“PlayChanger line?”
“Yeah. It’s like the new alternative. When you feed PlayChanger-line PerFormulae to your cure, you do it the same as if it was GameChanger, but instead of affecting the cure’s next clone, a PlayChanger line PerFormula affects the cure who ate it. Or drank it. Whatever.”
“Whatever,” Jared Leto says. “I don’t believe it. That is way too rad to possibly be true.”
“You want me to show you?”
“Hella right I do, bro. If it’s real, I’m gonna get some myself. Come on. I’ll drive us to the mall.”
“What’ll your friends say?”
“Those dudes are just a bunch of total poseurs anyway.” Leto turns to the group of older boys. “Later!” he shouts to them.
“Later, skater!” shouts the boy with the ™ nose ring.
“Whatever, dude,” Leto says, putting his arm around David’s shoulder.
“Yeah totally,” says David. “What. Ever.”
“Like who is that kid?” says the boy with the ™ nose ring.
“I don’t know, holmes,” says one of the others, “but he’s kinda the freakin man, looks like.”
Formula Trial
Garagenhauer R&D Laboratories
2009, Germany, subtitled
[3 minutes, 27 seconds]
On a table is a soda bottle’s screwtop cap, incurvate side up. A narrow hand with pink-lacquered nails places a WorkPellet into the cap, disappears offscreen. The same hand, bearing a dropper-bottle’s dropper, reappears a moment later and drops a drop of formula onto the pellet, disappears again. The pellet, soaking the drop up, darkens.
A single-legged Curio approaches the bottlecap. A woman, offscreen, speaks in German to the Curio. [Eat it up, now, small mechanical angel,] the subtitles read.
The cure pulls the pellet out of the bottlecap, takes a bite, chews, swallows, takes a second bite.
CUT.
One hour later. Overhead shot. The single-legged Curio is sleeping in a PillowNest. A hand different from the first—its nails are painted black—reaches into the nest to prod the cure’s belly. The cure awakens and stretches, giving out a strangely guttural series of sighs.
The same woman who spoke before says, [Pull the tail.]
The black-nailed hand grasps the tail’s tip and jerks.
The cure jumps to all threes, barks like a dog, a loud single bark. Laughter is heard.
[It worked. Pull again,] the woman says.
The hand pulls the tail. The cure barks again. More laughter is heard.
[The cutest,] a second woman says offscreen.
[Yes. Precisely,] the first woman says. [Now to make it even cuter. Using your nails, pinch the tail firmly and do not cease pinching.]
The hand pinches the tail, in the middle, between thumb and forefinger.
The Curio barks continuously. The cyclic modulations of the barking’s pitch and volume suggest that the Curio is attempting to sing its painsong. It does not appear surprised by the sounds it is making. As the “painsong” continues, more laughter is heard, as are occasional, un-subtitled yowls of “Ja!” and “Mein Gott!” and a couple of other un-subtitled mono- and duosyllabic German words that seem to be in the spirit of praise/wonder and/or encouragement.
After thirty-seven seconds of barking, the Curio appears to gag, as if on a mouth ejection. Its eyes go wide and extra wet. It points frantically at its throat and turns its head, right-left-right-left, presumably attempting to make eye contact with either or both of the offscreen women. This goes on for nine seconds before it drops to its stomach, and a small, glistening chunk of matter with an organic, though unrecognizable, shape, slides from its lips to the floor of the PillowNest.
The hand continues to pinch the Curio’s tail, and as the Curio gets back up on all threes, its mouth and diaphragm move as before, when it was barking its “painsong,” but the only sounds it emits are sibilant, barely audible, gasps.
[I did not believe that this could get any better,] says the first woman, [but as it turns out, it can get very much better.]
The Curio continues its sibilant gasping for another twelve seconds, then, tilting its head, appears to notice the glistening chunk of matter before it, shuts its eyes, collapses, and ceases to move.
[Too bad,] says the second woman. [I thought we had it.]
[Maybe we do,] the first woman says. [I say we do. I say ‘good enough.’ We will sell it as a terminal formula.]
[I do not know if the effects are long-lasting enough.]
[Tell me the bizarre ejection was not spectacular. Tell me it wasn’t a moving finale.]
[Yes. Of course. Of course I was moved. I am not made of stone. But I would have hoped for a longer arc. A moving finale—no matter how spectacular—if it takes but only a minute or two to build toward…It can be disappointing. I am thinking of CrawlSkin as an ideal to aspire to. The long arc of CrawlSkin. Fifteen minutes of ever-increasing, ebbless flow. Sometimes twenty.]
[You lack imagination.]
[How can you say that? I proposed this formula.]
[Yes. That is so. It was wrong for me to say that you lack imagination. But you lack creative market sense. You can’t get your head around the effects of price points on consumer expectations.]
[Price points. Always with the price points—I don’t care. I’m a creator. I would not say an artist, but a creator. Do you understand? Price points—]
[I appreciate your value. But you must learn to appreciate mine, and what I propose is that we sell this as a single dose—as a pretreated WorkPellet in a candy wrapper. Two euro a pellet. One-fifth the cost of a three-dose bottle of CrawlSkin, yes? But without the bottle, the dropper, and the extra doses, the profit margin is maintained. And maybe we instruct the consumer to terminate the robot within—what was it?—ten seconds of the ejection? Fifteen seconds? How long before it deactivated?]
[Ten or fifteen seconds, yes—we will test again and see. But how will we communicate the instructions to the consumer if there’s only a wrapper…I suppose…I suppose we could print the instructions on the wrapper in very small print, or, better, in pictographs.]
[Yes, yes, keep talking. Now you’re getting somewhere.]
[We print the instructions out on the wrapper, and if they neglect to strain their eyes to read these instructions, and they find themselves disappointed by the outcome of feeding the Curio the formula, they will perhaps complain to the retailer, or look again at the wrapper, only to discover they should have followed the instructions, and to then blame themselves for not having read the instructions.]