J.M.J.
TITLE: "Conversations with a Mecha Named Joe" Chapter 11
AUTHOR: "Matrix Refugee"
RATING: PG-13
ARCHIVE: Permission granted!
FEEDBACK: Please? Please?
SUMMARY: Joe asks Cecie an odd question about human behavior.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own "A.I., Artificial Intelligence", its characters, settings, concepts or other indicia, which are the property of the late, great Stanley Kubrick, of DreamWorks SKG, Steven Spielberg, Warner Brothers, Amblin Entertainment, et al.
NOTES: It took me a while to update this, and it's a rather belated chapter dealing with St. Valentine's Day in Rouge City: I inadvertantly misplaced the rough draft. Better late than never!
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Chapter 11: "This Thing Called Eating"
I thought that Christmas in Rouge City was pretty wild, but it didn't hold a candle to St. Valentine's Day, which has to be the official holiday for the place. They celebrate it for the whole month of February, much in the same way Salem, Massachusetts used to celebrate Halloween for the whole month of October, before the sea rose and swamped it.
All month long, the prototypes for new models are brought to the city to have their trials in the various clubs all over town. During my walks, I've seen transports from different robotics companies shuttling up and down the streets and crews unloading coffin-sized crates and boxes from them, or pushing them on carts along the sidewalks and down alleyways to the side-entrances of the clubs.
Somehow, I found out from Vautrin that Joe's inception date was coming up, on February 14th, no less!
"I'll have to think of something special for him," I said, smiling at this bit of information.
"Well, don't bother makin' him a cake: Things like him don't eat."
"I knew that much: Our neighbor next door when I was growing up, had to let their handyman go since he kept mooching from the wine cellar; they got a Mecha to help out."
"Good to hear; well, not good that the guy lost his job, but when you do something stupid like that, you'll almost asking to get yer job pulled out from under you."
Despite the fact that over half the population of the city didn't need to eat, I noticed a lot of elaborate window displays of chocolate boxes... and other chocolate treats molded into shapes a lot less innocent than hearts and cupids and heart-shaped red pasteboard boxes....
The movie theatres ran marathons of classic romantic films, both dramatic and comic. And the Mechas! Their owners -- or whoever chose the outfits for them -- went all out putting themed costumes on them. Pink and red silk babydolls and black or red or white silk teddies proliferated on the females, while I saw quite a few dressed in Grecian/Roman gowns to make them look like Venus or Aphrodite.
This one small, chubby French male Mecha known as Julien was seen dressed as Cupid, with a pair of little white wings glued to his back, a bit of pink satin strategically placed to keep him decent, if not modest, and armed with a quiver of foam arrows, which he fired at people with a plastic crossbow. The first few times he did it to me, it was funny, but after the tenth or the eleventh time it got really annoying. I happened to be there when he fired an arrow at some snooty, highly-placed French diplomat who was in town, and bopped the guy on the back of the head while M'sieu Important was talking up a female Mecha. That was the last time I saw Julien with the bow and arrow and the Cupid costume.
The majority of the male Mechas were dressed a lot more sensibly. I saw several dressed in Shakespearean capes and tunics -- Romeo in search of Juliet? -- or like Sir Lancelot or some other medieval knight in shining armor, in this case made of titanium. Quite a few wore medieval tunics and carried lutes or guitars, roaming the streets in the manner of itinerant minstrels singing love ballads, while others appeared as Romantic era poets in frock coats and Byron-collared shirts.
Joe, of course, in keeping with his 19th-century-retro look, was one of the Romantic-poet types, and I didn't doubt that he had a whole library of romantic poems stored in a database under that glossy scalp of his. Unfortunately, he was so booked up that month -- it hardly surprised me that he's one of the city's most asked-for Mechas -- that I hardly got a moment to even so much as say hello to him. I took this in stride, but I'd be flat-out lying if I said I didn't miss him terribly.
But a couple days after Valentine's Day, when I still hadn't come up with a good "build-day" present for him, Joe came to my door bearing a small gift basket adorned with silk flowers and curls of red, white, and pink ribbon, containing a red cellophane-wrapped packet of French truffles.
"Hey, Joe, whaddayah know?" I asked, letting him in. "Is that for me?"
"Yes, an admirer gave them to me, and much as her generosity is to be admired and rewarded, it was, alas, lost upon me since I do not eat," he said. "Thus I thought that you might appreciate them."
I took the basket from his outstretched hand and set it on the table. "Oh yes I would! Thanks."
He eyed the basket thoughtfully, then turned his eye to my face. "Then you truly enjoy such things?"
"Hey, I consider chocolate to be a staple of life, to make it bearable," I said. I was tempted to open the cellophane and sample it, but I suddenly felt odd eating in front of him.
"Then it brings you pleasure?" There was this slightly puzzled look in his eye, that had me twigged.
"Oh yes it does," I said.
"Then may I ask why some women consider this thing called eating to be a burden?"
"Okay... what makes you ask me this?"
"I tried to offer this token of affection to another admirer and she refused to accept it," he said. "I could only respect her wishes, but then she started a monologue in which she bewailed being Orga and telling me how lucky I am to be Mecha and how I do not need to eat in order to maintain functionality. Then she went on to describe how her weight has been up and down but, to use her words, mostly up for much of her life and how this offering would only add to the problem.
"But you seem to enjoy some aspects of this thing called eating. Why then do you accept it, but this woman bewails it?"
That was a really complex question for me to answer and I wasn't sure how to reply to it, even though Joe has an inquiring mind and I knew he'd be happy to hear what I had to say even if he didn't really understand it.
"If it is too complicated a question to be answered, no harm has been done," he said. "I can always ask Dr. Know."
I put my hand on his wrist. "No, Joe, save your money. I just had to turn it over in my head. ... Okay, this lady who didn't want the chocolates, would you say she has a bit of a weight problem, or is she thin?"
He pondered this for a second or two. It dawned on me that he's such a romantic that he might not be able to adequately answer this question: He probably is designed to see beauty in all women, no matter how plain they might be or how they see themselves. I thought I'd throw that to him to see if the answer might help me answer his first question.
At length, he looked up at me. "No, I would not say that she does have this difficulty. She has an exquisitely shapely figure, curved as a woman's form should be."
I guessed that to mean that she had a normal-to-average figure: she wasn't a skinny little stick, but she wasn't in dire need of one of these synthetic tapeworms that have been used to treat some people with dire cases of obesity.
"There's some people who just have trouble accepting themselves the way they are," I said.
"And why do they suffer from this affliction?" he asked.
"It could be that someone who should have cared more about them put them down verbally, and now they have those words stuck in their heads," I explained. "And that's why they have a hard time seeing themselves as anything else beyond that. Or it could be that they compare themselves to others who, they think, are better-looking than they are, but there again, if they think that way, chances are they got put down when they needed someone to lift them up."
He nodded, understanding, a small gesture. "Yes. Word can indeed impact one's demeanor profoundly. Words form a great part of how I find my admirers, how I win their hearts, and all too often, how I soothe their troubled souls."
I reached out and patted his silk-smooth cheek, softer even than a baby's skin. "Good thing the robotics experts created beings like you," I said. "You make up where we Orgas fall short of the mark."
He smiled and took my hand in both of his. "And you help me to understand your kind better," he said, covering my hand with his free one.
I felt my face grow warm at his words... and other feelings arise inside me.... At that moment, his pager, hanging from the chain about his neck, trilled. I moved my hand inside his; he let it go, laying my hand on my knee as he took his pager in his free hand and looked at the display.
He looked up at me with an apologetic smile. "My duty of soothing troubled souls calls me elsewhere," he said.
"You take care of her, Joe," I said. I hated to see him go, but I know he'd do some good wherever he went.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
More to come...
TITLE: "Conversations with a Mecha Named Joe" Chapter 11
AUTHOR: "Matrix Refugee"
RATING: PG-13
ARCHIVE: Permission granted!
FEEDBACK: Please? Please?
SUMMARY: Joe asks Cecie an odd question about human behavior.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own "A.I., Artificial Intelligence", its characters, settings, concepts or other indicia, which are the property of the late, great Stanley Kubrick, of DreamWorks SKG, Steven Spielberg, Warner Brothers, Amblin Entertainment, et al.
NOTES: It took me a while to update this, and it's a rather belated chapter dealing with St. Valentine's Day in Rouge City: I inadvertantly misplaced the rough draft. Better late than never!
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Chapter 11: "This Thing Called Eating"
I thought that Christmas in Rouge City was pretty wild, but it didn't hold a candle to St. Valentine's Day, which has to be the official holiday for the place. They celebrate it for the whole month of February, much in the same way Salem, Massachusetts used to celebrate Halloween for the whole month of October, before the sea rose and swamped it.
All month long, the prototypes for new models are brought to the city to have their trials in the various clubs all over town. During my walks, I've seen transports from different robotics companies shuttling up and down the streets and crews unloading coffin-sized crates and boxes from them, or pushing them on carts along the sidewalks and down alleyways to the side-entrances of the clubs.
Somehow, I found out from Vautrin that Joe's inception date was coming up, on February 14th, no less!
"I'll have to think of something special for him," I said, smiling at this bit of information.
"Well, don't bother makin' him a cake: Things like him don't eat."
"I knew that much: Our neighbor next door when I was growing up, had to let their handyman go since he kept mooching from the wine cellar; they got a Mecha to help out."
"Good to hear; well, not good that the guy lost his job, but when you do something stupid like that, you'll almost asking to get yer job pulled out from under you."
Despite the fact that over half the population of the city didn't need to eat, I noticed a lot of elaborate window displays of chocolate boxes... and other chocolate treats molded into shapes a lot less innocent than hearts and cupids and heart-shaped red pasteboard boxes....
The movie theatres ran marathons of classic romantic films, both dramatic and comic. And the Mechas! Their owners -- or whoever chose the outfits for them -- went all out putting themed costumes on them. Pink and red silk babydolls and black or red or white silk teddies proliferated on the females, while I saw quite a few dressed in Grecian/Roman gowns to make them look like Venus or Aphrodite.
This one small, chubby French male Mecha known as Julien was seen dressed as Cupid, with a pair of little white wings glued to his back, a bit of pink satin strategically placed to keep him decent, if not modest, and armed with a quiver of foam arrows, which he fired at people with a plastic crossbow. The first few times he did it to me, it was funny, but after the tenth or the eleventh time it got really annoying. I happened to be there when he fired an arrow at some snooty, highly-placed French diplomat who was in town, and bopped the guy on the back of the head while M'sieu Important was talking up a female Mecha. That was the last time I saw Julien with the bow and arrow and the Cupid costume.
The majority of the male Mechas were dressed a lot more sensibly. I saw several dressed in Shakespearean capes and tunics -- Romeo in search of Juliet? -- or like Sir Lancelot or some other medieval knight in shining armor, in this case made of titanium. Quite a few wore medieval tunics and carried lutes or guitars, roaming the streets in the manner of itinerant minstrels singing love ballads, while others appeared as Romantic era poets in frock coats and Byron-collared shirts.
Joe, of course, in keeping with his 19th-century-retro look, was one of the Romantic-poet types, and I didn't doubt that he had a whole library of romantic poems stored in a database under that glossy scalp of his. Unfortunately, he was so booked up that month -- it hardly surprised me that he's one of the city's most asked-for Mechas -- that I hardly got a moment to even so much as say hello to him. I took this in stride, but I'd be flat-out lying if I said I didn't miss him terribly.
But a couple days after Valentine's Day, when I still hadn't come up with a good "build-day" present for him, Joe came to my door bearing a small gift basket adorned with silk flowers and curls of red, white, and pink ribbon, containing a red cellophane-wrapped packet of French truffles.
"Hey, Joe, whaddayah know?" I asked, letting him in. "Is that for me?"
"Yes, an admirer gave them to me, and much as her generosity is to be admired and rewarded, it was, alas, lost upon me since I do not eat," he said. "Thus I thought that you might appreciate them."
I took the basket from his outstretched hand and set it on the table. "Oh yes I would! Thanks."
He eyed the basket thoughtfully, then turned his eye to my face. "Then you truly enjoy such things?"
"Hey, I consider chocolate to be a staple of life, to make it bearable," I said. I was tempted to open the cellophane and sample it, but I suddenly felt odd eating in front of him.
"Then it brings you pleasure?" There was this slightly puzzled look in his eye, that had me twigged.
"Oh yes it does," I said.
"Then may I ask why some women consider this thing called eating to be a burden?"
"Okay... what makes you ask me this?"
"I tried to offer this token of affection to another admirer and she refused to accept it," he said. "I could only respect her wishes, but then she started a monologue in which she bewailed being Orga and telling me how lucky I am to be Mecha and how I do not need to eat in order to maintain functionality. Then she went on to describe how her weight has been up and down but, to use her words, mostly up for much of her life and how this offering would only add to the problem.
"But you seem to enjoy some aspects of this thing called eating. Why then do you accept it, but this woman bewails it?"
That was a really complex question for me to answer and I wasn't sure how to reply to it, even though Joe has an inquiring mind and I knew he'd be happy to hear what I had to say even if he didn't really understand it.
"If it is too complicated a question to be answered, no harm has been done," he said. "I can always ask Dr. Know."
I put my hand on his wrist. "No, Joe, save your money. I just had to turn it over in my head. ... Okay, this lady who didn't want the chocolates, would you say she has a bit of a weight problem, or is she thin?"
He pondered this for a second or two. It dawned on me that he's such a romantic that he might not be able to adequately answer this question: He probably is designed to see beauty in all women, no matter how plain they might be or how they see themselves. I thought I'd throw that to him to see if the answer might help me answer his first question.
At length, he looked up at me. "No, I would not say that she does have this difficulty. She has an exquisitely shapely figure, curved as a woman's form should be."
I guessed that to mean that she had a normal-to-average figure: she wasn't a skinny little stick, but she wasn't in dire need of one of these synthetic tapeworms that have been used to treat some people with dire cases of obesity.
"There's some people who just have trouble accepting themselves the way they are," I said.
"And why do they suffer from this affliction?" he asked.
"It could be that someone who should have cared more about them put them down verbally, and now they have those words stuck in their heads," I explained. "And that's why they have a hard time seeing themselves as anything else beyond that. Or it could be that they compare themselves to others who, they think, are better-looking than they are, but there again, if they think that way, chances are they got put down when they needed someone to lift them up."
He nodded, understanding, a small gesture. "Yes. Word can indeed impact one's demeanor profoundly. Words form a great part of how I find my admirers, how I win their hearts, and all too often, how I soothe their troubled souls."
I reached out and patted his silk-smooth cheek, softer even than a baby's skin. "Good thing the robotics experts created beings like you," I said. "You make up where we Orgas fall short of the mark."
He smiled and took my hand in both of his. "And you help me to understand your kind better," he said, covering my hand with his free one.
I felt my face grow warm at his words... and other feelings arise inside me.... At that moment, his pager, hanging from the chain about his neck, trilled. I moved my hand inside his; he let it go, laying my hand on my knee as he took his pager in his free hand and looked at the display.
He looked up at me with an apologetic smile. "My duty of soothing troubled souls calls me elsewhere," he said.
"You take care of her, Joe," I said. I hated to see him go, but I know he'd do some good wherever he went.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
More to come...