Machine Man

by Max Barry

  The next day I got serious about feedback. The surprising thing was how little research there was. Papers were speculative, describing experiments that might be useful if other people filled in other great gaping voids. They opened with statements like: To date there has been little interest in the problem of replacing sensory function lost in amputation.

  It irritated me. You could walk into an electronics store and for three hundred dollars take home a game console with a gyroscope-equipped dual-feedback resistance controller that shook and pushed to emulate in eighteen different ways the sensation of driving a tank across a battlefield. But restoring touch to someone who’d lost an arm, that wasn’t of interest. Those people got a claw from the 1970s. That was problem solved. We had the technology but in the wrong places. It wasn’t the morality that bothered me so much as the inefficiency. It was a misallocation of resources. And I knew that logically companies should spend a hundred million dollars on a game controller rather than a prosthesis that let a man feel again. But every time I read that, lack of interest, I wanted to kick someone.

  I pulled the entire team onto it. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Omega: about a hundred people. By the end of the day they had self-organized into hierarchical structures for task delegation and reporting. I didn’t care about this. I just told them what I wanted done and let them figure it out. In this sense they were like a subroutine. Like the path-finding tech in my legs. I could see the sense of Cassandra Cautery’s body analogy. On the third day, Omega hooked a girl into a nerve grid and made her taste colors. Alpha built a skin-like alloy that seemed promising until it put three thousand volts through one of them and they had to deal with Human Resources. But despite setbacks, we made progress. By the end of the week the nerve interface was two-way, capable of transmitting gross sensation. It was indistinct, every touch wrapped in cotton wool, but I could close my eyes and know when an assistant poked a mesh array. Everyone was very proud. But this wasn’t because of our brilliance. It was because nobody else had tried.

  I went back to the arms. They were titanium and servomagnetic and could rotate 360 degrees on three independent axes. One night I sat there staring at them and realized there was nothing else to do. They were the smartest things I had ever built. And, not wanting to boast, I had built some smart things. Once I created a microbe that ate garbage. You could open your trash can, throw in your scraps, and an hour later they would be gone. The microbe ate them. It didn’t get through QA because if the microbe got out, it would eat everything. There were concerns about a trashcan-eats-man scenario. Which was not the fault of the microbe, in my opinion. My feeling was that someone should come up with a safe receptacle. But anyway. There were no such problems with the arms, because the only person whose opinion mattered was me.

  I retired to my bunk and retracted the Contours. The plant I’d stolen the week before was slumped over, brown and shriveled. I hadn’t watered it. The lack of natural light may have been a problem, too. I felt annoyed. There was something pathetic about an organism that couldn’t even live if you left it alone. This was maybe a little hard on the plant, which had been removed to a hostile environment, but still, it reminded me why I was doing this.

  I WROTE an e-mail to Cassandra Cautery. By the third draft it said:

  You said you wanted to be kept in the loop re: destructive testing, well we are at that stage so just letting you know. CN.

  I put it all on one line so she might miss it. I clicked SEND and waited. Ten seconds later the e-mail notification window slid up and my heart sank because the subject was STOP DO NOT PROCEED WRT DESTRUCT TESTING. I clicked it open. All it said was: call me pls. My desk phone rang. I looked at it for a while. But there was no escape. “Hello?”

  “Where are you? What’s happening?”

  “Nothing. I’m in the Glass Room.”

  “Stay there. Okay? Don’t do anything. I’m coming down. I have to make a call first. But I’ll be there. Don’t move.”

  “I wasn’t saying today. I’m just keeping you informed.”

  “Great. Yes. Thank you. But I do not want you hurting yourself. Is that clear?”

  “I thought you were helping me. You said you would help.” My hand holding the phone, the metal one, tightened. I did not usually get angry at people. I was not a confrontational guy. But I was annoyed to discover Cassandra Cautery’s true allegiance, because it should have been obvious. “I’m making these parts for me.”

  “That’s not practical, Charlie.”

  “It is practical. Don’t tell me what’s practical. My job is all about practical. I know more about what’s practical than you ever will.”

  “Calm down. We don’t need to argue.”

  “They’re my arms.”

  “I’m sending security.”

  Assistants had gathered in the Glass Room. They watched with huge, neon eyes. I turned my back on them. “We’ve been working toward this for weeks and suddenly we can’t proceed with testing? You can’t bring in someone else. You can’t just go find some random amputee. This is a secure lab. It will take weeks to clear someone.”

  “I have that covered. I don’t need … just stay calm. Sit there and don’t do anything, okay?”

  “What do you mean, you have that covered?”

  “That’s not important. Just …” I heard clicking fingers. She was signaling to someone. “Sit tight.”

  “How do you have that covered?”

  “Go,” Cassandra Cautery hissed, but not to me. I put down the phone. When I turned I was confronted with a dozen sets of cats’ eyes. Jason cleared his throat. “Is everything all right?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was thinking. Security was on its way. I wasn’t sure what they would do when they got here. Maybe nothing. But maybe I had a limited window in which to act unfettered. “Go back to work,” I told the cats. I thunk-thunked out of the Glass Room and down to Lab 5. This was where the arms were housed, the most recent incarnation of the servomagnetic sensory-feedback technology. They hung on plastic thread supports, spotlit. Of course they did. I didn’t know why I’d felt the urge to check them. I headed to Lab 1. We had started calling this the Repository because it was where we stored the parts that never worked right, never got finished, or were exciting until we invented something better. Some were entire fingers and spleens and stomachs. I touched my metal ring finger to the security panel. It glowed red. I stared. This lock had never shown red to me, ever. There was no reason for it to do so. It was my room. It was where I kept my parts.

  A groan slipped out of my mouth. I tried the finger again. Red. I thought: Maybe there’s something wrong with the finger. But there wasn’t. It was the lock. Cassandra Cautery had disabled my access. No door in Better Future would open for me now. I felt dizzy. I grabbed at the wall for balance, which was stupid, because I was in the Contours, which would keep me upright whether I was conscious or not, not like treacherous meat legs, and then I did start to faint, and my skull hit the wall. “Ow,” I said. The Contours took a stuttering step. I did not ask them to do that. I was freaking out. I was brainstorming the nerve interface. That was bad. That might have unintended consequences. And the bottom line was I needed to get into the Repository and see if my parts were okay.

  I kicked the door. It burst inward and ricocheted off steel shelves on the far wall. I flinched at my own violence. The lab lights fuzzed on. I walked inside. We tried to keep it tidy but it looked like an army of robots had exploded in here. I scanned gleaming shelves, running inventory. I couldn’t remember everything we had but it seemed full. I felt myself calming. I had been silly. I had gotten carried away. Of course my parts were here. It was going to be hard to explain this door.

  I saw a gap. A space on the shelves, where none should be. I was missing some arms. Not in the good way.

  I EXITED, stopped, and went back in. I couldn’t leave parts here. Who knew where they would be by the time I got back? I grabbed some fingers and a forearm, then I saw a hand I liked better. I tried to rea
rrange things and fingers scattered across the floor. I had to get out of here. I had to be gone before security arrived. I didn’t know where I would go but it had to be somewhere. I suddenly remembered Lola’s heart, the one I was making. I dumped the parts on the nearest horizontal surface and left for Lab 3. I swiped my finger across the security panel, just in case, but it gave me red, so I stepped back and kicked the door. I tried to be more gentle this time but it blew off its hinges and smashed through a mounted spotlight. Glass rained to the floor. This noise would draw assistants like osmosis. They couldn’t stay away from the sound of something breaking. I thudded inside and pulled black cloth off Lola’s heart. I stared in dismay. It was spread across the steel workbench in thirty pieces. I’d forgotten: I was tinkering with valves. It would take hours to put together. I couldn’t even gather the pieces without scratching contacts and bending circuitry. I heard the elevator. I thought it was the elevator. It could have been anything. I needed better ears. I left the dismantled heart and stuck my head into the corridor. No one. But it was only a matter of time. An elevator stood open, empty, and I couldn’t delay any longer. I ran, the Contours thumping the floor. Inside I pressed for G and of course nothing happened. I swiped my finger. The panel emitted a regretful tone and said: CONTACT MANAGEMENT. I stepped out of the car and kicked the stairwell door. I was panicking and didn’t control the force at all and the door bounced off the stair banister and flew back at me. I threw up my hands and it ricocheted off the doorway, eight inches away from decapitating me, and went skidding down the concrete steps. “Whoa,” said someone behind me. Assistants were coming. Up up up, I told the Contours, and they began cantilevering up the steps. On the third turn they froze in mid-step. I thought: Oh God, they have turned me off. But I could feel frigid stairwell air on my metal legs’ mesh array and that meant I had power. I triggered a soft reset by imagining my left knee rising three times. The hooves rose and came together. A bug. Some kind of regression. I would have to look at that. I set off again and two levels later froze again. I reset the legs. It must be the steps. Finally I reached a door marked GROUND. I leaned against it rather than kicking, and it groaned and popped open. A man in a suit gave me a surprised look. Not security. That was lucky, because I was agitated and not making completely logical decisions. If someone tried to stop me I didn’t know what would happen. I had to find Lola. I didn’t know what it would accomplish but I felt confident that together we could figure something out. The Contours took this idea and ran with it. They cracked every tile on the back route to Building A and nudged open the stairwell door. It took five minutes and ten soft resets to ascend eight floors. This was terrible. This was sloppy unit testing. But I made it and thumped past potted plants and banged a metal fist on Lola’s door. “Lola! Lola!” I couldn’t wait. I popped open her door. I was getting the hang of this. I pistoned into her suite but it was empty. She wasn’t in the bathroom. She wasn’t anywhere. This didn’t seem possible. Lola was always here. I didn’t know where to go.

  The Contours started moving. I had to backtrack my thoughts to figure out where they were headed. The recovery room: where Lola had been before they brought her here. I had no idea why she might be there but it was the only place I could think of. The Contours cantilevered easily down five floors and I thought I must be figuring out the particular configuration of terrain that locked them up when they completely missed a step and hit the next one like a mallet. Cracks shot through the concrete all the way to the opposite wall. I gasped and clutched at the sides of the bucket seat. My thighs were drenched in sweat. I had never tested what happened when water pooled around the nerve interface needles. It couldn’t be good. I had to get off these stairs. I focused manually on each step to override the automatic pathfinding. My teeth hurt. I was grinding them. When I finally popped the door on the medical level, my body was shaking. I had never done anything so physically demanding. I stepped into the corridor and four Better Future security guards were waiting for me.

  “Dr. Neumann,” said one. Not Carl. “I would very much appreciate it if you could calm down a second.”

  All four guards had a hand resting on a gun holster. They were telling me that this didn’t have to get serious but it could. I wondered whether I could get past them on the Contours before they could draw their weapons. Probably yes. They were underestimating my acceleration. Of course, it would be a temporary solution. But it was something. I decided to do it. Lola emerged from a doorway. “Charlie!” She shouldered her way between the guards. “You look terrible. What’s wrong?”

  “They …” I said. “What are … why are you here?”

  “There’s a man. He had an accident. They asked if I could help him.” She tried to push hair out of my eyes. “Charlie, you look like you’re having a heart attack.”

  “What man?”

  “Through here. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  “What accident?”

  She pulled me by the hand. I followed and the guards moved aside. “He’s a security guard. He’s … you know, he’s that security guard.”

  Which security guard, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t, because I already knew.

  “His name is Carl.” She stopped outside the recovery room and turned to me. I saw a terrible light in her eyes, like love. “He doesn’t have any arms.”

  AND THERE he was: Carl, sitting on the edge of the bed, naked but for boxer shorts, flexing one arm. My arm. It was a Beta prototype: thin, hollow bands of delicate al-titanium alloy foil rods on ball joints with independent axes of rotation. Its main advantage was it could reach in any direction, including backward, and it weighed ten pounds, which was ideal for the user who hadn’t upgraded the load-bearing capacity of his spine. The nerve interface was first generation, good only for motor function. It was essentially a trainer arm. But this did not change the fact that Carl should not have it.

  To his credit, he looked mildly ashamed. He stopped flexing. His eyes shifted. His lips twitched, as if he wanted to smile but thought maybe that would piss me off. This was a good call. Because in this moment, it was everything I could do not to kick Carl through the wall.

  “He had an accident,” Lola said. She saw something about the way the arm was strapped around Carl’s shoulder she didn’t like and began fooling with it. “He’s not allowed to talk about it, but … well, obviously it was traumatic. And it’s so lucky, because you have these amazing units. I was just telling Carl.” Her fingers continued to fiddle around bulging muscles. The guy was like an anatomy textbook. It made no sense that someone who put this much work into his body would want to remove part of it. Except for the burned fiancée thing. You can never be too strong. “I’m so glad you’re here, Charlie, because what you’ve gone through, how you turned your amputation into a positive, it’s what Carl needs to hear right now.” She smiled, one hand resting lightly on Carl’s shoulder.

  I said, “I need to talk to you.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Well … okay.” She walked around Carl. “Keep practicing those lifts.”

  “Okay,” said Carl.

  “HE SHOT you,” I whispered. “In the heart.”

  Lola scowled. She had a hell of a scowl. I had never seen it before. Her eyebrows rotated thirty degrees. “You think I don’t know that?”

  “Then why—”

  “Because he’s hurt.”

  “This …” Down the corridor, a guard coughed into his hand. I forced myself to lower my voice. “This was not an accident.”

  Lola’s eyebrows flipped. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because nothing that happens here is an accident. Cassandra Cautery said—”

  “Your first transfemoral was an accident. You got caught in a clamp.”

  “That was different. That’s not the point. The point is—”

  “What’s the point?” She put her hands on her hips. These emotional cues were distracting. I was used to arguing with scientists, who would explain with perfectly bland faces why you were wrong and
stupid. “Tell me the point.”

  “The point is they’re my parts.”

  Lola went still. When she spoke, her voice was low and dangerous. “You didn’t just say that.”

  “I built these. He took them without asking. Or someone took them. How would you feel if you saw someone else wearing parts of your body?”

  She screwed up her face. “What?”

  “He’s got a piece of me in his body.” I felt panic. “I’m not explaining this very well.”

  “It’s a prosthesis. A prosthesis, Charlie.”

  “My prosthesis.”

  “He’s lost both arms!” Her voice echoed up the corridor. I glanced over my shoulder. The security guards avoided my eyes.

  I swallowed. “I can … I’ll make something. Something just for him.”

  Lola stared at me. “I’m surprised at you.”

  “They’re going to give him the big arms. The ones I made for me. They’re not going to let me have them.” I tried to touch her arm but she shook me off. “Let’s go to your suite. You shouldn’t be here. You just had heart surgery.”

  “That was two months ago,” she said, which surprised me, but I guess it was true. “I’m fine. That man …” She pointed at the recovery room. “Is not.”

  “Lola,” I said. “Wait. Don’t go in there.” But she did.

  “I UNDERSTAND,” said Cassandra Cautery. “They’re your parts.” She spread her arms. “What’s to get? They’re your parts.”

  I nodded. “My parts.”

  “I had a sister once. She used to borrow my clothes. I’d be looking everywhere for this one particular belt and she’d walk in wearing it. Drove me insane.” She put an elbow on the arm of the sofa. Her legs were tucked beneath her, as if she might be about to curl up for a nap. It was not a particularly nice sofa. It looked like one from the lobby they had been going to throw out. “And that was just clothes.”