Dopecentury LII --- The Dance
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: "the monotony rarely becomes tedious.") My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these "Dopecentury" entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
Everyone could dance. She knew that. Or at least believed it. Or at least told herself she believed it. But watching other people dance, even professionals, was almost painful for her. Their sense of space was atrocious, their sense of themselves in that space was wildly loose. To her, it looked like their bodies flapped all over the place, like startled chickens.
And she knew she was different. How could she not? It was constantly commented upon. Every teacher, every director, every choreographer, even the occasional stranger in a cafe or museum with their comments: "I have never encountered a dancer with such precision of movement before", "You have the finest sense of proprioception I have encountered, I hope you realize how special that gift is and don't waste it", "Can I just say, you hold yourself magnificently, it's a pleasure just to watch you stand and move about this place". After a lifetime of this, one's own exceptionally eventually (or maybe quickly) sinks in. It did not take long for her to rise the ranks of professionals to the very top of the discipline.
There was no denying it, her sense of where her body existed in space was beyond exceptional, it was once-in-a-generation. The choreographers and directors loved her for it: every time she came out onto the floor she could repeat the same performance as the previous time, hit her marks at exactly the same time, in exactly the same position, the smallest bone of her smallest finger occupying precisely the same spot in the air as the previous performance and the one before that and before that. A choreographer could direct her to move her hand a single breadth's distance (or even a finger's distance if they had chosen to, though there was no choreographer on Earth who could visualize the difference at that small a scale). In some ways, it was absolutely frustrating to the people who instructed her because she typically had to share the floor with other dancers who, by the necessity of abstraction that comes with being a typical human moving through space, could not replicate her precision. To the knowing observer, she would stand out on the floor as a unyielding perfect modern form, surrounded by a messy abstraction off arms and legs flying through the air, like a perfectly machined sphere of steel had been thrown into a thick splatter of mud. For the choreographers, it could be difficult to reconcile the styles that clashed, at least not without writing works specifically design to leverage her skills, which they began to do as her career rose and rose.
For her, it was equally frustrating to work and live among people who just could not even comprehend what it was like to be her with her sense of space. The other dancers flew all around her with the seeming randomness (and often the annoyance) of gnats. Just being in public spaces could be aggravating, a line at the store might have someone standing just slightly ignorantly too close, or too far behind her, and she could feel it it and it would prick at her. Lovers she took were a ridiculous joke, flailing wildly above or behind her unable to even partially meet her precision of motion. The women were only slightly better than the men.
At some point her career made it a necessity that she move into the city, and being in the city she would cross paths with myriad other people at the top levels of their disciplines. So it was that at gallery opening one evening she found herself in a conversation (standing too close, with an unnecessary slouch) with a professor from one of the universities who was an admirer of her work and informed her of a colleague of his who worked in research on autonomous machines. His idea was that the machines could be instructed for very precise movement, not unlike her own, and she might be interested in a collaboration of some kind.
This chance encounter set her off on a phase of her career. The autonomous machines department at the university was thrilled when she reached out to them — generally they labored in obscurity, researching marginal improvements in grimy workflows for huge factories in far-away flatlands. A collaboration with a famous creative person like her could raise the profile of the department, bringing in new students, and funding.
She immersed herself in the project. Machines and engineering did not come naturally to her, but the thrill of the precision with which she could get these machines to move — even if it took days of configuration to get a small movement correct — sucked her into the work. She built a small team to help her, and hired grant writers to get wealthy donors from society to fund it, which they happily did since she was a generational talent working on some kind of magnum opus; all the rich people wanted to have a part in that.
The result, after years of work, was a machine slightly taller than herself and vaguely the shape of a man — to her it was much less important what it looked like than that it could carry itself through space with extreme precision. It was a mess of gears and hoses and rusting steel piping and slickly shining pistons that dripped small spots of oil on the floor, and black bands of rubber tightly wound and conveying power from one wheel to another, from one part of the machine to another. Its large movements were powered by high-pressure hydraulics, which were fed by a hose that ran across the floor to where a small diesel engine chugged away to provide the pressure. The hose was wound round with an electrical cord that provided power to the servos that moved the small movements of the machine. The machine was also extremely heavy, as one might expect with the weight of steel and motors and the viscous hydraulic fluid that ran in its veins.
She and her team built out the machine as proof-of-concept first. And then when they were satisfied that it would work, spend the next few years configuring it to perform the first routine. This configuration was done by setting thousands of small switches that were peppered all over the machine, each controlling a movement and a time to execute. It was proposed that these switches should be connected to an off-stage control board for easier configuration by a director, but she had taken the lead in the configuration process and did not want to have to be constantly running to the side of the stage to change a configuration. Instead, as she developed the dance, her small hands would move over the machine, the tips of her fingers finding the switches (soon by muscle-memory alone) and make subtle adjustments to the configuration — sometimes while the machine was still moving.
The machine was moving with her — for she would dance with it, of course. The dance developed slowly, as one might expect, as slowly as possible, over years. But it developed. The thing moved with her in a precision she had never been able to get with a human partner. (The hose running across the floor that powered the machine — a ridiculous sight on a dance floor, for sure — was no challenge at all for her to remember to step over when necessary.)
The night of the first performance was sold out, the hall full of anticipation for a perfection of movement through space that had never been achieved before. The accompanying music was a piece composed especially for the performance. A modern experimental piece that took into account the drone of the diesel on the side-stage and incorporated it, but still had a coherent melody and rhythm that melded well with dance. It was pre-recorded and played over an amplification system, in order to balance well with the chugging engine.
The first movement was a triumph, her body blending and twirling with and around the machine in a way that felt like the music itself was holding the strings of the mechano-human marionette that played across the stage. The first movement ended with a standing ovation that so long that it set back the time-table of the performance, though there would be no complaints.
The audience excitedly settled into their seats for the second movement, expecting the transcendent work they had just seen to be raised to an even higher level.
The second movement opened with an energy of movement that just seemed impossible for a machine to achieve, and yet there it was, prancing across the stage, somehow just as light and precise as her. She and the machine came apart and then met in the middle, and moved around each other. And at the moment they were closest, one of the rubber belts in the machine snapped. The end of the belt whipped against a hose, and the hose, weakened and cracked from years of rehearsals, burst. Hydraulic fluid sprayed out and the machine suddenly stopped at the apogee of its movement above her.
It collapsed.
The full bulk of the machine slammed down on her leg, fully fracturing her femur.