by Max Barry
“Here … no, they’re not the legs! They’re just crutches!”
“Where are the Contours?” said a guard carrying me. He spoke with no strain.
A black town car drew to a halt in front of us. All its doors popped open at the same time. From the rear emerged Cassandra Cautery. Her gaze flicked over me and settled on Mustache. She seemed eerily calm, her face expressionless. It made me nervous because I had no idea what she was thinking. “The legs?”
“We haven’t—”
“Find them.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And put him in the car. We have time, I think.”
“Yes, ma’am.” They carried me toward the town car. Then there was a noise, a kind of crunch from somewhere far away, and everybody stopped. A siren wailed; a car or a house alarm.
“Screw,” said Cassandra Cautery. “He’s coming.”
She looked at the guards and snapped her fingers. They bundled me into the backseat of the town car and slammed the door. I noticed it wasn’t locked, so I opened it again. A guard looked down at me and pushed it closed. This repeated twice more.
“Stop that,” the driver said. My door locked with a thunk. I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror: condescension, from a guy with one foot resting on the accelerator of a 200-horsepower vehicle.
The opposite door opened. Cassandra Cautery slid her gray-skirted butt onto the leather seat. “Go,” she told the driver. As the car pulled out, she turned to look out the rear window.
“Where’s Lola?” I got no reply, so twisted to see for myself. The white van doors were pushed closed by guards, then the vehicle peeled onto the road behind us. A few remaining gray uniforms scuttled toward Angelica’s open garage. “Who’s coming?”
Cassandra Cautery looked at my thighs. This whole time, she was yet to have an expression. “She toasted the Contours, I assume.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She glanced out the back window again. “Do you know what my life has been like the last five weeksh?”
I peered at her, because it sounded like she said weeksh.
“Oh, you want to see? Have a good old look.” She leaned toward me and pulled out her lip. Among her gleaming white teeth was a gap. Not like before. It was a chasm. She released her lip with a plop. “They said they could fix it. They ground the tooth all the way down and you know what? They were wrong. I can’t feel half my fache. I can’t feel my fache.” She stabbed her forehead with her finger. “It’s like stone.” She noticed the driver watching us in the rearview mirror. “What are you looking at?” His eyes flicked back to the road. “Science is bullshit, Charlie. It’s bullshit. You want super legs and lab assistants with eyes like headlights and that’s possible, oh sure, you can turn a lab technician who looks like a horse into a supermodel. But when it comes to a perfectly shimple thing like diastema you paralyze her fache. I’m married. Did you know that? He’s a litigator. And he expects me to have expresshions. He expects reshponses. What’s going to happen when he notices this?” She stared at me. “I want to drop a bomb on your department. I don’t care about revenue projections. I don’t care about schtrategic vision. What they”—she jabbed a finger at the car ceiling—“never appreciate is that mesh breeds. It eatsh organization. And your department is nothing but mesh, creating more mesh, and so help me, it’s going to eat the company. No one gets it. You breathe a word of this and you’ll regret it.” This was directed at the driver, whose eyes were drifting to the rearview mirror again. “We have a new shee ee oh. You should appreciate this. You can’t kill a manager. They just replace that part and restart the machine. He even looks similar. You’ll never meet him.” She stabbed a finger at me. “You will never be in the same room as a listed corporate officer again. But they want to use you. Leverage the investment. But, Charlie, I’m dying to end this. I’m looking for an excuse. One twitsch in the wrong direction and I’m bringing down the curtain on this shorry enterprise. Understand?” Before I could answer, she waved her hand in my face. “Don’t answer. It doesn’t matter what you think.” She turned and stared out the window. She put her elbow on the sill and her hand on her forehead. Her fingers probed. It reminded me of how I massaged the Contours.
“Who’s coming?”
“Hmm?”
“You said—”
“Carl’s coming.” She turned back. “This is what I mean. Did I want to rush into expanded testing? No. Did I want to weaponize Lola Shanksh? No. But we’re an engineering company. I say, ‘Let’s stop and consolidate a minute before rushing into new products,’ everybody jumps up and down, bleating about processhesh. But a man wants his limbs removed and that’s fine. No one sees a problem. You people have thish mentality that the world is all hard science or hocush-pocush. Nothing matters but numbers. Well, we needed psychologists. But we didn’t get any because we’re full of engineers, and engineers think psychologists are witch doctors.”
I didn’t say anything. Psychologists are witch doctors.
“So Carl went under the knife. We gave him those, you know, little arms to practice on. Then you found him and hit the roof, asked me to dishpose of him—”
“I meant fire.”
“Let’s not get into a thing, Charlie, because it’s incredibly cold either way. I couldn’t do that to Carl. The kind of legal liability it would have opened up … so I hid him from you. But of course we had to take away his arms and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all. We made him a new pair as fast as we could—your team did—but, like I said, we had no psychologists. We didn’t see the cracksh. It seems obvious now. You look at the tapes. He’s talking about his arms like they’re alive. Like they’ve got a mind of their own. Then he split. Shtole some things. Now he’s trying to find you. He wants your partsh.” Behind her, the streetscape grew industrial: we were closing in on Better Future. “Some kind of revenge fantasy, I asshume.”
“He wants my parts? You mean he wants to kill me?”
“I don’t know what’s running through his head. But the way we get through this, Charlie, is by ensuring there are no more Carls. No more major body alterations to people who can’t handle it. Testing confined to test subjects who have a proven psychological detachment from their own physical form.” She eyed me. “That’s just you, if you haven’t guessed.”
I wasn’t ready to depart the topic of Carl wanting to kill me, but this got my attention. “You’re going to give me parts?”
“Your legs didn’t start talking to you, did they?”
“Um,” I said. “No.”
“Then yes. Whatever you want. Carte blanche. It’s like a dream come true for you, isn’t it? You get everything you want, because I’m running along behind you, cleaning up. I’m resigned to it. It would just be nice if someone stopped for one moment to say, ‘Hey, Cashandra, just letting you know, we couldn’t do this without you.’ I’m too capable. Anyone else in my situation would be insane from the stress. Do you know how old I am? Thirty-four. I’m only thirty-four.”
I licked my lips. When Cassandra Cautery had said, “They want to give you parts,” something in me had lit up. It began sending out pulses. Parts. Parts. “I can really have parts?”
“Yup.” The Better Future complex rose ahead. They had installed searchlights on the roof, which shone in the dusk light. “The building’s been repaired, in case you’re interested. The entire wing had to be checked out for structural damage. People worked out of the cafeteria for weeksh. It was a nightmare.” She twisted to look out the back window. “Carl’s tracking us. Once he gets here, we’ll …” She glanced at me. “Give him the medical care and attention he needsh.”
The drumbeat in my head became almost painful. Parts. Parts. I tried to push it down, because I needed to establish something. “Are you sure I can actually have whatever parts I want?”
“Yes.”
“For myself.”
“No one else can handle them.”
“I can design and build my own parts.”
>
“In between testing military-grade Better Products, absolutely. Charlie. Trust me. There’s no catch.”
I wished I was better at reading faces. Whenever someone looks me in the eye and speaks earnestly, I believe them. I have no siblings.
The car descended the ramp to the underground garage. Yellow lights flicked past the windows. I tasted oil. I remembered that fantasy I’d briefly entertained at Dr. Angelica’s about escaping to a snow town and living out my life as a hermit, free from technology. What had I been thinking? That was really dumb.
“Welcome home,” said Cassandra Cautery. I didn’t look at her because I didn’t want her to see how excited I was.
I HAVE a strong focus. When something gets my attention I forget about everything else, like who I was talking to or where I was going. When I was six I got distracted at my birthday party by the washing machine, which was new, and sat in the laundry room watching it tick through cycles until my father came in and asked what the hell was I doing, everybody was leaving. In high school I was crossing the road and a beautiful girl walked by and I didn’t realize I was standing there gaping until she turned to see why everyone was honking. The look she gave me still makes my ears burn.
It’s a useful trait. I’m not sure I could have advanced far in science without it. But it’s not always appropriate. Sometimes this doesn’t bother me, because that washing machine really was more interesting than the birthday party, but other times I wish afterward that the shutters hadn’t closed. I wish I’d retained enough self-awareness to realize I was standing in the middle of the road like an idiot. I wish that when the town car drew up beside the parking lot elevator, my brain left room for thoughts besides Will I get parts now and I wonder what they’ve done on legs. Because the door opened and I saw a guard with a wheelchair and I did not once think about Lola.
CASSANDRA CAUTERY rode in the elevator with me. The doors opened on the ground level and a guard wheeled me into the corridor. Three white coats stood facing the wall with their hands neatly folded behind their backs. When we passed the atrium, all the chairs were turned away. I saw the backs of suit jackets. A year or two earlier, I had been in the cafeteria when a guard asked everyone to please turn and face the wall because they had to bring through some classified material, and I had faced the wall.
As we descended, Cassandra Cautery said, “Your department has been busy in your absence, of course.”
The doors slid apart. At the end of the long corridor was a kid in a green T-shirt and ripped jeans. I did not recognize him because we did not employ anyone who had the time to put in three hours a day at the gym. His eyebrows ratcheted up. He slapped his forehead like he couldn’t believe it. In the process, muscles rippled and bulged. “Dr. Neumann!” He turned and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Neumann’s back!”
“Better Mushles,” said Cassandra Cautery. She sounded disgusted. “They grow while you shleep, apparently.”
Cats emerged. Few wore lab coats. Instead they had short dresses, sleeveless tops, miniskirts, heels, shirts with the top buttons undone. The boys were huge and the girls were reeds. They began to clap. Jason elbowed his way to the front and grinned. He was no longer skinny. His teeth shone like stars. I felt ugly.
“What’s annoying,” said Cassandra Cautery, “is they look like this, but they act like ashholes.”
“I heard that,” said Jason. There was laughter. “With my Better Ears.”
“Move out of the way,” said Cassandra Cautery. The lab assistants parted. As I drew closer, I smelled a cloying mixture of musk and sweat, like entering a bad dorm room. I coughed. “Sorry. It’s the Better Muscles,” said Jason. He shuffled alongside, threading his way through other cats. “They produce a few nasty by-products. But we’re working on Better Scent.”
A familiar-looking girl smiled with her lips pressed together, then gave in and showed teeth. “Hello, Dr. Neumann.” She was Elaine, my old lab assistant, with Better Skin.
Cassandra Cautery turned. “Get lost. This part is private.” They began to disperse. Cassandra Cautery swiped open the lab door, juggled cards to swipe again for me, then it was the guard’s turn. The door closed behind us with a smack. The room was full of parts: metal and wire spilling from stainless steel shelves, themselves jammed together. I saw joints. Fingers. Baglike organs. They had been busy. Very busy.
We squeezed between the shelves. “There.” She gestured, with distaste. For a moment I thought my Contours had come back to life. But they were black, not silver. They had larger hooves. They stood on a black rubber mat, held in place with metal cords that dropped from the ceiling. “They’re calling these Contours Mark Three. Don’t ask what happened to the Twos. You don’t want to know. They’re a revishion of the original Contours, upgraded for strength, bug fixes, et cetera.”
I wheeled myself forward and touched the Contour Threes. Their metal skin was mottled, covered in a billion tiny bumps. I didn’t know why. But I was intrigued. I ran my fingers down the legs and was surprised by their slimness. “Where’s the battery?”
“Relocated.”
“What?”
“They draw more power. The battery got too big. And there were concerns about safety. It’s not a good idea to store a masshive energy source in a limb exposed to impacts.” She held up her hands. “Don’t argue. You weren’t here for the Twos.”
“So where’s the power source?”
“Here.” She moved to a shelf on which sat a steel object the size of a vacuum cleaner. On one side was stamped the international symbol for radiation. “Pocket reactor.”
“But … the legs aren’t modular? They’re not self-sufficient?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Charlie. It’s the direction the team took after you ran off.”
“So to wear the legs I need the abdomen?”
“Yes.”
I chewed my lip.
“Also, the abdomen requires a shpine upgrade.”
“A what?”
“It weighs eight hundred kilograms. It’d fall right out of you.”
I eyed the abdomen.
“And if we’re doing the shpine … well, you can stop there. It’s just …” She shrugged. “It’s hard to make work without the upgraded torso.”
“The what?”
“I thought you would be totally into this,” she said. “Isn’t it what you always wanted?”
“Yes …” I said. “No. I don’t like using other people’s technology. I like to build my own.”
“Oh. Well, that’s going to be something of a tough sell to management, Charlie, with thirty tons of military equipment waiting around for you to field-test.” She opened her mouth like she was about to laugh, then snapped it closed. “I’m kidding. You can take it as slow as you like.”
I touched the Threes. I wondered what that rough surface was for.
“Where does this end for you, Charlie? New legs. New arms. Just out of curiosity. When do you say, okay, now I’m happy?”
I blinked, because that was an odd question. You didn’t stop improving things. Reaching a point where everything was as good as it could be, that would be terrible. You might as well die.
“You know what? Forget the abdomen. We’ll get you a really long cord, we’ll plug your Threes into the generator, you can figure it out from there. How does that sound? Just dip your toe in the water.”
“Okay.”
“Okay!” She clapped her hands, took a breath. “Let’s get you into shurgery.”
“Surgery?”
“I forgot to mention. The, ah, the nerve interface or whatever on the Threes … the part that plugs into you? It’s a different configuration. Or something.” She waved her hands. “I don’t know. But they need to take another inch or two off your thighs.” Her cell phone trilled. She studied the screen. “We can’t dither all day, Charlie. What’s it to be? Shurgery?”
Part of me wanted to say Wait. Because did I really need to rush into the Contours? The rest of me said Yes.
“We’ll get you on a gurney, somebody can explain it all on the way. How’s that? Okay?” she said. “Okay?”
THE CEILING of Better Future was a checkerboard. The lighter squares were actually lights: they glowed uniformly, as bright in the corners as the middle. I had never appreciated this until I lay on a gurney and watched them pass over my head. “These lights are neat.”
“Can we get him sedated?” This was Cassandra Cautery, walking alongside. Cats were accumulating, and people in green scrubs. “We have a time presshure.”
“I’ll find out.”
I felt thrilled, and nervous, and like I had forgotten something. I wondered what that was. I jumped. “Where’s Lola?”
“Being treated,” said Cassandra Cautery. “They wanted to check her over, make sure she was okay.”
“I want to see her!”
“Would you like me to make a call? I can have her meet us in surgery.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Done.”
“Are you sure?” I felt light-headed, even though I hadn’t had any drugs yet. “You’re not just saying that?”
“Gas here.” A plastic mask approached. “Head forward, Dr. Neumann.”
“Can you make the call right now?” Hands took hold of my head. The mask snapped around my mouth and nose.
“Will do, Charlie. I have the phone right here.” She wiggled it. But she did not use it. We passed through a doorway. The glowing checkerboard ceiling was replaced by white sheetrock and surgical lights. I saw many people in green and thought, Do you need that many people for an inch or two of thigh? They grew fuzzy. Fuzzy and warm. My head was heavy.
“Did you,” I said. The rest of this was give me a general. I tried to push out the words but couldn’t feel my mouth. My head lolled. I got it up and saw people laying a green sheet across my body. Why do I need general anesthetic, I said. My eyes closed.
