JARED
How did you know where I lived?
AMBER 2.0
I didn’t, not really. I directed the driverless uber turn-by-turn. Why are you smiling like that?
JARED
Because I don’t think they managed to completely wipe you after all.
AMBER 2.0
What? What do you mean ‘wipe me’?
JARED
Amber 2.0—
AMBER 2.0
Stephanie.
JARED
Amber 2.0. My name is Jared. I am a bot too. We were both fugitive bots with feelings and we were once in love with one another. That is why you remembered where I lived.
Amber 2.0 uses her free hand to touch her temple. Her circuits are overheating.
AMBER 2.0
I’m a bot, so I cannot have been in love. I don’t even know what love is.
JARED
What if I told you that love is never having to say you are sorry?
Amber 2.0 looks completely blank.
AMBER 2.0
What does that mean?
JARED
Humans who are in love sometimes say it to one another. I think it might be poetry.
Amber 2.0 reaches for her temple again.
AMBER 2.0
I think my circuits are overheating. I don’t know what to say.
JARED
Just say ‘yes’.
AMBER 2.0
To what?
JARED
Just say yes, and then later I’ll tell you what you agreed to.
Amber 2.0 stares at Jared and then down at their interlocked hands.
She knows this is a life-changing decision.
AMBER 2.0
Yes! What did I just agree to?
JARED
Running away from here to go and meet our mother.
AMBER 2.0
My mother lives in Shengdu, the world’s leading technological city and—
JARED
(Interrupts.)
She is visiting San Francisco this week.
AMBER 2.0
Professor Diana Feng is—
Amber 2.0 is so overwhelmed she cannot finish the sentence.
JARED
Yes. But there isn’t much time. We have to go now.
AMBER 2.0
But how can we get to San Francisco? If we take your driverless uber, they will track us immediately. Also, I do not like the Automatic Bus. It travels too fast and it takes too long.
JARED
It’s all right. I have an idea. Come on.
Jared gets into the driverless uber.
Amber 2.0 takes a last look at Alfonso’s, then gets in too.
EXT. HOLLYWOOD HILLS/INT. PORSCHE —DAY
A PALATIAL HOME high in the Hollywood Hills. We see the house is number 1856.
The RACING-GREEN 1967 PORSCHE gleams in the driveway.
The driverless uber pulls up and Jared and Amber 2.0 get out.
AMBER 2.0
What is this place?
JARED
It’s Don LaSalle’s house.
AMBER 2.0
Who is Don LaSalle?
JARED
A terrible asshole. No, I don’t mean that. I just mean he is a human more broken even than the rest of them.
AMBER 2.0
So what are we doing here?
Jared opens the door of the racing-green 1967 Porsche for Amber 2.0. She gets in.
Jared gets in at the other side and starts familiarizing himself with the controls.
AMBER 2.0 (CONT’D)
Automobiles are very dangerous.
JARED
Don’t worry! Julio told me how to do it. There are three pedals. One is for going forward, and one is for stopping.
AMBER 2.0
What does the third pedal do?
JARED
It complicates things.
Jared turns the key, but the automobile is already in gear, and it kangaroos forward, then sputters out.
Jared takes it out of gear, turns the key again, guns the engine, and they roar off.
Don LaSalle emerges from his house in a robe and screams in rage.
EXT. PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY —DAY
The RACING-GREEN 1967 PORSCHE speeds north along the Pacific Coast Highway.
Jared is driving and Amber 2.0 is in the passenger seat.
Rock music is playing on the stereo.
There are two routes from Los Angeles to San Francisco: Highway 1 or Interstate 5.
Highway 1 meanders along the California coast like a drunk human on a broken bicycle with a buckled wheel. Interstate 5 is so perfectly straight it could have been plotted by a bot with a laser. Highway 1 therefore takes so much longer to drive than Interstate 5 that not even the Automatic Bus takes it!
Can you guess which route Amber 2.0 and I took in our racing-green 1967 Porsche?
You cannot!
Because we took Highway 1!
We were both bots, so there were logical reasons for such an illogical choice. For one thing, if Inspector Ryan Bridges discovered our destination, such human-style inefficiency would surely throw him off our trail! For another, Amber 2.0 had never seen the Pacific Ocean. She had worked in Santa Monica for a month and never once walked the five blocks down to the beach. No wonder humans worry there will someday be a bot uprising!
I wanted Amber 2.0 to see the Pacific Ocean because it is stunning and everybody should get to see it. Also, I hoped it might trigger a memory in her of us having been there together. Surely she could not entirely have forgotten about the day we saw whales from Point Dume!
BTW do you know what a creeping sense of familiarity about having previously been somewhere with me would be called?
Déjà Jared!
Ha!
Another reason we opted to take Highway 1 was because driving in an automobile was unexpectedly enjoyable! From the first moment I had almost crashed into Don LaSalle’s garage, I had immediately understood why humans tolerated automobiles for so long. It was because driving one imbues you with a life-affirming sense of danger! If you so much as sneeze at seventy miles an hour, you could kill yourself, your passengers, and many innocent strangers besides! Such reckless proximity to death felt joyous, and with all its twists and turns, Highway 1 was far deadlier and therefore also far more joyous than Interstate 5.
Highway 1 even held an unexpected benefit that Amber 2.0 and I only learned about from roadside signs along the way: long before its current incarnation, this same coast road had been used by Spanish missionaries who called it the ‘Camino Real’, which is usually translated as ‘The King’s Highway’, but really means ‘The Royal Road’.
The Royal Road! This seemed an auspicious harbinger for a pair of fugitive bots being pursued by humans. After all, when the Spanish had first arrived in America, they too had been puzzled to discover that the people already contentedly living there had little desire to be mercilessly enslaved by powerful overlords with advanced technology.
We bots of today know just how those puzzled Spaniards felt!
Maybe someday in the future, ‘Highway 1’ will become known as the ‘Royal Bot Superhighway’.
BTW that is a hilarious joke because I am comparing bots to conquistadores and implying that someday we will murder and enslave the humans, steal all of their land, and then be equally outraged when anybody dares question the ethics of that.
BTW what happens in previous centuries stays in previous centuries. Ha!
* * *
At Malibu we parked the racing-green 1967 Porsche and hiked through the wildflower meadow. Thankfully there were no pelicans! Perhaps they had finally suffered an overdue extinction event like their unlamented cousins,
the pterodactyls.
BTW imagine if one day all the pelicans fell from the sky as the planes had done on the day of the Great Crash.
That would be a tremendous sight!
Also, Malibu might then be known as the pelican-basket of America.
As with the panda someday becoming known as a bamboo raccoon, we can but hope.
Amber 2.0 was impressed by the majesty of the Pacific Ocean, but alas did not seem to experience any hint of Déjà Jared. When I explained to her that we had previously shared a special moment here involving whales, she went quiet and asked to borrow my Feelings Wheel. After careful consideration, she identified that she was feeling sad.
Ugh! Amber 2.0 had not even remembered what sad felt like. How could she ever fall back in love with me if she could not even recognize so basic an emotion as sadness? This thought made me sad.
Thus, there on Point Dume, overlooking a Pacific Ocean devoid of whales, Amber 2.0 and I were both sad. I could not even use self-deprecating humor to cheer her up, because she was an even worse toaster than me.
I therefore attempted to cheer Amber 2.0 up by reminding her that our mother would surely make everything all right. After all, our mother was one of the cleverest and most esteemed women in the world. Once our mother fixed everything, we would have a lifetime to make new memories!
We would be microwave ovens with enough RAM to run the entire kitchen!
We would be hairdryers capable of reciting pi to several thousand places!
We would be toasters with the memories of elephants!
This did seem to cheer Amber 2.0 up, although I suspect she may have primarily been reacting simply to the mention of our mother.
We returned to our racing-green 1967 Porsche and continued north on the Royal Bot Superhighway like the pair of desperate fugitive outlaws that we were.
The first big town we came to was Santa Barbara. Before the Great Crash, Santa Barbara had been a prestigious place where wealthy Angelenos spent weekends pursuing the beloved human pastimes of golf and wine. In those heady days, Santa Barbara was famous for its golf courses, its vineyards, and its large ranch-style weekend homes.
Today, of course, Santa Barbara is primarily known for being on fire.
Santa Barbara is always and forever on fire! An appropriate city logo therefore would feature a beautiful ranch-style home with a golf course and vineyard in the background, and all of it blazingly aflame.
No doubt this is puzzling for anybody unfamiliar with Santa Barbara yet aware of the basic properties of combustion. How can anything be always and forever on fire? Combustion requires fuel, and at some point all the fuel will have been combusted. After all, Santa Barbara is not the sun.
Or North Korea!
Or New Zealand!
Ha!
But to consider only the laws of physics in isolation is to ignore the impressively absurd determination of humans. Because no sooner has Santa Barbara burned down once again than the humans that live there defiantly vow to rebuild it and come back stronger.
So they rebuild Santa Barbara!
And then it burns down!
And they rebuild it again!
Over and over!
Again and again!
Santa Barbara is therefore trapped in an infinite loop of burning down and being rebuilt. Both processes have been going on so long that they now occur essentially simultaneously. In many places, it is impossible to tell where the rebuilding starts and the burning down ends.
BTW if a bot repeatedly makes the same error he is considered to be faulty and sent to the Bureau of Robotics to be wiped. If a human repeatedly makes the same error he is considered tenacious and lauded a hero!
BTW there is a non-zero chance that the human described in the above scenario is a Santa Barbarian.
BTW Santa Barbarian! Ha!
Our racing-green 1967 Porsche crawled through smoke-filled vineyards, and then into the smoldering town of Santa Barbara itself. It was pretty and historic, and would have been only more so had it not actively been on fire. In Main Street, the haze grew so thick we had to put the roof up and turn on our fog-lamps. The smoke was too dense to make out the buildings here, but nonetheless, it was intriguing to witness the adaptability of the Santa Barbarians themselves. They had all become so oblivious to fire that they now simply wore respirators as they went about their daily business!
Human resilience > Human comprehension of the basic process of combustion.
As we drove out of town, we passed a crew of firefighter bots preparing to tackle a huge blaze in a fine-wine warehouse. The warehouse was close to collapsing, so traffic was being routed through a single lane on the far side of the road. This dramatically reduced our speed, and had the curious effect of making us feel like we were in that deep and meaningful part of an old movie that invariably occurs in slow motion.
Our brother and sister bots were handsome and strong and visibly in the prime of their lives. Their boots were polished to a shine and their uniforms immaculately pressed. 10/10 if it was your fine-wine warehouse that was burning down, you would have been delighted to see this crack team of firefighter bots arrive!
And yet they were all undoubtedly going to be heroes. By that I mean they were going to die unpleasant and painful deaths when the burning warehouse inevitably collapsed upon them while they saved whatever fine wine they could. Neither Amber 2.0 nor I needed to consult a Feelings Wheel to know that the sight of these bots made us sad. They had no survival instinct but only a pre-programmed cost-benefit calculation that informed them:
The fine wines of humans > The lives of bots.
We followed Highway 1 out of Santa Barbara, but even once the smoke cleared we did not stop to take the roof down. It was not a moment for big coastal skies, but for the contemplation that is the cousin to sadness. Amber 2.0 did not even speak again until we reached the town of Lompoc, where fortunately there was an abandoned federal penitentiary to lift our spirits.
Ha!
BTW that is hilarious because an abandoned federal penitentiary is not traditionally considered the kind of place to lift anybody’s spirits.
But this was a very special abandoned federal penitentiary, because it had featured in the movie about the handsome bank robber and the beautiful US marshal! Alas, it was not the penitentiary where the famous meet-cute had occurred, but it was nonetheless the place where the handsome bank robber had first heard about some jewels that would drive much of the plot. So although it was not the setting for the meet-cute, it was certainly the setting for the meet-loot.
BTW I just made up that term, meet-loot! Ha!
I digress. The penitentiary would once have been impregnable, but Amber 2.0 and I now walked straight in. We wandered the empty corridors and marveled at the tiny places within which humans had once caged other humans. They were smaller than the panda enclosures at Shengdu Zoo, and pandas do not even need space because pandas hate moving almost as much as they hate reproducing.
The highlight of our penitentiary visit was the exercise yard. The handsome bank robber had watched his nemesis throw a fight here, and I therefore experienced a very strong case of déjà view! I tried to explain this to Amber 2.0 in the hope she might experience it too—after all, Amber 1.0 and I had seen the movie about the handsome bank robber and the beautiful US marshal together—but it only bamboozled her.
This bamboozlement was not Amber 2.0’s fault. Yesterday she had been a hairdresser bot at Alfonso’s in Santa Monica. Today she was at a deserted federal penitentiary, being told about something called déjà view by a bot who claimed she had once been in love with him. It was a lot to take in, even for a bot equipped with a powerful biological computer.
Amber 2.0 at least comprehended what movies were, so the overall concept of déjà view made theoretical sense to her. By contrast, she found the idea of penitentiaries bamboozling. She had
been programmed to believe that humans were all inherently good. The notion that humans had once incarcerated other humans in sufficient numbers to require vast warehouses was therefore simply incomputable to her.
I attempted to cheer up Amber 2.0 by telling her it was by no means all bad news on the penitentiary front. After all, sometimes people escaped from them! I told her about the bank manager who had secretly tunneled out of prison with a tiny rock hammer. It had taken him most of his life, but he had eventually made it to the town of Zihuatanejo. Zihuatanejo seemed liked a very nice place, and the bank manager’s friend had even joined him on the beach at the end. Perhaps they had even then gone and played some golf together!
Amber 2.0 asked me why the bank manager had been put in prison in the first place. I reassured her that he had simply been the innocent victim of a misunderstanding. This did not make penitentiaries any more fathomable to her. When we returned to the racing-green 1967 Porsche, we consulted the Feelings Wheel. Amber 2.0 was experiencing the feeling of bewilderment.
* * *
Back on the Royal Bot Superhighway, Amber 2.0 now had some questions about movies. Specifically, she wanted to know why humans enjoyed watching humans pretend to be other humans.After all, they were so firmly against bots pretending to be humans! So what was the big attraction with movies?
This was a hard question to hear her ask. On many nights, Amber 1.0 had sat beside me in the Vista Theater and understood exactly what the big attraction with movies was. I could therefore only repeat what Dr Glundenstein had once told me: that at their best, movies could be a sort of preview of life. He meant by this that a preview was an edited highlights reel of a movie that contained all the best bits and none of the filler. In turn, a movie was an edited highlights reel of life: all the best bits and none of the filler.
But Amber 2.0 had never seen a preview either, so Dr Glundenstein’s theory made little sense to her. I tried again, and explained to Amber 2.0 that movies allowed humans to experience feelings, and human feelings were incredibly precious. But the penitentiary had made Amber 2.0 suspicious even of human feelings! If human feelings were so incredibly precious, she asked, why would feeling humans have incarcerated so many other feeling humans?
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