Machine Man

by Max Barry

  “They will make you a pair, of course,” said Mirka. “If you ask them. Gamma.”

  “Gamma’s making these?” I pulled off the glasses. The world went dull.

  She nodded. “Gamma is doing many peripherals.”

  I lay back. Mirka filled the syringe with morphine. I didn’t mind Gamma experimenting. That was what I had told them to do. But I wasn’t sure I wanted them making glasses. I didn’t know why. As Mirka filled my veins, I wondered if it was because I had not designed them. My department was not just about me, of course. It was about developing products for a general market. Cassandra Cautery had explained this to me and it had seemed okay at the time. But I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  I CAUGHT the elevator to the fourth floor of Building C, where Cassandra Cautery worked. Cassandra Cautery had visited the labs several times but I was always drugged or busy with wireframes so we hadn’t spoken. I just knew she was escorting executives around.

  I wheeled myself along carpet so thick it made my arms ache. Building C was nice. The entire Better Future complex was visually attractive, but in a utilitarian, engineering kind of way, where beauty meant simplicity. We favored straight lines and parabolic curves, no bleeding of anything into anything else. Here was free-flowing color. I was not a big fan of art but I think some part of me relaxed.

  I found Cassandra Cautery’s office at an intersection of corridors. I had an appointment but was early. I wondered if I should do a lap. “Charlie!” Cassandra Cautery came around her desk and beckoned me inside. “Thank you so much for making time.” She closed the door behind me. The office was small and filled with thick books. It had a low sofa, a painting of a circle, and a computer that looked more interested in being pretty than working fast. There were no windows. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  She leaned her butt against her desk and folded her arms. Her blond hair glowed in the artificial light, picking up the UV. “I’m hearing nothing but great things about your work. Everyone is extremely, extremely excited. It’s a credit to you. As a manager.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Don’t be so modest. I know you don’t consider yourself that way. But your people don’t need a social boss. They need someone who inspires them on an intellectual level. Who forges within them a burning desire to invent. That’s you.”

  I shifted in my wheelchair.

  “Listen to me. Advancing within a company requires self-assessment. I should know. My first performance review, my boss said, ‘Cassandra, you are diligent, intelligent, motivated, and hardworking, but you need to learn how to settle for less than perfection.’ I argued at the time, but she was right. I had to train myself to accept that not everybody works as hard as me. That what I consider unacceptably sloppy is actually an okay result, and it’s counterproductive to get into a whole thing where someone starts crying and threatening to quit. And you know what? Learning that not only helped me grow as a manager. It helped me grow as a person. Because back then, I was actually, well, a little obsessive.” She smiled. “You haven’t told anyone about my diastema, have you?”

  “What?” I remembered the gap between her back teeth. “No.”

  “Thank you, Charlie. Because I told you that in confidence.”

  “Um,” I said. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about fingers.”

  She nodded. “Go on.”

  “Gamma has been developing fingers. They got started by themselves. I only wanted them to stop fighting with Beta. But they did some interesting things and now we have a hand. It’s workable. We could replace somebody’s biological hand. It doesn’t work as well in all respects, mainly because of the loss of sensation, but it has advantages. It’s stronger. And multipurpose. You could fit a finger with a spectrograph, for example, so you could feel electromagnetic waves. That would be really useful in our line of work. And everything about it is upgradeable. So it opens up a lot of possibilities for future enhancement.”

  “That sounds like exactly the kind of thing we’re interested in.”

  “That’s what I thought. And it’s ready. For testing.”

  “You want me to find someone who needs a prosthetic hand?”

  I shook my head. “I can do it.”

  “You can … you mean …”

  “I can replace my own hand.”

  Cassandra Cautery was silent. “That’s good of you, Charlie. But I think we’ll find a test subject for this one.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Well … thank you. But you can’t be the test case for every bionic you invent.” She smiled. “Can you?”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Charlie. You’re doing an amazing job. Upstairs could not be happier with the way things are going. And neither could I. Honestly, at first, I thought this whole project had the makings of a disaster. Not a disaster. But potentially it could be very, very messy. And you’ve totally proved me wrong. So let’s … let’s just keep doing what we’re doing. And I’ll find someone who needs a hand. How about that?” I didn’t say anything. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll do that.”

  WE PERFORMED a live trial of the nerve interface. It turned out Alpha’s legs didn’t bend low enough for me to attach without yanking out needles whenever I twitched, so at the last minute I switched to Beta. This triggered angst and gloating because Beta had been a long way behind since the wheel debacle. But it was all about the technology. Beta’s legs were half the weight and contoured silver steel: of all the models, they most resembled real legs. Except for the feet, which were hooves. Hooves were working for us. I finished fitting the needles and two assistants slid me into the Beta legs and tilted me upright. At this point nothing was powered on. The assistants cleared the lab and began to fill the Glass Room, crowding against the green glass. I felt a twinge of nerves. It wasn’t so much the fact that I was about to see what happened when you plugged your brain directly into a pair of self-powered mechanical legs but that so many people were watching. I found the power button with my thumb and put my other hand on the emergency shutdown. I looked up at the Glass Room again and saw Jason’s thumbs-up. If there was a problem with both the power button and the emergency shutdown, Jason would trip a remote kill switch. None of this should be necessary because we were feeding the legs a tenth of regular power. And we had exhaustively tested in software. Everything that happened today should be unsurprising.

  I pressed for power. I heard a high-pitched whine, barely detectable. I tried to ignore this. As clearly as I could, I imagined myself lifting my right leg and taking a single step.

  Nothing happened. I opened my eyes, disappointed. Then I looked down and my right leg was in front of the other. I mean the Beta leg. It had done exactly as I asked, so perfectly I hadn’t noticed. When I looked at the Glass Room, behind the three-inch translucent green plastic my lab assistants were jumping up and down, Z-specs bouncing, cheering in silence.

  THE MORE I tinkered with Gamma’s hand, the more I liked it. It was funny how as soon as you knew there was something better, what you had seemed unbearable. Every time I had to dig around for my ID tag, I thought: I wouldn’t have to do this if it were embedded in my finger. When I was working on a lathe or a circuit board and I reached for a tool, whenever my fingers slipped or my hands shook, I felt exasperated, like why was I still dealing with this. It was the same with the glasses: the Z-specs were heavy and hurt my nose but when I took them off I missed them. The hand was not so advanced I could honestly say it was on balance superior to its biological equivalent. But still, there was something about it I couldn’t keep away from.

  I INSTALLED a Voice Over IP client on my workstation and dialed the hospital. The packets went nowhere. I wasn’t surprised: the company firewall was strict. One of the ironies of working for the world’s most advanced research lab was that our internet connection was like dial-up. The filter had to sniff everything. I played with the port settings but it didn’t help. I would have to jury-rig something that
made audio look like Wikipedia pages. I thought about this. It seemed possible.

  Another solution would have been to leave Better Future and find a pay phone, but to be honest I thought about that only later.

  THE LEGS came along in leaps and bounds. Not actual leaps and bounds. The lab ceilings weren’t high. We had to save that for outdoor testing. But I could tap a hoof. I could step over a knee-high obstacle without crushing it. In fact, I could step over a knee-high obstacle without noticing it, because the legs sensed terrain. I just willed them to take me somewhere and while they took care of that, I could think about other things. It felt like the way travel was supposed to work.

  A twenty-four-hour period passed in which nothing went wrong. I wore the legs outside the lab, up and down the corridor. We called them Contours, on account of their sweeping lines. They were a good-looking set of legs. I wanted to show Lola. But I still hadn’t been able to reach her. It had been five weeks.

  One day I was fitting myself into the Contours and the legs began to retract. This was not supposed to happen. They should have been powered down. One of the assistants cried out in alarm. I looked at the pistons and the narrowing gap between them and reached out as if I could stop them.

  There was a wrenching. A brilliant flash of pain. Someone screamed. Hands pulled at me. I saw Jason’s face, contorted in grief. He said, “I’m sorry,” over and over. I looked at my hand. It was sandwiched between the Contours’ knee and the retracted socket. There was a lot of blood. I felt dizzy. “I’m so sorry,” Jason said again. He was technically in charge of the Contours until I stood up. But we hadn’t been strict about that for a while because everything had been going so well. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” I was about to faint but I wanted to tell him this. “It’s no problem.”

  “CHARLIE!” SAID Lola. She sounded robotic, because my computer was untangling her audio from IP packets that to the corporate sniffer looked like a long joke e-mail. But there was unmistakable delight in her voice. I felt relief. It had been a long time and who knew what had changed. “I’ve been calling and calling!”

  “You have?”

  “Yes! They always tell me you’re busy and I have to leave a message. And I got your home number, but your answering machine filled up.”

  “I haven’t been home.”

  “Since when?”

  I had to think about this. “March.”

  “Charlie.” Her voice dropped. “I think you should get out of there.”

  “Why?” I went to scratch my cheek and missed. I looked at my hand. I wasn’t wearing my index finger, that was why.

  “I just think it would be a good idea.”

  “Okay.”

  “Meet me,” she said. “I’m going to give you an address.” I reached for a pen, with the hand that had fingers.

  A FEW years before, a guy in Gels stabbed three people with a broken Schlenk flask. They had to use tear gas to get him out. He kicked and screamed that no one took his lab reports seriously. One of the stabbed people died. For days afterward people congregated in corridors and asked each other, “You just can’t understand it, can you?” They huddled in unusual social configurations, engineers with marketers and managers and people from accounts. Everyone wanted to make sure that everyone else agreed: you can’t understand it, can you? Like they needed to hear that no.

  At first I shook my head along with everyone else. I didn’t want to seem disrespectful. But finally it got to me and I said well obviously he was frustrated. This was to Elaine, my lab assistant with the bad skin, who quit because of nightmares. Elaine looked at me like she was trying to find something. “Yes, but to get so frustrated you would do something like that …” I said that’s what people did when they got frustrated: they displayed violent behavior. Elaine said, “But you would never do something like that,” and I said probably not but in the same environment with the same stimulus it was fair to assume I’d have a similar response. I wasn’t a different species. It’s not anybody’s fault for feeling violent when their brain is flooded with vasopressin. That’s just what happens. You drop a glass, it falls toward the earth. Maybe that’s not the outcome you want, but don’t blame the glass. Don’t pass moral judgment because cause produced effect. We’re biological machines. We have chemically driven urges. You inject a nun with a particular chemical cocktail, she’s going to start swinging punches. That’s a fact.

  This all seemed simple and self-evident to me but maybe I didn’t express it well because that afternoon I got a call from Human Resources. They said counseling was available for anyone unsettled by the incident and would I like to make use of it, and I said no, and they said maybe I should anyway, and I talked to a bald man in his office for three hours. By the end he seemed to understand my point, or at least accept that I wasn’t going to shoot up the office. He said part of our responsibility as civilized beings was to control our baser instincts. Which I agreed with, but it made me think what a bizarre situation that was, a world of polite, smiling men and women one serotonin dip away from savagery, pretending that they weren’t. It seemed to me that situation could be improved.

  I WENT to Lab 4 and climbed into the Contours. A few Gammas were about, and they looked at me curiously through their Z-specs. “Are we testing?” asked one. I shook my head. I powered on and extended the Contours to walking height. I took a step and another and walked out of the lab.

  By the time I exited the elevator four security guards were waiting. One of them was Carl, the human mountain. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “Going somewhere?”

  My legs were already detouring around him and it was a moment before I could persuade them to stop. They were a little feisty. I came to a juddering halt. There was no one else around, I noticed. The place had emptied. “Yes. Out.”

  “Where would you like to go? We’ll take you.”

  “Just out,” I said. “Part of testing.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Neumann, but external testing must be authorized.”

  My jaw tightened. It wasn’t Carl’s fault, but I was pissed about being cut off from Lola. I thought, I should just walk out of here. Because it wasn’t like they could stop me. I didn’t mean to express this as a mental instruction, of the kind the Contours could pick up. But like I said, they were feisty. And then they were moving so quickly I had to grip the sides of the bucket seat. “Whoa,” I said. Carl lunged at me like a linebacker. The Contours stepped around him and thumped into the lobby. “Dr. Neumann!” Carl shouted. “Stop!” His voice bounced around the glass-ringed lobby. It sounded a little frightening and possibly in response to this the Contours broke into a run. They pistoned toward the glass lobby doors. These did not open in time, which caused the collision-detection software to stop me so suddenly that my forehead cracked against the smoked glass. That hurt. I would have to fix that. Then the gap between the doors grew wider and the Contours took off.

  I WAS atop a jackhammer. With each stride, my neck stretched and tried to detach my head. When each hoof slammed down, my chin bounced into my chest hard enough to crack teeth. Through eyes blurred with tears, I saw an approaching road and thought: Oh please now they will stop. But they didn’t. They ran into traffic. I clawed for the emergency shutdown button and missed. That was possibly a good thing because in retrospect I didn’t want to lose power in front of oncoming automobiles. A sedan whipped by so close its turbulence tore at my hair. A truck the size of a building honked. I heard a terrified shriek and realized it was me. There was a clicking deep within the Contours, something I felt rather than heard. They stopped. I was in the path of the truck. I was going to die. I was about to learn why you don’t conduct a live field test of new technology while strapped to the top of it. This truck would run me down and when it stopped its driver would find a long bloody smear leading to a gleaming pair of perfect titanium legs. It would be the ultimate vindication of my work. A testament to the superiority of artificial parts and the need for comprehensive bug tes
ting.

  The legs bent and sprang. The traffic and road grew small and far away. I let go of the seat to flail my arms. I was trying to grab air, or fly. My upward velocity slowed. For the briefest moment I was moving leisurely forward sixty feet above the ground, neither rising nor falling. It was kind of beautiful. Then the world grew larger and more dangerous. My brain suggested my terminal velocity at forty miles per hour. That was how fast I would be going when I hit the sidewalk.

  Below, a woman and her young son gaped up at me. They were standing at the exact point I was destined to intersect the sidewalk. It was a terrible coincidence. Then I realized it wasn’t. It was calculated. These people were cushioning. Physical objects that would help absorb the shock of impact. I had programmed the legs to avoid collisions on a horizontal plane but anything lower than they were was deemed to be ground. It had seemed a reasonable assumption in the lab.

  THE MOTHER yanked her son’s arm. He was no toddler. I had seen women wrestling with children of this age before, in supermarket aisles and parking lots, and usually the kids didn’t budge. But apparently a man plummeting out of the sky triggered a major adrenaline boost, because this kid flew through the air like he was hollow. I impacted the sidewalk ten inches away. Concrete split beneath my hooves. Dust burst into the air. My spine bent in a way that felt very, very wrong. I lost my breath and sucked in a lungful of powdered concrete. I felt the Contours moving beneath me, preparing to run. I tried to tell them to wait a second, because I had to apologize to the mother, and make sure she and her son were okay, and so was I. But the legs didn’t care. Their world was defined by a location, a destination, and the optimum path between the two. Nothing else was relevant. They were definitely going to kill me.

  THEY RAN for ten minutes. During this time I clung to them, begging them to stop. Apparently one of the things you couldn’t simulate in the lab was that mortal terror interfered with the ability of the nerve interface to interpret mental instructions. Either that or they were willful. I tore past pedestrians. When I finally closed my eyes and gave in to them, they stopped. I looked around and saw a busy intersection. I was somewhere downtown. Seconds passed. My legs did not move. I breathed. My tie hung over my shoulder like a tongue. My shirt was soaked with sweat. My jacket was gray with concrete dust. I looked like a hobo. A mechanical hobo. And I laughed, because that was a funny thing to be, and my legs had stopped, and I was alive, and that was the most out-of-control freaking ten minutes of my life.