 "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. |
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.