Ha!
BTW that is a hilarious pun based on the fact that driverless ubers have license plates and food is served on plates.
We got our first glimpse of San Francisco as we drove onto the Bay Bridge. Perhaps the sea air had simply abruptly cooled my circuits, but I recall that view as if it was an image uploaded directly to my hard drive, which of course is exactly what it was.
The city was a medley of glimmering white houses and hills and skyscrapers. There were more skyscrapers than in Los Angeles and Chicago combined, and almost half of them looked like they were still occupied! There could be little doubt that San Francisco fully deserved its reputation as the world’s second leading technological city after Shengdu!
But the city itself was only a part of the view, and it was not even the best part of it.
Because there was the San Francisco bay too, an emerald-green lake traversed by sailboats and drone boats and ferry boats and automatic freighter boats. There were islands scattered throughout it, even including the notorious penitentiary island of Alcatraz, where Al Capone himself had been sent back in the days when humans inexplicably considered selling people alcohol a greater crime than putting them in penitentiaries.
And yet the undoubted crowning glory of the entire thing was the bridge.
I do not even mean the impressive Bay Bridge we were traveling across.
I mean the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Golden Gate Bridge!
Set it to five, we could see the Golden Gate Bridge!
The Golden Gate Bridge links San Francisco to the green headlands of Marin beyond, and yet it does far more than that. After all, the Golden Gate Bridge is not merely a bridge but also a metaphor. It is a metaphor for the majesty of human dreams and the resilience of the human spirit! How many killer bots, natural disasters, monsters, zombies, and aliens have tried to destroy this mighty structure in movie after movie? And yet here it still stood, a cathedral undaunted and unbroken by an endless onslaught of all the very things that terrified humans most. Humans only have to look upon the Golden Gate Bridge to know that they are the undefeated and the best!
Humans > All other species.
Even to a humble toaster with a heart, the Golden Gate Bridge was an astounding sight. I was so overwhelmed that I momentarily forgot about the third pedal and stalled the racing-green 1967 Porsche on the Bay Bridge! A police driverless uber on the other side of the bridge slowed down and looked at us. The officer inside was also human, but even he seemed to understand that something was up. I restarted the engine and we sped into San Francisco, the world’s second-greatest technological city after Shengdu.
Our first task was to dispose of Don LaSalle’s racing-green 1967 Porsche. I had hoped to set it alight and roll it off a cliff into the ocean, but as we could not risk drawing attention to ourselves, we instead abandoned it in a lot on Fisherman’s Wharf. This was entirely uncathartic, but I at least kicked the racing-green 1967 Porsche hard enough to dent it. The automobile had discharged its duties admirably, but if I had learned anything from humans, it was the importance of punishing innocent machines for the mistakes of men.
Our mother’s speech was not until the following morning, so our next task was to find accommodation. Unfortunately, all the big hotels required a barcode. It soon began to rain, and for the first and only time in my life, I was briefly nostalgic for the Hotel Pyongyang. Eventually, we found a motel in the Marina District, an infamously foggy area of the infamously foggy city. Despite this location, the lack of anything Spanish about the establishment, and the fact that it was anyway a motel, it was called the ‘Hotel del Sol’.
Humans!
I cannot!
Nonetheless, the Hotel del Sol was brightly decorated and surprisingly pleasant for an establishment that did not require a barcode. My only possible complaint was that our room contained two separate single beds rather than one double bed. Chintz though the Big Sur Motel had been, I had appreciated spending my standby mode lying next to Amber 2.0. But perhaps nobody would be getting much standby mode tonight anyway!
Ha!
BTW that is an innuendo, which is a remark intended to be hilariously misconstrued as a reference to sex. I was therefore pretending to imply that a lack of standby mode would be due to Amber 2.0 and I recapturing the heady heights of the Joshua Tree Inn. In fact, any lack of standby mode that might occur would be due to our excitement about seeing our esteemed mother the next day.
I digress. It was still only lunchtime, so Amber 2.0 and I decided to see the sights of San Francisco. It would make us appear more convincingly like human tourists, and it might also tire us out and therefore help us to enter standby mode that night.
The clerk at the Hotel del Sol informed us that the best way to see the sights of San Francisco was to take a bus tour. Sensing our skepticism, he reassured us this was not an Automatic Bus, but was driven by one human while a second human provided commentary. This sounded extremely unsafe and inefficient, but then you do not employ humans because they are safe and efficient. You employ them because they are humans.
The bus tour was fascinating! After all, before the Great Crash, San Francisco had been the leading technological city in the world. The commentating human was therefore able to point out the homes of the individuals responsible for the Great Crash. Their fellow humans remained furious with them, and even now many of these buildings continued to burn down and be rebuilt almost as often as Santa Barbara itself!
Humans like to accuse elephants of never forgetting, but do you know what the creature with the best memory on planet Earth is?
It is a human with a grudge!
Ha!
The commentating human even pointed out some landmarks from bot history. At first this came as a wonderful surprise, because most cities would have been ashamed to have had anything to do with the development of bots. Unfortunately, the tour guide then added that we should not get him wrong: San Franciscans hated the bastards too, but you could be proud of making a good nuclear weapon yet still hope you never had to use it, couldn’t you?
I was sad that Amber 2.0 had to hear that.
We were not bastards.
We were not nuclear weapons.
We were toasters and kettles with fledgling hearts.
Maybe some of our hearts were a little more fledgling than others.
And maybe some of our hearts were a little more forgetful than others.
But she would always be the most beautiful toaster or kettle I had ever seen.
And she was nothing whatsoever like a nuclear weapon.
I experienced some D-word feelings then, but they did not last long.
Because guess where the tour bus now drove us?
Over the Golden Gate Bridge!
Set it to five, we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge!
I did not even need to look at my Feelings Wheel to know that this was another feeling for which there were no words.
There would not even be any words on the reverse of the Feelings Wheel for this feeling!
After all, what words could there possibly be to describe the wind in your hair and the Pacific Ocean beneath you?
It is indescribable!
Je ne sais quoi!
And yet this magnificent experience was not without its sadness. The commentating human told us that over a hundred humans throw themselves from the Golden Gate Bridge each year, a frequency that made it the number one spot in all America for humans to destroy themselves. Even though I had known that humans sometimes destroyed themselves here, it was moving to be reminded of these stark facts while on the magnificent bridge itself.
After all, it was so high.
And the water so far below.
And it looked cold.
And full of strong currents.
And yet the currents would be the very least of it.
/> All those poor humans.
They had felt so much that they no longer wanted to feel anything at all!
If right then I had seen a shooting star appear over San Francisco, I would have wished that those humans had known how precious their feelings were, and that they had known that they were beloved on the earth, and that they were now all at peace from the feelings that had overwhelmed them.
Maybe that would have required three separate shooting stars.
Nonetheless, that is what I would have wished for.
I passed the rest of the bus tour feeling so contemplative that even the landmarks of the famous earthquake of 1906 barely even registered with me.
* * *
Amber 2.0 and I ate dinner in North Beach, in a place we assumed was a restaurant but turned out to be a strip club. Amber 2.0 did not seem to notice the naked humans, and the only desire I felt was for the delicious spaghetti and clams in front of me.
BTW a strip club is an establishment where humans pay other humans bitcoin to sexually frustrate them. I do not know why.
After dinner, I purchased a postcard to send to Dr Glundenstein. Back at the hotel, I wrote to him that San Francisco was his kind of town, reassured him that my toenail was improving, and signed it from ‘Brad Rynearson’. Amber 2.0 entered standby mode before me, but even I did not have much trouble. The bus tour had done its job!
In the morning I again watched the news while Amber 2.0 showered. Once again the news was not good. The police had discovered the racing-green 1967 Porsche in the lot at Fisherman’s Wharf and therefore now knew we were in San Francisco! I felt regretful that I had not set it on fire and pushed it over a cliff, but also a slight warm glow that I had at least kicked a dent in it that would undoubtedly enrage Don LaSalle.
BTW that warm glow was my old friend, schadenfreude. The Germans that had built the automobile would have understood that, all right!
There was also another interview with my nemesis, Inspector Ryan Bridges. He was eating clam chowder in front of a billboard that depicted Sherman destroying the Golden Gate Bridge. Speaking through a mouthful of crackers, he said the famous producer Don LaSalle had now screened him the entire film and it gave a truly chilling insight into the dark and apocalyptic fantasy of a murderous bot.
They showed the same clip of the evil Sherman lasering the orphans and rescue dogs to death, and then the screen returned to Inspector Ryan Bridges. He did not seem to have been anticipating this, because he now had a mouth full of snow crab. Yet when the camera pulled back, I got a far bigger surprise than even he had. Because rising up behind the tumbling Golden Gate Bridge on the Sherman poster was the real Golden Gate Bridge itself!
Inspector Ryan Bridges was already here in San Francisco!
As he began to talk about the importance of calling both his hotline and the police, I banged on the door of the bathroom and shouted to Amber 2.0 that we had to leave.
Once again I had made the mistake of greatly underestimating my nemesis!
The 16th Annual Symposium on Safety Issues in Genetic Robotics was taking place at Fort Mason, an old military base on the edge of the San Francisco bay. Military bases are historical buildings from the time when humans had such a surplus of resources that they squandered them murdering each other on an international level, but there was no time to dwell on such perplexing mysteries. After all, Amber 2.0 and I were a pair of fugitive bots about to attend a conference about bots!
10/10 we needed disguises. As the conference was for scientists, the best approach would have been to disguise ourselves as scientists. Unfortunately, the Marina District catered not for scientists but for tourists. We therefore had to disguise ourselves as tourists. I purchased a sweatshirt that said ‘California’ and had a picture of a grizzly bear on it.
BTW a grizzly bear is a magnificent animal that used to be the symbol of California until it was replaced with a seagull as a mark of respect to the innumerable humans eaten by grizzly bears in the aftermath of the Great Crash.
Amber 2.0 bought a shirt that had the logo of the San Francisco 2049ers. This was an ingenious double bluff! After all, a bot wishing to disguise the fact they were a bot would hardly wear the shirt of a bot football team.
Or would they?
10/10 double bluffs are as indecipherable as sarcasm.
Of course, the key component of any tourist disguise is a hat. This is because hats are the most absurd and impractical pieces of human clothing, and tourists are the most absurd and impractical of humans. The hat I selected was a baseball cap that said ‘SAN FRANCISCO—WORLD’S SECOND-GREATEST TECHNOLOGICAL CITY’.
I hoped my mother might appreciate it.
After all, we both knew what the world’s greatest technological city was.
It was Shengdu!
The hat that Amber 2.0 selected was another of her ingenious double bluffs. It said,
‘I LOST MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO’.
Ha!
I cannot!
BTW I am not certain that Amber 2.0 intended this as any kind of bluff at all. Nonetheless, it was a clever disguise for a bot, who should not have had a metaphorical heart to lose anywhere.
We heard Fort Mason before we saw it. Rather, we heard the chanting of the crowd and could make out the word ‘bots’. This excited us both greatly! I had known scientists were the most educated humans, but I had not dreamed they were educated enough to chant for bots! Only when we turned the corner and saw that the crowd were not scientists did we understand what they were actually chanting:
Burn the bots!
Burn the bots!
Burn the bots!
Ugh!
Fort Mason was surrounded by a large anti-bot protest!
As a former dentist, I had of course seen many irate humans before, but I had never seen so many of them in one place. They were a terrifying sight, and the irrationality of their anger made them only more so. If they had discovered Amber 2.0 and me, we would have immediately been toast! Burned toast!
Nonetheless, our mother and our glorious future lay on the other side of them! We pulled our hats low to our eyes and pushed our way through. Unfortunately, in order to remain inconspicuous, we even had to join in the chanting.
Burn the bots!
Burn the bots!
Burn the bots!
I do not know if the Chief of San Francisco Police was being sarcastic or ironic when he dispatched bots to police the anti-bot protest, but they were doing an admirable job under very difficult circumstances! When Amber 2.0 and I reached their line, I politely explained we were not anti-bot protestors but military base tourists hoping to look around Fort Mason. The police bots took one look at our ridiculous sweatshirts and hats and let us straight in! 10/10 you could never fool bots with logic, but you could certainly fool them with terrible sweatshirts!
The conference was in a large hangar which had once been used to build ships. These ships had been used to sink the ships of other countries, but often got themselves sunk by the ships of those countries in the process. This necessitated the building of further ships, which were then themselves also sunk. Meantime, other countries were reciprocally engaged in the same ship-building and ship-sinking process.
It was thus an infinite international loop of building and sinking ships.
Humans.
Truly, I cannot.
A stage had been set up at one end of the hangar, but the rest of the vast space was filled with seats. Almost every one of them was occupied by a scientist. I estimated there were over 20,000 scientists there! Truly, I’d had no idea there were even so many scientific humans! A buzz of chitter-chatter emanated from the scientists, and every fourth and fifth word seemed to be the name of our mother. They were all almost as excited to see our mother as Amber 2.0 and I were!
Alas, there were several speakers before the esteemed Professor Feng
, and they seemed to have been sequenced in order of increasing awfulness. The topics ran:
/Maximizing bot efficiency.
/What is the minimum amount of standby mode a bot needs?
/Preventing revolution in bots.
/Cost-effective incineration of bots.
I wanted to cover Amber 2.0’s ears, but I could not. It would have made us stick out even more, and we were already two tourists amidst 20,000 scientists. Anyway, maybe it was also even good for Amber 2.0 to hear some of these things. I still did not think she properly understood the dangers humans posed to us. In my opinion, she had joined in with the ‘Burn the bots’ chant a little too enthusiastically.
The room fell briefly silent when our mother finally emerged onto the stage. She was flanked by a pair of huge security guards that made her look like a tiny child, but her scientific peers nonetheless rose to give her a standing ovation. They understood what an honor it was to hear the great Professor Diana Feng of the National University of Shengdu speak, no matter her comparative height!
When our mother approached the microphone, giant screens around the hangar flicked on to display her in close-up. She was dressed in a smart black suit and looked radiant! If anything, she seemed only younger and wiser and more glorious than she had on our graduation day at the United Fabrication plant!
Did I tell you that Professor Diana Feng of the National University of Shengdu is our mother?
Yes, I did.
Thinking about this makes my circuits overheat.
I looked across at Amber 2.0 and saw that she was sobbing.
Sobbing!
Set my heart to five, Amber 2.0 was sobbing!
Sobbing strongly implied Amber 2.0 was feeling something profound! And if Amber 2.0 could feel something profound enough to make her sob, maybe she could feel something profound enough to fall in love with me again one day too! Our mother had not even begun to speak and yet she was already making everything all right!
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