Everyone Died+My iPhone Stopped Working: An Oral History of The Robot Apocalypse

Domo Arigoto, Mr. Roboto

Kenny Lee

Age: 32

Bartender

I liked working corporate gigs, but you did run into some real dicks. And you could tell who the real dicks were by the drinks they'd order. Anyone who played "stump the bartender" by asking for a, I don't know, Floating Fuzzy Abortion On The Dirty Beach or some shit, was a dick. Some of your wine guys were major dicks. "Do you have any Chateau Latour?" Yeah, dude. This is an open bar and we serve thousand-dollar bottles of wine. They come in a glass made out of unobtainium and blow jobs.

If you ordered a beer, you were probably OK. If you were a chick, margaritas were a good sign that you're pretty cool and like to party. If you're a dude, margaritas were a good sign that you wanted to be a chick. Not judging. Just saying.

The company was called FutureMind and they were a pretty good crowd. Computer nerds. Which meant I didn't have to worry about breaking up a fist fight. A slap fight, maybe. And one time I saw someone stabbed with a mechanical pencil, which was pretty hilarious. Click-click-click... stab!

It was a total sausage fest, though. There were like only two nerd girls in the whole place. One was kinda cute. She reminded me of that chick from The Hunger Games if she wore librarian glasses. Her dumpy friend just stood next to her, looking at everybody suspiciously like, "Nobody's gonna roofie nearsighted Katniss on my watch!"

Everybody was really stoked about something. Some big announcement that "Robert" was gonna make. They never said "Rob" or "Bob." They never said a last name. He was that important. I wondered what the other dudes in the room named Robert - there had to be a few, right? - thought about him totally owning their name.

The cute nerd girl ordered daiquiris for her and her grumpy friend and as I was making them I told her about her Katniss resemblance. She laughed hard at that. "For the last three years, I've cosplayed Katniss at WonderCon!" she said, all excited, like those words would mean anything to me.

[NOTE: Do not bring up the topic of cosplay with Lucas. He will never shut up about it.]

"That's so awesome!" I said, then changed the subject. "So what's everybody buzzing about?"

She told me that Robert was about to unveil the first honest-to-God artificially intelligent machine. And he was announcing it a whole week before Misha - who I figured was another one-named computer guy - was going to unveil his artificially intelligent machine.

"Ha!" I said. "Misha sounds like a total loser!" She laughed at that, too. We were really making a connection until her friend Butchy McCockblock started talking all serious about how this technology would change absolutely everything, at which point I turned on the blender so I didn't have to listen to her babbling on and on about stuff I didn't care about.

Then the lights went down and some music came on and a spotlight appeared on the stage. Both the girls said the word, "Robert!" at the same time, like they were tweens at a Justin Bieber concert.

Please tell me the robots got him, at least!

[NOTE: they did]

The girls forgot all about me and their daiquiris and ran off to join the crowd in front of the stage.

The whole place went apeshit as this flabby balding guy waddled onto the stage. He was far away, but his image was projected on a ginormous screen behind him. Each drop of sweat on his forehead was the size of a quarter. I couldn't believe that this was the Robert everyone was creaming themselves over.

So Robert is talking about history and the dawn of a new era while wiping his forehead over and over with a handkerchief and then some dork in a T-shirt with the words "Science: It Works, Bitches!" written on it asked me for a Lemon Drop which seemed like a weird drink to celebrate the dawn of a new era. Plus, it's a bitch to make, with all that powdered sugar that gets all sticky and disgusting. By the time I handed it to him, I had missed a lot of what Robert said, but there was a ton of cheering and "We love you, Robert!" and that kind of thing.

"So... are we ready to change the world?" You could see his armpit sweat through his shirt.

I thought it would have been funny if they all shouted no! But of course they screamed yes! Then he milked the moment by saying he couldn't hear them and they had to say yes a few more times until he was satisfied.

He waddled over to this shiny box with a big red button in front of it. It was kind of cheesy. But fine. It's theater. I get it.

Robert then said, "Let there be light!" which I'm pretty sure he stole off a bumper sticker or something. He pressed the button. And there was light. There was also sound. Super-fucking-loud sound. That "Mr. Roboto" song from that old car commercial.

And then on the mondo screen we could see the machine, which was clearly in a whole other building. I guess it was stupid of me to think that they'd put it on a truck and drive it over here. It looked like a large stainless steel refrigerator with calmly blinking lights. I couldn't help but wonder if it made ice. Especially since I was running dangerously low on ice.

At first, it was kind of a letdown, but then I realized that I couldn't stop staring. There was something about it that made the hair on my arm stand up. I was trying to wrap my head around the idea that this refrigerator wasn't just a dumb machine. It was thinking. Which is more than I can say for some of my exes. And I couldn't help but wonder, what is it thinking about?

And suddenly, everything felt different.

Then someone leaned in close to me and said, "Chateau Latour."

And everything felt the same again.