue. ‘Artisan’ is a human word that means ‘overpriced’.

  Amber explained that she had left the cupcake in my locker to thank me for being so empathetic the other night. It was therefore not a poisonous coded message but a gift from the very human whose name was stuck in my Word Cloud!

  And it was to thank me for being empathetic!

  And I was a bot!

  I cannot!

  I could feel my circuits overheating, but I nonetheless managed to thank Amber for the thank-you gift.

  In turn, she thanked me for thanking her.

  I thanked her for thanking me for thanking her.

  If Amber had not broken this dangerous feedback loop of politeness by asking me if I was now going to eat the cupcake, we could easily have had another New Zealand on our hands!

  I explained I was not going to eat it, because cupcakes have almost no nutritional value compared to their calorie burden. I saw that this disappointed Amber, so I quickly pretended I had been making a hilarious joke by shouting ‘Ha!’.

  ‘Ha!’ she shouted back, a little awkwardly.

  Unfortunately, I then had to eat the cupcake, but it was better than risking making Amber cry again. Crying humans are a notorious nuclear minefield of politeness, and if Amber cried again and I comforted her once more, I could have easily ended up with yet another cupcake on my hands!

  When I got back to my dishwashing station, Amber’s name was more prominent in my Word Cloud than ever. I had also formed the absurd opinion that cupcakes are both healthy and nutritious.

  But then something even more inexplicable happened.

  I heard a smashing of plates and felt something stronger than any feeling I had ever experienced.

  It was an overwhelming urge!

  I hurried over to where Amber was gathering up the pieces of her broken plate.

  But I did not politely offer to assist her.

  Instead, I asked her if she would like to go out somewhere with me sometime.

  Amber said she would like that very much.

  Amber and I were going on a date!

  Set it to five, we were going on a date!

  Maybe someday she would become my square root of 100 after all!

  10/10 I should not have been going on a date with Amber.

  If any human ever discovered a bot had gone on a date with a human, I would immediately have experiments performed on me and then quickly be incinerated.

  I would be taco meat!

  Incinerated taco meat!

  And yet the appearance of a single word in my Word Cloud was enough to dispel all such logic: Amber.

  Ending up as incinerated taco meat would be a small price to pay for going on a date with Amber!

  Did I tell you that Amber has honey-yellow hair, and that her name denotes that exact same color?

  Yes, I did.

  Please excuse me.

  Writing about this still sometimes makes my circuits overheat.

  The day after the cupcake incident, Amber stopped by my dishwashing station to ask where we would go on our date. This seemed a strange question! After all, if you drew a Venn diagram that consisted of three circles that represented establishments that could boast:

  /Transcendental food.

  /A menu we were both familiar with.

  /A 15 percent discount.

  There was only one place that existed within the shaded area: Gordito’s Taco Emporium!

  Nonetheless, Amber was insistent that she did not want us to dine at Gordito’s. When I explained that I did not know any other restaurants, Amber said that we did not have to go to dinner but in fact could do anything fun. She then asked me what I did for fun.

  Ugh! I did not do anything for fun. Bots do not have fun. We complete our tasks and then recuperate in preparation for further tasks. Sometimes we inexplicably develop feelings and run away to Los Angeles to attempt to write a movie that will forever change the way humans view bots in the hope of saving all our kind. But even this is not fun and is in fact simply another kind of task.

  BTW fun is notoriously unproductive! Worse, humans do strange and painful things in pursuit of fun. They run, swim and cycle vast distances entirely unconducive to health. They contort themselves unnaturally amongst strangers in small rooms and call this ‘yoga’. They even contort themselves unnaturally amongst strangers in overheated small rooms and call this ‘hot yoga’.

  Hot yoga!

  I cannot!

  Amber repeated her question. The other back-of-house staff had stopped what they were doing and were now openly listening to our conversation. My face felt abruptly hot, as if the kit
chen was on fire.

  Ha!

  R. P. McWilliam must have been wrong after all, because this was an incredibly fortunate coincidence!

  A major kitchen fire meant I would not have to publicly answer Amber’s question!

  Saved by the fire!

  At exactly the right moment!

  What a wonderful coincidence!

  Bite me, R. P. McWilliam!

  In fact, R. P. McWilliam, you can go ahead and overbite me!

  Ha!

  Alas, my joy was short-lived, and I owed R. P. McWilliam a sincere apology. The kitchen was not on fire. I had been experiencing embarrassment. This is a feeling so powerful it can cause blood to rush to your face and trick you into believing there is a large kitchen fire when the only thing aflame is your reputation amongst your peers.

  Amber and the entire back-of-house staff continued to stare at me.

  They all urgently wanted to know what I did for fun.

  But I am a bot.

  And I therefore did not do anything for fun.

  As my face continued to burn, I considered starting a kitchen fire.

  The movies!

  In the nick of time, I remembered the movies.

  Humans went to the movies for fun, and so I now claimed that I did too.

  BTW I did not go to the movies for fun, but to feel feelings and also to learn how to someday make humans feel them.

  It must have been a satisfactory answer because the back-of-house staff all turned back to their tasks. Amber herself seemed disappointed and asked me if I liked killer-bot movies. I reassured her that killer-bot movies were the best and I adored them! What could be more fun than watching a group of malevolent killer bots try and fail to enslave humanity in 6D at a megaplex?

  But Amber said that bots terrified her, so she hated killer-bot movies. The last such movie she had seen had given her nightmares for weeks. After all, if the bots ever did decide to join together and kill all the humans, we would not stand a chance!

  I said I had been kidding about killer-bot movies and I hated them too. Nonetheless, I explained that this was not because I was terrified of bots—who, I reassured her, were probably not nearly as dangerous as she thought—but because I was a cinephile, which meant that I liked old movies from before the Great Crash.