"Juggling Lessons"
(Near-future social SF)

This is the first part of a three-part story entitled "Androids Take Over the World" that appeared in Unparalleled Journeys II. It stands alone as its own story.

This takes place in the not-so-distant future, where androids have gone beyond just doing all the manual labor and menial tasks and now do everything -- including all the acts at the circus. Here, Michael 23965 learns from an old man why the androids' abilities are not so exciting after all... and why failure can be a great thing.

"Juggling Lessons"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick

Michael 23965 tossed the four orange balls, almost nonchalantly, in the air before him. They fell, even as he continued to toss, and he caught them. Up they went again, flying, arcking, dropping. His eyes never stopped moving; like corn in a popper, they flashed this way, that way, each eye tracking several balls in sequence, working in tandem with his strong hands to attack the chaotic falling spheres and catapult them back into flight.

The circus had let out a half hour before, and he had put on another performance. Save for his being clawed at by one of those small child humans and having his synthetic skin torn below his right elbow, everything had been good. Ringmaster John 42556 had told him the tear would be patched the next day, so there was nothing to do until then but juggle out back, waiting for the gray skies to coat the earth with a little rain.

He never could figure why he had to always practice, but that was the way of the circus. There was never any need, for he never dropped the balls. Not one of them. Today, he had juggled sixteen balls to amaze the crowd of eager humans. He had barely thought about it. Usually while juggling, he played processing games with himself—try to time the tossings and catchings of the balls with the reverberations of the power core that thrummed vibrantly within his chest, for instance, or ensure that hydraulic pressure to his servo motors was always exactly equal to the other servos. The humans saw so much enjoyment in his juggling; he saw only his purpose, and just couldn’t quite understand the oohs and ahhs the crowd breathed at him in their amazement. Then, enjoyment was not exactly something for which he had been programmed.

“Hey, mister.”

He snapped his head around, lost focus on the balls, and had to recover even more quickly to catch them all. He did, snatching them out of the air with lightning reflexes. Two in each hand, fingers splayed about them, he turned to face the human child. It was a male of the species, standing just at the corner of the immense brick wall that was the auditorium, within which the circus was cleaning up and preparing for the evening performance.

“Good day, human child.” It wasn’t that he disliked human children, or humans at all; he was not programmed for any such feelings. He simply viewed them with indifference.

“You sure juggled good, mister,” the boy said. He was ten, perhaps eleven, hair badly in need of a combing and mouth sticky with cotton candy remnants. The child was obviously enamored by the juggler’s skills. Such was the case with the humans, particularly the child versions.

“Fine compliment, human child,” he said, “but it is inappropriate of me to allow you to address me as ‘mister.’ I am an android.”

“I don’t know what else to call an android,” the boy said, scrunching his brow in thought.
“The correct term would be ‘android,’” he informed the boy.

“Okay, android,” the boy said with a mischievous grin, obviously liking the way it sounded rolling off his tongue. “Anyway, you juggled good. Nobody ever juggled like you.”

“Contrarily, human child, any android would be capable of juggling as I if only he were programmed as such.” The android held up his four orange balls as if considering them. “My skills are purely mathematical in nature. I cannot make mistakes so long as what I juggle is within the bounds of my capabilities.”

“I don’t get it,” the boy said.

“Many variables enter into the juggling equation: the number of objects juggled; their weight, shape, and mass; how much force I must exert upon each ball when tossing it; their launching trajectories; external conditions such as wind or the surface upon which I stand; the condition of my servo motors and quality of the hydraulic fluids which power them; and many other factors. Using balls such as these, I could easily handle thirty.”

“Thirty!” The boy, his eyes wide and mouth agape, sounded like he had just been given an oversized allowance for just taking out the garbage.

“If regulations governing artificial life forms were not so stringent,” he replied, “androids would be able to juggle a hundred or more.”

“No real person can do that!” the boy said, still amazed.

“Quite true,” the android said, and launched back into juggling. The orange balls whizzed up, down, into and out of his hands, as he talked. “As you can see, the higher I toss these balls, the more time I have to target and acquire those on the way down. The lower I toss them,” he continued, the balls now being barely lobbed a foot into the air, “the less time I have to react, and the quicker I must be.” They moved like flame-orange electrons orbiting madly about an invisible nucleus. His hands followed suit, synthetic skin tones blurring as if played as out-of-focus, fast-forward video.

The boy watched him as he got the balls going as low and as fast as he could, never hitting one ball to another, never missing one on the way down. It was relatively simple work, really; his darting eyes never really needed to target separately, simply taking in the whole scene as one large, complex variable composed of many subvariables. In human terms, to him his skill would be “child’s play,” but no human could see it that way. What he was doing would be no child’s feat, and even the best of human jugglers—when there were such things years ago—would have been hard-pressed to have kept it up for even a short while.

Abruptly, he stopped, his hands snatching the balls from the air like two mousetraps snapping down on four unsuspecting rodents. The human child yipped in awe and clapped his hands with approval. “Show me how, Mister Android. Please show me how to juggle the balls.”

This struck him as odd. “Very interesting,” he noted to the boy. “Humans always seem to enjoy my juggling, but I do not believe I have ever met one interested in learning how to do it.”

Clearly, he was talking above the boy’s head; the child only wanted to learn to juggle, and what an android was or what humans normally did was beyond his caring.

Michael 23965 heard a shuffling of feet off to the corner of the building again, and looked up to see another human. This one was an adult, older than most Michael 23965 had seen, his hair gray and face full of an almost-beard. The android, possessed of normal hearing, hadn’t heard the old man approach any more than he had heard the boy.

“Good day, adult human,” the android greeted him. He wondered if he would be in trouble for talking with the human child alone like this.

“Grandpa!” the boy exclaimed. “The android was juggling really fast, and he never dropped one ball!”

“So I saw,” the old man said, his voice scratching and raspy, as if filtered through a handful of pebbles. To the android, he said, “Yes, you know, you’re right about how humans are amazed by what you’re all programmed to do. But the thing is, you androids just miss the point.”

“I do not understand,” Michael 23965 said...

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

And the old man proceeds to explain it to Michael 23965. Can he change how an android thinks with just a brief conversation and a few notable observations? If so, how?

To read the whole story, order Unparalleled Journeys II from Journey Books Publishing.

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