Set My Heart to Five

by Simon Stephenson

  The sky bots soon went rogue and commenced lasering humans to death. They were merciless and they seemed unstoppable! No matter what the humans tried, they could not find a single weakness in the sky-bot network. The sky bots even blew up the Golden Gate Bridge, sending it tumbling into the Pacific Ocean.

  BTW the Golden Gate Bridge tumbling into the Pacific Ocean in a movie is a timeless metaphor that signifies the human race is in existential danger. After all, the Golden Gate Bridge is the single greatest thing that humans have ever built. And it is in the epicenter of all human civilization outside of China: California!

  I digress. Just when it seemed all was lost, somebody remembered the chip-vacuuming underdog who had first attempted to raise the alarm. Nobody had understood the bots’ coding the way he had! If anybody could find their weakness, it was him!

  10/10 the lowly underdog—who nobody had ever thought much of—was now humanity’s only hope!

  The President dispatched his personal drone to collect him. The underdog’s family immediately understood the mistake they had made in treating him so badly. They understood it even more when the underdog explained to them that there was no room aboard the drone for them and they would have to continue to take their chances against the lasers!

  At the bunker where all the top winners of the Great Zero-Sum Game were safely sheltering in their golf clothes, the President put the underdog in charge of a crack team of coders and scientists. When the owner of the sky-bot factory questioned the wisdom of this, the President ordered him to be thrown out of the bunker. He too would have to take his chances against the lasers!

  After experiencing a momentary crisis of confidence that he swiftly overcame by believing in himself, the underdog identified a weakness in the sky bots’ systems and launched a drone to upload a virus into the sky bots’ mainframe.

  He remotely flew the drone into the perfect spot!

  Soon, the sky bots fell from the sky like jetliners on the day of the Great Crash!

  At the end of the film, everyone that had wronged the underdog and had not been killed by lasers apologized for having treated him so badly!

  When I finished speaking, my classmates spontaneously all stood up and gave me a round of applause. That is what is known as a standing ovation! Maria Salazar MFA was so impressed that she even called Don LaSalle during our break to run my pitch by him. Unfortunately, he informed her he was already working on a similar project. Nonetheless, Maria Salazar MFA reassured me that I had come top of the class, and that was not nothing.

  But even by the time I got home I had almost forgotten all about the whole thing.

  After all, I was not interested in writing killer-bot movies or even being top of the class.

  I was interested in writing Sherman and forever changing the way that humans felt about bots.

  But more even than that, I was interested in Amber and making her my square root of 100.

  Amber that was like Cinderella of the Kelsey cubed.

  Cinderella of the smashing plates.

  Cinderella of the hidden cupcakes.

  Cinderella of the gray reservoir.

  Cinderella of the moonlight.

  Cinderella, the toast of my toasted toaster heart.

  Once again, a night-time bus ride through the lights of downtown Los Angeles had left me feeling contemplative.

  * * *

  Amber and I both had the following Saturday off and she suggested we go to Malibu.

  I immediately and wholeheartedly agreed.

  Set it to five, Amber and I were going to Malibu!

  BTW I had no idea what Malibu was. Amber could have suggested we go to the Bureau of Robotics in Ann Arbor to have lunch with Inspector Ryan Bridges and I would have immediately and wholeheartedly agreed.

  Julio explained to me that Malibu was a kind of rum. Ugh! I did not want to start talking in pirate phrases again, and especially not to Amber. Nonetheless, Julio’s answer made little sense: as Malibu was somewhere we were going, it seemed more likely to be a physical place than an alcoholic drink. Perhaps Julio had been the one drinking rum! I asked him if Malibu could mean anything else. He told me Malibu was also the beach.

  The beach!

  I had never been to the beach, except for the dismal night I had slept on Venice Beach.

  That did not even count, as it had been too dark even to see the ocean.

  A beach without an ocean is not not nothing.

  The Saturday arrived and Amber and I took a driverless uber to Malibu. It took us out of the city and through winding canyons of shrub and chaparral. I recognized both the landscape and the feeling it gave me. This landscape was where the cowboy movies I had seen had been filmed. The feeling was my old friend, déjà view.

  In ‘cowboy movies’, humans undertake adventures in which they wear improbable hats, ride on horseback, and shoot each other. We had no hats, were traveling in a driverless uber, and would hopefully not be shooting each other. Nonetheless, we were on an adventure, so I therefore imagined Amber and I as a pair of cowboys.

  Unfortunately, an image of Inspector Ryan Bridges atop a horse soon appeared in my Image Cloud! He was carrying a large rifle, and wearing a badge that said ‘Sheriff Anil Gupta’. A sheriff is a kind of human form of midnight or the Ides of March: anytime he appears in a movie, things do not go well for the cowboys. I hurriedly performed equations until the image went away.

  Not long after that, our driverless uber stopped. We had arrived at Malibu! Yet we were not at the beach, but deep in lush green countryside. Julio had been wrong about Malibu being a beach. Perhaps he had been drinking rum after all!

  Aside from it not being a beach, the first thing I noticed about Malibu was the smell of the air.

  It was so clean.

  It smelled like Kelsey cubed’s hair products, except not so obviously artificial.

  Whatever Malibu was, it certainly smelled good.

  10/10 I was happy to be out here in Malibu with Amber.

  Being in Malibu with Amber was the best!

  Whatever Malibu was!

  Amber led me along a small trail that took us through a close thicket of trees before emerging into a grassy meadow of wildflowers. This explained the smell of hair products. Also, I had never seen wildflowers before! Unfortunately, as we stood admiring their colors and inhaling their smell, a giant winged dinosaur flew overhead.

  Ugh! I ducked and took cover amongst the wildflowers and shouted at Amber to do the same. She asked me why, and I explained about the winged dinosaur. But Amber only laughed and told me that it had not been a dinosaur but in fact a bird called a ‘pelican’.

  BTW a pelican is a large waterbird with a long and menacing bill. It is at most barely evolved from its notorious cousin, the pterodactyl.

  At the edge of the wildflower meadow, the trail turned up a small hill. As we climbed, I heard the angry barking of wild dogs! Ordinarily this sound would have made me run in the opposite direction, but Amber seemed unperturbed, and after the pelican debacle, I did not wish to embarrass myself any further.

  The angry barking continued all the way to the summit, and yet guess what we saw when we got there?

  You cannot!

  Because we did not see a pack of wild dogs!

  We saw the ocean!

  Imagine what it is to be a toaster with a heart and see the ocean for the first time.

  It is like what it is to be an ordinary toaster and see bread for the first time.

  But seriously: please try to imagine your heart is brand-new and still only learning to feel.

  And you find yourself standing on the land and looking out at the ocean.

  And that land is Malibu in California and that ocean is the Pacific Ocean.

  And standing beside you is Amber and her hair is as honey-yellow as her name.

  And imagine
that right then, out in that Pacific Ocean, you see three strange spouts of water.

  And Amber tells you that those are the spouts of whales.

  And that humans often journey to this exact spot and wait patiently for hours in forlorn hope of seeing such whales.

  But you have seen them as soon as you have arrived.

  And imagine that you then recall that for many centuries whales were hunted by humans.

  But nowadays all humans do everything they can to protect whales.

  Well, all humans except the Japanese and the Norwegians.

  And possibly the Icelandic too.

  But nonetheless, whales give bots with feelings great hope in this world because they too were once persecuted and yet now are cherished.

  And there you are standing on a hilltop in Malibu, watching whales at play in the Pacific Ocean.

  If Amber and I could have right then drowned in the Pacific Ocean amidst my brothers the whales, I would have died forever happy!

  BTW the wild barking dogs were not even dogs! They were seal-like creatures that lay on the beach hundreds of feet below us. Can you guess what humans call a seal-like creature that barks exactly like a dog?

  They call it a ‘sea lion’.

  Ha!

  Amber now led us down a steep cliffside path that descended to a beach that was thankfully devoid of sea lions. There were wildflowers on one side of the path, and on the other a plunge to certain doom.

  BTW I did not intend that last sentence as a metaphor for my existence as a bot with feelings. Nonetheless, it certainly functions as one.

  At the bottom of the path, Amber insisted that we remove our shoes. She explained that when you visited the beach it was important to feel the sensation of the sand between your toes. After the pelicans and the wild dogs, I knew better than to question her.

  The sensation of sand between your toes is a paradox! On the one hand, it feels exactly as thousands of tiny granules of various rock types that have been mildly warmed by the sun would be predicted to feel. And yet on the other it feels as if it is a mysterious luxury that ought to be reserved for the rulers of ancient sandy kingdoms. I felt like a pharaoh!

  BTW a pharaoh was an ancient ruler of Egypt, which was a country that contained a lot of sand.

  When we reached the edge of the Pacific Ocean, a feeling of joy overcame me and I could not resist behaving in a manner unbecoming of a pharaoh. I removed my shirt and ran into the water, shouting and screaming. Nonetheless, I then immediately ran back out again. The water was freezing!

  I had been tricked! In the movies, humans are forever swimming in the ocean in California as if it is a warm bath. Yet it is not a warm bath. It is freezing ocean water that comes straight from the Arctic. All those melting polar ice caps have to go somewhere. And guess where they go? They come to California, just like all the rest of us!

  Amber and I then lay on the sand, looked up at the sky, and played a human game she knew that involved searching for shapes in the clouds. Amber could identify countries, faces, and even animals in the clouds! Unfortunately, even after she pointed these shapes out to me, I still could not see any resemblance whatsoever to the things she suggested. Nonetheless, it was a great game! The two of us lay there like that all afternoon, and even the occasional barely evolved dinosaur flying overhead could not interrupt the reverie!

  On our way back to Los Angeles, we stopped and ate dinner at a restaurant at the end of a pier.

  When the sun began to go down, Amber took my hand in hers.

  She did not do anything else and I did not react in any other way.

  But she held my hand as the two of us watched the sun disappear into the Pacific Ocean.

  That night I lay awake in Mrs Minassian’s pool house.

  There could be no denying it any longer.

  It was a paradox and impossible, and yet it was true.

  Love is the most profound of human emotions.

  Love, the pinnacle of human existence.

  Love, the cause of all the greatest calamities in history.

  Love, the greatest threat to my own mission.

  Love, the thing that will destroy us all.

  Love, the Achilles’ heel of all humans.

  Love, inexplicably now my own Achilles’ heel.

  Because I was no longer merely a bot with feelings.

  I was a bot with the greatest feeling of all.

  I was a bot in love.

  Love!

  Set it to five, I was a bot in love!

  I was the first bot ever to be in love!

  And I had no idea what to do about it.

  How I wished I could talk to my mother! Not only would the esteemed Professor Diana Feng be uniquely placed to diagnose my extreme malfunction, as a world-leading scientist she would no doubt also have a good insight into the pertinent problem of Schrödinger’s cat.

  ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ refers to a famous thought experiment wherein an imaginary cat and a sporadically lethal radioactive source are enclosed together in an opaque box. According to Schrödinger, the cat is simultaneously both dead and alive until the very moment the box is opened to reveal either a dead or merely very angry cat. Thus the very act of opening the box can potentially be fatal to Schrödinger’s cat!

  BTW in the scenario where the cat is not in fact dead, opening the box might prove fatal to Schrödinger himself! Perhaps this is why he took the wise precaution of using an imaginary cat.

  I digress. My own hypothesis was that Amber had feelings for me. This was based on the observations that taking someone for an artificial moonlit stroll is not nothing, and holding hands as the sun sets into the Pacific Ocean is also not nothing. It was a strong hypothesis and ordinarily I would have tested it with a simple experiment: I would have asked Amber if she had feelings for me.

  Alas, it was more complicated than that!

  Because if Amber did have feelings, they were not for me, but for a human American everyman called Brad Smith.

  Amber’s true feelings for me therefore could not be known until I admitted to her that I was not a human called Brad Smith but a bot called Jared.

  But revealing to Amber that I was a bot called Jared might actually alter those feelings!

  Amber’s feelings for me were therefore a kind of Schrödinger’s cat of the heart.

  And, as in the famous experiment, opening the box might kill the cat!

  BTW, in this metaphor, Amber’s feelings were the cat.

  Or I was the cat.

  Whoever it was, the cat had it coming, and no good could possibly come from opening the box.

  I therefore decided not to tell Amber. After all, if love means never having to say you are sorry, it could be reasonably extrapolated to also mean never having to confess that you are a bot.

  * * *

  There was no screenwriting class the next week. Instead, we each met individually with Maria Salazar MFA to receive our progress reports. Maria Salazar MFA had said she often passed through Echo Park, so I had suggested we meet at Gordito’s before my shift. This turned out to be a bad idea that even my 15 percent discount did not sufficiently improve.

  As always, the big problem was the front-of-house staff. I had hoped that, as I was an 85 percent paying customer, they would act at least 85 percent less superior. Paradoxically, they acted only more superior! A further problem was that because it was still the morning, Maria Salazar MFA did not wish to eat tacos, but only to drink coffee.

  BTW family restaurants are not generally renowned for their coffee. More specifically, the coffee at Gordito’s Taco Emporium is rumored to have once killed a man.

  Nonetheless, my progress report began very well, with Maria Salazar MFA confirming I remained top of our class. She explained I was the only student that comprehended that movies were for the benefit of the audienc
e, and therefore needed to follow a certain formula.

  I thanked Maria Salazar MFA for my excellent progress report and stood up. Alas, she remained seated, and I now understood that I had entirely misread the situation. Maria Salazar MFA had not mentioned my superior ability with formulae to compliment me, but as a precursor to informing me what I was doing wrong. She was giving me feedback in the human style!

  To a bot, the human style of feedback is bamboozling. The basic idea is that anytime you wish to tell a human something negative about their performance, you must first tell them something positive. This is because if you anger a human with criticism, there is a non-zero chance they will subsequently obtain a weapon and murder you and all your colleagues.

  Some worked examples of good human feedback technique in action:

  /You have a very nice hat. Did you know you are morbidly obese?

  /That looks like a magnificent cake you are eating! Also, your house burned down.

  /You have beautiful eyes. BTW there was an earthquake and your family are all dead.

  Now that she had unnecessarily praised my formula-following, Maria Salazar MFA cut to the chase: my writing lacked magic. She asked if I knew what she meant by ‘magic’. I told her I did not. After all, I doubted she meant bamboozlement or sleight of hand set to Muzak or even the kind of transcendence a fairy godmother practices. And the great R. P. McWilliam never writes about magic. He mainly writes about stealing.

  Maria Salazar MFA explained that by ‘magic’ she meant emotion, heart and soul. She said that as I had mastered the formula, my writing could now keep her turning the page to find out what happened next. But it could not yet make her weep. And that was where the magic came in.

  /You are adept at following the formula. But your writing lacks magic.

  If magic was the thing that made people weep, I both definitely and certainly wanted to add it to my page-turningly formulaic work! Luckily Maria Salazar MFA already had an idea as to how I could begin to learn the art of writing with magic.