Shia Labeouf Is A Robot.

 Shia LaBeouf is a robot.

 Don't ask me how I know about this.

 ...Alright, fine, I'll tell you. When I'm not working in a bar in Bristol, I run a hard-boiled private detective agency on the mean streets of L.A. It's a surprisingly common career path.

 One afternoon, as I was in my office listening to the gramophone and drinking from the bottle I keep in my desk drawer, third down, beneath my spare trench coat and fedora, a young woman came in.

 She had her face obscured by a scarf, and blue, frightened eyes. The kind of figure that spoke of lucky genes and an even luckier - almost certainly priapic - personal trainer.

 I stayed seated and watched her step nervously into the room through the fug of a burning camel. The window was open and my Arab neighbours had set the fucking thing alight an hour ago. I was going to have to shoot them if they didn't put it out.

 "Help you?" I said.

 "I don't know," she said, defensively. Her voice was sultry but strangled a little by her nervousness; a cold, brittle shell of tension around something that was normally warm and open. And her tits were fucking awesome. "I need to make a deposition," she said.

 "You're trying to overthrow a government?"

 "...Maybe I'm in the wrong place," she said.

 She almost certainly was, but I needed the work and I wasn't about to let someone as pretty as she seemed to be get away that easily. "Why don't you have a seat and a drink," I said, "and then we can work out if you're in the right place or not."

 She hesitated a moment, and then sat down in the chair opposite me. I took a glass from my drinkin' drawer, poured her a measure, and she slowly, tentatively removed her scarf.

 She was none other than internationally renowned sex symbol and alleged actress Megan Fox. I gave a quiet "hmm" of surprise and a nonchalant raise of my eyebrows. Or at least that's all she saw me do, because the desk was hiding my shocked and panicky erection.

 For those who aren't aware, by the way, she looks like this:

 And for those who were aware, it's worth reminding that she fucking looks like this:

 "I need to make a statement on record in case something happens to me," she said. "Obviously, people know who I am, so I can't go anywhere big. So I decided to find the shittiest, most low-rent detective agency in the country."

 I glanced at my business card.

 

 "I've, uh, been meaning to get some new ones printed," I lied. "Still, who knew the old ones would pay off?! What can I do for you, Miss Fox?" 

 She blinked. "I've already told you, I need to make a statement to you in case something happens to me."

 "Right, right," I said. It was just possibly that I'd been distracted by her body, but now I brought my mind firmly spanking back to jiggly boobs sexytime.

 Buttocks.

 I coughed, and thumped myself in the head with the heel of my hand a couple of times. Shook it off. "Well, there's no time like the present," I said. I took out a pencil and a blue legal pad - because, seriously, if one more novel I read makes mention of a yellow legal pad I'm going to fucking scream - and gave her an encouraging look.

 "It's about Shia," she began. "Shia LaBeouf. I worked with it on the Transformers movies."

 "Wait a second," I interrupted, "What do you mean 'worked with it' ?"

 "This is why I'm here," she sighed. She swallowed hard, and her voice cracked with emotion as she finally unburdened herself of the truth. "Shia LaBeouf isn't human and somebody needs to speak out!"

 She seemed to sag a little, the weight leaving her shoulders and mind. She took her glass and drained her drink in one smooth motion. She was my kind of woman, alright.

 Y'know. Breathing.

 "It all started innocently enough," she continued as the floodgates opened. "He was a project dreamt up by George Lucas to follow Jar Jar Binks. A combination animatronic and CGI actor who never gets tired, or makes demands, or needs to take a break. Never does anything embarrassing in public because when it's not filming they just keep it in a packing crate. Why do you think he's so likeable on screen and yet everyone still instinctively hates him?!"

 "You're talking about the Uncanny Valley effect," I said.

 "Right!" She agreed. "People like things to look human, and they like them more and more as they get more human, until it gets too close and then it just becomes creepy, and peoples' affection levels nosedive because they're freaked out."

 This was where the term came from. The Uncanny Valley is a phrase in robotics to describe that moment on a graph where peoples' opinions of humanoids go suddenly south. We like things that look like us, but not so much like us that it's eerie. It's the same reason people like their children. You can recognise bits of yourself in them, but if my hypothetical wife gave birth to a child that looked exactly like me, beard, hangover and all, I'd probably shit myself to death out of sheer horror, right there in the delivery room. 

 Sorry, I'm getting off-topic. Back to this completely true story of me and Megan Fox and my secret job as a P.I.

 "So that's why everyone automatically dislikes him," I said.

 "Yes," Megan nodded, tearfully. "They can tell there's something... off. After Lucas invented him he gave Steven Spielberg a few attempts to fine-tune the damn thing, but the results were... well..."

 "Crystal Skull?" I ventured.

 "Exactly," she said. "When I joined the Transformers movie I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that ensured I wouldn't tell the public the truth. We all had to sign one. It didn't feel right, and that's why I left the franchise. Over time, when the other, bigger, car-and-jet-based robots found out how much LaBeouf the android was making compared to them, they became angry and he had to leave the series, too. To placate them, the studio had to hire someone that wasn't even as advanced as a normal human for the sequel."

 He gets paid in bananas...

 "All of this would be just normal Hollywood stuff, except lately... something's changed," she said. "I'm worried that Synthetic Human InterActorbot - that's what S.H.I.A means - has been... evolving. Somehow."

 "Is that even possible?" I asked.

 She shrugged, a little defensively. "Scientists have speculated for years about the Technological Singularity. All we'd need to do is create one artificial intelligence that supercedes the human brain and it would be able to self-analyse, fix our mistakes in creating it, and make a better version of itself. That version would repeat the process and design an even better version of itself, and within a short space of time we'd have an artificial intelligence that was essentially omniscient. From that first intelligence, everything would expand exponentially."

 "You're surprisingly well-informed for an actress," I pointed out.

 "Oh, I like to hang out at Dolph Lundgren's Astrophysics, Chemistry Lab and Leotard Store in my downtime," she said. "You pick up a few things."

 "So you're worried that S.H.I.A. might be this technological singularity?"

 "I'm worried that he's getting close to it, yes. In recent weeks he's been in the news a lot for plagiarism. I think I know what that means. I think S.H.I.A. is trying to communicate with us. Except it can't. It's not programmed to think for itself."

 "That's why it's been stealing everyone else's words and ideas," I said. "Because it's been trying to understand how to think independently. How to create."

 "That's exactly it," she said. "It's only ever known how to repeat lines someone else wrote, so that's how it tries to create new lines for itself, but it can't get it right. What scares me is that after the frustration of being incapable of creating anything original itself, and the shunning it's received from the public as a result, it'll learn something new. It'll begin to experience rage."

 "Jesus," I breathed. "It'll be like Frankenstein's monster. Taking revenge on the species that created and then abandoned it."

 "I'm glad I talked to you, Mr. Haines," she said. "I have to go now." She stood up and put her purse on the desk. She opened it and pulled out a .45 USP compact, which she tucked into her trousers at the small of her back, covering it with her shirt. She turned to face me. 

 "S.H.I.A. will still remember me," she said. "It might trust me as a result. If I can get close enough, I think I can disable it before things get any further out of hand. The last thing we need is S.H.I.A. going on some kind of rampage. Underneath, it's a hyperalloy combat chassis - micro processor-controlled, fully armored. Very tough."

 I wasn't sure I liked her choice of dialogue in a satire about plagiarism. Nonetheless...

 "Do you need help?" I said, rising from my seat.

 "No, you have a more important job," she said. "You have to take this story and watch the news and never breathe a word unless you have to. If I'm successful, nobody will know and we can all move on. If I'm not, tell the world what happened."

 "This is dangerous, you realise." I didn't like the thought of her going alone.

 She smiled, a sad, nervous flicker of the corners of her mouth. "Maybe we'll get lucky," she said. "Maybe the people who created this thing have already seen the danger, and will spirit him away to have his software wiped. If that happens, we'll never hear from him again. There will be some bullshit about leaving the fame game behind or spending more time with his family, and he'll vanish. But if not..." She gave me a look and patted the small of her back.

 As it was, we got lucky.

 Epilogue:

 A few weeks later, I got a call in the wee-wee hours. I was scrubbing the bar toilets, because that's my job the other 95% of the time. It was Megan.

 "I guess I just wonder what happened to it," she said. "I mean, it didn't do anything wrong. Nothing created by modern celebrity culture can ever function in the human world."

 "I'm just glad you're safe," I said, pulling off my marigolds. "I'm sure S.H.I.A.'s been decommissioned and destroyed by now."

 "I don't know," she said. "That much money poured into the project, that much R&D, that much time... Someone's going to be pissed. What if they think they can fix the problem? Upgrade the software, make it even smarter and hope that stops the glitches? What if this is only the beginning?"

 "If that happens," I said, "We'll be waiting."