by Max Barry
We reached the elevator bank. I pressed DOWN. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She came around in front of me. “I want to be a test subject for Better Skin.”
I tried not to look at the spots on her forehead but couldn’t help it. “I don’t actually select test subjects.”
“But you could. You could get me in.”
“Um …”
“I’d follow protocol. I would be an extremely good test subject.”
“I know you would, Elaine.” At last, the elevator arrived.
“I wash my face eight times a day. I use aloe vera. I use methylhydroxide. I sleep with a face mask. It wakes me up but I use it. Please.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I entered the elevator and pressed for the labs. Elaine stayed where she was, her hands pressed together.
“Thanks,” she said. “Thank you.”
I SWIPED my way into Lab 5 and interrupted a bunch of lab assistants shaving off Mirka’s hair. The floor was littered with dark filaments. In a bald head, Mirka’s cat eyes looked enormous, like a Japanese cartoon. We all stared at one another and then I clomped across the lab and began searching for the hand scanner.
“We’re, ah …” said Jason. “I guess you’re wondering what we’re doing.”
“No.” Half-dissected electronics lay all over the workbench. “Where’s the scanner?”
“There,” said several cats at once. I couldn’t see where they meant until I followed their pointing fingers and shifted a schematic. A tiny part of it must have been poking out, too small for me to notice. A cat said, “Why aren’t you wearing your Eyes, Dr. Neumann?”
One of the assistants held a surgical drill, I noticed. That couldn’t be good. But I didn’t have time for this. “Don’t do anything stupid,” I said, and left.
I RODE the elevator up to ground, turning the scanner over in my hands. It was very basic, with a narrow electromagnetic range. But that should be enough to tell what was happening inside Lola. Right now I couldn’t imagine why her heart would start emitting a magnetic field. It was a pump.
The elevator doors opened. For a second I expected Elaine. Can I have the Skin? But the area was empty. It was very empty. I thumped along the corridor and past the atrium and now its tables were empty, the muesli-eating suits vanished. When I reached the elevators for Building C and went to press the call button, it was dark. All the panels above the elevators were blank but one, which ticked downward from 18. I waited. When it opened, it had Cassandra Cautery in it. “Charlie. We need to talk.”
“Something’s wrong with Lola.”
“It’s taken care of. Come here.”
I hesitated, then entered the elevator. Cassandra Cautery swiped her ID tag. The doors closed.
“We have a little situation.” She touched her palms together, as if praying, and put the fingers to her lips. “It’s all right. Everything is fine. But we do have a problem we need to deal with.”
“Is her heart malfunctioning?”
“Let me just lay something on the table. The company has made a significant investment in Lola Shanks. That life-saving operation, that did not come cheap.” This did not strike me as a very fair assessment, since the operation was life-saving only because she was shot by Carl, but I kept silent because I wanted to get to the part where Cassandra Cautery explained what was wrong with Lola. “You can debate whether the right decision was made. I know I had concerns. But that was not my call.” Her eyes flicked to the floor numbers ticking upward. “I’ve always tried to do the right thing, Charlie. You understand that, don’t you?”
I said nothing.
Her tone sharpened. “When you asked me to dispose of Carl, did I quibble? Did I say, ‘Gee, Charlie, that’s a little heartless, he’s a ten-year employee with no arms?’ No. I didn’t.”
“Fire.”
“What?”
“I asked you to fire Carl.”
“You said get rid of.”
“That’s the same thing.”
She hesitated. “Of course it is. The point is, I’ve tried to provide you with a supportive environment. I’ve sheltered you from the harsher realities.” She stuck a thumb in her mouth and gnawed at it. Then she pulled it out and stared at it like it had betrayed her. “No one appreciates the middle manager. Upstairs, they’ve forgotten what it’s like. They think you tell employees to do something and they do it. But it’s not called telling. It’s called managing. The only reason this company functions is because people like me keep them and you apart.”
The elevator doors opened. We were not on Lola’s floor. We were somewhere else.
“But no, no, no,” said Cassandra Cautery. “You and Lola Shanks couldn’t keep your hands off each other, and everything’s gone to shit.”
I saw myself in a huge silver mirror hanging on the opposite wall. Beside it sat a little table with a lamp and a vase of white flowers. On the other side was a life-sized statue of a woman with an outstretched arm and blank eyes. Some kind of goddess. Cassandra Cautery exited the elevator.
A beautiful girl appeared, smiling like a sunburst. Beside her, the goddess seemed plain. “Hello! You must be Dr. Neumann. And Cassandra! How are you? What is that shirt, by the way? I always mean to ask.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, I love you in it.” The girl put her hands on her hips.
“Is he ready?”
The girl turned solemn. “He’ll be two minutes. But if you come with me, I will get you completely set up with whatever you need. Is that okay?”
The girl sashayed away down the corridor. Cassandra Cautery stared after her with loathing. I felt out of my depth, like a deep-sea fish hauled to the surface. I was not compatible with this environment. I did not possess the parts necessary to survive in it. “Where’s Lola?”
“Being looked after.” Her voice was flat. She didn’t look at me. “You need to stay away from her, Charlie. At this point you would do her more harm than good.” She walked after the girl.
I looked at the scanner in my hands. Then I put it on the carpet beside the elevator and followed.
THE GIRL took us to a sitting room. I say this as someone who is not totally sure what a sitting room is. I mean something from an eighteenth-century mansion: drapes, busy wallpaper, chairs with curving, detailed legs. Turned, I think is the word. I straightened my posture. It just felt necessary.
“You know who we’re meeting,” said Cassandra Cautery, once the girl had closed the door on us. This was not posed as a question, although I didn’t know the answer. “The Manager.”
“Which manager?”
“The Manager.”
“Who?”
“The Manager,” she said. “The Manager. You know. The Manager.”
“That’s his title?”
Cassandra Cautery stared at me. “Of course not. He’s the chief executive officer. But everyone calls him the Manager. That’s what he does. He manages. You know when Congress wanted to shut us down after the Boston VL38s turned out to be not so nonlethal? Of course you don’t. Because he managed it. How can you not know the Manager?”
Now she mentioned it, The Manager did sound familiar. He might have signed off on a few company-wide e-mails that I skimmed through. There might have been a few inspirational quotes from him on the cafeteria notice board. When people told stories about employees who vanished, projects that evaporated overnight, lab fires that were never officially reported and accidents that never happened, they might have said: Then The Manager came. “The Manager.”
“Exactly.” Her thumb slipped into her mouth again. “The Manager.”
THE DOOR handle clacked open. I was disappointed. The way Cassandra Cautery had been acting, I expected lightning crackling around the shoulders of his tailored suit. And he was in a suit, and I guess it was tailored, but otherwise he looked normal. If I had been buying a car and this guy walked out of the salesroom, I would not have been surprised.
“Dr. Neumann.
” He came at me with his hand outstretched and his teeth exposed. His hair was extremely neat. I wouldn’t have thought you could get hair to sit like that. Not with consumer-grade chemicals. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee? Something to eat?”
“No.” I shook his hand. This lasted a while and he smiled the whole time.
“Now.” He looked at my legs. “What’s protocol here? Do I offer you a seat?”
“I’m comfortable.”
“Of course you are. You know what? Let’s all stand.” Cassandra Cautery, who had popped out of her chair when the Manager walked in and was now in the process of lowering herself, arrested her descent. “Okay with you, Cassie?”
“Of course,” she said. Cassie. I would never look at her the same again.
The Manager walked to the window and drew back the drapes. I squinted against the glare. I could barely make out his face. “It’s a thrill to meet you, Dr. Neumann. I’m sincerely disappointed it’s taken this long.” He did not look at Cassandra Cautery, but in my peripheral vision she tensed. This was some kind of silent, manager-level communication. “I’ve taken a personal interest in your project. We have our fingers in many pies, of course, a large number of speculative pies, but yours captures my imagination. So much of what we do, Dr. Neumann, is about incremental improvement. It’s about doing what we did the year before, only slightly better. Products that are a little lighter. A little cheaper. A little more reliable. You people in the labs, you come up with an incapacitating sound wave that’s like nothing anyone’s ever seen, but the police departments don’t want sound guns. They want Tasers. In fact, they want the Tasers they’re used to, which have been through committee and achieved sign-off from relevant stakeholders, only a little lighter, cheaper, and more reliable. So we take this wonderful innovation that comes from the labs and crush it down to incremental improvement. And I find that depressing. I really do. It’s less than we all deserve. Sometimes when I drive in to work, Dr. Neumann, and I see the buildings coming toward me, I think: Why aren’t we doing more? Why aren’t we changing the game? Why aren’t we running the world?” He chuckled. “That’s an expression. But you see my point. We have the brains. We have the production capacity. We have the network. Yet we’re a mere company. An extremely well-respected company with an unparalleled history of technical achievement. We should all be proud of that. But we should also strive to be more. More than just a company that builds what its customers want. What I’ve been thinking is: What if we could tell them? What if we could say, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re getting a fucking sound gun. Because it’s a seriously great technology, and you’ll figure that out if you just take it. You’ll get over the sonic leakage and the reverb and bone damage and all that. Just take the fucking gun.’ And I truly believe, Dr. Neumann, if we do that, people will start to realize, Hey, these guys at Better Future know what they’re talking about. Hey, we don’t need to figure out our own requirements. We don’t need to write up a spec that says each Taser should come with a strap exactly twenty-eight-point-one inches long, and if it’s thirty, my God, there must be half a dozen meetings and phone calls and maybe the whole order should be canceled. They can just sit down with us and ask, ‘What can you give me?’ And we’ll tell them. We’ll tell them.” The Manager put a hand on my shoulder. It felt fatherly. “That’s what excites me about your project. It’s a game changer. We don’t need a demand analysis on Better Eyes. We don’t need to run around asking our customers what kind of quantity of Better Skin they might consider and under what specs. These products are self-marketing. They put us in the driver’s seat. And the best part, Dr. Neumann, the terrific irony, is that it happened because you changed our game. Did anybody ask you to do this? No. You took it upon yourself. I look at you, Dr. Neumann, and I see a man controlling his own destiny. A man who refuses to let others define him. Nature dealt you a hand, you tossed it back. You said, ‘I’ll decide who I am. I’ll choose the limit of my capabilities. I will be not what I was made, but what I make.’ ”
I blinked. “Yes. That’s it exactly.” I wondered why Cassandra Cautery had been so concerned about letting me talk to the Manager. He was fantastic. He was just like me.
“I could not be prouder to count myself as one of your supporters.” He smiled. I smiled back. “Now. Let’s talk supersoldiers.”
The Manager turned to the window and gazed into the distance. There was nothing out there but sky. I struggled to rearrange his last sentence so that it made sense. I thought: Did he mean super solder?
“The equipment carried by the average modern-day soldier weighs a hundred fifty pounds.” He turned and spread his palms. The light flooding in behind him made this vaguely messianic. “That’s a standard, what-do-you-call-them, grunt. The specialists lug half that again. The primary limitation of today’s soldier is simply that he can’t carry everything. War has become a load-bearing exercise. A logistics puzzle. And, sure, tell me it’s never been any different. Tell me that throughout history, battles have been won on the back of resource coordination. I’ll agree with you. To a point. That point is when the gap between what’s possible and what’s practical to carry becomes a canyon. And that’s what we have today. Imagine weight wasn’t an issue. We’d have soldiers who run at fifty miles per hour, leap twenty feet into the air, fire fifty-millimeter chain guns, shrug off enemy fire like it’s rain. We’d have Better Soldiers. And let me tell you, Dr. Neumann, as tickled as I am by the consumer-level products your people are producing, the Better Eyes and Better Skin and so forth, they’re nothing compared to what we can do with the military.” He held up a finger. “Let me correct that. What we can do with the militaries. I won’t bore you with business details, but there is a protocol for developing military products. The first step is you go to Defense and say, ‘Hello, just letting you know, we’re thinking about making a mobile combat exoskeleton.’ And they say thank you very much and here is a set of papers legally compelling every employee within a hundred-foot radius of our building to be cleared through military intelligence, a four-star general to be in the room whenever we utter the project’s name, and so on. Ten years later, when they allow us to build a crippled, simplified version of the product we originally designed, they give us another set of papers saying how many units we will produce, how much they’ll pay us for each one, and how many years we’ll serve in prison if we sell a single piece of related technology to another sovereign nation. And you know what? That sucks, Dr. Neumann. That is what keeps us small. So this time, I want to try it another way. Try it in-house. And I’m not saying we’ll sell these things to North Korea. I don’t think anyone wants North Korea with an army of, you know, unkillable Better Soldiers. But it’s not a bad thing for that possibility to be out there. It’s not a bad thing if we can go to DOD and say, ‘Whoops, mea culpa, turns out some of our people went ahead and developed human war machines, and they’re already on the ground in various poorly governed countries across the world.’ They’ll rant and scream and threaten, of course. But then we’ll do a deal. On our terms. Because we have the tech.”
I said, “I don’t want to be a supersoldier.”
Cassandra Cautery smiled. The Manager laughed. “Of course you don’t! Good God, Dr. Neumann, perish the thought. You’re a thinker.”
“You’re the brain,” said Cassandra Cautery.
“Exactly. Your role is hands-off.” His eyes flicked to my metal hand. “Excuse the expression. I mean there’s no need to put yourself through QA for every Better Part. We have people for that. Cassie must have talked you through this.”
“The thing with Charlie,” said Cassandra Cautery, “and I hope this doesn’t offend you, Charlie, but the thing is, he’s an artist. He has that mentality. I’ve been extremely, extremely cautious about bothering Charlie with the practical applications of his work, because for him it’s a personal project. Very personal. That’s what inspires him.”
The Manager was silent. “I’m not sure I understand. He’s an employee, i
sn’t he?”
“Of course, but—”
“Are you an employee, Dr. Neumann?”
“Yes.”
“You’re paid to perform work for Better Future, correct?”
I hadn’t checked my bank account for a very long time. But I assumed so. “Yes.”
“Then I think we’ve established your role.” He nodded. “I understand there are at least half a dozen people now capable of original part design. You should be proud of the way you’ve passed on your skills, Dr. Neumann. No employee should be irreplaceable.”
I said, “I want to make parts for myself.”
“Let me tell you what I want,” said the Manager. “I want you to assist our test subjects. Help them adapt to life with Better Parts. That’s your specialty now. Not design. Look at you. If I’m booking in for some hard-core surgery to become a Better Soldier, you’re the guy I want to talk to. You’re the guy I want beside my bed when I wake up, telling me it’s okay, it’s great on the other side. It’s Better. I’m not saying this has been the problem. Cassie, I’m not blaming you for the issues we’ve had with test subjects. I’m just saying, the last thing we need is Better Soldiers having psychotic breaks.”
I said, “What test subjects?” I look at Cassandra Cautery, then back to the Manager. “You mean Carl?”
“Dr. Neumann, I can’t believe you don’t know this. You are not the only recipient of Better Parts.” He glanced at Cassandra Cautery. “Honestly.”
“Who else has … has …”
“There’s you, those in your department, and the volunteers.”
“Which volunteers?” I felt myself shaking. “Does Lola Shanks have a Better Part?”
“Of course. Well. That was an early one. Before we had the volunteer program up and running. We had to make a leap of faith. I know you can appreciate that. When you crushed your leg, did you know how it would turn out? Did you know for sure you would even survive? No. But you did it. Because great achievements require great courage. And it was obvious from the beginning that it would be easier to recruit volunteers for some Better Parts than others. The Eyes, the Skin, sure, they’re lining up. But who wants a military-grade spine? Who wants a satellite-linked eardrum? Don’t say you. We’ve been through that. The world is not full of Carl LaRussos. We will not stumble across a group of people eager to replace vital organs. So we seized the opportunity that presented itself.”
