Machine Man

by Max Barry

  So I crawled off the bed and began hunting for one fixable thing. But I couldn’t find it. Weeks passed.

  I HAD an epiphany. I was on my stomach, straining to reach some titanium pieces that had somehow wound up under the bed, and thought, These are just metal. I guess that doesn’t sound very revelatory. But it was. I stared at these pieces, which had once been the core of my fingers, and they didn’t look like part of me.

  I sat up. I would never put the Contours back together: I knew that now. Previously, this had been a paralyzing fear, but I mostly felt relief. Part of me still wanted to fix them, to try one more time, but it was a small, receding part. I looked down and thought, I’m a mess.

  I had damaged Lola. Maybe she had left. Someone was bringing me food and listening outside the door, but that could have been Dr. Angelica. I pulled open the door. Fresh air hit me like a slap. A piece of paper lay in the corridor: a clipping from a trade supplies catalog. It was an advertisement for an arc welder. On it was Lola’s handwriting: For you, in the garage.

  I was still there when she appeared at the top of the corridor. “Oh,” she said. “You … well, I heard you needed one. It took me a while to get.” She shifted from one foot to the other. “I hope it’s the right kind.”

  I croaked: a low, pathetic sound. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Lola said. “It’s okay, Charlie.”

  AS I entered the bath, a film of grease peeled away from my skin, forming a swirling Mandelbrot slick. I was the center of a galaxy of sweat and dissolving dirt. I hadn’t realized how badly I stank. You could get used to anything. Your brain complained only about change.

  Lola began to wash me. I could not really believe the lack of vindictiveness. I hadn’t known this about love: that you did not need to deserve it. I thought there was a set of criteria, like a good sense of humor and looks and wealth. You could compensate deficiencies in one area with excellence in another, hence rich, ugly men with beautiful wives. But there was an algorithm involved. That was why I thought I was unloved: I didn’t score highly enough. I had made some attempts to improve my score and also told myself I didn’t care because if that was what women wanted, something fake and temporary, I would rather be alone. And sometimes I was just lazy and would rather code things. But here I was soaking in a bath of my own filth with Lola scrubbing my shoulders, and what algorithm could explain that? That problem was nonhalting.

  Lola left and came back with a set of prosthetic legs, like the day we’d first met. She rested them against the wall. “Now, these are nothing special …” They had crutchlike poles and plastic buckets. They were prosthetics for war veterans abandoned by their government. “They were all Angelica could get without arousing suspicion.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “They’re basic, I know. They’re not like … they’re really basic. But they’re something.”

  “Thanks.”

  She smiled. “Want to try them on?”

  The straps were frayed and worn, dark in patches. A lot of amputated thighs had sweated into these. The sockets were loose in some places and strangling tight in others. When I slid the plastic around my thighs, my tissue wailed. I was used to nanoneedles, not gross pressure. It felt like fitting a glove onto my eyeball. I belted the strap around my hips. I slung an arm over Lola’s shoulder and she helped lever me upright. I couldn’t sit in the sockets, like the Contours: I had to move them, as if they were stilts. They were stilts. I took a step, hanging off Lola, and sideswiped the wall with a rubber toe, leaving a black mark. “That’s okay,” she said. “Keep trying.” The sockets were filling with blood, I was sure.

  By the fourth step I noticed my body liked it. My thighs didn’t like it. My thighs hated me. But my brain was feeding me endorphins, pleased to be moving. This is what you’re supposed to do. My brain was not an intellectual. It took pleasure in simple things like long walks and hard work. Maybe it had a point. It was probably just the endorphins, but suddenly it seemed possible to live like this. Perhaps Lola and I could build anonymous lives in some tiny Canadian snow town. Lola could bake pies. I could grow vegetables. I would be the man with no legs and the half-hand who was a scientist once. The townspeople would find me aloof but grow to respect me. They would call me Doc.

  Lola lowered me to the toilet seat. “That was awesome, Charlie. That was an insanely good first effort.” She reached for a buckle.

  “Again.”

  Her eyebrows jumped. “Are you sure?” She clapped her hands. “That’s the spirit, Charlie! That’s the spirit!”

  NIGHT FELL. I won’t recount the whole sweating, groaning ordeal. I’ll just say it was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. I speak as someone who crushed his legs in an industrial clamp. The problem was I went to bed with no parts. It was just me and Lola curled inside my arm and this seemed doable with the lights on, but as soon as silence fell, I knew it was a mistake. I lay there staring at the ceiling. I felt a crawling. Not painful. But there.

  I tried to ride it out. I thought about other things, like whether Carl would find me, and what he might do if he did. The crawling escalated to pangs. I twitched and Lola’s head came up. Her eyes glittered in the darkness. “It’s okay,” I said, but I wanted her to know I was lying.

  “Do you want to put your legs on?”

  I shook my head. I chewed my teeth. At midnight we switched on the light and strapped me into the war veteran legs. The relief was immediate. I massaged their stark poles with shaking fingers and felt invisible muscles loosening. Lola snuggled into me. I closed my eyes.

  I woke screaming. My legs were inflating, stretching. My thighs were on fire. It was unlike anything I had ever felt. Lola scrambled for the light. I grabbed at the poles, willing my brain to realize they were there. But that wasn’t the problem. I knew it immediately. It wasn’t that I didn’t have legs. It was that I didn’t have Contours. My baseline had changed. I needed my real artificial legs.

  “I’ll get the nerve interface mat,” said Lola.

  “No,” I whimpered. “Not yet.”

  MORNING WAS better. Lola padded off to the shower, clad in a borrowed T-shirt that said DINO-ROAR! I tried walking in the war veteran legs by myself. I staggered into the corridor, taking huge, toddlerlike steps, bouncing off the walls. There were no dogs around. I should have noticed that.

  “He has.” It was Lola. She had detoured to the living room for some reason. “You’ll see.”

  “You bought him a frickin’ welder. You’re enabling him!” Dr. Angelica, of course. “I swear to God, Lola! This ends with you in pieces.”

  “He’s trying. You’ll see.”

  “Trying to get to the garage, I bet.”

  “He’s using those, those stupid legs. He’s changed.”

  “He hasn’t. They never do.”

  I formed a smug little plan. I would totter out there on my pole legs. Dr. Angelica would be surprised. Lola would glance at her like See? And I would be all What?

  I got one pole in front of the other. As I reached the end of the corridor, I attained balance and entered the living room walking, actually walking, albeit stiff-backed and goggle-eyed, like a zombie. Lola and Dr. Angelica turned. It was perfect. Then I stepped on a dog.

  “Biggles!”

  I had never heard a more piercing sound, and I’ve worked in metals fabrication. Dr. Angelica rushed at me, her fingers hooked into claws. I looked down and saw a dog, Biggles, I guess, trapped under the rubber toe of the pole. Mostly it seemed to be Biggles’s blue vest, but he was making a hell of a noise, so maybe some of Biggles was there, too. I tried to raise my leg but snagged on his coat. Then I was off balance and could do nothing but pivot. Dr. Angelica’s shriek reached a new pitch of outrage. It possibly looked like I was grinding on the dog. She banged into me with her shoulder and I hit the floor in a tangle of poles. When I levered myself up, Dr. Angelica was cradling Biggles in her arms. Biggles licked her face, whimpering.

  I realized they had pl
anned this. Dog, the pack mind, had sent Biggles to throw himself under my poles. He was a suicide bomber. I looked around for the furry faces I knew would be watching from a dark doorway somewhere. “It’s a setup.” In retrospect, I should have kept this theory to myself. “Biggles did it on purpose.”

  Dr. Angelica hit me. You would think a surgeon would be careful about using her hands as blunt instruments. But she let me have it. Her nails raked my cheek. On all sides came yapping and shrieking. Dogs streamed out of the walls. Biggles bit my finger. “Get out!” Dr. Angelica screamed. “Get out you asshole you asshole get out!”

  “Stop hitting him!” said Lola. The dogs’ yowling melded with Dr. Angelica’s enraged screams and Lola’s shrieks until I couldn’t tell one from another. At Better Future I once attended a demonstration of sonics-based nonlethal weaponry and what came out of that gun did not sound as bad as this. I wrapped my arms around my head. Pain exploded in my kidney. I looked up. Dr. Angelica had kicked me. She stared down and in this moment I was glad she did not have a scalpel. Lola grabbed a fistful of hair. Dr. Angelica shrieked. She swung a looping punch at Lola and Lola ducked and they stood a few feet apart, shocked at each other, or themselves. Dr. Angelica clutched Biggles tight and ran out of the room. A train of little dogs trotted after her. One looked back at me before he disappeared and I sensed him gloating. The bedroom door slammed.

  “God,” said Lola. She looked at me, then the closed door. “God.”

  I began levering myself up. “That was an accident.”

  Lola blinked. “Of course.” She came over and helped me onto the sofa. “You’re scratched. Let me see that finger.”

  “Biggles can’t be too hurt, if he can bite like that.”

  “Shh.”

  I shushed. In the silence I heard Dr. Angelica muttering to her dogs. “She’s going to kick us out, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dr. Angelica’s voice rose. It sounded strident. I had never heard her talk to the dogs like that.

  “How could she think you would deliberately step on Biggles?” I said nothing. “Nobody understands you,” Lola said.

  Dr. Angelica said, “Svvn nmm hrr nww.”

  “Is she on the phone?”

  We listened. Now there was silence. But I knew what Dr. Angelica had done. I could almost hear it: the white van with the Better Future logo on its side.

  I struggled to my feet. My poles, I mean. A standing position. I got upright. “Where are Angelica’s car keys?”

  “What?”

  “Her car keys.” I managed a step, then another, and made it to the kitchen doorway.

  “Why do you want Angelica’s car keys?”

  This was a difficult question to answer without elevating Lola’s heart rate. Elevating Lola’s heart rate would be bad. It could lead to an electromagnetic pulse, a dead car, and no way out. I had to execute the world’s calmest escape. “I just …” I spotted them on the counter, and scooped them up. “Let’s go to the garage.”

  “Why?”

  “I feel like a drive.”

  Lola stared. “You want the welder.”

  “What? No!”

  “Angelica was right.” She put her hands on her forehead. “I’m so stupid.” Her eyes popped open. “Do you love me? I mean, even a little?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve never said it.”

  I felt surprised. But she was right. I guess I assumed it was obvious. “Oh.”

  “ ‘Oh’?”

  “I mean, I love you.” It sounded bad, even to me. “You know.”

  “How am I supposed to know that?”

  “From observation!” I tried to spread my arms, but I was holding crutches. “I almost died trying to get you out of that building! What other hypothesis better fits available evidence? Schizophrenia?” I bit my lip, because that was workable.

  Lola stared.

  “We are going to walk past the welder and get in the car. Come see.”

  “Then why—”

  “Just come. Please. Now.”

  THE CAR was a hybrid, like me. Lola climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted the mirror. “I’m not sure we should be doing this.”

  My pole legs snagged on the passenger door somehow. They were so ungainly. I had to do everything. In frustration I ripped off the straps and pulled at the sockets. They resisted, the plastic sucking on my skin, then popped off with a slurp. I threw them into the backseat.

  “I don’t even know where we’re going.”

  “Anywhere.” I pulled shut the car door. Through the window, I saw it: the arc welder. My breath caught. It was a gray refrigerator on wheels. That thing had to be 200 amps.

  “I should leave a note …” She reached for the door.

  “No! Stop!”

  “Charlie, what the hell? You’re not making any—”

  “Quiet.”

  “What?”

  “Shh.”

  “What?”

  “Stop talking.”

  “You stop talking! Asshole!”

  I hunted between the seats until I found a remote control. The garage door began to rattle upward. “You need to turn off your brain.”

  “You want me to be a machine!” Her face flushed. This was not good. None of this was good. “You want to switch me on and off whenever you want!”

  “Lola, you remember that EMP weapon in your chest.” The garage door retracted into the ceiling. Beyond lay a concrete driveway, flanked by garden beds and an inviting empty road. “The one that activates at high heart rates.”

  “I remember, Charlie.”

  “Well, the thing with that is you need to stay calm. You understand? You need to be isolated from stress.”

  “Is something happening?”

  “No. But please drive.”

  Lola stared at me. Then she leaned forward and pressed a button. The car started, near silently.

  “Thank you.” I began to relax. She put the car in gear. She seemed focused. She was being a machine. Then a white Better Future van jumped the curb, engine shrieking, and slewed across the driveway in front of us.

  THE VAN’S rear doors banged open. Carl was in there. I didn’t see him. But I knew. We would try to squeeze past and Carl’s metal arm would shoot out and grab our bumper. Our little hybrid wheels would smoke, the engine would scream, and I would turn to see vengeance burning in his eyes.

  “Drive!”

  I braced myself against the impending acceleration. But there was no acceleration. I looked at Lola. Her eyes were closed.

  “Zero, one, one, two, three. Five. Eight. Thirteen.”

  “What are you doing? Is that Fibonacci?”

  “Twenty-one. Thirty-four. Fifty-five.” Guards emerged from the van, armed and grim-faced. “Eighty-nine. One hundred thirty-four.”

  “One hundred forty-four.”

  “Shut up!” Her eyes opened, took in the guards, and squeezed shut again. “Oh God!”

  “It’s just, if you’re going to do Fibonacci …” I forced myself to stop. “Okay. You recite arbitrary numbers.” Five guards. But still no Carl. I had to figure out how to operate a motor vehicle when one of us couldn’t see and the other couldn’t reach the pedals.

  “Tibialis anterior. Extensor hallucis longus. Extensor digitorum longus. Fibularis tertius.”

  She was reciting muscles I didn’t have. But this gave me an idea. I shouldn’t think of us as two people. We were a collection of body parts. We had one pair of eyes, two feet, three hands, two brains; everything we needed. It was a matter of resource allocation.

  I took hold of the steering wheel. “I’ll steer. You keep your eyes closed and work the pedals when I tell you.”

  “Triceps surae.”

  “Depress the accelerator as far as it will go.”

  The guards began to close in. “Plantaris,” said Lola, and stepped on the gas. The car leaped forward. I aimed for a guard to the left of the van: an older guy with a mustache. He stepped profess
ionally out of the way. He didn’t look scared, which was a little insulting. Although it was hard to tell. It was a bushy mustache. As we passed, he unloaded his pistol into our tires. The car rang with flat impacts, as if we were being attacked by a baseball-bat-wielding gang. This would have been an improvement on reality, now I think about it, so maybe I should have tried to sell that to Lola. We bumped onto the road. I hauled on the wheel, which was not easy with one hand from the passenger seat. “Less acceleration!” I said, but not quickly enough, and we thumped against a parked wagon. I was thrown against Lola. Her head rebounded from the side window. She said something that sounded like guk but probably wasn’t. I got my hand back on the wheel. “More acceleration!”

  We didn’t move. I looked at Lola and her eyes were wide open and fixed on me. She looked pale. “You’re … okay.”

  “I’m fine.” I threw a glance out the rear window. Better Future guards jogged after us. Still no Carl! I couldn’t think where he could be. But we weren’t moving, and that was more urgent. “Let’s go.”

  “Maybe that was a mistake. Closing my eyes.”

  The car dash was dark. There was a smell in the air, sharp and hot.

  Lola leaned forward until her forehead touched the steering wheel.

  “Did you …” I couldn’t think of a word for it. “Discharge?”

  “I thought we … hit something. I thought you might be hurt.”

  “Put your hands on the dash! Do it now!”

  Better Future guards encircled the car, pointing weapons at us. “Let me see your hands!” one yelled, and another said, “Now! Do it!” in case there was any confusion. They seemed more nervous than when I had been trying to drive a car through them. A guard pulled open my door and leaped back, as if I might bite. “He’s moving!”

  “No legs!” said the older guy with the mustache. “He’s not wearing the legs!”

  “Confirm that! Subject has no legs!”

  Guns disappeared into holsters.

  “Get them into the van,” said Mustache. “Double time.”

  Hands reached for me. “Go away,” I said, and was ignored. Two guys got me under the armpits and pulled me out of the car. “At least bring my legs!” I twisted around and caught a glimpse of guards dragging Lola out of the driver’s seat. Another was peering through the side window.