Machine Man (2 page)

I passed the atrium, which was already filling with young people in white lab coats and older managers in suits and skirts. At the central elevator bank was a young woman with dark hair. Marketing, or possibly recruitment. The call button was lit but I moved to re-press it anyway, then stopped myself because that was completely illogical, then
went ahead and did it because, seriously, what was the harm. It wasn’t like I was doing anything else. As I stepped back, I saw the young woman looking at me and glanced away, then realized she was starting to smile and looked back but then she was looking away and it was too late. We stood awhile. I reached into my pocket for my phone. I hissed. She said, “Take forever, don’t they?”

“No, I lost my phone.” She looked confused. “That’s why I was …” I trailed off. There was silence.

“They’re all on three,” she said. According to the display, three cars were at Sublevel 3 and the fourth was right behind them. “All these engineers, you’d think we could figure out how to decluster the elevators.” She smiled. “I’m Rebecca.”

“Hmm,” I said. I was familiar with the elevator algorithm. It sent cars in the same direction so long as they had a destination, then allowed them to reverse. It was supposed to be efficient. But there was an alternative that allowed people to enter their destination
before
getting in, which allowed the scheduler to make more intelligent decisions. The problem was the system could be gamed: people figured they got elevators faster by mashing buttons. I wondered if cars should move away from one another when idle. It might even be worth delaying one car to create a gap. You would slow one journey but benefit everyone who came after. I should run some numbers. I opened my mouth to say this and realized an elevator had arrived and the woman was entering it. I followed. She pulled her satchel close to her body. She seemed tense. I tried to think of something to say but all I could think was,
Takes forever, doesn’t it
, which was what she had said to me. She got out at Organizational Communications without looking at me.

I AM
not a people person. Whenever I’m evaluated, I score very low on social metrics. My ex-boss said she had never seen anyone score a zero on Interpersonal Empathy before. And she worked with engineers. If anyone is having a party, I am not invited. In meetings, during downtime, the people I’m seated between will both talk to the person on their other side. There’s something about me that is repellent. I don’t mean disgusting. I mean like magnets. The closer people get, the stronger their urge to move away.

I am a smart guy. I recycle. Once I found a lost cat and took it to a shelter. Sometimes I make jokes. If there’s something wrong with your car, I can tell what by listening to it. I like kids, except the ones who are rude to adults and the parents just stand there, smiling. I have a job. I own my apartment. I rarely lie. These are qualities I keep hearing people are looking for. I can only think there must be something else, something no one mentions, because I have no friends, am estranged from my family, and haven’t dated in this decade. There is a guy in Lab Control who killed a woman with his car, and he gets invited to parties. I don’t understand that.

I EXITED
the elevator and swiped for access to the Glass Room. We called it the Glass Room because it overlooked several adjoining labs, but actually the walls were green-tinged polycarbonate plastic. Apparently they were glass until an incident involving a spilled beaker, a weapons-grade pathogen, and panicked techs with office chairs. I heard two versions of this story: in one, the pathogen was harmless and served as a wake-up call to everyone concerned. In the other, two people died before the complex could be locked down, and another six afterward, when they flooded the labs with gas. It was before my time so I don’t know which was true. All I know is the walls are plastic.

The moment the door opened, I could see my phone was not on my desk. I pawed through papers, just in case. I checked the drawers. I kneeled on the plastic floor. I did a circuit of the room, checking other desks, then again, slower, encompassing all horizontal surfaces. Then I reeled into my chair and closed my eyes. I had grabbed at this idea of my phone being at work without properly considering the probabilities. Would it have killed me to do one more sweep at home? My phone was probably on my bedside table, stuck between novels. I had looked there pretty thoroughly but maybe I hadn’t. I opened my eyes and rotated my office chair to survey the room slice by slice. Nothing. Nothing. I had an idea and picked up my office phone to dial my cell, but froze with my finger above the buttons because I did not know the number. It was on my phone. Everything was. I sat there and did not know what to do.

MY LAB
assistants arrived. I had three: Jason, Elaine, and Katherine. Katherine was the one who wasn’t Chinese. I was supposed to be teaching them something while they worked, but I had never been sure what. I knew I was a disappointment to them. They had made it into one of the most exciting research labs in the world and their mentor turned out to be me.

They donned white coats and stood there expectantly. Elaine glanced at Katherine and Katherine rolled her eyes and Elaine jiggled her eyebrows like:
I know
. This was right in front of me. I should have come down on them but it seemed stupid to say,
Stop jiggling your eyebrows
. They probably knew this. I had no such problems with Jason, who would say what he thought, if you asked him directly.

Elaine said, “Should we get started sometime today?”

“On what?”

Another glance with Katherine. She gestured to the glass. The plastic. The lab beyond. “On durables testing, of course.”

We were supposed to be bombarding a lightweight carbon polymer with radiation. The idea was to check that it wouldn’t melt. On our three previous attempts, it had melted. It was interesting to watch but frustrating on a professional level. It was probably going to melt again. This was not what I wanted to be doing, with my phone missing: watching a polymer melt. But I stood and went to get my coat because, after all, it was my job.

JASON RETRIEVED
the polymer while I swiped into Lab 4 and powered on the Clamp. The Clamp was a pair of hydraulic-powered steel plates, good at holding things and not melting. The rest of the room housed a spectrograph, a compact accelerator, and various support equipment, all connected by dangling cables as thick as arms. As I wiggled the joystick to maneuver the Clamp into place I saw Elaine and Katherine, green-tinged and blurred, moving about in the Glass Room. I wondered if they had seen my phone. I should have asked. But I had to concentrate on what I was doing because the Clamp was approaching and that thing was so heavy it could hurt you moving at a tenth of a meter per second. Once it had left a bruise on my hip that took three weeks to heal. My own fault. The equipment had safeties but your primary piece of protective equipment was your brain. There was a presumption that anyone entering this room was intelligent enough to keep away from hot things, sharp things, and things carrying large stores of momentum. We were not factory workers.

I set the Clamp in place and pressed a rubber button to bring its plates closer together. A klaxon sounded. An
orange warning light spun. That always happened. It wasn’t something I noticed anymore. While I waited, I thought about that girl in the elevator. I should have told her about elevator algorithms. She might have been interested. She might have said,
I had no idea
, and when we arrived at her floor, put a hand on the door to stop it closing.

I saw my phone. I had spent so long imagining it that for a second I wasn’t sure it was really there. But it was. It was on top of the spectrograph. So obvious. I had worked late and when checking my pockets for a pen had realized I still had my phone, which wasn’t allowed, and none of that mattered because here it was. I went to get it. My outstretched fingers were about to close on it when my thighs brushed metal. I looked down. I had walked into the Clamp. The plates were touching me. They were actually closer than I had meant to bring them. I should have hit
STOP
a few seconds ago. I heard the klaxon and noticed the swirling orange light as if for the first time. I began to back out. I wasn’t in real danger. The plates moved too slowly. Although that was deceptive. The gap shrank linearly but in relative terms it accelerated. My thighs jammed. I turned sideways and shuffled. My left shoe caught. I freed that but then the right did. I hadn’t accounted for a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the plates increasingly obstructing movement. I had left insufficient margin for error. I lunged for freedom and fell face-first onto the floor. I pulled one leg free but my right shoe caught. I grabbed my thigh and pulled. Above the clamp, through the green glass, Elaine and Katherine gaped. Between them and me sat my phone, untouched.

I felt unbearable pressure. My intestines tried to squeeze out of my ears. I didn’t hear the noise. The klaxon covered that. But I saw the spray. In the orange light, it looked black.

During Clamp operation, the lab autolocked, for safety. I
had to tear my shirt into strips to stem the bleeding. I had to flop across the floor until I could reach the controls. I’ll be honest. There was a lot of screaming. I got my hands on the
STOP
button. The klaxon died. The orange light faded. I closed my eyes. I was going to vomit, or pass out, or one then the other. The door opened and Jason said, “Oh fuck, fuck.” I felt very sad, because that seemed to confirm it.

A ROOM
formed around me. It didn’t happen all at once. It wove itself out of nothing by degrees. Not really. It was just how it seemed, under medication. It was a while before I felt confident it wouldn’t blow away again—the bleached sheets, the beige walls, the furniture that was all on wheels—to reveal I was still in Lab 4, bleeding to death.

A surgeon visited, a tall woman with dark frizzy hair and impatient eyes. Usually I appreciate impatience in a person. It indicates an appreciation of efficiency. But my head was full of bees and she talked too fast to follow.

“The debridement went very well. Often in the case of traumatic injury there’s a great deal of bone fragment and destroyed tissue, but yours was remarkably clean. You’re lucky. I had to take your femur up about six inches but that’s really nothing. Very little smoothing of the bone was
required. I did a closed amputation, stitching the skin closed during the operation, and that’s extremely rare in a trauma case. Normally we’d have to leave the skin flaps open, to make it easier to clean any infected tissue. But as I said, it was a remarkably clean site.”

“What was a site?” My voice was thick. I wasn’t sure what I was asking. I just needed her to slow down.

My surgeon raised a clipboard and scanned it. Her name tag said
DR. ANGELICA AUSTIN
. That sounded familiar. She might have visited me earlier, when I was less conscious. Dr. Angelica Austin flipped a page. “We might look at scaling back your pain meds.”

That sounded like a terrible idea. I tried to sit up. I caught sight of my leg. I had a thigh. A thigh in a stocking. Three or four tubes emerged from areas that were patched with dressing, looping to hanging plastic bags. Between these were glimpses of something pink and black and shiny that did not look like skin but was. I was short. That was the shocking part. It wasn’t the stump so much. The stump was bad. But what was terrible was the air. The space. I had half a thigh. My knee was gone. My calf. I had no foot. I was missing an entire foot. I had kicked things with that foot and now I didn’t have it. These were things that were wrong.

“You …” said Dr. Angelica Austin. “We went through the stump yesterday. I showed you.”

“I don’t remember.”

Dr. Angelica Austin wrote something on her clipboard. She was lowering my dosage. Before I could object, she put her hand on my shoulder. It felt awkward, for both of us. “I’ll come back when you’re rested. This is the darkest point, Mr. Neumann. It all gets better from here.”

MY ROOM
had windows. I could see all the way across the Gardens. At dusk, the skyscrapers flared orange. It was very quiet, this hospital. It was like I was the only person there.

I HAD
four nurses: Katie, Chelsea, Veronica, and Mike. Mike was the one who bathed me. That struck me as unfair. All I’d gone through and a man sponged me. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just another disappointment. Nurse Mike was friendly. This is nothing against Nurse Mike. He taught me how to unwind the bandages without pulling out a draining tube, which was something I did once and never wanted to again. He showed me how to fasten them so they wouldn’t unwind in the night. My dressings needed changing every four hours. That’s how much I was leaking, even before you counted what came out of the tubes. It was an alarming idea. Presumably if I disconnected the saline drip, I would deflate to a husk. I was a junior high physics problem.
If Charles Neumann is a human being with volume 80 liters, oozing bodily fluid at the rate of 0.5 liters per minute, how often must we replace his 400-milliliter saline bags?
I felt I should have been more sophisticated than that.