Page 6 - Unlikely Stories 2

Hitch MacGuffin’s Last Role

He was gone almost the whole day.
“You know,” mused Val, as shadows lengthened and they could
hear the clank of an approaching caterbot operating without benefit
of factory-recommended maintenance, “if anyone could make a dent
in Logical’s mechanical mindset, it would be Hitch. He just radiates
the pathos of the human condition.”
“Indeed,” growled Russell, in a rare moment of agreeableness.
“His gravitas is imponderable. He is despicable to the point of being
lovable—to a certain sort of impressionable mind, I mean.”
“You mean, the typical audience already primed to expect a false
tension between external appearance and internal character?”
Helen interrupted. “Here he comes. Doesn’t look good.”
MacGuffin hobbled onto the veranda and collapsed with a mighty
sigh into his accustomed seat. His fatigue was evident, but something
more was evident in his good eye: puzzlement.
When it became obvious he wasn’t going spontaneously to talk
about it, Val went over to him.
“You look exhausted, Hitch. They must have really worked you.”
“They did. More takes than necessary. Got their money’s worth
capturing this old monstrosity for their cloning files. Didn’t have
much to do: simply lie on the pavement with a tin cup and turn
slowly toward the camera on cue to give the world a good view of
me. Just an actually metabolizing plot device. That’s all. But I knew it
going in.”
“Then you made it!” Helen was chirpily exuberant, as if her child
had successfully taken a step on its own.
“Nope.” Hitch sagged, looking off into the distance. “All of it cut.
Whatever algorithm functions as a target audience gave it thumbs
down. So they will cobble together a character from bits and pieces
of other portrayals with predictable feedback.”
“But what artificially confabulated puppet could outdo you?”
Hitch was barely audible. “They told me on the way out,” he
rasped, “that I wasn’t realistic enough.”

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