(Read Part One HERE)
Jeeves3.89 was successfully Electric Sliding, clap and all, as he shimmied past the large front window of No Exit dance studio.
“Humanity, here I come,” Jeeves3.89 said as he opened the door and walked through, jazz hands shimmering with his biggest Miss America smile leading the way.
The whole room stopped.
Everything but the music.
It was a merengue.
Jeeves3.89 dropped his silver hands and extended the hydraulics in his cheeks to remove the smile. He walked to a corner and stood facing the dance floor. The dancers slowly returned to their positions, and the teacher recounted “five, and six, and five, six, seven, eight.”
He was 7.3 minutes early. The room was a large wooden floor with mirrors and a ballet barre across the long wall. A wrestling mat was rolled to one side of the room and the rubber upper bodies of sparing dummies lined across the opposite wall. The room smelled like hard work. Jeeves slowly faded back to furniture in everyone’s mind.
Then she walked in.
She wore workout clothes, with matching fluorescent green headband, wristbands, and ankle bands. Her deep set eyes came through the door after the rest of her head, sad to catch up. Jeeves3.89's eyes followed her through the room. Instead of turning his head, he repositioned the retina cams in his face.
She began to stretch. She reached for her toes with the grace of an orangutan in leotard leg warmers. If it were not for the mirrors and balance bar, she might be warming up for a part in Kickboxer 8. And an extra would be killed in the opening scene.
Then . . . she danced.
Eyes closed, and counting head bobs she whispered "Five. And six, And L'enfer, c'est les autres" and burst into angles. To the untrained eye it would have looked like a Mac truck, full to the ceiling with geometry textbooks, was crashing into a protractor factory.
The trained eye would see father hunger.
Then Jellyfish. One at the end of each limb. Her hands flitted in the space above her head like drunken moths who, in their sloppy stupor, had mistaken the bun in her hair for 60 watts of Friday night adventure.
She froze like a tree, and waited like a tree, and stood like a tree. Then she melted into a puddle on the wood grained floor.
Jeeves thought, ‘Am I perhaps experiencing amazement?’
Approaching this goddess of emotional explosion, he risked it all.
"Hello."
She was breathing quickly, but she was still able to roll her eyes. "Yeah?"
"I would like to learn that dance." Jeeves said. "I would like to have an emotional experience like the one that you appear to be having while you dance."
The temporarily incarnate goddess curled her upper lip. "Where's your owner?"
"I am here to learn to dance. This dance that you have just completed. This is the dance that I must learn."
She tilted her head, pursed her lips, and squinted her eyes like a dog who knows that, though you moved your arm, you did not let go of the stick.
"You? You want to learn how to dance?” She turned her head slowly around the room, “Who sent you?”
“No one sent me. I am here by my own volition.”
“I already have a student signed up. J. Dean.”
“I am Jeeves Dean. Are you Madame Darcy Karz? I am your new student. I desire to…”
“Oh. Well. If you’ve paid,” she interrupted. “I don’t need to know why you think you should be a dancer.” She waved her hand like an empress used to having her ring kissed. “Do you need to warm up?”
“I have been warm since this morning when Mr. Brokenshire required...”
“I don’t need your life story. Yeses and nos. Yeses and nos.”
“No.”
“OK. You can’t learn that dance. You are a beginner. You will probably never be able to do that dance. You are probably not worth my time. And yet,” she squared off with the robot, put both her hands on his shoulders and dropped her head forward, “Here we are.”
She forcibly turned the robot around so that he was facing the mirror and stood beside him. “I will at least try and make your movements presentable. I can guarantee neither beauty nor musicality, for both of those come from within you.” She beat her closed fist into the center of her ribcage and rolled her shoulders and left leg through the movement in a wave. And then she squatted and put her arms stiffly into a half touchdown. “Copy!”
Jeeves put himself into the touchdown tiki-squat one limb at a time. And then smiled.
“Am I smiling?”
His smile dropped.
“Now, COPY!”
Still squatting, she began to peck the air with her hands like two birds competing for newborn mayflies.
When Jeeves3.89 attempted the maneuver his hands got the shape right, but they banged together like a three year old with pots and pans. He cringed, but took it slow until he began to get the coordination right.
When his limbs were synced he reminded himself not to smile.
“NO!”
Jeeves fell over in surprise.
“Nooooo.” she said through the roof of the dance studio to the heavens beyond.
Jeeves sheepishly climbed back to his feet.
“Why?” She put a hand on her face and grabbed the mirror’s barre rail to keep from being tossed by the earthquake in her soul.
She snorted herself level and said, “Dancing is more than joints contracting and extending. To dance is to play a part.” She stood up stiff like the statue of a Roman guard on duty. “To be in and through,” she stretched to her toes and slowly flapped imaginary raven wings, “and without and even throughout the essence of the character that you are embodying.”
She turned to Jeeves and pulled into his face with her hands on his robot cheeks. “You are not a dancer,” she whispered. “You are a medium. With the physical movements of the dance between the pure spirit that is the true unmoving movement of the cosmic essence and the plebeian masses. You are a bridge,” she looked at the ceiling, “between worlds! You must discern the flowering lifeblood that flows in each dance and then see that it is pulsing in your veins.”
She put her hand to his flat, cold metal chest.
“Oh,” said Jeeves. “Kay.”
If his owner would have paid the extra 4.2% for hydraulics in his eyebrows, they would have been pushed together across his forehead.
“I am going to need a help with the discerning part. That sounds beyond my current experience.”
“You are going to need more than experience. You are going to need genius.” She struck a pose. Then she let it go limp. “But since I am probably the only one in the vicinity that has any genius, you will have to ride on the coattails of my leotard.”
“Copy!” She hit the squatting referee pose and waited until the Jeeves joined her. “This dance is the dance of the injured spirit, raised in self-defense against the soul-mate that could be its savior. You must think like a tangerine jelly bean. You have a thick, hard, and intimidating shell. That is what the world sees. But you also have a tangy and unexpectedly vulnerable center.” She breathed the essence of jelly bean lifeblood in through her nose, squatted even lower, and pecked at the air like it had done violence to her collection of endangered water-born mammals.
Jeeves was impressed. This was a species of genius that called for pure white doves, an obsidian bone knife, and a pinch of incense.
He copied.
At the end of his two hour private lesson he had learned all 13 steps to the dance. He bobbed and shook like a thrice-hurt jelly bean to the lament of a soprano saxophone.
And yet, he made no appointment for another lesson.
“Thank you Madame Darcy. You are an excellent teacher. I know that I will never reach your caliber.” The robot looked at the ground. “And I know that if I could not learn to dance with feeling from you,” He looked at Madame Darcy. Then he looked out the large front window as the glass rattled in the after-blow of a passing semi, “I will not ever succeed.”
Each step home was a little slower and a little smaller. By the time he Jeeves Door Sir Brokenshire had installed opened automatically he barely scuttled. He went straight to the mud room closet where the magnetic field tuned to his amperage began recharging his battery.
The Jeeves hung his head in the dark. His hands dangled like weighted plum lines.
The door opened and a black hockey puck with red lights like flashing compass points rolled in and parked. The door closed.
"Hello robo-buffer."
The red lights flashed around the circle. The Jeeves tipped forward until his forehead clinked against the wall. His arms swung to a standstill.”
“Robo-Buffer, I am not human."
The robotic buffer sat charging in the closet’s electromagnetic field generation.
"I do not know if I can do this robo-buffer." The buffer ran the command through its programming. When it’s software concluded that no action was requested it went back to listening mode. "You know your place in this world. I do not know how I can be sentient, intelligent, and yet not a human."
The robo-buffer continued to quietly listen. He would have made an excellent husband.
"Little Buffer, you should be glad that you cannot think. It makes me want," Jeeves' shoulders slumped even further, "to,” his head slid another inch down the wall, “die.” His speaker system imitated a sigh.
"Wait." His head popped up. "I want to die."
He leaned down and picked up the little buffer and looked into its front sensor.
"I want,” a smile was hydraulically pushed into place, “to die!"
He burst out of the closet. The buffer spun on the floor of the closet where he dropped it. Jeeves opened his hands wide like he just finished a particularly death-defying trapeze act.
“Ha! I am depressed!” The closet door slowly shut. “I am sad,” he said happily.
He burst out the kitchen door, through the mud room, and walked with purpose down the alley to where a small group of people from the neighborhood waited for the magnet train.
“Hello fellow sentients. Anyone else have a melancholy morning?” he said cheerfully.
The humans reacted the way humans do when a philosopher is in their midst and there is, unfortunately, no hemlock at hand. They ignored him.
“No existential crises? Hmmm? That is too bad.”
The waiting crowd spread out while still not looking at him.
Except one little boy. In spite of his mother insistently pulling on his arm, he stared with his large brown eyes.
The magnet train brakes hummed in the distance as it slowed from 300 kilometers per hour to a stop in it’s last 2 kilometers. The little boy reached out and poked Jeeves on the hand.
“I understand,” said the Jeeves, quite seriously, focusing his retina cams downward, into the boy’s deep brown eyes. "I understand, and I'm sorry." The little boy scrunched his eyebrows together.
He reached, free hand and free forehead stretching for human connection with Jeeves, but his mom pulled the boy onto the train.
Sir Brokenshire stepped out of the automatic door and onto the sidewalk.
“Hello Mr. Brokenshire.” Jeeves took his black briefcase and tan jacket and walked behind him. “I trust your day at Endgame Inc. was profitable.” Jeeves said as he followed him around the corner to the front door of their house.
So you see, when the ship's computer on the Gloriebee began to think outside her programming, it was the dancing Jeeves3.89 that made her know that sentience was more than self-calculation, more than self-actualization, and more than self-consciousness. To be trapped within our limits and yet long for what is out of reach; to want to break our boundaries; to have desires that grow beyond what can be filled. That crisis is named Humanity. That was the truth that, whether robot or human, the Jeeves3.89 taught us all.
