Story by PR Johnson
The dancers are usually too perfect to be interesting. It's a night to remember when one perfectly flawed dancer catches my eye.
Tonight was for me. I walked into the main room of the nightclub and looked around. The place was packed. I could see two stages, each with its own bar, and a couple of VIP booths. Business was good, and the entertainment was drawing enough attention that I was almost interested.
A platform surrounded the dance floor and every chair was taken. People were backed up two and three deep for the main bar. There was a second bar, near a second stage, and even that bartender was doing a brisk business in overpriced stimtonics. Security for the club had been tight on the way in, though I could see a few holes that a professional wouldn’t miss. I reminded myself that I was there for the entertainment and not a job. I waded into the traffic jam that was the bar line, and waited my turn with everyone else.
I surveyed my surroundings, looking for the inevitable VIP that would be the big dog in the room. I looked at the booths in each corner. The place had two VIPs set up in opposite corners. The booth in the southwest corner had a tall man with three women sitting near him. His security facing outward in standard protective layers. The man in front on the left would take point for anyone that tried to approach. Two more bodyguards would back him up. The fourth man would be there to cover the VIP while he left.
I prided myself on being able to tell my clients what not to do. And I would never have walked into a place like this with a client. Yet there they all stood, watching the dance floor for any threats that might materialize. I found myself curious about the hardware they must be carrying.
“You don’t even have the targeting lens equipped, Jeth,” I told myself. There wasn’t a point, since I never would have gotten through the front layer of security with a pistol unless I had planned ahead. I turned away from the tall man in the VIP booth. My attention went to the other VIP booth, tucked into an alcove that couldn’t be seen from the entry way. It had a decent view of both stages, and I was surprised to see that the VIP was a woman. Her security was better, but I wondered why she would be here in the first place. I shook the thought off and looked at the main stage.
Two barely clad women were pretending to be interested in each other, and I realized that I was just pretending to be interested in them. The woman in the alcove booth was pretending to be interested in the entire spectacle. Everyone was making appearances. The women on stage were both top of the line entertainment robots, designed to be custom modified and altered to fit the desires of the clientele. One of them had red hair, and the other was a shade of blonde that was supposed to look natural. Both had two pairs of eyes, the second pair on their foreheads making them just unnatural enough to remind us that they were not human. Because humanity had a line that it wouldn’t want its automatons to cross.
The dancers were mostly covered in splotches of variously colored paint and there wasn’t anything natural about either of them. The combination of the colored lights and the patches of paint did its best to cover the unreal visual of two flawless women pawing at each other for the crowd. Their movements were perfectly choreographed, with both of them reacting to the other as if they knew what was going to happen next. It took me a moment of watching to realize why it looked so artificial. They weren’t playing off of each, they were playing a preprogrammed routine. People in places like this had been overlooking the fakeness of it all since before the work was taken over by robots.
I looked over to the second stage, and something about the dancer was different. She was covered in paint, no skin showing anywhere on her body. The lighting wasn’t as bright as it was on the main stage, and it was hard to see the details of her body against the painted backdrop of the wall. Her dancing intrigued me for some reason. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was that pulled my attention towards her, but as soon as I had my drink I started walking towards that smaller stage. I wanted to see more.
She danced to music that she didn’t get to choose, but made me want to watch all night. The movements of her dance were just as choreographed as the two ‘bots on the main stage, but they weren’t perfect. It was as if she had been programmed to be some combination of perfect and yet flawed. Either she was programmed to allow subtle variations in her dance, or she was a base model that wasn’t capable of precision in movement. She had been painted, just as the other personal entertainment bots had, but her painting seemed more deliberate and complete. The patterns in her paint reminded me of an aquarium, and her four eyes had been done in a makeup that mirrored her “Under the Sea” motif.
I switched on my targeting lens to get a more thorough look at her. The initial X-ray showed no weapons, and then the thermal scan overlay clicked in and I saw something I didn’t expect. Her body temperature was the same as the other humans in the room. I looked over at the two dancers on the main stage, and confirmed that their body heat was definitely not human. Each of them had a very hot core in the lower torso and the heat pumps typical of keeping a mechanical body running smoothly. But the woman before me was an actual woman; she was pretending to be a replica that was a reimagining of what she truly was.
It had been more than a decade since it was legal for humans to perform in a place like this. Our glorious government had determined that it was too easy to exploit humans, and once the AI units got good enough to pass for human, the law mandated entertainment like this be performed by androids. What was she doing here?
I watched her dance, intrigued. The targeting lens revealed that the extra eyes were just painted on her forehead. I started to push my way towards her. I switched off the targeting lens so that I could watch her routine through normal eyes. The longer I watched her dance, the more I wanted to get to know her.
Gunshots. My hearing unit was always on guard for the sound. My targeting lens came up automatically and a small arrow told me they came from the front entrance. The unit registered another burst as I turned my head. I scanned the room to see if anyone had been hit. Seeing no casualties, I pushed towards the second stage and away from the main entrance, trying to get distance while I still could. Once I felt the stage in my side, I looked over my left shoulder. A group of men entered the main room. I saw their attention shift from the table of the tall man to the smaller alcove. They started pushing their way through, and I saw the club security key on them. The club was about to become a blood bath.
I looked straight at the woman’s guards until they noticed me staring. Then I raised my hand in front of my face. I pointed towards the armed group pushing into the crowd. “Gun,” I said, enunciating the word to make it easier to see on my face. I repeated it three times, but I didn’t try to shout it. I hoped that I had shielded the gestures from the team that was moving through the crowd.
The security detail had seen me and turned their attention in the correct direction. I looked that way again, and realized that the man in the center of the group was someone that I had traded frustrations with. If he saw me, he would certainly have his people kill me among all the confusion. I didn’t have a gun, I didn’t have a plan, and I didn’t have an exit. I needed to find that last item, and fast.
I noticed the curtain break in the wall behind the dancer, and realized that it was my way out. My protective instinct kicked in, and I wanted to save the dancer in front of me as much as I wanted to save myself. Perhaps I would get to meet her after all.
There were four people in the strike team, and as I watched, they began a textbook assault. The two in front each grabbed someone from the crowd and pulled them close to use as human shields. The man I had recognized pulled a plasma rifle from his coat and started firing between his two goons. As soon as his rifle came up, the fourth man turned and faced the way they had come in. He shot the first security man in the face, turned his attention to the right and shot at another security man. Screams came from the crowd closer to the entrance, and all hell broke loose.
As soon as the club security began to push the crowd towards the entrance, I jumped onto the stage. The dancer looked at me, and took a deep breath to scream. “Shush,” I said, “I’m going to save you.” She screamed anyways, and people behind me started screaming as well. The gunfire got louder and more sustained. I grabbed the dancer with my left arm, trying to put my partially reinforced coat between us and the shooting. I missed the ceramic plates that made my coat a full length coat of armor. With a mental command, I activated the nanobots in the neck of my coat to create a thin shield that would deflect gunfire from the back of my head. The coat would do nothing to stop the plasma rifle, and I longed to have a gun to shoot back. It was just as well that I didn’t because I was not a target at the moment, but a gun would have made me worth taking notice of.
“I need to get us out of here,” I told the dancer. I half guided, half dragged her towards the doorway behind the stage, and then we were backstage. Several entertainment units stood backstage, oblivious to the panic just outside the curtain. I grabbed a long coat from a rack by an emergency exit and gave it to the dancer. It wouldn’t offer her much protection, but we were out of the main firefight. I kicked the emergency door open, and we were outside.
“Some guys will do anything to meet a girl,” the dancer said with a smirk.
“Only a real girl,” I shot back, directing us down the alley.
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