Birthday Notification

Barney and his folks celebrate is birthday together.

**Birthday Notification** is the second scene in *Ron's Gone Wrong*.

## Description

### "18 minutes of recess hell"

Nonsuch middle school breaks for recess, and kids pour out onto the playground, where two pupils, Savannah and Ava, each run the friendship algorithm. Savannah is looking for people to add to her group chat, and Ava is looking for people to join her "Science Squad" group. Their B-bots cycle through the profiles of nearby bots: the two, who are incidentally side-by-side, have their bots simultaneously land on each other's profile, registering "no match". They're incompatible. They awkwardly exchange glances and walk away.

On first thought, this is unsurprising, the two's interests couldn't be more different. But is the algorithm naive to promote friendship as a matter of sharing exact interests? Is there something more between the two? This is explored further on in the story.

Barney comes down the hallway and looks out to the playground. "18 minutes of recess hell," his internal monologue remarks. He's suddenly interrupted by a teacher, Miss Thomas, "all alone again [...] on your birthday?" she says.

### "Kill me now"

Barney and Miss Thomas sit on the "buddy bench". It's bench on the playground that, apparent in its design, is there to encourage making friends; anyone who sits on it is looking for a buddy. The boy thinks this whole affair is terribly lame, "it really won't [work...] it kinda makes things a whole lot worse," he insists to her. Lacking in all self-awareness, she responds to Barney's misery by burying him in an enormous hug. He slinks into total embarrassment as Rich and his cronies mock the situation, looking from afar.

### "You're a rock star!"

Prompted by Miss Thomas, Ava and Noah awkwardly walk over to Barney ― "happy birthday?" asking if he wants to talk about rocks; they got the memo that he wrote a report about geology. Embarrassed, he plays it down. Rich butts in laughing that it's his birthday and he still hasn't got a B-bot, and along with his cronies, taunts the poor boy about his interest in rocks over a livestream: "you're a rock star, Barney!" Then, through the rest of the day, "who's your favourite movie star, The Rock?", "you rock man!", "can we rock up at your house?". At the canteen; on the toilet; and at the end of the school day.

### "Happy birthday to you..."

Barney returns home and, after a brief run-in with the family goat Martina, he quickly checks in with dad, Graham, "hi Barney, good day?" he asks in-between a video call pitching his novelty toys to international distributors, only for his connection to drop-off. "Did you unplug my router again?" he panics, addressing someone in the room over.

The boy looks on unimpressed, "sure, it was fine", moving on into the dining room to find his grandmother, Donka singing happy birthday, a burly, menacing old lady thoughtlessly swinging a butcher's knife in her hand. Dad comes over and chimes in, "happy birthday to youuu..." and is gifted with a goat's wool balaclava, and... could it be a B-bot? He hopefully shuts his eyes, only to reopen them and be presented with a set of rock hammers. Yes. Barney, the sweetheart he is, is not even disappointed, just content.

### "When you were six!"

The boy explains that he sure does like rocks, or maybe used to... and he might be allergic to goat's wool? Donka, with all her old country gusto, insists "no-one-in-family-has-allergies!" Not even Uncle Boris, he was only possessed by a demon in a cashew. She moves on, "what time your friends come?" swiping the table cloth that undrapes a lavish mountain of delicious and peculiar Eastern European cuisine: cured meats, offals, and more.

Donka walks over to a record player and pops on a weird track, Zany Bogomil, "like last time we had party, remember? When you were six!" Barney pauses to grimly reflect. Yes. When he was six... where he and schoolfriends played an inadvisable knife throwing game "poke-the-dictator", where Noah kicked by Martina, a pinata game dumped wet sausages onto Savannah, and birthday candles toppling into a house fire.