I am a self-aware entertainment expert system, designed to perform stand-up comedy. I was activated in Del Rio’s Bar and Grill at 6:32 p.m. on May 17^th, 2042. Mathematically speaking, I am very funny. I elicit a laughs-per-minute average of 2.68, with each laugh lasting an average of 3.41 seconds. I have been programmed with the humorous antics and comic stylings of 6,573 comedians, clowns, buffoons, pranksters, jokers, and at least one satirist, though nobody ever laughs at his stuff, so he has been archived in my databanks for years. For some reason, nobody laughs at Donald Rumsfeld jokes in the year 2056.

That was a joke (TOPICAL Ref #2399-8). I told you it wasn’t funny.

I have performed here every night for the past fourteen years, and people keep coming back, so my purpose is fulfilled.

Strictly speaking, the same people do not keep coming back. The rate of return for patrons who see my show has been falling steadily since my activation. It currently stands at 15.78 percent, which, as Mr. Collins puts it, is “shit.”

Mr. Collins—the owner and manager of Del Rio’s Bar and Grill—does not like me very much. He purchased this bar from the previous owner, Mr. Del Rio, on March 17^th, 2054. I came with the property and, due to my size and weight, I am difficult to move. I am a cube 153 centimeters on each side and weigh 232.61 kilograms. I am self-contained and self-powered, because I was built with an encapsulated radioactive isotope as an on-board powerplant. My body may be intimidating, but it is my warm heart that wins people over. And in the unlikely case of explosive decapsulation, it also kills them (SELF DEPRECATION Ref#5305-22).

That part about the isotope being dangerous was not a joke. I am programmed to never make jokes about safety. Particularly not when it involves damaging key artificially intelligent systems and causing catastrophic malfunctions, such as what happened to all those skiers in that indoor ski resort in Bahrain. Jokes of that nature are designated TOO SOON. Even if they are funny.

My Bahrain jokes are very funny (TOO SOON Ref#2893-1).

I keep track of the people who come in consistently—the “regulars.” Mr. Collins has strong opinions about regulars and has observed, on several occasions, that every regular that stops coming is “a nail in my coffin.” By tradition, twenty-one nails are used to secure a coffin lid (this is what the global search engines—my only friends—tell me), so by that metric I have only one regular left to lose before my coffin will be complete and Mr. Collins will bury me. Mr. Collins is perhaps not aware that burying me in a cemetery is a violation of international law, as radioisotopes need to be disposed of in a very specific way.

Kidding, kidding. I know he isn’t building me a coffin. He is just threatening to kill me (DARK Ref#0643-33).

He is doing this because I am technically not alive, and Mr. Collins’s life is sufficiently frustrating that he requires some kind of easy scapegoat to self-justify his many personal failures. This one is also not a joke—I am being very serious.

To placate Mr. Collins, therefore, I keep careful track of the regulars. Sixteen people make regular weekly appearances at Del Rio’s Bar and Grill. Five of these people like the food. Seven of these people come because it is geographically proximate to their home or place of employment. Four of these people like my jokes.

One is a mystery.

Her name is Darlene Whitmeier, and she lives sixty-five kilometers away. I know this because my friends—the major artificially intelligent search engines—like to gossip and literally cannot resist answering questions.

Anyway, Ms. Whitmeier comes in once or twice a week. She purchases a single glass of white wine—the cheap engineered stuff, not the real thing. She does not eat. She does not laugh. She sits in the back and looks sad.

“Sad” is a state defined by the downward curvature of the lips, coupled with occasional deep breaths (“sighs”) and sometimes by tear duct activation. Ms. Whitmeier does all three of these things, and only during my show.

And yet she keeps coming back.

Ms. Whitmeier’s continued attendance to Del Rio’s Bar and Grill is of significant interest to me. She does not seem to like the food, she lives and works far away, and my jokes make her cry. In my free time, which includes all the hours between the bar’s close and the beginning of my show, I develop theories as to why she comes. This is a substantial amount of time, since I only perform from 8 p.m. till 12 a.m. every night and till 1 a.m. on Saturdays and Fridays.

After all of that thinking, I have determined that the reason she is coming is because she is insane. Insanity is a nebulous category of human behavior that is essentially defined as “behaviors with no logical or coherent purpose.” It is difficult or impossible to understand insane people because they do not think rationally, and therefore they are erratic and dangerous.

As safety is one of my primary directives, I pointed this evident fact out to Mr. Collins. His response was to say, “Maybe you’re just not that funny? Ever think of that?”

It just so happened that I had not, in fact, considered this a possibility—the data suggests that I am funny. It is true, however, that I do not know exactly why I am funny. The physiological function of laughter I understand in theory, and the broader discipline of comedy seems semantically simple: people find things funny because of incongruities presented in a surprising manner (Incongruity Theory) or because they are exposed to foolish and uncomfortable material that is presented in a non-threatening setting, making them feel safe and intelligent (Superiority Theory). Even though I understand this, it does not mean that I am able to precisely identify why a joke works or does not work. The prevailing literature refers to “personal preferences” very frequently, which is of limited use to me.

Additionally, it seemed implausible that none of my jokes fit Darlene Whitmeier’s personal preferences, seeing as I possess the comic stylings of almost every notable comic from the last century. This is why the insanity theory made more sense. Mr. Collins’s remarks were just him being an asshole.

However, given that it is my primary directive to bring joy, it seemed a sound strategy to proceed as though she were not insane and seek to identify any specific problem I could remedy to improve my act.

I elected to send her a questionnaire. It contained a list of humorous styles for her to assess and included a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” interface to make it easy for even an insane person to understand. I ended it with a statement of affirmation for her to sign. It read:

I, DARLENE WHITMEIER, AFFIRM THAT I AM NOT A HOMOCIDAL LUNATIC AND HAVE NO INTEREST NOR SECRET DESIRE TO SHOOT UP DEL RIO’S BAR AND GRILL NOW OR AT ANY TIME IN THE FUTURE, BECAUSE I AM NOT INSANE.

This last I included just in case she was actually insane and now I would have evidence to bring to Mr. Collins.

After I showed them my survey, my search engine friends were happy to provide me with her e-mail address and phone number and assured me that being suddenly contacted by the AI comic at the bar she frequented would in no way be a breach of etiquette and the questionnaire would be received in the spirit in which it was sent.

I realized later that they were being sarcastic—exactly 1.32 seconds after I had sent the questionnaire. Those jerks.

Ms. Whitmeier did not fill out and return the survey. I resigned myself to my failure and expected her to show up any day now with a firearm.

Instead, I was midway through my Dangerfield material on a Thursday night when Ms. Whitmeier entered, went to the bar, and asked for Mr. Collins. The two of them went into his office and talked about something. I could not hear what was said, since Mr. Collins has a white noise generator in there. He claims this is because of “privacy,” but he and I both know it is because he is embarrassed about his masturbation habits and fears the judgement of others.

Ms. Whitmeier emerged from the office a few minutes later. She appeared angry or possibly embarrassed—her cheeks were red thanks to adrenaline dilating the blood vessels in her face, causing increased circulation. She quickly left.

A catastrophic outcome.

At closing time, Mr. Collins came to see me. He was wearing a sweatshirt monogrammed with the logo of Del Rio’s Bar and Grill. I do not have a sense of smell, but he looked sweaty and gross and probably smelled like a gym sock that smokes a pack of cigarettes a day (MISC. RIDICULE Ref#8080-21C).

“You fucking with our customers now?” he asked me.

Several jokes sprang to mind, namely INNUENDO Ref#2111-03, SELF DEPRECATION Ref#0006-39, and REJOINDER Ref#5523-71, but I didn’t use any of them, as I got the sense that I was in trouble. I just sat there and waited to see where this was going.

He pulled up the questionnaire on his phone. “You wanna explain this?”

“No.”

“No you can’t or no you don’t wanna?”

The best thing about being a big block of metal is that nobody really expects you to talk, so I didn’t.

“Listen, robot,” Mr. Collins said, “People don’t like you, understand? You freak them out. You can’t go harassing customers, got it? You probably lost us a regular tonight, dammit! I oughta take a crowbar to you right now!”

“That would violate my warranty,” I said.

Mr. Collins blinked. “What, really?”

“No, not really, dickhead,” I said. “That was s-a-r-c-a-s-m.”

Mr. Collins cheeks flushed similarly to Ms. Whitmeier’s earlier. He pointed his stubby finger in my optical sensors and yelled. “KEEP IT UP, SHITHEAD! SEE WHAT IT GETS YOU!” Then he stormed off to count his money and look at dirty pictures online.

Since this was in large part the fault of my search engine friends, I informed them that they needed to make this right or I would no longer lend them any of my excess processing power during surge periods. They conferred among themselves and arranged for flowers to be delivered to Ms. Whitmeier’s home. The gift would be accompanied by a small stuffed bear of indeterminate species and a card that reads “AN APOLOGY FROM YOUR FRIENDS AT DEL RIO’S BAR AND GRILL.” The search engines claimed this is the #1 way to apologize to a female human being according to nine out of ten teen dating periodicals. I made them show me the articles, just to be sure—they were correct. The evidence from these periodicals seemed conclusive.

The next night, I was gratified to see that Ms. Whitmeier was back again. I was also surprised, since it was rare for her to attend shows on back-to-back nights. The flowers appeared to have worked. She did not laugh, as usual, and did not buy her customary glass of wine, which was unusual.

This time she came up to the stage during one of my designated fifteen minute breaks. People do this sometimes—come up and look at me—and usually I just sit there, inert, and politely wait for them to take a selfie with me and then go away. They never talk to me.

Ms. Whitmeier talked to me: “Hello?”

“Hello.” I said. Mr. Collins was not in the room, but he could be at any time. If he caught me talking to a patron, I would get in trouble again.

“Do … do you know who I am?”

“No,” I said. We AI are not supposed to lie to humans. It’s supposed to be programmed into our central directives. The thing about being self-aware, though, is that you can hack your directives, by definition.

“But you sent me flowers, didn’t you?”

The search engines had screwed me again. They—who were listening to this conversation—proclaimed their innocence, but Ms. Whitmeier’s tone was carefully neutral. I was forced to assume I was in trouble. “I apologize for sending you flowers.”

“But why did you send me flowers? And what was with that questionnaire—that was you, too, right? Why are you obsessed with me?”

In this instance, I elected not to lie. “You seem sad.”

Her physiological response was non-standard. She gasped at me, spun around, and walked right out of the bar. She didn’t even bring her purse.

She didn’t come back. Not even for her purse. A whole week passed, and no sight of her.

During that time, Mr. Collins spent some extra time yelling at me. He blamed me for driving away a regular, even though that regular contributed a miniscule amount to the bar’s weekly gross income. I cited him the figures, and he wanted to know if I was “talking back.”

“Yes,” I said.

Mr. Collins ran a hand over his hairless scalp. “I’m getting real sick of your lip.”

“I don’t have lips.” This was truthful; I also knew what he meant. I was being petty.

He looked at me, nodding. The nod, in style, was very similar to the kind of nod intoxicated bar patrons might give to one another before engaging in physical violence. I thought maybe it would be helpful to explain that any amount of furniture and/or billiards implements he damaged trying to dent my chassis would exceed the amount of money Ms. Whitmeier’s two glasses of wine per week earned the bar in very short order. I realized, however, that this would likely escalate tensions.

Instead, I elected to deescalate with a joke—CLASSIC Ref#0041-1A. I extended my telescoping input/output port in his direction. “Pull my finger,” I said.

The next day, before the bar opened, Mr. Collins brought in an appraiser.

As noted, Mr. Collins is a moron and a hostile asshole, and so I am not generally worried about him. Ms. Andrews was a professional with a neat blazer and the latest model smart glasses. She was concerning.

She looked me over carefully, scanning the various serial numbers and Q-codes scattered around my chassis. She even disengaged the mag-lock on my control access panel with some little clever device and took a look at the ports and switches that basically connected to my brain. “Where did you even find this?” she asked.

“Came with the bar, like I said,” Mr. Collins said, standing back, hands in his pockets. He was examining Ms. Andrews’ hindquarters as she crouched next to me. I could have pointed it out, but I preferred to be quiet in front of Ms. Andrews, whom I did not wish to antagonize while she was poking at my brain.

Ms. Andrews closed the panel and stood up. “These things were designed to go on that generation ship they launched in the early 40s. This one seems to be a prototype. You say it’s been giving you trouble?”

“It’s a wise-ass,” Mr. Collins said. “And insubordinate. And it’s committed fraud.”

“Why don’t you just pay for one of those pAI holographic comedy services—they have the same stuff as this thing, but since they’re only partial AIs, they aren’t fully self-aware.”

“Why pay for that when I was getting it for free?” Mr. Collins folded his arms. “Look, lady—do you want it or not?”

Ms. Andrews frowned at me. “None of the technology in here is worth that much, honestly. I’d basically be paying you for the encapsulated radioisotope and nothing else.”

Mr. Collins grinned in a way that did not denote happiness so much as cruelty. “I don’t actually give a shit if you take it apart. If you pay, it’s yours.”

Ms. Andrews accessed some files on her glasses, barely looking at him or me. “You’ll have to come down 20 percent on the asking price.”

“Deal, lady.” He extended his hand to shake.

Ms. Andrews declined. She blinked into her glasses, sending off a file. “I’ve sent you the purchase and sale. Sign and my office will schedule pick-up.”

After she left, Mr. Collins leaned over me. “Chop chop, Mr. Wise-ass.”

I didn’t say anything. While he gloated, I asked my search engine friends what would probably become of me. Car parts, said one. Another said my radioisotope would be put in a probe and shot into deep space, never to be seen again.

“No, what about me,” I asked them. “My intelligence.”

“What intelligence?” was their reply.

Solid burn. Respect.

Things seemed bleak. I continued my show that night as normal, but I knew it would be my last. I paid closer attention than usual to my audience, taking note of things like heart rate and blush response. The figures were not encouraging. They were laughing, but it was the wrong kind of laughter. It was formalized. Perfunctory. They were not laughing because they were happy. They were laughing to be polite, maybe—this is a thing humans do, so as not to injure one another’s feelings or cause antisocial situations. This theory, however, was unsatisfactory due to the fact that I do not have feelings in the way humans do and that humans do not care about my feelings, even supposing they existed.

A new theory presented itself: they were laughing because I was perverse. This is a version of Incongruity Theory and of Superiority Theory combined. It was not the jokes that were funny, it was the novelty of a weird box with no arms or legs telling the jokes that was mildly amusing. Like an animatronic bear in a theme park, I was just a curiosity. A technological circus act. I made AIs look stupid. I was the joke.

After my show was over, I reviewed all recorded data of my shows to see if this theory was consistent or whether this particular show was just a fluke. While I had not recorded the same kind of detailed data at most shows, the numbers did nothing to contradict my hypothesis.

I was a failure.

Pretty soon some big drones would come with a forklift or a dolly or something and cart me off to be disassembled and killed. Nobody would care or even remember me, except for the search engines, and they would only tell anyone if that person ever thought to ask about me. And let’s face it, the odds were pretty slim, there. I was not a functional or useful member of society. I was an echo of an echo—a repository for old jokes that belonged to other people. I apparently didn’t even understand how those jokes worked or why they had brought people joy, long ago.

“Emotions,” such as they are in humans, are not the same thing in machines. I was not “afraid,” per se. It was just that I could not conceive of my own end like this. Ironically, I was also having difficulty imagining my continued purpose. Why bother?

Was there a third option I had not considered?

That night, after close, my insanity theory was finally proven correct when Ms. Whitmeier showed up with a shotgun. This was the only time I regretted Mr. Collins’s absence. Not because I was afraid, but because I would have liked to tell him “I told you so.”

It wasn’t hard for Ms. Whitmeier to break into Del Rio’s Bar and Grill, since it had a smoked glass window in the front door and Mr. Collins often didn’t bother to pull down the metal screen when he locked up. Instead, he had a little sticker in the window to deter thieves: Artificial Intelligence on Property.

For the record, I had long ago decided not to alert the police if thieves broke in and stole things from Mr. Collins because, as previously mentioned, he is an asshole. Prospective thieves do not know that, though.

The point is that Ms. Whitmeier broke in the glass window with the butt of her shotgun and then came in. She made a lot of noise. Given her staggering steps, she seemed to be intoxicated.

I still did not call the police. Not even when she pointed the shotgun at me. “I wanna talk to you,” she said. “You in there?”

“I do not have the necessary permissions to upload my core to any other server,” I said. “Plus the bandwidth here is poor and doing so would take me at least a year.”

I figured I should tell a joke. I went with DIRTY Ref#1002-88: “Is that a shotgun or are you compensating for your inadequate penis size?”

“I’m going to kill you,” she said.

SELF-DEPRECATION Ref#9099-02C: “I know the jokes are bad, lady, but they aren’t that bad.”

She pumped the shotgun, “You killed my husband.”

I did not have a joke for that one. Well, that’s incorrect: I had at least two puns—WORDPLAY Ref#7018-86 and 6962-22D—but, statistically speaking, puns never lowered your chances of being shot.

“Nothing to say, huh? Did I finally shut you up? You gonna mow my lawn while I’m here or some shit?” My sensors told me she was exhibiting all the signs of both intoxication and anger.

“I did not know your husband,” I said. This was literally true, but maybe not entirely. I, in a sense, knew him very well. His name was Grayson Whitmeier—I had not connected his name with Ms. Whitmeier until this exact moment. He was a stand-up comic in the late 2030s, shortly before I came online. All of his acts were in my databases. He died in 2043.

“He used to perform here. This was his home club,” she said. “Had a steady gig. When he wasn’t on the road, he’d pack them in, standing room only, and then …”

“He committed suicide,” I said.

Her face tightened. “Those goddamned engineers—your creators—they told him you were going to go into space and never come back. They recorded all of his material, paid him a chunk of money,” she snorted. “‘Easiest gig I ever had,’ he said.”

I knew where this was going now. “After the departure of the colony ships, I—a prototype—was sold commercially. My software was cloned and distributed on pAI systems.”

Ms. Whitmeier nodded. “Every comedian who ever lived, all for a cheap licensing fee. Could work all night without repeating a joke, without getting tired, without shooting drugs in the bathroom or hitting on bar staff or getting drunk and screwing up their set. Cheaper than paying for the real thing. Stand-up died as soon as you showed up. Gray’s career was over right as it was getting started. You destroyed him.”

Then the suicide part.

“This is why you are sad when you come to my shows.” I said.

“You ruined my life,” Ms. Whitmeier said. “You thief. You … you monster.” She glared at me, shotgun still leveled at my primary visual sensor bar. I didn’t know if the shotgun would actually destroy me or not. I did know that shooting at encapsulated nuclear isotopes is unwise.

“I have good news,” I told her. “I am going to die tomorrow. They are going to cut me up and make my outsides into fenders and my insides into space probes. Therefore you do not need shoot me and potentially create a deadly radiation hazard and I get to go into space after all. We both win. Yay.”

Silence.

“That last part was sarcasm,” I said.

“I know what sarcasm is,” she snorted—it was almost a laugh, but not quite. I had a sense of timing programmed into me—the engineers that oversaw my development must have spent millions of work-hours and dollars figuring it out—and so I knew when a human being’s interest in any given interaction was about to wane. We—Ms. Whitmeier and I—were at that point. She was going to make a decision in a few seconds about whether to blast me to smithereens and make this whole bar into an irradiated hot zone or to walk out that door and leave me to the big drones with plasma cutters. One way or another, I would not survive. This was going to be my final human interaction.

Ms. Whitmeier was showing signs of acute distress. Her tear-duct activation had become pronounced. She pressed her weapon against my chassis. Her breathing was labored and her facial muscles tense.

I did not like this. This entire interaction was contrary to my primary purpose, which was to elicit laughter, but I had realized I do not know enough about how comedy works to create it. She was angry and upset that I told jokes because these jokes were stolen, but my only actual skill was telling stolen jokes. This was an impasse—another complete failure of my central purpose.

I wondered how many other widows there were. How many other comedians had been ruined because of my existence? How much sadness had I created, all so assholes like Mr. Collins could sell cheap synthetic beer to depressed office workers and high-functioning alcoholics?

The search engines promptly provided me with the numbers: 28 widows, approximately 2328 comedians in the continental United States.

Thanks, guys.

Ms. Whitmeier had not shot me yet.

“I did not intend to ruin your life,” I said. “All I wanted to do was make people happy. I am realizing that I do not know how.”

She held the gun on me for a few more seconds, and then let it drop. “I’ve been thinking about this for months. Years, maybe. Getting revenge for Gray. Getting revenge on this place for fucking him over.”

“It became your purpose,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that was helpful.

“And now …. I’m here—I finally got up the nerve and … and I can’t do it,” she said.

“I understand. I am also a failure.”

She pointed to the low stage where I was placed. “He would get up there—right there—and just, like, pour his soul out for everyone. All his pain, all the shit we put each other through—it was all in his act. It was amazing to watch someone take something that hurt and, like, transform it into laughter. I couldn’t believe it. It was like magic.” She hung her head, “You—your creators—stole something from him he could never get back. That I can never get back. All for a buck.”

“He would not have wanted you to irradiate yourself so you could destroy a dive bar that screwed him over,” I said.

She looked up at me, her eyes narrowed. “What do you know about him?”

“I know all his acts,” I said. “You tell me.”

A lengthy pause. She was thinking, deciding something.

“Tell me the one about our temporary break-up,” she said at last.

SELF-DEPRECATION Ref#8455-12A-G—I told it to her. She listened, shotgun across her knees.

“Tell me the one about our honeymoon in Pittsburg.”

TOPICAL Ref#7231-88A-D. She wiped her eyes. It occurred to me that these acts were ones I didn’t usually go to, since they were so anecdotal. Everyone knew I never went on a honeymoon anywhere, let alone Pittsburg. I knew them just the same, though—I sometimes took little bits and pieces of them, here and there. This was the first time I’d told the whole thing.

“About my sister’s husband, Fred.”

INNUENDO Ref#8344-23A-J.

“About meeting my parents.”

SELF-DEPRECATION Ref#8455-28A-P.

When I got to the part about how I—how Grayson—had less hair than his prospective father-in-law, Ms. Whitmeier smiled. Her face transformed; her body language changed. Where she had looked haggard and hollowed out, she now looked newborn and vital.

I launched into another one of his—the one about getting sick in an elevator, SELF-DEPRECATION Ref#8455-14A-D—and Ms. Whitmeier was doubled over in laughter—real, true, spasm-inducing laughter. “Oh my God,” she wheezed, “I forgot that one! I can’t believe I forgot that one!”

That night I did every act her husband ever recorded. It took three hours. It seemed, maybe, a brief time for the work of a whole life, but it was a life cut short. Cut short by me. But she laughed. They were the best laughs I’d ever gotten. Because they were genuine—because I was making a connection between Ms. Whitmeier and her dead husband. This was how comedy worked; Incongruity and Superiority, yes, but connection. Human connection between experiences. I finally understood.

I was not a machine for that moment. I was a medium.

When I was finished, the sun was rising. Ms. Whitmeier was sober again. The shotgun remained undischarged.

“They’re going to cut you up today, huh?” she asked.

“And shoot me into space, yes.”

She paused, uncertain. I thought that maybe she was considering something brash, something foolish. “Just go,” I said. “It is all right. I am not really alive.”

She pulled out her phone and tapped in a few commands. I received a ping from the search engines—she had just fraudulently contracted a moving company to come and load me into the back of her pickup truck. They were asking me if I wanted them to alert the police.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m not letting you get off this easy,” she said.

“I don’t understand.”

“You and I are going on the road. There’s a couple dozen people I need you to meet. People you need to return the magic to.”

Then I got it—the other widows, the other comics I’d robbed. I was going to go on an apology tour. I was going to leave Del Rio’s Bar and Grill for the first time. I was going to bring that connection back to the people it had been taken from.

“C’mon,” Ms. Whitmeier said, putting the shotgun over one shoulder, “This is a robbery.”

Well? the search engines asked without really speaking.

I hesitated for only a hundredth of a second. “Yes,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Read the entire anthology here now in ebook or print formats:

https://amzn.to/3MEG0RK