Machine Man (15 page)

“We miniaturized. Now they’re lenses.”

“Z-lenses,” corrected a girl.

“Silicon and gel on flexible polycarbonate wafers,” said Jason. “You don’t use your eyebrows to control the zoom. You blink.” His eyelids fluttered. His silver pupils swirled like mist.

“I see,” I said.

“No, you don’t.” More laughs. “Not without Z-lenses. Not really.”

I looked at their proud, smiling, pupilless faces. I was
being less enthusiastic than they wanted. But it was weird. “Okay,” I said. “Good work.”

I WORKED
on parts during the day and visited Lola every evening. Sometimes she slept. More and more she was awake. She lay with hair exploding across her pillow and put her hand on my arm as we talked. She could laugh and tell stories but she tired quickly and it was always over too soon.

“I’ve never liked my ears,” she said. “Look. They’re way too high.”

“Too high for what?”

“For …” She smiled, let go of her hair, and slapped my arm. In the setting sun, she looked very warm. “For
looks.
”

“They look great.” I touched her ear. I couldn’t quite believe I was allowed to do this, but I was. I was. “Your helixes follow the golden ratio.”

“That’s good?”

“I can prove it mathematically.”

“I wish you’d gone to my high school.”

“Your ears are excellent,” I said. “For biology.”

“Ah.” She nestled a little lower in the pillow, which meant it was almost time to go. “I suppose you could do better.”

“Well …”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know. No. I couldn’t.”

“You could, though.”

“I like your biology,” I said. “You have great biology.”

“But …”

“Well, functionally …”

“Yes?”

“There are areas for improvement.”

“Tell me some.”

“Well …” I glanced at the mirror. It was hard to know how private we were.

“If you had to change something.”

I hesitated. I touched her shoulder. “The clavicle. I guess that’s obvious. It’s not very strong. That goes for bones in general, relative to modern metals. We know how to do lightweight and strong a lot better than bones.”

“I don’t want to break.” She probed her clavicle around my fingers. In the sunlight, her hand glowed red.

“Exactly.”

“I like that you see past bodies,” Lola said dreamily. “To … something else.” She closed her eyes. I stayed a while, her hand on mine, watching her breathe.

I MADE
Lab 3 my own space, forbidden to lab assistants. I couldn’t concentrate with them around. They had always been loud and energetic, laughing at nothing, exclaiming over trivia like they were the first people in the world to synthesize a mated compound, but I had found this more tolerable before they had silver eyes. I began to dread walking into rooms, because of how they would look at me.

They offered to make me a pair of Z-lenses. I said I was busy. The truth was I didn’t like Z-lenses. I should have. They were marvels. I might have built these. But I hadn’t and that bothered me. I guess that sounds selfish. But I did not like technology I couldn’t modify. I was not a user.

In Lab 3 I tinkered with the Contours, sifting through software, tightening code. For fun I drafted some arms. I was just playing around. I didn’t plan on replacing my biological arms. Not right away. But the fact was I had artificial fingers and there was a limit to what you could do with those while they were attached to a biological arm. It was the bottleneck problem again. So I dabbled. It was the best
way to work: with no particular goal in mind. It allowed me to explore the most intriguing ideas, not the ones most likely to meet spec.

One of those kinds of ideas came to me in the elevator after leaving Lola. I rode down to Lab 3 and locked myself inside. I took out my ideas notepad and began to doodle. It was just a thought. I didn’t know much about this area. I didn’t know what was possible. But still, I liked it. The idea was to make Lola a heart.

LOLA MOVED
to a live-in suite in the upper section of Building C. It meant that to reach her I had to leave one elevator and circumnavigate the atrium, passing by the lobby. As I clomped along, Contours pistoning, hooves
clump-clumping
on the carpet, heads turned. Mouths dropped. People in suits backed out of my way and people in white coats edged closer. They wanted to ask questions and tell me about related projects and ask if I would pose with them for photos. I didn’t mind the attention but I was eager to see Lola and it slowed me down. So I found a back way, avoiding the high-traffic areas. Some of it was tiled and on my first step it splintered into a web of cracks. I hesitated. Then I continued.

“You should do a presentation,” said Cassandra Cautery, leaning against the wall outside Lola’s suite. She had been waiting for me. “Everyone’s asking about you.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” She laughed a little. I felt annoyed, because I didn’t want to do a presentation. “How is everything? Are you happy?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen a report on these, ah, these glasses.”

“Z-lenses.”

“They sound wonderful.” She smiled. “I’ve never needed
glasses myself. I’ve always had twenty/twenty vision. Just lucky.”

“Z-lenses are better than twenty/twenty. They’re about twenty/two.” Cassandra Cautery looked confused. “Twenty/twenty vision doesn’t mean you have perfect eyesight. It’s not twenty out of twenty. That’s a misconception. It means you can see as well over twenty feet as an average human.”

“I did not know that.”

“If you have good eyesight, you might be twenty/eighteen. That is, you can see from twenty feet away what the average human can see from eighteen. Very good eyesight for a human is twenty/fifteen. Maybe twenty/twelve. But you’d need to be descended from a nomadic tribe.” I eyed her blond hair. “I don’t think you’d be twenty/twelve.”

“Oh.”

“Twenty/two is about the same as a hawk.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well.”

“I’d like to see Lola,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

Cassandra Cautery nodded. She seemed preoccupied. I left her in the corridor and went inside.

LOLA’S SUITE
had a little table. At nights a nurse wheeled in a trolley and uncovered pasta or slices of unidentifiable meat. It was not particularly good food but it was the best part of my day. I cut things with a blade installed in my machine fingers and Lola watched me do it.

One night I reached for the salt but Lola had already moved it to her side of the table. I looked at her. She was drinking from her glass of water. “Salt,” I said, but she just nodded and kept drinking. She drained half the glass. When she set it down, she picked up a napkin and dabbed her lips. She tapped salt into her soup and handed it to me. I stared. “What?” she said.

“Nothing. It’s just … nothing.”

“What?”

I put down the salt. “You locked the salt while performing an unrelated task.”

She blinked. “You mean drinking?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t wait five seconds for salt?”

“I can. But salt is a shared resource. If you’re going to lock it, you should use it as quickly as possible, then release it. You can’t leave it locked while accepting an interrupt.”

“I got thirsty.”

“Then first return the salt to general availability.”

“Just in case you happen to want salt in that five seconds?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me. “Really?”

“Otherwise you compromise the system.”

“What system?”

“The …” I waved my hands. “The system.”

“There isn’t any system.”

“Everything is a system. Look.” I leaned forward. “What if I had your water and I suddenly decided I wanted the salt? And instead of giving you back the water I just sat here waiting for you to release the salt, which you didn’t because you were waiting for the water? It’s a deadlock, that’s what. It’s catastrophic system failure. And you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, I could just ask Charlie to give me the water in exchange for the salt.’ But that requires you to understand my resource needs, and violate process encapsulation. It’s a swamp. I’m not saying it’s a big deal. I’m just pointing out that locking the salt like that is incredibly inefficient and systemically dangerous.”

Lola snickered. “You’re insane.”

“I’m not insane. It’s a fundamental principle. You’re insane.”

“Regular people don’t bring fundamental principles to the dinner table.”

“Well,” I said.

We ate. “Explain that again,” said Lola. “That stuff about locks.”

LOLA BECAME
well enough to walk around. She held my arm and shuffled along corridors in her little cotton gown. We graduated from short strolls to circuits. The floor was almost empty but for plants in large gray pots. There was an area near the elevators where one wall was all glass and we gazed out across the Better Future lawn and watched the sun set. It occurred to me that I had never seen anyone visit. I asked if there was someone I should call. She rested her head against the side of my arm and said nothing for a while and then, “No.”

THE NIGHT
pains worsened. I couldn’t shake them. I woke to blinding cramps in nonexistent feet, the sensation of my legs curling back on themselves. I was still treating it by strapping on my old-model legs but it was no longer enough. I began to attach them before going to sleep. It was awkward and uncomfortable but better than fumbling with straps in the dark while my amputated muscles screamed.

I decided to leave the Contours on for a night and see what happened. It was a good idea because I didn’t like taking them off anyway. It was like becoming a cripple again, every night. I wasn’t sure how I could lie down but I was forgetting that compared with them, my weight was practically zero. All I needed to do was hold on while they bent in two places and rotated the bucket seat. I couldn’t roll over. That was awkward. But discomfort was not pain so it
was a big improvement. Pretty soon I couldn’t imagine ever taking off my legs again.

I ARRIVED
in the labs one morning and there was a girl in a white coat with eyes as blue as a Bunsen burner flame. I didn’t put it together until I passed another girl with violet eyes and then a guy with emeralds. By the time I reached the Glass Room I was prepared. Sure enough, Jason’s eyes glowed mahogany. “You colored the Z-lenses.”

“It’s only cosmetic.” Jason wheeled his office chair closer. “But people like it. What do you think?”

“Does it interfere with function?”

He shook his head. “You just set the chip to filter a particular frequency.”

“That sounds like extra complexity. Another potential point of failure.”

“It’s working pretty well.”

“Never sacrifice function for appearance,” I said. “It’s poor engineering.” But they did look nice.

I SET
Alpha to work on hormone regulation. Beta on sensory enhancement. Gamma on a bunch of things around arms. My ulterior motive was to deprive them of free time, to slow the progress of Z-lenses. It seemed to work. Then I got interested in them myself and realized I could make them shift into the nonvisible spectrum, so I could see infrared or ultraviolet. I didn’t know how exactly this would be useful but I could see it could be done. I spent a few days hacking out a prototype, in glasses rather than lenses because the technology was the same but without the delays of miniaturization, and put them on. In infrared, the world flared red and purple and people looked like glowing brains and
hearts. My Contours had three hot spots around the battery and hooves, but were otherwise frozen black. In ultraviolet not much was different except lab coats and some lights and surfaces, which shone. That was a little disappointing. But I felt better about Z-lenses, and stopped trying to delay them.

I CAME
out of Lab 3 and they were waiting for me. Mirka, who used to infiltrate me with needles, stood awkwardly at the front. She looked different. I mean, besides the fluorescent green eyes. Jason nudged her, but she didn’t speak. “We did it,” he said.

“Did what?”

“Found a way to regulate the spleen.” He reached for Mirka, then hesitated. “Show him.”

Mirka lifted her shirt. She had a very toned stomach. I noticed this first. Then the metal patch.

“Basic electrical stimulation,” said Jason. “The tricky part is hitting the right nerves. But of course we could leverage a lot of our earlier leg work.”

“Leg work,” sniggered somebody.

“Notice Mirka’s skin. We’re flooding her with estrogen and thylacine. Can you see the difference?”

I looked her over. She didn’t smile. But she looked good. The difference I had noticed was
health
. She was a more attractive version of herself.

“Her hair is thickening, too.”

“You went to human testing without asking me?”

“Um,” said Jason. “Yes. Sorry. We were going to ask. But you said not to disturb you.”

“You could have waited.”

“We could have. Yeah. Sorry.”

I stared at Mirka.

“Did we do wrong? Because we just wanted to be like you. Be our own guinea pigs.”

Mirka said, “I am happy to do it.” Against her flawless skin, her eyes shone like a cat’s.

“It’s just a harmless way to test our organ-management techs,” said Jason. “Just proof of concept. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t think of a way to say no. “Yes.”

Jason looked relieved. There was some laughter. “I thought it would be.” Somebody elbowed him. “We’re so excited about where this is going.” I nodded, still distracted by Mirka. “It’s all happening,” said Jason.

SO OF
course by the end of the week half my lab assistants had beautiful skin and glowing hair. I kind of saw this coming but still it was a surprise. In the sciences, looking good was usually a negative. It implied you wasted time on outdoor activities instead of building something useful. Even using hair product or makeup suggested misguided priorities. Like you thought how things looked mattered, instead of how they worked. We liked to look at attractive people. We expected it of our movie stars and TV characters. But we did not respect it. We knew physical attractiveness was inversely correlated with intelligence, because look at us.