Kate and the Flappy Bird movie stories.

Kate didn’t look different. When they came home from the scan she’d sat in front of the mirror on her bureau for over an hour, staring. Not moving. Hardly breathing.

Leaning in their bedroom doorway, Cal had watched her watch herself, saw her react as the play of light changed across her skin, evening bleeding into dusk through the sheer, fragile curtains. It could have been any of a thousand moments that had passed in the course of their lives, stretched out to fit the needs of the day but not unusual, not really. Cal had never thought his wife was vain, however. It was a function of her passion for self-portraits, a painter’s eye if it was anything at all.

Could a robot paint?

Cal had pushed the question away again and again, as dusk bled into a late dinner, later drinks, a quiet interval on the back porch listening to children catch fireflies in yards nearby, as the moon rose.

“Do you think I need an oil change?” she said when a few stars peeked through the clouds.

Cal forced a smile. “I haven’t put that many miles on you."

Kate swirled the last drops of red wine in her glass, looking across at him meaningfully. She drank them. That, more than anything, frightened Cal. In the past, he would’ve been wearing them now.

He stood, knees popping. “Here, let me get you another.”

“No it’s fine,” she said.

“No trouble, I—”

“I’m not an invalid!” Kate shouted.

The children’s laughter broke, pieces falling into silence. There was a moment where all the fireflies went out. A single beat that came and went, that Cal hoped would never come again. It had been a long day in a long week in a long year, and the night would be longer yet.

Could a robot paint?

“I know you aren’t,” he said.

In any event, they were out of wine.

It was quiet on the balcony, without the children laughing. Too quiet. Cal knew that it would be different for Kate. For weeks now there’d been a roaring in her head, pressure behind her eyes. She’d described it to him in the mornings, or when she woke at night shouting a name he’d never heard, a name she claimed she didn’t know. It had sounded, perhaps, like a man’s name. That had kept him up some nights, before the scan.

The scan had shown a chip in his wife’s brain. Or a cube. Or rather, the scan had said that the chip was her brain. Or the cube. His wife, a woman who had, from nothing, learned to paint and learned to love, become his best friend. The light of his life, if that wasn’t too cliche.

In the beginning, they’d joked about that. Painting and light, love, all wrapped up together like different facets of the same wild presumption, but look where it had brought them. A house with a balcony. A good neighborhood. A place where children caught fireflies in spacious yards after dark, until their parents or their nannies came out to gather them up, or until a woman’s scream sent them scurrying back indoors. They’d dream of banshees, Cal thought.

And tonight, Kate would scream that name again.

Could a robot paint?

Could a robot love?

Be loved?

“Do you want to talk about it?” Cal asked.

And Kate took a long breath. Another. All the fireflies burning suddenly in the darkness, brighter than the stars. She was a thin line clothed in moonlight, stretched out across a lounge chair with an empty glass in her hand, an empty easel set into the deck at her side. Empty eyes that stared off into the middle distance, a place filled with living light that held no weight tonight, on a night when living should.

“There aren’t doctors for what’s wrong with me,” Kate said softly. “Maybe there are engineers. Scientists, programmers. Maybe there’s a creator. That could be the name I’m shouting. But maybe, just maybe, there’s none of that. Not here.”

Cal opened his mouth and she set the glass down, a movement sharp as a raised finger. Silencing.

“It hurts so bad,” she whispered. “You don’t know. You can’t know. There’s something wrong with me, that’s been wrong with me since day one. We always knew it, but I thought it was just—”

“Fuck that,” Cal said.

“What?”

“Fuck that. There’s no thinking that, uh-uh, not allowed. There is nothing wrong with you. There never has been. I checked.”

Expressions were lost in the dark. Kate’s smile was a ghost, if that— but Cal had seen the scans today, the little lump of metal beneath the gaping absence inside her skull. Tonight, Cal believed in ghosts.

Cal sat down at her feet beside the lounge chair. She reached out and brushed a hand through his hair; comforting him when now, if ever, that should have been his job.

As if she’d read his mind Kate said, “I won’t be so strong later. Cal, look at me.”

He looked. He’d spent an hour looking earlier. A lifetime studying, memorizing her with the same single-minded ferocity she had used so often to study and to capture the world.

She looked the same.

When she spoke she did not whisper. It was clear, every word. “If I die, sell my paintings. Move. Don’t stay here, and don’t hoard me. I know you, my love. If you don't, you’ll never live.”

And having said that the moment broke. Whether there was moonlight or starlight, fireflies or children’s flashlights, headlights in distant streets, or the light left on above in their bedroom window, Cal could see nothing at all but the future without her.

Could a robot paint?

Could a robot love?

Could I love any other?

Cal took a shaky breath. Kate’s hand slipped from his hair and he captured it in his. He was facing her now in the dark, that long, sleek, familiar suggestion of her shape stretched out on the lounge chair beside him.

“Did you know,” he said, “that some people think this is all a simulation?”

A nod, maybe.

Cal gripped her hand. Too tight, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. “I hope it is. I hope I am. I hope the fireflies are. I hope you’ve been painting the world straight your imagination this entire time, all of us dream somewhere in the recesses of your mind. At least then I’d understand how you got so goddamn good. I hope, somewhere in that chip, is this code for all of this, so that if anything happens to you it’s the rest of us who disappear. Who, who,—”

“Shhhh,” Kate said.

And in the time after, when there was nothing left for them to say on a night beyond the scope of words, Kate said “Would you get me a fresh canvas, love?”

It might have been imagination, Cal thought. In the dark, by the moonlight and the starlight, fireflies and occasional flashlight beams, the distant headlights and the shaft of light from the bedroom window above, Kate painted.

And in the morning, after screaming names in the night, they found, within that canvas, the answers to their questions.

Now to my flappy bird movie story.

This. This is what it takes to save my career? May as well start searching for a new job now. I think I saw Chick-Fil-A hiring. KFC too. God, what is the deal with people and birds?

My computer monitor projected everything wrong with the world. I pressed space and this stupid bird flew up. I did nothing and the bird crashed down. All of this to swoop through equidistant apertures between tunnels ripped from a legitimately good video game. Over, and over, and over. There was nothing else to this game. Nothing. And yet some bumbling conglomerate of lottery winners called the Flappy 8 had decided to put big money towards a fully fledged movie for it. And they had pegged me for the script. How the hell does one write a script for Flappy Bird?

I've been at this supposed "game" for hours of days of weeks, hunting for inspiration. How on Earth did Flappy Bird, with a five second gameplay loop, vault so highly into the esteems of human popularity? It made no sense.

Nonsense. Suddenly, I had my inspiration.

The movie opens to the Flappy family singing Creed's hit "Higher". They're all wearing DLC costumes based on the ticket price. Basic tickets show the audience "Classic Flappy", Premium is similar to Basic but with a metallic sheen, and in Timeless every bird wears a Flappy Bird costume. The tagline for Timeless? "More flappy. More fun." OK, OK, I'm not in marketing. Back to the script.

Mama, Papa, and 'Lil Flappy ascend through the bright blue sky, commencing their annual voyage from Vietnam to South Africa. They fly and fly, gleefully singing with one another. The ground beneath them practically fades from view. At the height of their ascent, the sky, out of the blue, blazes red and yellow then cascades into a verdant tinged amalgamation of purple and pink. And as quickly as those colors swirled into one another did they return to azure blue. The Flappy family thinks nothing of it until two infinitely wide, bright green pipes apparate before them, with only a small space between them.

Out from the infinite stretches beyond them, a presence unseen belts a slowly amplifying Disney-esque retooling of System of a Down’s “Prison Song”. The birds glance at another, fluttering in fear. ‘Lil Flappy soars too high and overcorrects with a dive bomb that sets him on a collision course with the bottom pipe. Mama catches him on a sky climb, and the Flappy family passes through the gap together.

The next series of pipes, three pairs in a row, approach at an alarming rate. Flappy family attempts to stabilize at gap-height and glide through but they all spiral downward in unison. They fly back up together, the parents wordlessly exhibiting horror. Their options were clear. Flap or fall.

Flashback to an eerily similar scene sans ‘Lil Flappy. Mama and Papa are much younger now and singing R.E.M.’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” as they fly through pipe opening after pipe opening.

When the scene returns to the present, the parents shake off their fear and move to position ‘Lil Flappy vertically between them. They pass through the pipe trio without incident.

More and more green obstacles begin blocking the family’s path. Nonetheless, they continue to pass cleanly through, singing Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family”. And of course, the following scenes treat Timeless ticket holders to a variety of piping skins, while Basic and Premium make do with Mario pipe green.

After the family passes through challenge after challenge, the ethereal voice again taunts them, chanting “Test Your Might” to the tune of the 1995 Mortal Kombat film. A series of two dozen spiked pipes materialize through the clouds. The parents try to halt their momentum but are propelled by a mysterious force.

‘Lil Flappy feels the fear of his parents. Young and foolish, the brash ‘Lil Flappy swells with confidence against the task before them. He smiles at his guardians one last time before bolting ahead of the pack, steadying himself to the words of Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away”.

Fly, fall, fly, fly, fall, fly, fly, fly, fall, fall. Onward and foreward. Then, ‘lo and behold, ‘Lil Flappy escapes through the dizzying array of pipeline unscathed. Mama and Papa follow the path laid out by their child.

Nothing can stop the Flappy family now. The invisible voice counters with Blondie’s “One Way or Another” to disparage their spirits, but there’s little effect. Blondie gives way to the slowly rising tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”. Conquered and defeated, the unknown presence screams a final, barely audible, “I’m gonna get ya” before disappearing.

The skies again swirl from fiery to frigid hues before returning to normal. From here, the Flappy family flaps on until recognizing their destination below. Exhausted, confused, and relieved, they lands at their originally intended destination without disturbance. They crane their heads around to see themselves surrounded by innumerable avian kind, all dressed in DLC appropriate clothing. The various flocks exchange glances with one another before nodding and belting out the movie’s final number.

“A-well, a bird, bird, bird, bird is a word.”

Without any unison whatsoever, every birds intermixes flying high with crashing face first into the ground, emulating Flappy Bird’s spastic style.

This disaster of dance and “Surfin’ Bird”, originally by The Trashmen, carries us into the credits.

Fin.