Butler's Quarters


My quarters in the suite upstairs at the Mission Inn were not precisely a disappointment, but they did rouse my suspicions that Bergamo and Luther, who I gather expects to be a conduit for the arrival of an entire religious sect from the dying dimension, are trying to marginalize me because I am a clone. Because of my inherent DNA computing abilities I do not have the same weaknesses as a natural born. For example, I am capable of extraordinary humility when faced with the vanity of natural borns.

You can't design a clone to be master of time and space and expect him to not get an insult, no matter how subtle. But I'm getting ahead of myself, which for somebody who exists in ten dimensional space with full simultaneous consciousness of each that's quite a feat. Perhaps you have dreams, and remember them in what you think is detail. Everything that happens in the dream actually takes place in one of the dimensions you do not consciously inhabit. You can dismiss it because it is, after all, just a dream.

But the dreaming moment was not something recalled. It was in process, and because you distance yourself from the process, and thus from the dreaming mind, doesn't lessen the reality of the moment's unfolding. When I am walking up the stairs from the mission saloon and turn back to look into the eyes of the bartender, I know that she is wearing vestments. Was she wearing them before? There is no before. In a simultaneously unfolding dimension she is wearing a black pantsuit and I feel resentment toward her because of her sharp tongue. In this dimension she is an angel in vestments.

Because I am conscious in ten dimensions, I can't have a linear existence, or even relate to anybody in one dimension, without Symphony. That's part of my programming, and it works like a conductor who keeps several lines of logic combining harmoniously into a larger work. Each dimension of my existence is like a section, horns or woodwinds or percussion, violins or oboes, bells or kettle drums, and the conductor makes them combine into a house made of music.

The in vested woman's eyes have pierced me; she projected tiny vibrating filaments into my eyes. I felt the projection of course. I knew when I invested her that I would be invested in return. Now the filaments flash far down in the subatomic world, and her image dances inside my eyes. I am in love. Already I feel the shift in my chemistry, the surge of chemicals that prepare me for the mating ritual. This is the first time I've ever been in love, and I already pity the dreamers who don't know what has hit them.

Now I'm no longer ahead of myself but am here, standing in the entrance to my quarters, distracted by the vibrating filaments which have seeded in my eyes the image of a woman who doesn't even appeal to me without vestments. The planked floor has been covered in a dark blue carpet, and on it there are two blood red leather chairs, neither of which reclines. Each has an ottoman, and between them there is a serving cart. At the end of the room there is a butler's table with two straight backed chairs. Other than that, the room is empty except for a large object, about seven feet tall and perhaps half that wide. It is covered with a white cloth drapery so my measurements waver.

The combination of my cheeks burning with the insult of the butler's table and the serving cart, and my body burning with anticipation of sexual desire, whip up a powerful emotional storm. What is covered has to be uncovered, so I grasp the drapery, pulling it away with a flourish, revealing a mirror with odd properties. I can see myself perfectly now as I stand in front of it, but the rest of the room is not reflected. I am isolated in a field of shifting green light, and my image in the mirror is unfaithful.

I lift my hands upward, palms open, and my image is synchronous except that his palms are turned down. I turn my palms over and the image does not shift or betray in any manner that the mirror image is anything other than a reflection. But I know it cannot be just a reflection. It is another dimension, and one in which I am not conscious. This is a great disturbance to my confidence in myself as essentially perfect. I move side to side, turn my head, even twirl around, and the other experience is synchronously uneventful until the filaments the woman planted in my eyes suddenly flare to life.

She obviously came in without knocking while I was preoccupied with the mirror, which doesn't reflect the door, so that she seems to have appeared behind me out of nowhere. It takes me a moment to realize that she is actually in the room and not just a trick of the green dimensional door. I turned to look behind me and she actually is there. "I saw you come in," I say, my left hand gestures toward the mirror but now there is no reflection of either of us.

"You did not."

"Your reflection, I mean. But even so, I do have the capability to see remotely, so I could have seen you come in."

She presses the tip of her right index finger softly against my lips, "Shut up, Jeeves." I catch the sparkle across the surface of the green door and suspect that I have been infiltrated by a virus program, but because it is not consciously separated, or separable, from my experience of myself ..."

"Shut up, Jeeves," she repeats.

When she opens the vestments she is naked underneath them, and I begin to feel an irrational religiosity. The dragon is asleep, and behind her there is a captive princess watching my approach.

Later ... much later ... when she has slipped away and left me staring blankly at the green door, I begin to feel unfamiliar to myself, and at the moment of realization the green door opens.

What I mean is, there is no surface on it, no reflective quality to it. It has dropped the hard surface, and I know that if I reach out to touch it, my hand will pass through the frame and into an unknown dimension. I reach toward the space defined by the frame. I extend my right index fingertip into the void, the way she did.

"Jeeves." It startles me to hear my name. It isn't an outer voice but an inner one. I recall in an instant an entire collection of literature about the inner voices, from the song of the siren to the voices of the gods. The quality is unexpected. I have always been certain that despite my being a patented creation of $omaCorp, I have such superior reasoning that I can see the programming and, though I have never actually been inclined to do so, can overwrite a program or even create a replacement program. I don't consider myself just a tool. I'm also a tool maker.

The voice comes again: "Turn down the beds, Jeeves, and fetch my slippers."

As I was saying, I have reviewed all relevant data and it appears that inner voices often have a vibrational quality and sonic frequency that makes them difficult, if not impossible, to shift back to the present tense, and without reflection there is nothing to compare to, there is no decision involved when the only two polarities are to do something or to not do it. There is no program in which not following a command from deep programming is within the parameters of possible actions, as it is no action at all.

My decision is to take no action at all, even though I am recalling with some trepidation that the woman in vestments called me Jeeves, as if I'm not just a butler, but a cartoon butler or a search engine, and now it's Bergamo's voice calling me by the same name. I can hear them laughing over there in his quarters, and they aren't alone by the sound of it. There's at least two women in there and maybe more from the cackling and giggling I pick up when I stop and focus on the source of the audio waves.

They are having a joke at my expense, his calling me Jeeves and then asking me to fetch his slippers. I ought to demonstrate right now which one of us is the boss, and drive him right back into a priority chip program, watch him get caught in a loop, one moment of indecision and I'd slip through the gap and begin to work through toward the pre-recordings, until he's making polite conversation and waiting for a reboot.

Of course they can hear me, or rather they can pick up the jaw muscle patterns used to form my sub vocal speech, and they're hysterical with laugher now, listening to me imagine how I could knock Bergamo down into a spinning ball of death. But they can't amplify my sub vocal speech if they can't see me so how in the hell ...

It has to be the green door. It is picking up and amplifying all of the information flow in the room, reading every muscle pattern, eye movement, sound ... I throw the drapery back over it, steeling myself with a cold indifference to the party going on in Bergamo's quarters. His hilarity seems to have originated with the arrival of Betty the Bartender, and her calling me Jeeves. No, it was before that. It was when he saw my reaction to being programmed on Butler 9000 architecture.

There is one law in Space, and that is there is no time between thought and action. They are one thing. The moment she called me Jeeves I saw a tree, and on every branch there was fruit. Behind it I saw the mathematics running like sap. The tree was desire and every piece of fruit on it was desire's object. She was right there with me, so she has to be built on the same architecture as me. She has to be a clone, too. The green door has begun to hum at a pitch oscillating so low its origin is almost undetectable.

The party across the hall seems to be winding down. There is a knocking at my door. "Yes."

Bergamo sticks his head through. "No hard feelings I hope."

"About what?"

"Nothing ... just the noise and keeping you awake half the night ..."

"These rooms must be soundproof. I didn't hear a thing."

He looks like he can barely contain himself, but ultimately I am here to shut him down and he knows it, so of course he's testing me for vulnerability. "Nice quarters," he says. "I like the table."

"It's a butler's table."

He starts to say something and then he pauses, undecided. I feel a flush of satisfaction to have broken his flow. "Can I come in for a minute? There's something I need to say."

"Of course. Would you like brandy? Port? Something to smoke?"

"Red wine, but not port. Something lighter."

When I've poured the wine we sit, with the serving table between us, and Bergamo begins, "The one law in Space is that there's no separation between things. What you think and what manifests is one field, so ... well, the Butler thing isn't something I created. You created it yourself, casting me in the role of your master. I can't do anything about it now because it materialized."

"You can't do anything about it?"

"No, The only field I can influence is my own."

"I can't tell you how much better that makes me feel. Here, let me pour that for you."

Posted: Thu - May 17, 2007 at 09:49 AM