Machine Man (11 page)

I TRIED
to call Lola. I didn’t have my phone, so I wheeled myself to my desk in the Glass Room. I had to dial through reception, and it took a long time to start ringing, and that was all it did. It seemed odd that the hospital would not answer its phone so I dialed reception again and asked them to check the number. “This is the number you want,” she said. So I tried again but again it rang out.

I DIVIDED
my assistants into teams: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. It was the only way to keep them manageable. They worked in competition: I wheeled among them and anything I liked sparked grins and furious development. Beta came up with a whole new wheel-based leg design, almost a chariot, which I liked so much I took it over myself. Then Alpha and Gamma also got into wheels and Beta accused them of intellectual plagiarism. It was a whole thing. There were tears. I told Gamma to go build some fingers or something. They liked this. They wound up deploying four hands’ worth and using them to make obscene gestures at Beta. It was like being back at college, only I was respected. Sometimes I wheeled past bodies in the corridors: assistants who had literally lain down and slept because they were too tired to make it home. Everywhere were sodas.

EVERYONE THOUGHT
Beta was going to reach testing on a new prototype first but the wheels were a dead end. They couldn’t get good traction on uneven ground, not even in rotating sets on independent suspension with ground-sensing sticky locks. We did a lot of stairwell damage before figuring that out. We left gouges in the walls, broken steps, and a section of railing that bowed inward. But failure was just a method of learning what worked.

Then Alpha declared they had something. They were based out of Lab 2, where Katherine’s rats had lived, before they’d been moved off to another lab somewhere. Katherine had followed. I imagined they’d offered her the choice to stay with me or go with the rats. I still thought I could smell them every time I came in—the rats, that is—although that couldn’t be right, because when we cleaned these rooms we did it by sucking out all the air.

Alpha’s legs were similar to my previous prototype, only taller, sleeker, and titanium. There was less electrical tape and more custom carbon-polymer molding. I wheeled myself around them for an inspection. I wasn’t going to do anything special today, just check fit and balance. There were too many wired connections to walk. No nerve interface yet. But still, when my assistants helped me out of the chair and lowered me into the sockets, my heart thumped. I buckled in. “Okay.”

Jason held the control box. He pushed for power. Nothing happened. Smoke began to pour from the legs. People shouted. Hands grabbed at me and hauled me out. They broke out the extinguishers and drenched the legs in foam. When all that was taken care of, we started over.

I DIALED
reception and asked for a third-party directory assistance service. “If there’s a number you’d like to look up, I
can do that for you,” said the receptionist. I declined. When she put me through, I asked the directory robot for the hospital. It offered to connect me directly and I said yes. It rang. The hospital picked up. I opened my mouth to request Lola Shanks in Prosthetics and the line went
click
.

I lowered the phone and looked at it. Then I put it back on the cradle. Clearly it was pointless to redial reception. But at least I understood the problem now. I could apply myself to a solution.

I SPENT
a lot of time being jabbed with needles. Not syringes. Tiny steel slivers with embedded electrodes. The idea was to insert these into my truncated thighs so they could read signals from my brain, and translate them into motorized movement. We created a fourth team for this, using people transferred from other projects. Initially it was called Delta but it was confusing whenever someone said
delta
meaning “change,” which was often, so they renamed themselves Omega. We converted a lab into a medical room and I lay back on the table while a tall, high-cheekboned lab assistant named Mirka punctured me. This was excruciating during the first session but not so bad once we realized the equipment could read me just as well while I was hocked to the eyeballs. So I injected myself with analgesics and let my consciousness swim away while Mirka maneuvered metal slivers around, seeking the best reception for the electric language of my brain.

My legs hurt all the time. It seemed likely this was a side effect of jamming needles in there every day, but it had started before that. It was like phantom pain. I resisted this notion because it was so stupid. Physiological pain I could be on board for. Even something neurological. Neurology was the science of nerves. It was chemical reactions you
could point to. Psychology, though, was the science of fairy tales. It was like explaining volcanoes with stories of angry gods and expelled half-sons and revenge and betrayal. I did not believe in psychological pain.

But I needed sleep. So one night I took a pair of legs to bed. They were early, lightweight models, really just poles, which we’d used for prototyping and since discarded. I set them beside my bunk and turned out the light. Later, when I woke with my nonexistent muscles screaming, I dragged the legs onto the bed, shoved my thighs into the sockets, grabbed the feet, and manually flexed those crude blocks of plastic up and down. I got this idea from a paper on treating phantom pain by using mirrors to form optical illusions, which convinced the patient’s brain that the limb was still there. You see why I was skeptical of the whole area. As I flexed, I felt nonexistent muscles unlock and pseudo-blood begin to flow. I waggled the plastic. It was just as well no one could see this. “Ahhh,” I said.

FINALLY ALPHA’S
legs stopped catching fire. I sat in them and took a wary step. They moved smoothly, the whine of the servomagnetics almost inaudible. The floor did not break. Nothing popped or smoked. I walked to the wall. It was not a smooth ride but I was unfamiliar with the equipment. I rotated and walked back to the center. I raised a leg. I did not overbalance. I did not fall out. I flexed the foot. It was cloven. It actually looked more like a hoof. I lowered it and raised the other leg. Still upright. I looked around and saw a lot of happy faces. I smiled, too, because this was progress.

NEXT CAME
the nerve interface. I spent more time on this than anything else. When I had an idea for something mechanical,
I could usually tell someone else to go make it happen. But reading nerves was personal. It was like trying to sift raindrops from a thunderstorm only I could see. I passed days in Lab 1 with thirty-eight wires dangling from my thighs, trying to read my thoughts. It was a funny way to get to know myself. For example, when I thought about wiggling my big toe, my waves spiked at 42.912 gigahertz, but so too if I imagined country music. I wouldn’t have thought those were similar. But then I thought about toe-tapping and maybe they were. Either way, it was important to figure this kind of thing out before I wore the legs outside and someone put on Kenny Rogers.

Once we had a basic neurological landscape, I practiced moving in software. We loaded leg wireframes into the computer and I tried to control them with my mind. At first they wouldn’t respond. Then they jerked and twitched and tried to walk in three directions at once. Mistake by mistake, I crawled toward something practical. By the end of each six-hour session, I felt dazed and unsure where I was. I wheeled along the corridor and saw the whole world as lines and vertices. I dreamed I was a wireframe, made of green light.

MY ASSISTANTS
began wearing chunky glasses. They looked ridiculous. The lenses were milky, like the opposite of sunglasses. By the end of the week, half of Gamma had them. I didn’t pay much attention because I assumed this was some kind of young-person fashion trend, but when I arrived in Lab 1 for a date with Mirka and her needles, she pulled on a pair, and I had to ask.

“They are Z-specs,” said Mirka. She seemed surprised I didn’t know, although behind the glasses it was hard to tell. “You have not tried them?”

I shook my head. Mirka pulled off her set. There was a component I hadn’t noticed before: two wires terminating in flat metal contacts. Mirka unpeeled these from her temples. I wasn’t sure about this but I followed her directions to adhere the contacts to my own skull and fit the glasses. Everything looked flat. Then Mirka’s face sprung to life. I had never known my eyes were so low-res.

“The enhancement is nice,” said Mirka. “But the real benefit is the zoom. You pinch your eyebrows. Like this.”

I mimicked her movement. Her face rushed toward me. I flailed my arms. Mirka laughed. “And the other way to zoom out.” She helped me upright. “You see?”

I picked a corner of the lab and made it leap closer. There was a paper clip there, as big as if I were kneeling in front of it. I zoomed out and in, picking tiny objects in the room and blowing them up. I turned my head without zooming out and nausea bloomed. So that was not a good idea. Zoom out, turn, zoom in.

“They will make you a pair, of course,” said Mirka. “If you ask them. Gamma.”

“Gamma’s making these?” I pulled off the glasses. The world went dull.

She nodded. “Gamma is doing many peripherals.”

I lay back. Mirka filled the syringe with morphine. I didn’t mind Gamma experimenting. That was what I had told them to do. But I wasn’t sure I wanted them making glasses. I didn’t know why. As Mirka filled my veins, I wondered if it was because I had not designed them. My department was not just about me, of course. It was about developing products for a general market. Cassandra Cautery had explained this to me and it had seemed okay at the time. But I wasn’t sure I liked it.

I CAUGHT
the elevator to the fourth floor of Building C, where Cassandra Cautery worked. Cassandra Cautery had visited the labs several times but I was always drugged or busy with wireframes so we hadn’t spoken. I just knew she was escorting executives around.

I wheeled myself along carpet so thick it made my arms ache. Building C was nice. The entire Better Future complex was visually attractive, but in a utilitarian, engineering kind of way, where beauty meant simplicity. We favored straight lines and parabolic curves, no bleeding of anything into anything else. Here was free-flowing color. I was not a big fan of art but I think some part of me relaxed.

I found Cassandra Cautery’s office at an intersection of corridors. I had an appointment but was early. I wondered if I should do a lap. “Charlie!” Cassandra Cautery came around her desk and beckoned me inside. “Thank you so much for making time.” She closed the door behind me. The office was small and filled with thick books. It had a low sofa, a painting of a circle, and a computer that looked more interested in being pretty than working fast. There were no windows. “Can I get you a drink?”

“No. Thanks.”

She leaned her butt against her desk and folded her arms. Her blond hair glowed in the artificial light, picking up the UV. “I’m hearing nothing but great things about your work. Everyone is extremely, extremely excited. It’s a credit to you. As a manager.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Don’t be so modest. I know you don’t consider yourself that way. But your people don’t need a social boss. They need someone who inspires them on an intellectual level. Who forges within them a burning desire to invent. That’s you.”

I shifted in my wheelchair.

“Listen to me. Advancing within a company requires self-assessment. I should know. My first performance review, my boss said, ‘Cassandra, you are diligent, intelligent, motivated, and hardworking, but you need to learn how to settle for less than perfection.’ I argued at the time, but she was right. I had to train myself to accept that not everybody works as hard as me. That what I consider unacceptably sloppy is actually an okay result, and it’s counterproductive to get into a whole thing where someone starts crying and threatening to quit. And you know what? Learning that not only helped me grow as a manager. It helped me grow as a person. Because back then, I was actually, well, a little obsessive.” She smiled. “You haven’t told anyone about my diastema, have you?”

“What?” I remembered the gap between her back teeth. “No.”

“Thank you, Charlie. Because I told you that in confidence.”

“Um,” I said. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about fingers.”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“Gamma has been developing fingers. They got started by themselves. I only wanted them to stop fighting with Beta. But they did some interesting things and now we have a hand. It’s workable. We could replace somebody’s biological hand. It doesn’t work as well in all respects, mainly because of the loss of sensation, but it has advantages. It’s stronger. And multipurpose. You could fit a finger with a spectrograph, for example, so you could feel electromagnetic waves. That would be really useful in our line of work. And everything about it is upgradeable. So it opens up a lot of possibilities for future enhancement.”

“That sounds like exactly the kind of thing we’re interested in.”

“That’s what I thought. And it’s ready. For testing.”

“You want me to find someone who needs a prosthetic hand?”

I shook my head. “I can do it.”

“You can … you mean …”

“I can replace my own hand.”

Cassandra Cautery was silent. “That’s good of you, Charlie. But I think we’ll find a test subject for this one.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Well … thank you. But you can’t be the test case for every bionic you invent.” She smiled. “Can you?”

“Well,” I said.

“Charlie. You’re doing an amazing job. Upstairs could not be happier with the way things are going. And neither could I. Honestly, at first, I thought this whole project had the makings of a disaster. Not a disaster. But potentially it could be very, very messy. And you’ve totally proved me wrong. So let’s … let’s just keep doing what we’re doing. And I’ll find someone who needs a hand. How about that?” I didn’t say anything. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll do that.”

WE PERFORMED
a live trial of the nerve interface. It turned out Alpha’s legs didn’t bend low enough for me to attach without yanking out needles whenever I twitched, so at the last minute I switched to Beta. This triggered angst and gloating because Beta had been a long way behind since the wheel debacle. But it was all about the technology. Beta’s legs were half the weight and contoured silver steel: of all the models, they most resembled real legs. Except for the feet, which were hooves. Hooves were working for us. I finished fitting the needles and two assistants slid me into the Beta legs and tilted me upright. At this point nothing was powered on. The assistants cleared the lab and began to fill
the Glass Room, crowding against the green glass. I felt a twinge of nerves. It wasn’t so much the fact that I was about to see what happened when you plugged your brain directly into a pair of self-powered mechanical legs but that so many people were watching. I found the power button with my thumb and put my other hand on the emergency shutdown. I looked up at the Glass Room again and saw Jason’s thumbs-up. If there was a problem with both the power button and the emergency shutdown, Jason would trip a remote kill switch. None of this should be necessary because we were feeding the legs a tenth of regular power. And we had exhaustively tested in software. Everything that happened today should be unsurprising.