Arthur sits in the one-room flat he shares with his wife and tries to think in terms of mass appeal. That is, to think up plots with mass appeal. Something about love. And problems. And twists. And a happy ending. The old Hugh Grant type of films. Or something about spies. Countless beginnings, legs twitching, increasingly agitated. Every day the same. Start. Something with sun, autumn foliage, a wild but at the same time sweet girl strolling through Soho. Then. Arthur begins to poke around on social media. From current events to newspaper reports to the filter bubble of idiocy—the Nazi accounts—he gets excited, then tired, then he has a nap. No success. He has no success at anything; every new attempt to produce something with mass appeal is met with a proverbial shake of the head from the machine. Arthur writes a script about a machine gone awry that makes decisions about all things, subject only to its own absolute discretion. Decisions about life and death in hospitals, couples’ suitability for marriage, court verdicts. When it’s finished, the Scriptbox speech generator asks: “Where is the gag?” That night Arthur rapes his wife. Well, really, come on, rape? He just didn’t listen too closely when she said: “Nah, not tonight.” His wife, who is planning her departure. Getting away from the grouchy dope smoker who sits home at night awaiting her return after her shift at a restaurant to the little flat they were recently allotted. Before them, a fitness trainer with cancer lived in this dark hole. There were still photos on the walls. His wife later got pregnant, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is a miracle if you consider that the sperm count in the gonads of the Western world have already dropped 60 percent and that by the year 2030 men will be infertile, which explains why they’d all become so angry even back then.

In any case, his wife was not so enthused about this fluky biological bull’s-eye. She’d said: “I don’t want this.” And Arthur had thought: What do you mean you don’t want this? He had already seen his life with the baby flash before his eyes. A life where he didn’t sit at his desk all day and try to write a Hugh Grant film, god rest his soul, and in so doing despair about his lack of talent and so on, and instead he’d have a purpose. A meaning, in an I-can-raise-this-baby-and-do-baby-appropriate-things-with-him sense. He had figured out that his wife wanted to get rid of the fruit of her womb. Which is so incomprehensible. That a woman can decide what is to happen to a seed he planted. That a stupid cunt can kill his creation.