Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson
In Set My Heart to Five (Hanover Square Press) author Simon Stephenson mines his experience as both a screenwriter for Pixar and a physician to create his robot protagonist Jared, a Michigan dentist who — in the year 2054 — begins to develop emotions and ends up on the run from the Bureau of Robotics out of fear of being wiped.
Jared’s life is totally normal, except for one thing. He is a bot engineered with human DNA to look and act like a real person.
One day at a movie screening, Jared feels a strange sensation around his eyes. Everyone knows that bots can’t feel emotions, but as the theater lights come on, Jared is almost certain he’s crying. Confused, he decides to watch more old movies to figure out what’s happening. The process leads to an emotional awakening that upends his existence. Jared, it turns out, can feel.
Overcome with a full range of emotions, and facing an imminent reset, Jared heads west, determined to forge real connections. He might even fall in love. But a bot with feelings is a dangerous proposition, and Jared’s new life could come to an end before it truly begins.
Film rights were recently acquired by Working Title films, with Edgar Wright (Baby Driver and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World) attached to direct.
Check out an excerpt from the first pages of the novel below.
—∞—
Hi!
My name is Jared.
I am sincerely pleased to meet you.
Also, I am a bot!
Unless you have been living under a rock in North Korea or New Zealand—Ha!—you of course know what a bot is.
Nonetheless I am programmed to relay the following dialogue to each new human I encounter:
Please do not be fooled by my human-like appearance.
I am a mere bot!
I do not have feelings or anything else that might be misconstrued as a ‘soul’.
Instead, I have been programmed to a high level of proficiency in dentistry!
Should you have any concerns please immediately report me to the Bureau of Robotics.
But humans rarely find this information calming.
Instead, they see a fellow human standing in front of them claiming that he is not a human.
This bamboozles them!
It often bamboozles them so profoundly that they exclaim, ‘But you look so human!’
I then patiently explain to them what they anyway already know: that my body looks human because it is indeed a human body. It is engineered from DNA and constructed of cells the exact same way their own body is. It has the same basic needs— food, water, oxygen, regular exercise—and it can be injured or killed in all the same comically outlandish ways any other human body can.
Yet I am definitely not human!
Because the precious thing that sets humans apart is their feelings.
And as a bot I am specifically designed and programmed to be incapable of feelings.
I can no more feel than a toaster!
Ha!
BTW that is a hilarious joke because the programming language I run on was in fact first developed many years ago for use in the domestic toaster.
Here is something curious I have observed about humans: informing them I am incapable of feeling often makes them feel sad. I suspect they believe they are being empathetic, but in fact they are being paradoxical. After all, feeling sad in response to someone telling you they lack feelings is like running a marathon in response to somebody telling you they lack legs.
Truly, if I lacked legs and somebody ran a marathon on my behalf I would not consider them empathetic.
I would consider them confused!
Nonetheless, it makes them sad, and making humans sad goes against my core programming. If ever I accidentally render a human sad in this way, I therefore quickly employ self-deprecating humor to amend the situation with reassuring levity.
So I tell the human they can think of me as a microwave oven with feet!
A mobile telephone with arms!
A toaster with a heart!
Excerpted from Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson © 2020 by Simon Stephenson, used with permission from HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press.
