by Max Barry
He was bigger than I expected. He hadn’t grown. I had just forgotten. He was shirtless, which allowed me to see the metal support structure around his torso. His arms were huge, much larger than my own. He was built for strength. It was a moment before I realized he had Lola in front of him, his hands gripping her shoulders. She was so small by comparison that I had missed her. She stared at me with her mouth open. I looked different, of course.
“Hold it,” said Carl. “No closer.”
This was pretty stupid. Carl had clearly not thought through our relative strengths and weaknesses. If anything, he should be trying to lure me closer. This was why I was going to beat him: the intelligence differential. I raised my arm. He didn’t even know I had a gun. This was going to end really quickly.
I thought, Is Carl such a bad guy? Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe I could talk him into releasing Lola and he could get the psychiatric help he needed. Now I had him at my mercy, I felt a little bad. He had only wanted new arms. You couldn’t blame him for that.
“Charlie,” said Lola. “Please listen to Carl.”
Her tone was odd. She didn’t sound terrified. And why would Lola say that? Was she confused? I realized the way Carl’s hands were hovering near Lola’s shoulders, that wasn’t to hold her. That was protective.
“Carl wants to help,” said Lola. “He didn’t kidnap me. He rescued me.”
I said, “What?”
Carl cleared his throat. “Dr. Neumann, this might be hard to hear.”
I thought, Just shoot him. A part answered, Yes.
“I thought I wanted to be strong. I knew I couldn’t go back. You know. For my fiancée. But I wanted to be prepared. In case I needed to be strong again. So I wanted the arms. You understand.”
Stockholm syndrome? That was when kidnap victims sympathized with their abductors. It was a psychological condition.
“The thing is, after I got the arms, they started talking. Took me a while to believe it. Thought I was going crazy.”
I hoped Lola was hearing this. And drawing the logical conclusion: that Carl was insane.
“They wanted to crush things. To smash. I tried to tell people. But no one would listen. Not management, not the scientists, those kids. They only cared about the arms. I started sleeping with them, because it hurt to take them off, and one time I woke up and they were bending the bed in half. When I got irritated, they grabbed things. Then they threw a guy against a wall. I thought I’d killed him. That was when I knew I had to take off. I had to find you, and warn you.” His eyes moved to Lola. She tilted her head to look up at him. I did not like that. I didn’t like either of them. “Sorry about leaving you behind. I thought you were dead.”
“Lola,” I said. “Come. Here. A minute.”
“I hoped Lola could help me figure out what was going on. That’s why I saved her. I carried her right out through the flames. I was strong enough this time. And I was right. She’s helped a lot.”
“Lola,” I said. “Really. Come here.”
She said, “Charlie, can you talk to your parts?”
This was irrelevant. “Carl. This is a gun. This arm. It shoots. So let go. Of Lola.”
“Oh, Charlie,” said Lola. “Charlie, no.”
“It’s all right. Just. Ahead. Of schedule.”
“We have to get rid of your parts.”
I said, “Pardon?”
“You told me once you don’t need to think about where you step: that the legs figure it out. That’s clever, Charlie, that’s the kind of thing you do, but it created a problem. Because brains are plastic. They adapt. When you lose a limb, the parts of your brain in charge of it, the neurons, they don’t just sit there. They look for new jobs. There was a woman with a transtibial earlier this year, and I know how this sounds, but her eyesight improved. One man got better at math. We try to get people into prosthetics quickly so that we can capture those neurons for motor function before they wind up somewhere else. And what I think, Charlie, is your machine parts are too easy. They didn’t give your neurons anything to do. So they wound up all over. Can you talk to your parts, Charlie? Do they have a mind of their own? Because I think that’s you. Your subconscious, being no longer so sub. But it’s okay. Over time, we can retrain your brain. With physical therapy, we can move your neurons elsewhere. We can—”
“Let me. Stop you. There.” I drew in breath for an entire sentence. “I’m not sure you appreciate that at this point I am a head.”
“Charlie—”
“There is no. Getting rid of. The parts. I am the parts. Look. I passed that point. I sawed off. My arm. Sawed it off. So let’s calm down. And forget crazy ideas that. Can never happen.”
“The id is supposed to stay underwater, Charlie. It’s not supposed to be conscious.”
“The id. That’s psychology! A soft science!”
Carl said, “Dr. Neumann, I understand—”
“Shut up. You don’t understand. You have parts. I am parts. I’m technology. You’re a man with help. You are nothing like me.” Shoot him, suggested a part of me. It was a solid idea.
“I should have realized earlier,” said Lola. “I should have stopped you.”
“You shouldn’t. Move away from Carl.”
“Charlie, we need to get you out of those parts before you go crazy.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. It was not a very good argument. I was panicking because Lola was supposed to be on my side. “The thing is, Lola. The person I was. Nobody liked him. Then I did this. And people got interested. People like you. So how is. This bad? It’s not. It’s … a lot of parts. I’m still getting. Used to them. But let’s not talk about. Going back. There’s no back. I’m better now. Yes, the parts talk. But that’s okay. It’s like having company. And nothing works perfectly. The first time. You don’t scrap a project. Every hitch. You look for. Iterative improvement. The point is. On balance. Am I not better?” I could see from Lola’s expression that this was not very persuasive. “Forget that. Fact is, I need parts. To live. There’s nothing I can do. My hands are tied.”
“It’s possible that—”
“I don’t care! Even if I could. Survive. On some shitty life support system. I don’t want to! Do you know what. This body can do? I have GPS! What are we supposed to do? Go back to maps?” I forced myself to calm. “What you’re talking about. Is asking me to live in a cave. Like a Neanderthal.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“I didn’t say we.” But maybe I did. “The parts and …” I didn’t finish this sentence. Shoot, said the parts; they had been saying this for a while and it was increasingly hard to ignore them. My eyes moved to Carl. He was the source of trouble. He had been since day one. Shooting him would solve everything. Or not. Maybe the logic of that wasn’t quite there. But the part that wanted to shoot didn’t care. It just wanted him smashed. Lola would understand. Not right away. Eventually. It was the only way, because Lola wasn’t going to stick around for a head. I didn’t care what she said. That was not a viable long-term relationship. It was best for everyone if I shot Carl now.
Lola walked toward me. My heart leaped, because this opened up an excellent opportunity for firing on Carl. She stopped a few feet away. “Charlie … you never wanted to be a gun. Did you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with. The gun.” My legs rose up on their hooves, settled. Things were going to happen whether I wanted them to or not. It was out of my control.
“We can get through this. Somehow we will—”
“Look at Carl!” I shouted. “He’s got arms! If the parts are so dangerous. Why is. He wearing. His arms?”
Carl looked at Lola, then back. “Well …” He sounded apologetic. But only a little. “Because if you won’t give up your parts, I have to take them off you.”
HERE’S WHAT should have occurred to me about Carl: he had attacked Better Future and lived. They had deployed armed guards and serious hardware and he prevailed through clever planning and tactics. What this made clear, or
should have, was that Carl was not an idiot.
HE TURNED away a moment. Then his arm flicked in my direction. Something dark and cubelike hurtled toward me. Even before I saw what it was, it revealed that I had seriously misread the situation. Because being stronger than Carl, and faster, and better armed, that didn’t matter if he could surprise me by throwing things. The factor I had forgotten to include in my behavorial model was that I had never fought anyone in my whole life. I had almost hit a girl in elementary school. She pushed me over before I could commit. That was the extent of my hand-to-hand combat experience. Carl was trained to overpower people. It was his job.
The cube was a car battery. I flinched. The car battery ricocheted off my shoulder with a clang. I thought, Wait a minute, that didn’t even hurt, then a second battery hit me in the head and I screamed, because some of that was flesh. I staggered in a circle. Red waves poured from my shoulder, not exactly pain but rather a logical outrage. My ringlike abdomen rotated. I brought the gun arm around. But Carl was already on top of me, his elephant arms swinging. His fist contracted into a solid punching block and connected with my stomach. Lola screamed. I staggered backward and sat down on the hood of a car. Its windshield cracked. But the surprising thing was the weakness of his punch. I had tried to ride what I expected to be a huge transfer of momentum but totally overcompensated. Sitting on the hood of a red sports car, I realized that compared with me, Carl’s arms were not very strong. Of course they weren’t. He was mostly organic. Despite his exostructure, he couldn’t carry around my kind of hardware. For that you needed to be metal all the way through. I didn’t want to let his fists near my face. But he was not a big problem.
The Contours bent in three places, levering me upright. I swung my claw arm, aiming for his head. Carl not only deflected it but had time to first give me a patronizing look. He got his other fist beneath my arms and red waves blossomed around the side of my chest. “You want her,” I said. “Don’t you.” His block hands began to open, splitting into thick digits. One clamped on the forearm of my gun arm. The other closed on the thinner biceps. He strained. Red washed through me. I wailed, Stop stop he is ripping me.
“She understands me,” said Carl.
My tripod claw fired and locked on to Carl’s arm. His eyes widened. I pulled. Carl’s metal fingers squealed along my titanium arm, losing grip. I could hardly feel my gun arm. But it was there. It was functional. I tried to back up, pushing Carl away with the claw. All I wanted in the world was to get my gun arm on him and insert a lot more metal into his body than he already had.
My heels hit the car I had sat on earlier. I pushed and it shrieked, metal on concrete, folding up against the low retaining wall behind me. I raised my gun arm and Carl knocked it aside. The car behind me popped and banged. Suddenly there was less resistance and I staggered momentarily. I didn’t know what had happened but it created a gap between me and Carl and I swung the gun arm up. He ducked beneath it and punched the barrel upward. I kept walking backward, trying to find the distance I needed to finish this, and I discovered the reason the car was no longer pushing back on me: I had forced it completely over the retaining wall, sending it tumbling end-over-end through the air. The way I discovered this was all of a sudden so was I.
Night sky revolved. Something bright and white passed before me. I was spinning head over hooves, feeling the terrible mass of my body swell with kinetic energy. I caught a glimpse of Carl, framed by the punctured concrete wall of the garage. The next time I revolved I was ready and my claw hand fired, trailing metal cable. It snapped around Carl’s exoskeleton and yanked him off his feet. Another revolution. The brightness was blotted by a shape I finally recognized as the car I had kicked backward out of the lot. It hit the brightness and broke it into a thousand winking pieces, because the brightness was a lattice of frosted windows. The world slipped by. The sky rose. Carl fell toward me. I heard but did not see the car burst against the floor of whatever building was down there. Then it became visible again as a crater of scattered glass and metal. It was a live preview of coming events. I tried to twist my body into a posture that made it less likely that I would land with the many tons of my body above my biological head. But it didn’t respond. I screamed at my body’s betrayal.
My ringed abdomen swiveled. My legs extended. My hooves splayed, the toes extending. I hit the car like a bomb. The Threes retracted, eating momentum. The locking pins fired. I felt my left hoof grip the floor and my right hoof slide. It had come down on the hood of the car and flipped it into the air. I staggered. I was upright. The car hood came back down and tried to cut off my head. My claw hand released Carl and the cable whipped toward me. The Contours took a stumbling step, then another, and we almost had balance when Carl landed like a meteorite. The impact shoved us and suddenly there was a man there, a guy with a white face and horrified mouth and it was everything I could do to not stumble over the top of him. My abdomen revolved. I walked backward through a tall display case. Glass rained down. But I was balanced. I was alive. I felt like crying. I loved my body.
My claw hand completed retracting into my arm with a thwack. I was in a store. It was a great white cathedral of glass and air. Two dozen people cowered behind counters and display cases. The walls were lined with white flaglike posters like political propaganda and the cases were shrines built around tiny phones and computers and tablets.
Shards of glass fell from me like water. No one ran. No one screamed. I found that a little odd but then again I was in a technology store. Carl, said my parts, and that was a good point. I scanned the wreckage. Maybe he had bounced. He had pretty good armor but not much in the way of shock absorbency, I would have thought. I looked away then back because I had caught motion flare, and he had a tire and was ratcheting back an arm to throw it at me.
I raised the gun arm. This time I would not be distracted by minor projectiles. I squeezed my fist and as the internal barrel spun I thought, Actually, that tire is going to make quite an elastic collision. It hit my gun arm and bounced into my face. My head snapped back. I saw into the heart of the universe. My body sang and my brain crawled in the dark, trying to remember where the controls were. Powdered sheetrock drifted like stardust. I got my head balanced with the horizon. People in hip shirts and cargo pants jostled for the double-door exits in peer-seeking algorithmic patterns, like a school of fish. A man with sledgehammer arms and a yellow-gray exoskeleton ran toward me. He seemed familiar. I knew him from somewhere. I thought, That’s that guy, isn’t it, Carl, and he punched my legs. I jerked but did not fall. The Threes were better than that. Carl’s arm wrapped around my throat. The other clamped on to my tripod arm and bent it back. “Ag,” I said. Red pain waves poured from my elbow. I couldn’t see Carl but fired the claw hand anyway, hoping it might find a way to pull off his head on its own. Instead we tore a chunk out of the floor and hurled it across the store. It was not what I intended but maybe it was intimidating.
“I got her,” Carl said. I felt his hot breath on my cheek. “I went back and got her.” My arm shrieked. There was a squeal of metal. I felt separation. A part of me winked out. My forearm fell to the floor, trailing severed wiring. It did not hurt but the loss was the worst thing I had ever felt.
I rotated. I flailed my gun arm. But I could not reach Carl. His grip on my neck was unbreakable. His thick, blocky digits snapped at my gun biceps. I grieved for my arm. I did not want to be pulled apart. I told my parts, I don’t know how to do this but please just kill him somehow.
The Contours jolted forward. They crashed through a display counter and then another. We accelerated toward a wall. A moment before impact my abdomen rotated.
We hit the wall back-first. Sheetrock burst around me. Everything was dust. Where, I thought, and my parts said, I don’t know, and we took four steps backward and brought the gun arm up. We could not see Carl in the visible spectrum but in EM he was as bright as a star field. We clenched our fist and screamed fury at him through our gun.
; WE WAITED. Everything was awash with dust and heat. The floor was littered with broken plastic and glass and electronics. The dust settled. An object coalesced into a body. The gun arm whirred like a suggestion. But we waited, to be sure. Sirens grew. The body did not move. Heat drained from infrared and motion from the microwaves. The air cleared. I think we got him.
Motion flared behind us. We turned and saw Lola picking her way into the store. Her eyes found Carl. He had entered the visible spectrum. His metal structure was bent and broken. Beneath it, so was Carl. Some of his metal had gone into him. I didn’t want to gloat. But this was why you didn’t go hybrid. “Oh, God. You killed him.” Her hands flew to her mouth. Her eyes watered.
“He tried to take our parts. He ruined our arm.” We showed her. “Look.”
“This is wrong. This is so wrong.”
Outside, tires screeched. Doors slammed. “We should leave.”
Lola shook her head, looking at Carl. She wanted him to take our parts, we thought. It was a terrible shame because she was so very lovely. She was dear to us. But she had a bad idea, one incompatible with our existence.
Something went clunk within our gun arm. For a horrible second we thought it had died. Then we remembered this noise, from when Better Future had brought the gun online. We looked in our head, and on the other side of the window was Jason, watching.
WE HEARD a beeping. The main lobby doors banged open to reveal a second set of doors, industrial and flat-looking. These ratcheted open and we realized they belonged to a truck. A ramp clanged to the floor. Down the ramp came Cassandra Cautery and gray-uniformed security guards, who leaped off the sides, their flashlights illuminating glittering columns of dust. Behind them, the cats.
“Jeshus,” said Cassandra Cautery. “Look at this.” She stared at Carl without expression. If beauty really was permanence, Cassandra Cautery was more beautiful than ever.
