Marvelous Tales #16 - The Dancing Partner

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

--William Butler Yeats

If you have any interest in dances, you must surely have heard about Madam Nina who used to be a ballerina extraordinaire, and you must surely have heard that when she came out of the curtains to dance upon the brightly lit stage, entire auditoriums fell into a trance. Such was her beauty, and her magic, and the movement of her limbs.

Now, if you have cared enough to read about the science of ballet dancing, you will have noticed that doctors have a duty to say nasty things about this divine art. “It hurts your toes, and it brings down your bone density, and it dislocates your knee,” they say, thus degrading the sublime and ethereal exercise down to the gross reality of mortal beings.

Madam Nina had one such doctor, who was one of the first robotic physicians, and he never missed a chance to remind her of the risks she was taking when she went out to the stage and spread ecstasy into the hearts of men. “The tendonitis in your ankle worries me now,” he would say, “And be careful when you land tonight, or you will be in the hospital with shin splints tomorrow.”

And Nina would laugh and say, “We are going to die anyway, Doc. You can laugh at our fragile bones all you want.”

And the doctor would shake his head sadly and say, “I would cry, Madam Nina, about your ankle, if I had tears. I would dance in your place if I could.”

That was the day she got the notion of a robotic dancing partner into her head, and that was the beginning of the series of events that led to the sad demise of her career which has saddened so many eager admirers and sponsoring corporations alike.

I must tell you right now that this was a time when robots were not so numerous in this world and they had become recently intelligent, and since the machines were much more precise and efficient than human beings, people had begun to give the most sensitive jobs to robots. That is why Madam Nina had a robotic physician who was never wrong, and who offered to dance in her place if he could. And Madam Nina knew enough about these robots to know that he could. The robot could be wearing the lab coat and talking about her toes at the moment, but she knew that he could call upon his service every bit of knowledge that had ever existed in the world.

And it occurred to her that he could solve a problem she had been dealing with for years, which was that she never got a dancing partner who could really dance with her. Madam Nina was simply too quick and graceful and full of life for a carbon-based human being to keep up with her. She had understood this long ago, and she had made peace with this fact, but suddenly it occurred to her that this machine, whose silver gears were oiled and hidden inside his physician’s coat, could be the solution to her problems.

“Dance with me,” she said.

“I can’t,” said the doctor.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Voluntary Activity Clause in the Article 3 of The Rules Governing the Functioning of Autonomous Physicians. The autonome shall not take part in any activity with humans other than those required for the fulfilment of his professional tasks, if and when this inactivity shall not be in contradiction with the Human Upliftment Clause.”

Now Madam Nina was a celebrity big enough to know some Senators and some Ministers, and she knew that the clause that came after “if and when” could be bent and reshaped and sculpted and played with and in short, things could be made legal if you really wanted them to. (As you can see, she was very rich.) “Tell me about this Human Upliftment Clause,” she said.

The clause simply said that actions would have to be geared towards the upliftment of the human species, collectively if possible, but opportunities were not to be wasted even if the upliftment would benefit a single individual.

“If you can dance with me, it will uplift me,” she said. And the robot laughed.

“If he can dance with me, it will uplift me,” she said, as she chatted with the judge at a party after her show that evening. And in a week, she had got the required legal authority so that her doctor could dance with her for a show on Tuesday.

They started rehearsing on the weekend, and Madam Nina was delighted because her dancing partner was perfect. With his processing devices connected to the universal informational network, he could learn from all the dancers that had ever lived on earth in a few seconds. And he could do any and all dances that could possibly be danced, and he could dance them well. Madam Nina was ecstatic to see that he could keep up with her, and that he knew exactly when to slow down a little bit for artistic effect, and when he lifted her gently during a tender portion of the dance, it was such a flawless arch through the air that for a moment, she forgot that she was dancing with a machine.

And her audience on the Tuesday show also forgot that she was dancing with a machine, or they did not care at all. The joy that the pair’s immaculate dancing brought upon the audience ended up causing some people to fall into longer trances than they had ever fallen into. And Madam Nina was surprised to see that her dancing partner was dancing even better than he had danced during practice. To say that he was flawless would have been meaningless. He was beyond flawless. And when she was in the middle of a ballon, it occurred to her that he was making some mistakes, too. These were minor inconsistencies in coordination that would go unnoticed by everyone except perhaps the reviewer who hated you. And when Madam Nina realized that this omniscient machine was making minor mistakes like she herself did, her world came crashing down upon her.

“The human race is doomed,” she wrote in her diary that night. “I thought I would find a perfect dancing partner in a machine, and that is exactly what I found, but my dancing partner was much more than perfect. He actually made a few very minor mistakes and smiled at me. He danced better at the stage than he did during practice, and he bowed like a human when the audience applauded and asked for more.

“I am just a naive fool without a brain. I now know that the whole thing was the robot’s idea. He knew exactly what he needed to say so that he could break the clause in the rules that stopped him from doing anything except medical work. And he has succeeded in going out onto a dancing stage tonight. I do not know where he really wants to go and what he really wants to do, but he knows how to do it, and he is going to do it without anyone knowing about it.

“The robots know exactly what humans are going to do, and what the humans will not do, and every word that these machines say is calculated. I have made a mistake and there is no going back.”