Machine Man

by Max Barry

  “What’s in Lola?” My throat burned. All I could think about was her on the operating table, her hand limp and helpless. “Her heart. What is it?”

  “Well,” he said. “Something better.”

  A jolt of rage burst through my body. I did not usually get angry. I had never felt like this in my life. Certainly at no point while connected to the nerve interface, painstakingly teaching the Contours the language of my electrical neuroimpulses. They had no idea what I was telling them. That’s my explanation, anyway, for why my legs twitched, and I kicked the Manager through the window.

  EARLIER, I hadn’t paid much attention to which floor we were on. But as I moved to the shattered window and pushed aside the flapping drapes, I realized: we were really high up.

  “YOU’VE KILLED him.” Cassandra Cautery stepped carefully over the broken glass and braced herself against what was left of the window frame. “Look. He’s just lying there.”

  I tried to say, I didn’t mean to. But my chest was locked tight around my lungs.

  “That guy is dead.” There was a touch of awe in her voice. “He is definitely dead.”

  Against my better judgment, I looked down. Most of the space between Better Future and the road was occupied by a wide, healthy lawn. But it was bisected by a narrow concrete path, and on this lay the Manager. I’m tempted to claim this as bad luck. But from the way his legs were bent over his head, it didn’t matter.

  The Contours took an unexpected step forward, as if they wanted to look at what they had done. I teetered.

  “Charlie …” Cassandra Cautery murmured. Her eyes didn’t move from the Manager’s tiny, broken body. “You are in so very much trouble.”

  The Contours tensed. Four sections contracted two inches. I wasn’t making them do this. It must be a fear reaction: my terrified brain barfing out static. But that’s not what it felt like. It felt like they were making their own decisions.

  Behind me, someone gasped. The Manager’s beautiful assistant stood with one hand on the door handle, the other flying to her mouth, her eyes shocked wide. What would happen next became clear: the alarm call, the security guards. My legs were right, I realized. They had figured this out before I had. I looked at the drop, took a breath, and jumped.

  AS I fell through the air, the Contours extended to their full length. The hooves splayed into three toes, maximizing their surface area. The Better Future lawn rushed at me and I closed my eyes. My spine tried to impale my skull. When I could see again, the Contours were three feet long and had no hooves. I thought they had snapped. Then they began to reextend, and I remembered this was what they did on impact: retracted, to soak up deceleration. The hooves had sunk into the earth. I pulled one free, then the other, and shook off clods of soil.

  The Manager lay a few yards away. He didn’t look any better up close. I felt sick, then angry, because if the Manager had had some Better Parts, he would be fine right now. He would be walking around on machine legs and I would not be in this situation. What kind of CEO organized a project to manufacture artificial parts and had none himself? It was ridiculous. I stared at his biological mess and was furious. It was not my finest moment.

  Ahead of me, the lobby doors slid open. I thought, Maybe it won’t be guards, and was wrong. Then I thought, Maybe they don’t know this was me, and they drew their guns, and I thought, They won’t shoot unless I run, and was wrong again.

  THE FIRST shot thumped into my left biceps. I felt it not so much as physical pain as an insult. I hadn’t realized how deeply offensive it was to have someone deliberately injure you. I shouted, “Hey!” My voice was thick with outrage. I was going to march up to this guard and explain I was a human being, dammit, with a brain and rights and an ID card, and you can’t just shoot people. You can’t just kill them. Which was a little hypocritical, given I was standing next to the Manager’s folded-up body, but that didn’t occur to me. I was indignant about my violated biceps. The only thing that drove this plan from my mind was the realization that this bullet was not the last of today’s insults: that more insults were heading my way unless I got out of there.

  So I did. My legs fired. My neck snapped back. Something passed by my head so close it sucked hair into its wake. I grabbed at the sides of the bucket seat, afraid of falling out, which was more or less impossible but that’s not what it felt like. With each step my legs stretched out before me and my hooves drove into the lawn. They slipped on a slick patch of grass, then we reached the sidewalk and I felt them settle. They liked concrete. We both did. I clung on and cars and trees blurred past me until the security guards were far, far behind and I was safe and I realized I had left behind something important.

  I DON’T play the lottery. I don’t care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if people thought more about what they’re doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don’t understand why bridges aren’t art. It seems to me they’re penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that’s a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it’s infrastructure. That makes no sense.

  I mention this because what I did next was not completely logical. And I know if I heard about this from somebody else, I would lose a little respect for that person. I would think, Well, that’s just stupid. But I would be failing to appreciate the difficulty of performing an emergency situational assessment from the middle of one. When someone shoots at you, your hypothalamus sends a lightning bolt into your neuroendocrine cells, which dump cortisol and adrenaline and norepinephrine into your bloodstream, and then you are no longer a very good decision-making machine. You are a quick decision-making machine. And I don’t want to hide behind my biology, because at some point you have to take ownership of your neurochemistry, but I do want to point out that I didn’t decide to go flight-or-fight; my body did.

  I SLOWED. I stopped. On the sidewalk ahead, an elderly Latino woman struggled along with bags of groceries. She saw my hooves and her eyes bulged. “Diablo.”

  Lola was back there. She had who-knew-what in her chest cavity. Cassandra Cautery said they were taking care of her but that could be a lie. They had installed a device in Lola without her knowledge.

  “Diablo!” cried the woman.

  Maybe I should go to the police. Tell them there was a woman with a malfunctioning Better Heart she hadn’t asked for. That had to be some kind of crime. And guards had shot at me and that was wrong so the police should be on my side. I had metal legs but they would get over that. Although I had killed the Manager. Possibly from their point of view I was a violent criminal. Had Better Future already reported me?

  “Diablo!”

  “Quiet,” I said, because that was making it hard to think. My wounded biceps began transiting from comfortably numb to distractingly sore with hints of impending agony. I tried to concentrate. My legs shivered. That was weird. I hadn’t known they could do that. I wished Lola was here. She would know what to do. It was my weakness: I could not predict people. Lola could. Maybe there was a back entrance. A way into Better Future not protected by security guards with guns they weren’t shy about using. I mentally scanned floor plans. There wasn’t.

  “Diablo!” the woman shrieked. She dropped her groceries and clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Diablo!”

  “Then why am I going back?” I shouted. I wasn’t angry with her. I was just emotional about my own likely death. The Contours began to hammer the sidewalk, bearing me back toward Lola.

  I WASN’T an idiot. I didn’t approach from the front. Adjacent to Better Future was a small industrial plant, and I positioned one hoof on its chain-link fence and pushed. The metal jangled and shrieked and tore from its frame. I ran between building-sized vats and emerged to discover not one but two fences between me and Better Future, because neither company trusted the other. The Better Future f
ence was higher, stronger, and more likely to automatically notify somebody upon being breached. I raised a hoof and tore down the first fence, crossed eight feet of no-man’s-land, and positioned a hoof against Better Future’s fence. Every muscle in my body contracted. My teeth gouged my tongue. “Farg!” I said. I backed up, my nerves trembling. I didn’t know why I hadn’t realized it would be electrified. It was lucky my electronics were insulated or this would have been a humiliating ending. I looked around for something helpful, like maybe a tall tree I could push over, but saw only struts and scaffolding and other excellent electrical conductors. I looked at the fence again. Maybe twelve feet high. I could possibly jump that. I had never gotten around to testing the Contours’ vertical leap capability under controlled conditions but that one time they had leaped sixty feet in the air. I looked at the Better Future building. I concentrated on a patch of perfect grass on the other side of the fence. I thought, Take me there.

  The legs settled. I tensed, as if there were anything my muscles could do, and the legs sprang. My torso compressed like an accordion. I bit my tongue again. As I passed over the fence I let go of the seat and flailed my arms in the air, because my body still couldn’t come to grips with the fact that it was attached to two tons of titanium. The Contours thumped into soil. I rocked forward in the seat. I breathed. I was okay. That was actually not so bad. That was the least terrifying and physically damaging leap I had performed in the Contours so far. I thought, I’m getting the hang of this, and looked at the Better Future building, and thought, Oh, shit. The Contours were not good on stairs. I wouldn’t be able to run between floors. Why hadn’t I fixed that? Why hadn’t this occurred to me before I was standing on the lawn? I could see what I thought was Lola’s balcony and thought, Jump, and, Are you crazy, that’s like fifty feet. I began to walk toward the building but without enthusiasm. I didn’t know if I could do this. I couldn’t think of any logical reason why not but it was incredibly high and would kill me if I got it wrong. I thought, Is that even the right balcony? I thought, I don’t even know if she’s in there. I stopped. I felt relief, then shame. I thought, Fuck it, I’ll do it, and changed my mind again. Sweat tickled my ribs. My biceps throbbed. I thought, That needs medical attention. I should have it seen to before I do anything to make it worse. Lola’s balcony was high. It was really high.

  A Better Future Hummer skidded around the corner, its engine screaming. Its tires tore up chunks of turf and spat them across the grass. It fishtailed one way, then the other. Its grille centered on me. I stood frozen. Then I put up my hands. I did not want to get shot. The Hummer accelerated and a part of my brain informed me that it was doing so well beyond its need to reach me in a hurry. I ignored this information because surely that couldn’t be right, until it was incontrovertible and too late to address.

  There is an expression: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I had a hammer. I had a servomagnetic lithium-powered titanium hammer. So when the Hummer fell upon me, I kicked it. It went up on two wheels. The other two passed over my head. It sailed a drunken twenty meters, teetering on the brink of tipping over, like it was in a circus. As it wobbled toward the Better Future building I realized the driver faced two mutually exclusive objectives: to bring the car down onto four wheels or to not ram a ground-floor meeting room. This was really an either/or decision but the driver tried to accomplish both and the Hummer hit the building at a thirty-degree angle and disappeared halfway inside. Glass and brick dust burst across the lawn.

  Arguably, I deserve no credit for this. My input was limited to being very sure that I did not want to be run over. The Contours took care of the rest: bracing of one leg against the ground, timing of the swing, delivery of the correct amount of force. But then again, that was my code. I had written it without this particular situation in mind, but the fact remained, they were my instructions. From this perspective, I deserved plenty of credit, even more than someone whose body was grown for them. So I looked up. I located Lola’s balcony. I jumped.

  Glass flashed past my face. Wind pulled at my clothes. I squeezed shut my eyes and gritted my teeth and tried not to die. It felt like I might. The g-force eased and I opened my eyes to see whether I was anywhere near where I needed to be to survive and saw my hooves clear a balcony railing by two inches. I landed as gently as if I had just stepped off the lowest rung of a ladder. I understood the physics, but still. I sucked in air. I was alive. I looked at my Contours and had never felt so much love for an object.

  The balcony door slid back. “Charlie!” Lola came out of the suite. I was on the right balcony. Spatial skills: I had them. She threw herself at me. Inside, through the glass, I saw cats in lab coats everywhere. Jason and Mirka among them. I saw the nurse. They began to hastily empty the room. “Did you feel that? I think it was an earthquake!”

  “That was me.”

  Lola leaned over the balcony. “How did you get here? Did you jump? Did you jump?”

  “We need to get out.”

  “What’s that smoke?”

  “Lola. It’s important we get out of here as fast as possible.”

  “Okay.” She took my hand, the biological one. “I knew you’d come back. I knew it.”

  I threw a glance at the suite. It had cleared out. Those damn cats. Then I realized I couldn’t jump out of here. Not with Lola. The moment my legs touched the ground and I began to decelerate, Lola would weigh the equivalent of two thousand pounds. “Oh. We have a problem.”

  “What? Let’s go.”

  “I can’t hold you.”

  “Sure you can.” She held out her arms. “I’m little.”

  “When we land, you’ll weigh as much as a car.” To her expression, I added, “That’s not me. That’s physics.” I looked at my metal fingers. If I’d had the arms, this might have been doable.

  “Are you bleeding?”

  “Oh. Yes.” I showed her my biceps. “I got damaged.”

  “You mean injured.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You …” She shook her head. “What happened?”

  “They shot me.”

  “Who shot you?”

  “The company. Guards.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would they do that? Charlie?”

  “I kicked the CEO.”

  Lola’s eyebrows leaped. “Oh, no.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “How badly hurt is he?”

  “Um …”

  “They have really good doctors here. Maybe—”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Oh, Charlie.”

  “I’m sorry.” I meant for upsetting Lola. The Manager I was still mad at.

  “And now they want to kill you?”

  “I don’t know. They shot at me.”

  “They must think you’re dangerous. It’s a misunderstanding.”

  “Should I try to talk to them?”

  Lola frowned. “What did you mean before, ‘That was me’? How did you make that smoke?”

  “I kicked a car. It tried to run me over. I had to kick it. Into the building.”

  “Oh. Oh.”

  “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

  “I think that’s really bad.”

  “They’re putting parts in people. Military parts. They gave you a military heart.”

  “A what?”

  “A military—”

  “What does that mean? What the fuck is a military heart?”

  “I don’t—” Something went dink. “Was that the elevator?”

  “We have to get out of here,” said Lola.

  “Yes.”

  “Pick me up and run. We can go down the stairs.”

  “The Contours aren’t good on stairs.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “A bug, I guess. I haven’t had a chance to go through the software—”

&nbs
p; “What does that mean for us?”

  “It means we can’t take the stairs.”

  “Okay. We can … let’s try to sneak down in the elevators.”

  “The elevators won’t work unless …” Footsteps. Lola squeezed my hand. I felt that strange attractive force stir, trying to pull my fingers toward her chest.

  “Charlie …”

  It was a puzzle, I realized. Like having a bag of corn, a chicken, a fox, and a boat that could bear only one object across the river at a time. I could jump out of here, but Lola couldn’t. She couldn’t open the stairwell doors, assuming security had locked everything down, but she could walk down stairs, which I couldn’t.

  “Can you stomp through the floor?”

  “What? It’s reinforced concrete.”

  “Is that a no?”

  “Obviously it’s a no!”

  “Don’t look at me like that!”

  “I just …” I had it. It was simple. I would accompany Lola to a stairwell. Kick open the door. Jump down to ground level. Reenter the building. Kick open the door at ground level. Grab her. Run away. It was a good plan. Simple. It made a few assumptions about my likelihood of being shot. But it was a solution. I took her hand and entered the suite.

  A man appeared in the doorway. A guard. And I stood there, my plan forgotten, because the guard was Carl.

  HE LOOKED different. At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was distracted by other thoughts, like why he was here. I had thought he was gone. Terminated, one way or another. But here he was, blocking the only exit that didn’t require falling eighty feet.