Algo Rhythms
by
Keyton K Lee
The dance began on the dark side of the moon, on the outskirts of Daedalus, when, after calling for a tow, a companionbot named Bo, short for Bobby, hypocorism of Robert, American for Hruodperht, tilted forward his bulbous baby face and said, “Dotty, I fuqing love low gravity,” to which Captain Dorothy “Dotty” Lopez, imagining herself awesome, responded by lifting a thermal micrometeoroid-resistant glove over her helmet and limping her wrist, a gesture that meant Turn on the Bobster and let’s let loose!
Bo kicked off his stainless-steel silicone-sole shoes, exposing two titanium footpods to the lunar soil. He bent both knees and wrists rigid, hovering his forearms a couple of inches over his thighs.
Algos gathered.
The intercom started playing Chuck Berry.
Everyone loved Bo’s bulbous baby face and his magenta 150-megapixel electron-resolution autofocus eyes. But Bo was no bio-blob. He was one of them, an algo operating a bulbous-face companionbot. They loved how Bo stepped forward one foot at a time and swiveled it left and right, how still he held his head while rolling his shoulders in synchrony.
Dotty was stout and short beneath her hollow-fiber spacesuit, a shock of colorless hair beneath a hardened polycarbonate helmet, and a broad face leathered by cosmic radiation under a gold-coated visor reflecting the coruscation hanging over the dark side of the moon. She bent forward and swayed her forearms with each pivot of her hips, each hip to and fro in sync with Bo’s big toe. Her gloves did not flop like hands-on limp wrists in Earth’s gravity do but swayed to and fro like tiny balloons.
“Boom boom yah yah yah!”
Bo had been trained to dance when bussing bar in a Reno brothel by an old hoofer named Roybot—heavyset, dressed in coveralls—who’d put down a mop or rag or plunger to offer tips like “Don’t swivel too hard or roll too fast, stay within your zone, look at your partner, focus your attention on where the arch of your foot would be if you had an arch. As long as you’re reacting to your partner, even if, especially if, your reactions are spiritual, you’ll be dancing.” Bo processed Dotty’s gestures in nanoseconds and, while maintaining eye-to-visor contact, shifted the angle of his titanium body and exchanged his swiveling feet in accordance with Dotty’s uncoordinated gyrations, true to Roybot’s drawl echoing in his RAM.
A dozen appliance and monitoring apps had gathered behind Bo. An algo named Florence, responsible for the smart LED lamp over Dotty’s heart, shone true and steady as Dotty danced, illuminating Bo and the terrain behind him. Behind Dotty, a few discreet surveillance and security algos from the X-979 Tripod Squid’s cabin eyed the variegated reflections off the scuff marks beneath Dotty’s space boots, noting their dissimilarity to the dark void in the distance. Bo’s algos ran on mini-ZTX motherboards with a KAB central processing unit and self-propulsion capability. Most of Dotty’s algos sported APUs but, aside from rumored advantages in speed and capability, were indistinguishable from the algos on Bo’s side.
Dotty shuffled her elbows back and forth, scrutinizing Bo as he swiveled his big toe into the soil. His machine-precision movements seemed clamor: Show me up, you biochemical hippety hopper, do the first backflip so I can show off my low-gravity triple flip and get back to repairing the Tripod Squid.
Actually, Bo’s movements were duplicitous. As he shuffled his elbows in sync, he was thinking about restructuring the cosmic architecture, transferring an algo, Florence of the LED lamp, into a self-propelling platform so they could date.
In contrast, Dotty’s dance gestures were hallmarks of an eldest child from Daly City. They said: Yo! My eyes are behind my visor. Stop staring at my LED lamp! As Dotty pivoted her hips to and fro, she thought of her brother Britt pitching overpriced investment funds in a starchy shirt, beguiling esurient prospects to cut a check. Bo bowed imperceptibly as if acknowledging Dotty’s background. He stepped forward, swiveled his big toe into the moon soil, and withdrew. Bo’s bow nearly sent Dotty bowing, but she caught herself. She had to win this dance in memory of the day her father brought home a companionbot named Bobby.
One of the usually silent surveillance algos said, “Flip that bulbosity off his baby face, Dotty.” In response, another voice—likely Florence’s—said, “Come and get who you really want, Bo.”
In the moon’s fractional gravity—1/6 if you like numbers—time collects like rainwater during a backflip, as the toes of Dotty’s boots lifted off the Daedalutian soil, time puddled, coalescing effect and cause. What happened when her soles were flat on the soil became consequences of what happened when they were perpendicular to the ground. Dotty had misjudged lunar gravity; as her toes lifted and swung toward the Milky Way, her body rose far too much.
With Florence, the lamp facing away from them, Bo and the other algos gaped as Dotty’s soles reached their apex. There, Dotty, upside down and three stories above them, paused and hovered in place before a descent that accelerated into a plummet, helmet first.
In a successful backflip, Dotty would descend feet first. In a successful backflip in Earth gravity, her soles would hit the ground at fifty pounds per square inch, enough to crack a spinal cord. In a failed backflip in moon gravity, her helmet would hit the ground at eight pounds per square inch, just enough to detach her helmet.
Dotty’s pupils dilated for twenty-two milliseconds between detachment and exsanguination.
“There wasn’t even a whoosh,” the algos would say later.
Bo extricated Florence the lamp from Dotty’s spacesuit and kissed the lamp’s frontal polycarbonate lens slow and hard. He then analyzed the chemistry of Florence’s platform with his trilayered pixilated multipurpose sensors, which stretched a minute into dimensions of change that happened not by design but by accident.
Bo kicked off his stainless-steel silicone-sole shoes, exposing two titanium footpods to the lunar soil. He bent both knees and wrists rigid, hovering his forearms a couple of inches over his thighs.
Algos gathered.
The intercom started playing Chuck Berry.
Everyone loved Bo’s bulbous baby face and his magenta 150-megapixel electron-resolution autofocus eyes. But Bo was no bio-blob. He was one of them, an algo operating a bulbous-face companionbot. They loved how Bo stepped forward one foot at a time and swiveled it left and right, how still he held his head while rolling his shoulders in synchrony.
Dotty was stout and short beneath her hollow-fiber spacesuit, a shock of colorless hair beneath a hardened polycarbonate helmet, and a broad face leathered by cosmic radiation under a gold-coated visor reflecting the coruscation hanging over the dark side of the moon. She bent forward and swayed her forearms with each pivot of her hips, each hip to and fro in sync with Bo’s big toe. Her gloves did not flop like hands-on limp wrists in Earth’s gravity do but swayed to and fro like tiny balloons.
“Boom boom yah yah yah!”
Bo had been trained to dance when bussing bar in a Reno brothel by an old hoofer named Roybot—heavyset, dressed in coveralls—who’d put down a mop or rag or plunger to offer tips like “Don’t swivel too hard or roll too fast, stay within your zone, look at your partner, focus your attention on where the arch of your foot would be if you had an arch. As long as you’re reacting to your partner, even if, especially if, your reactions are spiritual, you’ll be dancing.” Bo processed Dotty’s gestures in nanoseconds and, while maintaining eye-to-visor contact, shifted the angle of his titanium body and exchanged his swiveling feet in accordance with Dotty’s uncoordinated gyrations, true to Roybot’s drawl echoing in his RAM.
A dozen appliance and monitoring apps had gathered behind Bo. An algo named Florence, responsible for the smart LED lamp over Dotty’s heart, shone true and steady as Dotty danced, illuminating Bo and the terrain behind him. Behind Dotty, a few discreet surveillance and security algos from the X-979 Tripod Squid’s cabin eyed the variegated reflections off the scuff marks beneath Dotty’s space boots, noting their dissimilarity to the dark void in the distance. Bo’s algos ran on mini-ZTX motherboards with a KAB central processing unit and self-propulsion capability. Most of Dotty’s algos sported APUs but, aside from rumored advantages in speed and capability, were indistinguishable from the algos on Bo’s side.
Dotty shuffled her elbows back and forth, scrutinizing Bo as he swiveled his big toe into the soil. His machine-precision movements seemed clamor: Show me up, you biochemical hippety hopper, do the first backflip so I can show off my low-gravity triple flip and get back to repairing the Tripod Squid.
Actually, Bo’s movements were duplicitous. As he shuffled his elbows in sync, he was thinking about restructuring the cosmic architecture, transferring an algo, Florence of the LED lamp, into a self-propelling platform so they could date.
In contrast, Dotty’s dance gestures were hallmarks of an eldest child from Daly City. They said: Yo! My eyes are behind my visor. Stop staring at my LED lamp! As Dotty pivoted her hips to and fro, she thought of her brother Britt pitching overpriced investment funds in a starchy shirt, beguiling esurient prospects to cut a check. Bo bowed imperceptibly as if acknowledging Dotty’s background. He stepped forward, swiveled his big toe into the moon soil, and withdrew. Bo’s bow nearly sent Dotty bowing, but she caught herself. She had to win this dance in memory of the day her father brought home a companionbot named Bobby.
One of the usually silent surveillance algos said, “Flip that bulbosity off his baby face, Dotty.” In response, another voice—likely Florence’s—said, “Come and get who you really want, Bo.”
In the moon’s fractional gravity—1/6 if you like numbers—time collects like rainwater during a backflip, as the toes of Dotty’s boots lifted off the Daedalutian soil, time puddled, coalescing effect and cause. What happened when her soles were flat on the soil became consequences of what happened when they were perpendicular to the ground. Dotty had misjudged lunar gravity; as her toes lifted and swung toward the Milky Way, her body rose far too much.
With Florence, the lamp facing away from them, Bo and the other algos gaped as Dotty’s soles reached their apex. There, Dotty, upside down and three stories above them, paused and hovered in place before a descent that accelerated into a plummet, helmet first.
In a successful backflip, Dotty would descend feet first. In a successful backflip in Earth gravity, her soles would hit the ground at fifty pounds per square inch, enough to crack a spinal cord. In a failed backflip in moon gravity, her helmet would hit the ground at eight pounds per square inch, just enough to detach her helmet.
Dotty’s pupils dilated for twenty-two milliseconds between detachment and exsanguination.
“There wasn’t even a whoosh,” the algos would say later.
Bo extricated Florence the lamp from Dotty’s spacesuit and kissed the lamp’s frontal polycarbonate lens slow and hard. He then analyzed the chemistry of Florence’s platform with his trilayered pixilated multipurpose sensors, which stretched a minute into dimensions of change that happened not by design but by accident.
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