Machine Man (20 page)

I blinked. “Yes. That’s it exactly.” I wondered why Cassandra Cautery had been so concerned about letting me talk to the Manager. He was fantastic. He was just like me.

“I could not be prouder to count myself as one of your supporters.” He smiled. I smiled back. “Now. Let’s talk supersoldiers.”

The Manager turned to the window and gazed into the distance. There was nothing out there but sky. I struggled
to rearrange his last sentence so that it made sense. I thought:
Did he mean super solder?

“The equipment carried by the average modern-day soldier weighs a hundred fifty pounds.” He turned and spread his palms. The light flooding in behind him made this vaguely messianic. “That’s a standard, what-do-you-call-them, grunt. The specialists lug half that again. The primary limitation of today’s soldier is simply that he can’t carry everything. War has become a load-bearing exercise. A logistics puzzle. And, sure, tell me it’s never been any different. Tell me that throughout history, battles have been won on the back of resource coordination. I’ll agree with you. To a point. That point is when the gap between what’s possible and what’s practical to carry becomes a canyon. And that’s what we have today. Imagine weight wasn’t an issue. We’d have soldiers who run at fifty miles per hour, leap twenty feet into the air, fire fifty-millimeter chain guns, shrug off enemy fire like it’s rain. We’d have Better Soldiers. And let me tell you, Dr. Neumann, as tickled as I am by the consumer-level products your people are producing, the Better Eyes and Better Skin and so forth, they’re nothing compared to what we can do with the military.” He held up a finger. “Let me correct that. What we can do with the
militaries
. I won’t bore you with business details, but there is a protocol for developing military products. The first step is you go to Defense and say, ‘Hello, just letting you know, we’re thinking about making a mobile combat exoskeleton.’ And they say thank you very much and here is a set of papers legally compelling every employee within a hundred-foot radius of our building to be cleared through military intelligence, a four-star general to be in the room whenever we utter the project’s name, and so on. Ten years later, when they allow us to build a crippled, simplified version of the product we originally designed, they give us
another set of papers saying how many units we will produce, how much they’ll pay us for each one, and how many years we’ll serve in prison if we sell a single piece of related technology to another sovereign nation. And you know what? That sucks, Dr. Neumann. That is what keeps us small. So this time, I want to try it another way. Try it in-house. And I’m not saying we’ll sell these things to North Korea. I don’t think anyone wants North Korea with an army of, you know, unkillable Better Soldiers. But it’s not a bad thing for that possibility to be out there. It’s not a bad thing if we can go to DOD and say, ‘Whoops, mea culpa, turns out some of our people went ahead and developed human war machines, and they’re already on the ground in various poorly governed countries across the world.’ They’ll rant and scream and threaten, of course. But then we’ll do a deal. On our terms. Because we have the tech.”

I said, “I don’t want to be a supersoldier.”

Cassandra Cautery smiled. The Manager laughed. “Of course you don’t! Good God, Dr. Neumann, perish the thought. You’re a thinker.”

“You’re the brain,” said Cassandra Cautery.

“Exactly. Your role is hands-off.” His eyes flicked to my metal hand. “Excuse the expression. I mean there’s no need to put yourself through QA for every Better Part. We have people for that. Cassie must have talked you through this.”

“The thing with Charlie,” said Cassandra Cautery, “and I hope this doesn’t offend you, Charlie, but the thing is, he’s an artist. He has that mentality. I’ve been extremely, extremely cautious about bothering Charlie with the practical applications of his work, because for him it’s a personal project. Very personal. That’s what inspires him.”

The Manager was silent. “I’m not sure I understand. He’s an employee, isn’t he?”

“Of course, but—”

“Are you an employee, Dr. Neumann?”

“Yes.”

“You’re paid to perform work for Better Future, correct?”

I hadn’t checked my bank account for a very long time. But I assumed so. “Yes.”

“Then I think we’ve established your role.” He nodded. “I understand there are at least half a dozen people now capable of original part design. You should be proud of the way you’ve passed on your skills, Dr. Neumann. No employee should be irreplaceable.”

I said, “I want to make parts for myself.”

“Let me tell you what I want,” said the Manager. “I want you to assist our test subjects. Help them adapt to life with Better Parts. That’s your specialty now. Not design. Look at you. If I’m booking in for some hard-core surgery to become a Better Soldier, you’re the guy I want to talk to. You’re the guy I want beside my bed when I wake up, telling me it’s okay, it’s great on the other side. It’s Better. I’m not saying this has been the problem. Cassie, I’m not blaming you for the issues we’ve had with test subjects. I’m just saying, the last thing we need is Better Soldiers having psychotic breaks.”

I said, “What test subjects?” I look at Cassandra Cautery, then back to the Manager. “You mean Carl?”

“Dr. Neumann, I can’t believe you don’t know this. You are not the only recipient of Better Parts.” He glanced at Cassandra Cautery. “Honestly.”

“Who else has … has …”

“There’s you, those in your department, and the volunteers.”

“Which volunteers?” I felt myself shaking. “Does Lola Shanks have a Better Part?”

“Of course. Well. That was an early one. Before we had the volunteer program up and running. We had to make a
leap of faith. I know you can appreciate that. When you crushed your leg, did you know how it would turn out? Did you know for sure you would even survive? No. But you did it. Because great achievements require great courage. And it was obvious from the beginning that it would be easier to recruit volunteers for some Better Parts than others. The Eyes, the Skin, sure, they’re lining up. But who wants a military-grade spine? Who wants a satellite-linked eardrum? Don’t say you. We’ve been through that. The world is not full of Carl LaRussos. We will not stumble across a group of people eager to replace vital organs. So we seized the opportunity that presented itself.”

“What’s in Lola?” My throat burned. All I could think about was her on the operating table, her hand limp and helpless. “Her heart. What is it?”

“Well,” he said. “Something better.”

A jolt of rage burst through my body. I did not usually get angry. I had never felt like this in my life. Certainly at no point while connected to the nerve interface, painstakingly teaching the Contours the language of my electrical neuroimpulses. They had no idea what I was telling them. That’s my explanation, anyway, for why my legs twitched, and I kicked the Manager through the window.

EARLIER, I
hadn’t paid much attention to which floor we were on. But as I moved to the shattered window and pushed aside the flapping drapes, I realized: we were really high up.

“YOU’VE KILLED
him.” Cassandra Cautery stepped carefully over the broken glass and braced herself against what was left of the window frame. “Look. He’s just lying there.”

I tried to say,
I didn’t mean to
. But my chest was locked tight around my lungs.

“That guy is dead.” There was a touch of awe in her voice. “He is definitely dead.”

Against my better judgment, I looked down. Most of the space between Better Future and the road was occupied by a wide, healthy lawn. But it was bisected by a narrow concrete path, and on this lay the Manager. I’m tempted to claim this as bad luck. But from the way his legs were bent over his head, it didn’t matter.

The Contours took an unexpected step forward, as if they wanted to look at what they had done. I teetered.

“Charlie …” Cassandra Cautery murmured. Her eyes didn’t move from the Manager’s tiny, broken body. “You are in so very much trouble.”

The Contours tensed. Four sections contracted two inches. I wasn’t making them do this. It must be a fear reaction: my terrified brain barfing out static. But that’s not what it felt like. It felt like they were making their own decisions.

Behind me, someone gasped. The Manager’s beautiful assistant stood with one hand on the door handle, the other flying to her mouth, her eyes shocked wide. What would happen next became clear: the alarm call, the security guards. My legs were right, I realized. They had figured this out before I had. I looked at the drop, took a breath, and jumped.

AS I
fell through the air, the Contours extended to their full length. The hooves splayed into three toes, maximizing their surface area. The Better Future lawn rushed at me and I closed my eyes. My spine tried to impale my skull. When I could see again, the Contours were three feet long and had no hooves. I thought they had snapped. Then they began to reextend, and I remembered this was what they did on impact: retracted, to soak up deceleration. The hooves had sunk into the earth. I pulled one free, then the other, and shook off clods of soil.

The Manager lay a few yards away. He didn’t look any better up close. I felt sick, then angry, because if the Manager had had some Better Parts, he would be fine right now. He would be walking around on machine legs and I would not be in this situation. What kind of CEO organized a project to manufacture artificial parts and had none himself? It was ridiculous. I stared at his biological mess and was furious. It was not my finest moment.

Ahead of me, the lobby doors slid open. I thought,
Maybe it won’t be guards
, and was wrong. Then I thought,
Maybe they don’t know this was me
, and they drew their guns, and I thought,
They won’t shoot unless I run
, and was wrong again.

THE FIRST
shot thumped into my left biceps. I felt it not so much as physical pain as an insult. I hadn’t realized how deeply offensive it was to have someone deliberately injure you. I shouted, “Hey!” My voice was thick with outrage. I was going to march up to this guard and explain I was a human being, dammit, with a brain and rights and an ID card, and you can’t just
shoot
people. You can’t just
kill
them. Which was a little hypocritical, given I was standing next to the Manager’s folded-up body, but that didn’t occur to me. I was indignant about my violated biceps. The only thing that drove this plan from my mind was the realization that this bullet was not the last of today’s insults: that more insults were heading my way unless I got out of there.

So I did. My legs fired. My neck snapped back. Something passed by my head so close it sucked hair into its wake. I grabbed at the sides of the bucket seat, afraid of falling out, which was more or less impossible but that’s not what it felt like. With each step my legs stretched out before me and my hooves drove into the lawn. They slipped on a slick patch of grass, then we reached the sidewalk and I felt them settle. They liked concrete. We both did. I clung on and cars and trees blurred past me until the security guards were far, far behind and I was safe and I realized I had left behind something important.

I DON’T
play the lottery. I don’t care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if
people thought more about what they’re doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don’t understand why bridges aren’t art. It seems to me they’re penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that’s a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it’s infrastructure. That makes no sense.

I mention this because what I did next was not completely logical. And I know if I heard about this from somebody else, I would lose a little respect for that person. I would think,
Well, that’s just stupid
. But I would be failing to appreciate the difficulty of performing an emergency situational assessment from the middle of one. When someone shoots at you, your hypothalamus sends a lightning bolt into your neuroendocrine cells, which dump cortisol and adrenaline and norepinephrine into your bloodstream, and then you are no longer a very good decision-making machine. You are a quick decision-making machine. And I don’t want to hide behind my biology, because at some point you have to take ownership of your neurochemistry, but I do want to point out that I didn’t decide to go flight-or-fight; my body did.

I SLOWED
. I stopped. On the sidewalk ahead, an elderly Latino woman struggled along with bags of groceries. She saw my hooves and her eyes bulged.
“Diablo.”

Lola was back there. She had who-knew-what in her chest cavity. Cassandra Cautery said they were taking care of her but that could be a lie. They had installed a device in Lola without her knowledge.

“Diablo!”
cried the woman.

Maybe I should go to the police. Tell them there was a
woman with a malfunctioning Better Heart she hadn’t asked for. That had to be some kind of crime. And guards had shot at me and that was wrong so the police should be on my side. I had metal legs but they would get over that. Although I had killed the Manager. Possibly from their point of view I was a violent criminal. Had Better Future already reported me?