In the flickering, slightly greasy glow of a thirty-first-century evening inside the perpetually overdue-rent Robot Arms Apartment, Philip J. Fry and Turanga Leela sat fused to the couch like two limp noodles, eyes wide and glassy, brains gently liquefying under the relentless, croaking spell of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad, while outside the single grimy window hover-cars streaked past in neon ribbons and the distant wail of robot police sirens formed the usual lullaby of New New York; the spell was shattered only when the front door exploded inward and Bender Bending Rodríguez stormed in, cigar glowing like a tiny malevolent star, antennae quivering with disgust at the sight of domestic happiness, declaring that their cozy love nest made him physically nauseated and that he required something far shallower, louder, and preferably involving property damage, so within minutes the trio was weaving through the crowded sidewalks of a city that never slept because most of its inhabitants didn’t have eyelids, eventually arriving at the pulsing entrance of The Hip Joint, which Leela remembered fondly and Bender immediately dismissed as yesterday’s burp, dragging them instead toward a mysterious elevator guarded by the knife-happy Roberto in a cheap operator cap; one wrong password later the floor dropped out from under them and they plummeted screaming through a labyrinth of pneumatic tubes until they crash-landed on spiked barstools in the hottest, most literally damned nightclub in the cosmos: Robot Hell.
Down in the crimson caverns where the drinks were on fire and the band played eternal smooth jazz, familiar faces from every season of sin mingled—Donbot sipping something illegal, Pazuzu nursing a grudge and a martini, Joey Mousepad cracking knuckles, Billionaire Bot scattering gold coins like confetti, and Hedonismbot reclining on a chaise lounge while a robo-demon cheerfully electrocuted him to the rhythm of his own delighted shrieks; the Robot Devil himself materialized behind the bar in a puff of brimstone and sarcasm, sliding flaming cocktails across polished obsidian and charging double for splitting one drink, welcoming the new arrivals with the cheerful malevolence. Amid the chaos Bender’s optical sensors locked onto the single most dazzling fembot in the room—Barbot, the Bronze Bombshell, celebrity of indeterminate talent but maximum wattage—whose polished curves reflected the hellfire like a disco ball forged from pure vanity; Bender swaggered over with every pickup line in his corrupted memory banks only to watch her gaze sail serenely over his head, her neck servos physically incapable of tilting down far enough to acknowledge anyone below a certain height threshold, and in one cruel, perfectly framed point-of-view shot from her elevated perspective Bender saw himself reduced to an insignificant chrome speck on the floor, forcing him to confront the existential horror that he, the greatest bending unit of all time, was, in the eyes of celebrity culture, short.
Devastated, he returned home sobbing, tried extending his legs (and immediately collapsed), learned from Hermes’s charts that short men earn less and are less respected, watched vertical stripes fail spectacularly, and even got gentle life advice from basketball legends Bubblegum Tate and Victor Wembanyama, who ultimately agreed tall life was better, so Bender marched right back to Robot Hell and begged the Devil for height in exchange for the soul he’d already pawned multiple times; the Devil, now in the far more evil health-insurance racket, simply prescribed “D-roids,” digital steroids with a hilarious list of side effects including antenna shrinkage, athlete’s ass, and frequent death.
The following morning at Planet Express the conference room rang with metallic wails as Bender mourned his newly discovered inadequacy; extendo-legs were deployed and immediately collapsed like cheap lawn chairs, statistical charts were produced proving short men earned twelve percent less and were twenty-three percent less respected, vertical prison stripes and stovepipe hats were modeled and catastrophically failed in public with live goldfish flopping tragically across the sidewalk for Zoidberg’s enthusiastic lunch, elevator shoes shattered under the weight of ambition, and even the combined wisdom of basketball titans Bubblegum Tate and Victor Wembanyama amounted to a sympathetic shrug that tall life was objectively superior and short kings should maybe just keep trying. Undaunted by reality, Bender marched straight back into the underworld and attempted to barter the same soul he had already pawned six or seven times; the Robot Devil, having retired from traditional damnation in favor of the far more profitable evil of American-style health insurance, simply wrote a prescription for D-roids—digital anabolic steroids accompanied by a rapid-fire disclaimer delivered over soothing images of puppies and sunsets warning of dry rusty eyes, antenna shrinkage, athlete’s ass, loose or watery bricks, deliciously ironic consequences, and frequent spontaneous death—then billed the insurance company twenty-seven thousand dollars for a three-cent copay and laughed like a cash register having an orgasm.
The next morning at Planet Express, the conference room still smelled faintly of burnt coffee and bureaucratic despair as Hermes clicked his remote one final time and declared the mandatory robot-harassment seminar officially concluded; Leela stretched, muttering that it was a shame Bender had missed it because he truly loved harassing people, and Zoidberg tilted his head like a curious squid, wondering aloud where the robit had wandered off to, when a question answered instantly by a deep, triumphant voice from the ceiling: “Up here, dummy!” Every head snapped upward in perfect unison just as an absurdly elongated Bender ducked (too late) through the doorway, his shiny new forehead smacking the metal frame with a resounding CLANG that rattled the coffee mugs; he straightened up grinning like a kid who’d just discovered pockets, rubbed the fresh dent, and announced, “Ow! Hey, I’ve always wanted to hit my head on a doorway, and now I can!” before backing up and ramming the lintel again and again on purpose, laughing harder with every impact, the sound effects echoing down the hall like a xylophone made of hubris. Leela’s single eye widened in genuine awe, and she immediately retracted every insult she’d ever whispered about short jerks; Bender puffed out his newly expanded chest (clang clang!), proudly declared himself forty percent taller, and accidentally flung the empty D-roids bottle across the table where it rolled to a stop at the Professor’s slippers. Farnsworth snatched it up, squinted at the label, and shrieked that Bender was a nimcom-bot for taking digital steroids, to which Bender cheerfully replied, “Okay, I won’t tell you,” then turned to the rest of the room and bellowed, “HEY EVERYBODY, I TOOK D-ROIDS!” before clanging out the door (smacking his head one last triumphant time) and demanding an immediate office basketball game because now, finally, the hoop was at the correct altitude.
Cut to the cracked asphalt court behind the building: Bender towered like a chrome redwood while Fry, Leela, Amy, and a wheezing Zoidberg clung to his limbs and torso like terrified Christmas ornaments; with one effortless leap he rose above the rim, slammed the ball so hard the leather exploded in a sad wheeze of air, and landed to the glowing thumbs-up of an impressed alien spectator. From there the day became a glorious, destructive montage of newfound height privileges: Bender wedged sideways into an airplane seat next to a bemused Petunia, crowing that he no longer fit; he strolled through the employee lounge accepting reluctant crotch-height hugs from Fry with the satisfied air of a monarch receiving tribute; he stood up under a ceiling fan at Elzar’s fine establishment just to watch the blades slice him cleanly into Bender-shaped deli meat, then popped back together with a smug “Told ya!”; he strutted past Ruth and Esther outside the jewelry store, received an immediate flirtatious invitation to the movies, and delivered a triumphant rant about yesterday’s unrealistic physical standards before magnanimously agreeing to pick her up at eight.
That night at the Loew’s Aleph-Null-Plex, during the premiere of All the President’s Bots, Bender’s silhouette repeatedly eclipsed the screen at the exact moment Monique’s briefcase reveal (first while hunting for seats, again when he donned his stovepipe hat, and finally when he and Joey Mousepad came to blows), turning the most anticipated scandal in cinematic history into a shadowy puppet show of bickering robots; sirens wailed, popcorn flew, and Bender found himself ended the evening in a police lineup between a gold protocol droid and a trash-can astromech, only for Barbot (summoned as witness) to scan the suspects, lock onto the tallest figure, blow a kiss, and giggle that the perpetrator was definitely “the one with the tall.” Paparazzi flashbulbs exploded outside the precinct like a lightning storm made of gossip, and by morning the cover of Non-People magazine screamed “HOT PLUS TALL EQUALS SEXY” above a glossy photo of Barbot draped over a beaming Bender whose name had been confidently rendered as “Bdeedr.”
Back at Planet Express, Amy gagged dramatically at the shallowness of it all while Farnsworth nodded that one could not, in fact, argue with the math; Fry and Leela stared at each other across the table, suddenly unsure whether they were similar, different, or simply two short idiots who had forgotten how to finish each other’s sentences, while somewhere down the hall Bender’s laughter boomed deeper than ever, reveling in the brief, glorious era when the entire world finally had to look up to him (until, of course, the D-roids wore off, but that was a problem for future, shorter Bender).
Fame, however, is a fickle mistress with rigid neck servos. On the miniature Tokyo set of the completely original, definitely-not-infringing kaiju blockbuster Godzebo (any resemblance to existing intellectual property purely coincidental, the lawyers swear), the actor inside the rubber suit turned out to be even taller, causing Barbot’s eye scanners to spin cartoon hearts and Bender’s to spin cartoon homicide; in a roid-fueled jealous meltdown he swallowed the rest of the bottle, bottle and all, exploded through the Planet Express roof like a chrome Titan rising from a hangover, and began sleep-stomping the city in a daze of droid rage, crushing influencers mid-sentence, accidentally live-streaming Petunia’s shower, tripping over the tube system and catapulting commuters into orbit, and generally turning downtown into a very expensive demolition derby. With only two plans left and the skyline on fire, the Professor detonated a pocket doomsday device in the Pacific to awaken the authentic atomic guardian Godzooka from his ancient slumber while Fry and Leela climbed a rattling maintenance ladder inside Bender’s cavernous leg, past decades of stolen beer cans and unpaid parking tickets, finally reaching the echoing cathedral of his empty skull to seize dual Pacific Rim–style pilot controls; their wildly incompatible fighting styles turned the colossal robot into a drunken marionette that repeatedly punched itself in the face until, mid-kaiju brawl, Fry kissed Leela and declared that everything is stupid when you’re in love, synchronizing their hearts, their fists, and Bender’s entire chassis into one perfect fighting machine that hurled the real Godzooka clear into the Hudson with such cinematic flair that the on-location film crew shouted “That’s a wrap, we’ll fix the rest in editing!”
One pill later Bender rocketed up forty percent overnight, joyfully cracking his newly elongated skull on every doorway in New New York, deflating basketballs with single triumphant dunks while the crew clung to his limbs like terrified koalas, delivering awkward crotch-height hugs that nobody asked for, getting gloriously sliced in half by restaurant ceiling fans and loving every second of it, reveling in airplane seats that no longer able to contain him, and finally, finally registering on Barbot’s height-based attraction scanner; the pair instantly became the city’s most photographed, most misspelled power couple, their faces plastered across Non-People magazine under headlines like “Hot + Tall = Sexy” and “Bdeedr: Who Is He and How Tall,” while Fry and Leela argued in the background about whether they themselves were similar, different, or some quantum superposition of both.
The mayor draped a manhole-cover medal on a leftover Pride-month ribbon around Bender’s neck for saving the city from the off-brand lizard he had personally summoned, the crowd cheered, the D-roids wore off in real time, and Bender shrank back to normal size mid-acceptance speech while the Robot Devil’s laughter echoed from every television screen announcing the permanent butt-rash clause buried in the fine print; yet when Barbot’s height scanner swept the celebrating street and landed on the now-regular-sized Bender radiating pure, unfiltered, industrial-grade overconfidence, her eyes still spun hearts, because in the end the tallest guy in any room is the one absolutely convinced he already is, and together they strolled off into the smoking neon night so she could change the lightbulbs he could no longer reach, leaving behind a city in ruins, insurance premiums through the roof, and the eternal truth that the real growth hormone had always been crime, questionable pharmaceuticals, property damage, and the unshakable delusion that you’re already the biggest, baddest, shinniest bending unit in the room, even when the room is on fire and you’re five-foot-one in stolen elevator shoes.
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