“How did I do, Doctor?”

                “You did wonderfully, Lynette.”

                The little android dancer did a perfect imitation of a frown.  She still, Simonson realized, had very little intuitive ability when it came to reading the emotional expressions of her human counterparts.  For once, he was grateful as he struggled to hold back tears of appreciation for her perfection.  He had not said a single word to her since the closing of the curtain to deafening applause, and as quickly as he could he had gotten her out of there, out into the night and the silence of order.  Now they were simply riding, riding aimlessly throughout the countryside in the nightcar he and his wife had leased.  He sat back and stared out of the window, seeing nothing but a continual replay of the androids’ ballet.

                Lynette was oblivious to her own beauty.  He had wondered countless times, as he watched her execute her flawless movements, what exactly it was she tapped into, if not passion itself.  How could she do it?  She, who could not express an understanding of beauty in a way that was recognizably human; at least not to people who knew better, like Simonson and his colleagues.  He had helped her, of course, with a sort of forced vocabulary that included descriptors like “harmony” and “shape” and “unity” and geometry” that made it sound like she had much more profound sense of her perfection than she actually did.

                But as far as Lynette was concerned, doing “wonderfully” did not mean much of anything at all.  Since she had understood from day one the importance of the performance she would be giving to the academic community, she could not understand why his compliment did not employ more concretely extreme language than usual.  So she sat back and gazed out of the window too, rerunning her performance and conducting an intensive analysis of the geometrical shapes she had made with her body, the colors used in the presentation, and the appropriateness of the musical accompaniment.  When she had run out of these scenarios and found that they were still traveling through the night to some mysterious destination that, for whatever reason, the Doctor had chosen not to reveal, she spent the next few minutes accessing memory of human mythology and philosophy to see if she could make any connections, but as usual it was not long before this wore her circuits to a dull, throbbing hum.

                The Doctor, hearing the low, rumbling sound, finally turned to look at her. 

                “What’s wrong, Lynette?”

                “I’m trying to find the flaw in my performance, Doctor.”

                “What makes you think there was a flaw at all?  I said you did wonderfully!”

                “But you always say that, Doctor.”

                “Because it is always flawless!”

                “I don’t understand.  If that is so, why did you seem to find such greater significance in this performance than in any other?” 

                “I…I hadn’t thought of it that way before,” he mused, startled.  “I’m so sorry, Lynette, if I’ve caused you any anxiety about this.  You see, you may be flawless, but I’m still human!  I suppose it was just very important to me to have the world see you the way I do.  You are a gift to us, you know that, don’t you?”

                “A gift?  From whom?”

                “From the universe!  You see, until now, humankind has always only had approximations of true beauty, of all the things that the Divine speaks to us.  We produce art and literature and music, because we wish to go back…back to that place we come from.  To remember who we are.  We long to bring the divine, the utterly Perfect, into this imperfect life we live and articulate it for the short time that we’re alive.  But we can’t.  We can’t, because we are imperfect artists.  You, being a perfect machine, are the instrument for which we have longed for since the beginning of time.  Through you, we touch the face of God again.”

                There was a silence after this, during which the Doctor noticed with some amusement the almost imperceptible chirping sound the android made when she was storing away information that she was going to try making sense out of later.  Then, presently, her tiger-like eyes grew bright again, and she leaned forward expectantly, her gaze seeming to fall upon the GPS Driver-Navigator screen in the front of the car, which operated completely of its own accord.

                “Where are we going, Doctor?”

                “Huh?”  He shook himself out of the reverie his own sermon had put him into.  “Oh, we’re going home, my dear.  I just felt like taking a little drive.”

                “How arbitrary.”

                “Yes, Lynette.  Humans are very spontaneous creatures, although my wife often prefers the term ‘moody.’”

                “Ah.”

                “Speaking of my wife, I suppose I should have given her a call to let her know we were out…” Simonson sighed.  “She’s probably going to snap my head off the moment I walk in the door.”

                A few months ago, Lynette would have commented strongly on the unlikelihood of his wife to have such a violent reaction to his tardiness, but he noted that she had come to have a rudimentary understanding of irony and exaggeration. 

                “Perhaps she would have called if she were concerned, Doctor.  That’s what she usually does,” she pointed out instead.  And suddenly, like a sharp shard of broken glass puncturing the skin, he was struck with the notion that something was very wrong.  Hadn’t his wife, now that he thought of it, left the performance in rather a hurry?  Early, in fact?

                As if to confirm his suspicions, the sound of sirens screaming in the night seemed to grow louder and louder as they approached their community pod, and he became vaguely aware of the fact that he had been hearing them all along.

                “What’s wrong, Doctor?” Lynette asked more loudly, picking up on his alarm from the widening of his pupils and quickening of his pulse.

                But the Doctor didn’t answer.  He merely stared, mouth frozen in a gape, at the rushing of the men and women in white through the courtyard of their pod in the direction of his home.