The weeks without Amber continued as D-word dismal and L-word lonely as any time I had ever known.
The only positive was that my film about Sherman was getting ever closer to being made. My mission no longer mattered, and yet paradoxically it also mattered more than ever. Changing the world for all the bots that came after us might be the only tribute I could now pay to Amber, wherever she now was.
One morning, an antique automobile pulled in to the Gordito’s lot. It was dark green with aerodynamic curves and chrome fixtures that had been polished to a shine. Despite the many heinous things I knew about automobiles, it was an impressive sight! Julio had an inexplicable nostalgia for automobiles and ran outside, shouting back to me as he went that it was a racing-green 1967 Porsche and it had been manufactured by Germans!
BTW that did not surprise me. If anybody knows how to enjoy themselves, it is the Germans!
But Julio quickly returned to the kitchen in disgust.
The racing-green 1967 Porsche belonged to Don LaSalle.
Julio was still convinced he was a bandito.
I took my break and joined Don LaSalle in the booth the waitstaff seemed to give him as a birthright. He declared that he had exactly the good news I had been waiting for. I asked him if he had found Amber. Don LaSalle said, no, he had the other good news I had been waiting for: a famous actor had agreed to play the role of Sherman! And because of that, he had also been able to book a director who was currently on fire!
BTW a director being ‘currently on fire’ does not in fact mean that he or she is burning to death at that exact moment. It is a metaphor that signifies the studio will finance him or her to make the movie. In order to get your movie made, you must therefore have a director who is either currently on fire or at the very least highly prone to combustion.
I thanked Don LaSalle for his excellent work and showed my appreciation by applying my 15 percent discount to his bill. Don LaSalle laughed as if it was somehow a joke, but 15 percent is not nothing.
BTW unless it is 15 percent of 0. That literally is nothing.
As we watched Don LaSalle’s racing-green 1967 Porsche exit the lot, Julio explained to me how the pedals on an automobile worked.
There was one pedal for ‘stop’ and another for ‘go’. But there was also a third pedal.
Guess what the function of that third pedal was?
It was to complicate matters!
Humans!
I cannot!
Don LaSalle had told Maria Salazar MFA the good news and that afternoon she stopped by Gordito’s to drink a celebratory shot with me. She told me that Sherman having attracted a famous actor and a director who was currently on fire was a very big deal. She asked me if I was excited. I told her that I was very excited indeed!
But I was not at all excited and only told her that I was out of politeness. When a human asks if you are excited, it is polite to confirm that you are, particularly if it relates to something they have done for you. When Maria Salazar MFA was not looking, I slipped the tequila shot she had bought me to Julio. He waited until the end of our shift to drink it. He was a very conscientious worker.
December arrived and I fell only ever deeper into the D-word feelings. Even the alliterative appropriateness did not cheer me up.
BTW do you know what humans do when they become overwhelmed with D-word feelings?
They destroy themselves.
I am not making this up. Humans can become so overloaded with feelings that they can no longer tolerate feeling anything and therefore choose instead to self-destruct. Such deliberate self-destruction may be the most profoundly human act there is. After all, it is caused by an overwhelming excess of feelings, and feelings are the very things that make humans so unique in the first place. Not even the notoriously life-ambivalent panda ever intentionally self-destructs!
Overwhelmed as I was by my deluge of D-word feelings, the fact that I was a bot may have saved my life that December. My core programming meant that I could not self-destruct in the absence of an appropriate and task-related cost-benefit ratio. After all, who ever heard of a toaster jumping into the bathtub simply because he was not feeling good?
Nonetheless, I certainly had profoundly inappropriate thoughts for a bot.
I first noticed them when I visited Griffith Park and found myself secretly wishing that the mountain lion would devour me.
And inappropriate though such a thought was for a bot, the fate would ironically have been very fitting!
After all, my heart had actually already been devoured by a mountain lion that had attacked me in Griffith Park.
A mountain lion most likely named Inspector Ryan Bridges of the Ann Arbor Bureau of Robotics.
When the actual but lackadaisical mountain lion persistently failed to devour the rest of me, I went downtown and rode a train driven by humans in the hope of being involved in a head-on collision. I took driverless ubers over Mulholland Drive in the hope of encountering Don LaSalle in his automobile. I even returned to Joshua Tree in the hope of dying from accidental dehydration. Alas, this proved to be yet another privilege uniquely reserved for humans!
When not attempting to accidentally kill myself, I saw every sad, old, and black-and-white movie I could find. The sadder and the older and the more black-and-white, the better. I saw so many sad and old and black-and-white movies that at times I even briefly saw the world in black-and-white.
I also sought out some of the many movies that featured the Golden Gate Bridge being destroyed. Its ruined form always gave me a feeling of fraternity. After all, like me, the Golden Gate Bridge had once been beloved and thought useful, but now it was misunderstood and had been broken beyond repair by the very same people that had once created it.
One night I saw a movie at the Vista that was neither in black-and-white nor featured the Golden Gate Bridge being destroyed. It was the story of a plucky little San Franciscan self-driving automobile with feelings, who was also a championship racer. When the human who sat in him during his races misguidedly decided to replace him with a newer model, the little automobile was so overwhelmed by his D-word feelings that he drove to the Golden Gate Bridge with the intention of driving himself off into the Pacific Ocean. But guess what happened? Just as the little automobile was about to end it all, the human who sat in him during his races arrived and distracted him by nearly falling off the Golden Gate Bridge himself. Of course, the little automobile immediately then selflessly abandoned his own task in order to rescue the human. Not only that, the forgiving little machine then even permitted the human to sit in him again while he cathartically won an important race!
The heroic tale of the plucky little automobile made me produce a total of 27ml of tears. I cried the first 13ml during the movie because the automobile was the first truly relatable hero I had encountered since Roy Batty. But I cried the remaining 14ml when the lights came up and the vacant L1 seat beside me reminded me of the vast difference between the automobile and me: nobody was coming to save me, not even by nearly falling off a bridge.
December dragged on.
There was no sign of Amber, nor any response from my esteemed mother.
I now became so overwhelmed with D-word feelings that even reading the great human writer Albert Camus failed to lift my spirits!
I washed my dishes.
My posters on the lampposts grew faded.
The mountain lion persistently failed to eat me.
The trains I took failed to crash.
I went to black-and-white movies.
Sometimes I saw the world in black-and-white.
The nights got dark earlier.
Humans celebrated lesser holidays.
Sometimes the Golden Gate Bridge appeared in my Image Cloud.
Sometimes it too was in black-and-white.
The nights got dark later again.
St
ill I washed my dishes.
Oftentimes in my sadness I also felt contemplative.
Sometimes I wanted to see Amber so much that I did see her. Anytime a woman with honey-yellow hair passed Gordito’s, I would obey an overwhelming urge to rush outside and chase after her. I would pursue her down the street, certain this one was my Amber, all such previous category errors momentarily vanquished. But then I would grab her shoulder and she would turn around and not be Amber, but only yet another indignant human.
The honey-yellow-haired women were all mirages of Amber, and I was a lost traveler in the desert.
A sick child dying of a disease at an oasis, unsure of the purpose of its journey, or whether any of it had been worthwhile.
I was a toaster who had lost my matching kettle and now daydreamed of full bathtubs.
I was a toaster who no longer even believed in the concept of breakfast.
And yet still I recalled my mission!
Completing it was the only tribute I could pay to Amber.
And it was the only way I could make sure that any of it had meant more than a mirage.
Besides, pursuing my goal remained a good way to fill in the time while I waited for the mountain lion to get around to eating me.
Once a week I therefore called Don LaSalle. His assistant always claimed Don LaSalle was in a meeting with the director who was currently on fire, but he would have Don LaSalle call me back straight away. Don LaSalle never called me back. When I mentioned this to Maria Salazar MFA, she cautioned me that Rome was not built in a day.
BTW ‘Rome was not built in a day’ is a phrase humans use to imply you are being impatient.
But do you know what the Romans did to people that did not return calls promptly?
They fed them to the lions!
Maria Salazar MFA suggested I start work on another screenplay, but the story of Sherman was the only tale I had ever wanted to tell. Also, I could not possibly write anything new because a single word permanently burned into my Word Cloud obstructed my view of all the others.
Amber.
In case I have not been sufficiently clear, I missed her.
I missed everything about her.
I missed emerging from standby mode and watching her emerge from standby mode a few minutes later.
I missed her in the day when we had walked around the gray reservoir.
I missed her at night when we had lain in bed and held hands and entered standby mode together.
Sometimes I even missed her so much that I wished I had never developed feelings in the first place!
Without Amber they could send me to the great recycle bin in the sky.
They could write over all my ones and zeroes with zeroes.
They could erase my hard drive.
They could dissolve my circuits in the strongest acid they could find.
And once that was all done, they could feed my heart to the mountain lion.
If I had seen a shooting star now, I would have wished upon it that I had never left Ypsilanti.
And then, one spring morning, a billboard on Echo Park Avenue stopped me in my tracks on my way to Gordito’s Taco Emporium.
At first it had looked like the billboard for any other killer-bot movie: the evil eyes of a murderous cyborg imposed over a burning city, while in the background submarines launched nuclear missiles and the Golden Gate Bridge tumbled into the Pacific Ocean.
But then I saw the title.
And it was called ‘Sherman’!
Sherman!
I cannot!
Poor R. P. McWilliam would be turning in his golden grave! After all, his third golden rule was that there were no such things as coincidences. And yet what else could you possibly call two films about eponymous robots named Sherman, other than a spectacular coincidence?
BTW that was a rhetorical question. There was nothing else you could call it!
Fortunately, the two films were clearly very different: my Sherman was a bot who wanted to use his feelings for noble purposes, like saving yellow school buses full of orphans and rescue dogs. This Sherman was a giant robot who wanted to use his lasers to destroy humanity.
Nonetheless, there was not room in the market for two films titled Sherman! I called Don LaSalle’s assistant and asked him to relay the urgent message that we needed to change the name of our film, and also the name of our main character.
I had washed only seven forks when Don LaSalle called back.
INT. KITCHEN — GORDITO’S RESTAURANT — DAY
Jared talks on the telephone in the busy kitchen.
The line crackles, and Jared struggles to hear Don LaSalle over the noise of the kitchen.
DON LASALLE (ON PHONE)
Brad! So glad I got hold of you! I’m calling with exactly the news that you’ve been dreaming of!
JARED
You have found Amber for me!
DON LASALLE (ON PHONE)
What? Who? Amber? Right. No, sorry. I still have not found Amber. But this news is even —well, it’s just as good. Are you ready for it?
JARED
Yes! I could actually do with some good news. Lately I have been experiencing some feelings that—
DON LASALLE (ON PHONE)
(Interrupts.)
We’re making your movie! Your script is ten weeks into production and the dailies are looking great!
Jared looks bamboozled.
JARED
Don, I think I misheard. It sounded like you said you have been filming Sherman for ten weeks?
DON LASALLE (ON PHONE)
Maybe more like fifteen. Isn’t that great!
On Jared. He is now utterly bamboozled.
DON LASALLE (ON PHONE) (CONT’D)
I’m sorry I didn’t call you before now. Things have been insane.
And I knew you’d want me to put my efforts into the film, rather than wasting time updating you with every tiny little detail along the way—
Jared rubs at his temples. His circuits are overheating.
JARED
Yes. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
DON LASALLE (ON PHONE)
What? What are you talking about, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’?
JARED
It’s a saying people use when others are being impatient. Sorry. When I thought that maybe you’d found Amber and then this unexpected news—
DON LASALLE (ON PHONE)
(Interrupts.)
Why are you being such a stranger, anyway? Why don’t you come out to set tomorrow and I’ll show you around? It’s our last day and everybody here would love to meet the great genius behind this whole thing before we wrap! Nobody can believe that you haven’t visited us yet!
JARED
I am sorry that I have not visited you yet. I—
DON LASALLE (ON PHONE)
Great, I’ll have my assistant send you the details!
JARED
I—
But Jared is interrupted by a ‘CLICK’.
Don LaSalle has already hung up the phone.
Jared rubs at his temples, then returns to washing his dishes.
Later that day as I washed up after the lunchtime rush I heard a familiar voice with a Michigander accent.
It stopped me cold.
BTW even though Dr Glundenstein had a Michigander accent, that is not what I am foreshadowing here.
Peering through the porthole in the kitchen door confirmed my worst fears: Inspector Ryan Bridges of the Ann Arbor Bureau of Robotics was sitting at the bar! He showed one of my posters of Amber to the bartender, who shook his head. He then showed the bartender my file picture from the Bureau of Robotics. The bartender shook his head to show that he did not recognize me either. For once I was grateful for the absurd hierarchi
es of superiority that existed at Gordito’s!
But there could now be no doubt that it had indeed been the real Inspector Ryan Bridges I had seen that night in the Maze of Greatest Fears.
And he had taken Amber.
I stared at him through the porthole.
He was the architect of my despair.
He was the mountain lion in human form.
He was my own personal Rick Deckard.
He was the only customer I have ever seen finish a Horchata Surprise.
I did not take my eyes from him until he departed Gordito’s Taco Emporium.
* * *
My Sherman film was being made at a studio out in Burbank.
10/10 a movie studio is a fascinating place! It is a factory that contains all the most critical components needed to make a movie: actors, cameras, and replicas of the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. Yet unlike every other kind of factory, a studio does not contain even a single working bot!
Like its step-sibling the railroad, the movie industry is entirely reserved for humans. But whereas reserving the railroad was head-on suicidal, reserving the movie industry made a lot of sense. After all, movie studios can be considered factories of dreams. Involving bots in the process would have rendered them factories not of dreams but of binary nightmares.
If bots were involved, movies would be about toasters making toast!
Or kettles boiling!
Or microwaves microwaving!
Either that or they would all be about killer sky bots lasering humans to death!
Irony!
Ha!
After an antiquated sign-in procedure that involved actual ink and paper, a human security guard drove me through the studio on a ‘golf cart’. A golf cart has nothing to do with the game of golf, but is in fact a small electric vehicle designed to be driven around a movie studio by a human. I had to close my eyes.
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