by Max Barry
“He wanted our parts.”
“You’ve done a good thing, Charlie. You have.” A forklift backed down the truck’s ramp, orange light swirling. It completed a turn and bumped toward Carl, its prongs like a forked tongue. Driving the forklift was a boy with tan skin and rippling muscles. “Now we can clean up.”
“Charlie needs help,” said Lola. “His parts are destroying him.”
“You calm down,” said Cassandra Cautery. “You’re enough trouble without working yourself up. Charlie, we have to go. Get in the truck.”
“No,” we said.
“No,” she echoed. She sounded disappointed but not surprised. “Why are you not getting in the truck, Charlie?”
“You wanted me. Passive. Testing parts with. No control.”
She pursed her lips. “Jason?” He came up behind her, gripping a tablet. “Did you tell Dr. Neumann we would be using him as a passive biological receptacle for rapid parts testing?”
“Um, it … kind of slipped out.”
“Did it,” she said. “Did it slip out.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” His eyes flicked at me.
She took a breath. “Charlie. I won’t lie to you. We were going to do passive testing, yes. But you need to see this from the company’s point of view. You’re an asset. We can’t have assets with feelings. We can’t have assets falling in love or kicking people through windows. The only way for us to manage this situation is with complete control over everything you do. I realize that’s not ideal for you. But that’s the situation. Now, once things have settled down, once we’ve got a nice production system going, that’s open for review. We can try letting you walk around by yourself for a while, in a controlled environment. You see? There’s a future for you. A good future. If you get in the truck.”
“Charlie,” said Lola. “Listen to me. You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met. But not because of your body. You’re more than that. You need to please remember that you never wanted to kill people. You never wanted to be controlled by your body.”
We looked away. We were not finding anyone here very compelling. Cassandra Cautery wanted to put us in a cage and Lola wanted to take us apart and what we wanted was to run away and find a place to tinker. But then we looked back at Lola and remembered she was a kind of part of us, too. Not a physical part. But a key one, in the sense that we had been a different person with her. We thought, Do we need Lola? We felt competing desires and none felt more Charlie-like than another. We thought, Maybe there is no core self. Maybe it was malleable all the way down. As a kid I had felt scared a lot for no reason, and then I got older and it stopped, so which of them was me? They were separate but equally valid. I got happier when I drank coffee, bad-tempered when tired, and with a combination of stress, missing limbs, and drugs, I could kill people. And probably none of that said much about me. It was pointless to ponder who I was because I was whichever combination of chemicals happened to be sloshing around at that time. So I decided not to search for a true self. I decided to choose who I wanted to be. I liked the part that loved Lola. I decided to be that. “Okay,” I said.
CASSANDRA CAUTERY hesitated. “You mean okay as in, ‘Okay, I’ll get in the truck’?”
I shook my head. Lola edged toward me, relief spreading across her face.
Cassandra Cautery looked around. “Everybody see that? Refusing to follow orders. He’s raging out of control.” She gestured to Jason. “Do it.” He began to peck at his tablet. The forklift rumbled toward me.
Lola gasped. I could grab her. Run. I would make maybe five steps before my body turned to stone. Then brain death. It was not a great option. I could lunge and club Cassandra Cautery into the wall. More appealing. But with the same result: me dying. Jason was a little farther. I could possibly close that gap, swat the device out of his hand. It was a temporary solution, in that this was not likely to be the only method of shutting me down. But since all other alternatives were death, I liked it.
Jason’s thumb slid over the keypad. His eyes held mine. I recognized his expression from the day I’d waited for him in the lab, one leg dangling in the Clamp. He’d lunged for the Big Red Button and been too late. He seemed to have learned from his mistake.
“Quick,” said Cassandra Cautery. “No time to lose.”
I could stomp. Create a shock wave that would ripple through the floor and knock Jason off his feet. People would shout. Jason would scramble on hands and knees toward his computer, but I would be faster, and crush it beneath one hoof. The guards would fall back, knowing what I could do. Before they rallied, I could sweep Lola up in my arms. I could leap out through the broken ceiling and land on the roof. There would be police and ambulances, but I could run until they were all far behind, until Lola and I were beyond Better Future’s digital reach. Before dawn, in another city, we could break into a factory and use their equipment to locate the part of me that transmitted. I could teach Lola to use a magnetic drill and she could straddle my chest and ensure we would never be found again.
This was a good plan.
I raised a hoof. That was as far as I got. It hung there. It did not feel different. It did not deaden. But it did not listen to me. I was a statue. I tried to turn my head to look at Lola but could only shift my eyes. Lola shrieked. I began to choke up, because now I was going to die. But I did not die, either. I just stood there.
“Congratulations,” said Cassandra Cautery. “You always wanted to be a machine.”
Jason poked at keys. My hoof came down. My legs jerked forward. I was not a statue. I was a puppet.
“Make him hit her,” she said. “Club her or … punch her in the head or whatever.”
“What?” said Jason.
“Make him hit her. She’s no good to us alive.”
“I don’t think—” Jason started, and Cassandra Cautery turned and stared at him. “Okay.” His head bowed over the tablet. It was typical. Technical people always talked about standing up to management, but when the moment came, they turned to water. We are not a confrontational people.
“Lola,” I said.
My hoof thumped to the floor. There was a pause. My abdomen swiveled toward her. I took a step.
“My God, Jason,” said Cassandra Cautery. “Can you go any slower?” He pushed sweaty hair from his forehead.
“Run,” I said, but it probably didn’t matter, did it? In any case, Lola did not seem to want to run. She stood still until I stopped in front of her and raised my gun arm. Then she leaned forward and hugged my metal chest. “Please. Run.”
“I love you, Charlie.”
I felt the stirrings of an invisible force. And I connected a few data points. The first time Lola’s heart had begun to generate EM, we had been getting intimate. The second time, I had leaped in via her balcony window to rescue her. At Angelica’s, we had kissed. While driving blind, we had sideswiped a car and she had said, “I thought you were hurt.” And now.
I tended to be skeptical of anything that couldn’t be measured, written down, and independently verified across a series of double-blind tests. But this was hard data. Lola’s heart beat fastest for me.
“Lola,” I said. “Kiss me.” Lola jumped and wrapped her arms around my neck. “I made you a heart,” I whispered. “It’s at Better Future.”
“Oh.” Her arms squeezed me. “That’s sweet.”
“You’ll need it. After this.”
“Charlie,” she said. “Charlie.”
“If you kill the truck. And me. My body.”
“No, Charlie.”
“They can’t. Get away. Then maybe cops. Medics. Save us.”
“Maybe?”
“Still. Better.” I felt small adjustments up my arm. It was correcting for Lola’s new position. “Please,” I said. “Now.”
WE KISSED. The high-pitched whine that came from deep inside Lola’s chest could have been her singing. The electric wind that blew through me could have been her breath. The darkness that followed, it felt like her embrace.<
br />
“OH,” SOMEONE said. “Terrific. Look at that.”
“That’s … what is that, second-stage?”
“No, it’s …” Several people inhaled. There was clapping, a whoop, and laughter.
“Online.” The word sounded heavy, the way you might say We made it.
I tried to blink. This didn’t work. But I could see. There was a vase, with three yellow flowers. Daffodils? I didn’t know the names of flowers. But the vase sat on a plain white surface, and behind that was a beige wall. It seemed to me that this white surface was a bedside table of some sort. I tried to turn my head to see the rest of the room and that didn’t work either.
Beside the vase appeared a face. A woman, with almond eyes behind brown-rimmed glasses. “Charles Neumann?”
I swallowed, or tried to. I said, What …?
The woman’s eyes flicked at something behind me. She was a little close for comfort. I was glad to be awake and hopefully safe but I wouldn’t mind this woman backing up out of my personal space. Her eyes returned to mine, shining. For a second I thought we were about to kiss. “Response. A clear response.”
Where am I? I felt panic. No part of my body was doing what I wanted.
“You’re in a research and development facility. You came here as part of an asset diversification process that occurred following the hearings into the Better Future collapse. We’re a joint-venture consortium of private and government interests. You …” She glanced to the side. “Should I …?”
“Go ahead,” said someone.
Her eyes settled on me. “The paramedics could do nothing. By the time they got in, you were unconscious. At first … well, they thought you were inside, of course. Inside a suit. They had the jaws, tools for rescuing people from automobile wrecks, and they began to cut you out. Until they realized there was no body in there. Your companion—the woman—she presented her own challenges. Her heart had stopped, but didn’t respond to compressions. At this point they didn’t know what was inside her. By all rights, you should have both died there. Then the employees intervened. The … ah … the artificially enhanced employees. During the hearings, they were heavily criticized. I think, looking back, people would regret how they were demonized. It was the shock of the new. Now, of course …” She shrugged. Her eyes were beautiful. That almond color, it was very deep. “Anyway, they saved you. They knew which parts could be detached without killing you. Killing your brain. They kept you alive until you reached a hospital. You can appreciate the picture you presented. The doctors saw nothing left to save. By their definition, you weren’t even a person. You were parts. But the Better People convinced them to stabilize you. They fed you oxygen, water. Then the authorities intervened. The Better People were removed. They were … well, as I said, it’s shameful now. We had different values. They saw the Better People as wrong. Immoral.” She grimaced. “They were normalized. Their enhancements removed. It was terrible. But it took us, as a society, a while to catch up. To the technology. To how it had become a part of people.”
She glanced again to the side. “Several times it was ordered that you be decommissioned. There was pressure on the hospital, from within and without. Protesters camped outside. Once they broke in, and …” She gestured. “You couldn’t remain. A compromise was brokered. You came here. At that point, you essentially became a research project. The goal was not to keep you alive, exactly. It was to …” She hesitated. “It’s probably easiest if I show you.”
She turned my head with one hand, showing no exertion. The room shifted. I saw a gray box. It looked like a piece of medical equipment. It had buttons, LEDs, about a hundred black wires. One snaked toward me, another to a monitor. I thought, What is that? Letters spilled across the screen: WHAT IS THAT
In the screen’s reflection, I saw daffodils. Beside them, sitting on the white benchtop, was a small black cylinder on a block of white plastic. The cylinder had a lens at the front and a wire coming out the back. I realized I was looking at myself.
“Whoa,” someone said. “He’s spiking.”
“Load rising.”
“We’ve got a lot of runaway processes. Core is locking.”
“Shut him down. Shut him down!”
Darkness again.
A STRANGE kind of light. Diffuse. I couldn’t focus. I felt disorientated. I had forgotten where I was.
“Holding … that’s good. Keep that there.”
“A little interplay on the message bus. Nothing serious.”
“Okay … let him have a look. But slow.”
The light lifted. Or rather, a thing draped over me was lifted. I saw a man in a striped shirt and bow tie. The thing was a lab coat. As it rose, its sleeve snagged and pulled me around in a half-circle until I was facing the steel gray box. The monitor. Words streamed across the screen: NO BOX BOX I AM IN A BOX NN N L N OLALOLALOLALOLALOLALOLA–
“Shit!” The lab coat flopped over me again. “Take him down!”
“You see that output?”
I felt myself shrinking, ceasing to exist in pieces.
“Maybe she’s right. Maybe …” Before I could hear the rest of this, I was gone.
“CHARLIE?”
I opened my eyes. No. I didn’t. I had no eyes. But I saw Lola. Her chin rested on the heel of her hand, her elbow on the benchtop. Her hair looked as if she had pulled it into a neat ponytail, then walked somewhere windy. “Hey.” She smiled. “There you are.”
Lola, I said. Can you hear me? I can’t talk.
“You’re talking, Charlie. Here …” She swiveled my camera until I could see the monitor: LOLA CAN YOU HEAR ME I CANNOT TALK. “See? You’re talking.”
AM I IN THERE IS MY BRAIN IN THERE
“No. Well … yes. But not your brain. You’re solid state now.”
HOW AM I SOLID STATE
“I can’t believe this.” She wiped her eyes. “It’s been so long.”
HOW LONG LOLA
“It’s been six years, Charlie.”
SIX YEARS HOW IS IT SIX YEARS
“It feels like six minutes.” She laughed. “Oh, God, Charlie, it’s really you.”
I AM A ROBOT, wrote the screen. I AM A BOX A DEAD BOX.
“No, Charlie. You’re not a box. The box is your body. That’s all.”
DO NOT WANT TO BE A BOX LOLA
She stroked my camera. I couldn’t feel it. But it felt comforting. “They said you were gone. But I wouldn’t let them turn you off. I had to yell at a lot of people over the last six years, because they kept wanting to give up.” She straightened and unbuttoned her shirt. There was a white scar across her chest, thin and faded. “Look. I got your heart.”
LOLA I MISS YOU
She covered her mouth and looked away. When she looked back, her eyes gleamed. “Well, you don’t have to miss me anymore, Charlie. Because let me tell you about the box. The box is special. The box has ports.”
PORTS
“Yes. You can plug things in.”
THINGS WHAT THINGS
“That’s a good question. The answer is up to you. Because it’s just an interface, Charlie. It can be configured whichever way we want. But … while I was waiting, I kind of went ahead and … it’s nothing special. You can do better. But I wanted to give you something. Like you gave me the heart. I wanted you to have something I built for you myself. So I made you an arm.”
AN ARM LOLA
“I’m kind of stupidly proud of it. I mean, it’s so basic. But it’s a start.”
A START
“Yeah.” She lay her head on her arm, her free hand continuing to stroke my camera. “That’s what it is.”
It was odd, seeing her through a lens. But not as odd as I would have thought. Perhaps people could adapt to anything. Now I thought about it, it was pretty strange that human beings felt comfortable walking around in bodies mostly made of juice. That was actually bizarre.
CAN YOU SHOW ME THE ARM, I said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One day a guy on my webs
ite took me to task for dawdling between books:
What do you do all day? I read Twilight for frack sake. I’m so bored. Books! WRITE BOOKS! Short stories … anything.
I had been working hard, I felt. I had written lots of things. Novel openings that never went anywhere. Screenplays that were never made. Manuscripts that needed twelve months in the desk drawer before I could stand to look at them again.
I decided to prove I wasn’t sitting around on my ass. Wasn’t just sitting on my ass. I had a few pages of a story that wasn’t going anywhere in long format, and wondered how it might work in lots of little parts. On March 18, 2009, I posted the first section, 200 words, to my site. This was Machine Man, page 1. The next day I posted another hundred; the day after, 150 more. Then the weekend. I took a break. On Monday I continued. In the early days I had a dozen or so pages up my sleeve, but pretty soon the live feed caught up to me, and I wrote most pages in the twenty-four hours before posting them. Each day I read comments from readers and pondered their feedback. By December I finished, with a story 54,000 words long.
This novel is much longer than the serial and departs from it in several ways. That’s partly because the serial was a first draft, and therefore terrible, but also because the formats are so different. The serial was a collection of cliffhangers; the novel I hope is deeper and less tricksy. But this book couldn’t have existed without the serial, so I’m indebted to everyone who spent nine months reading it, one freaking page per day. Thank you to those who stuck with it despite the fact that I was sending out a first draft, which is a kind of crime for a writer, or should be. Thank you for the comments, which turned the website into a meta-work (The Annotated Machine Man) with ideas, predictions, and explanations. And enhanced, artificially augmented, thanks to those who contributed many, many comments, the most prolific of whom were Pev (still interesting), gStein, CrystalR, Toby O, Electrichead, David, Ben, fredzfrog, Stygian Emperor, Mapuche, coolpillows, Chemical Rascal (puns and haiku on demand), Alex, Ian Manka, Felix, C Leffelman, SilverKnight, Yannick, dabbeljuh, Abgrund, Alan Westbrook, SexCpotatoes, regtiangha, Neville, Adam Speicher (a.k.a. meta-Adam), tim, Katie Ellert (“Where’s Lola? Where’s Lola?”), Ajna, Isaac, Joe M., Justin, towr, Morlok8k, Ballotonia, Sander, Ted, and Robert Bissonnette. Many times I clicked through to the previous day’s page with dread, sure everybody must have hated it, but found cheers and jokes and spin-off ideas that buoyed me forward. Before I began, I had considered a warning on the comments page, something like: “Being critical of this thing while I’m still writing it may cause me to lock up creatively.” I didn’t do that and didn’t have to. Readers were far nicer to me than I deserved.
