Machine Man (25 page)

“God,” said Lola. She looked at me, then the closed door. “God.”

I began levering myself up. “That was an accident.”

Lola blinked. “Of course.” She came over and helped me onto the sofa. “You’re scratched. Let me see that finger.”

“Biggles can’t be too hurt, if he can bite like that.”

“Shh.”

I shushed. In the silence I heard Dr. Angelica muttering to her dogs. “She’s going to kick us out, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

Dr. Angelica’s voice rose. It sounded strident. I had never heard her talk to the dogs like that.

“How could she think you would deliberately step on Biggles?” I said nothing. “Nobody understands you,” Lola said.

Dr. Angelica said, “Svvn nmm hrr nww.”

“Is she on the phone?”

We listened. Now there was silence. But I knew what Dr. Angelica had done. I could almost hear it: the white van with the Better Future logo on its side.

I struggled to my feet. My poles, I mean. A standing position. I got upright. “Where are Angelica’s car keys?”

“What?”

“Her car keys.” I managed a step, then another, and made it to the kitchen doorway.

“Why do you want Angelica’s car keys?”

This was a difficult question to answer without elevating Lola’s heart rate. Elevating Lola’s heart rate would be bad. It could lead to an electromagnetic pulse, a dead car, and no way out. I had to execute the world’s calmest escape. “I just …” I spotted them on the counter, and scooped them up. “Let’s go to the garage.”

“Why?”

“I feel like a drive.”

Lola stared. “You want the welder.”

“What? No!”

“Angelica was right.” She put her hands on her forehead. “I’m so stupid.” Her eyes popped open. “Do you love me? I mean, even a little?”

“What?”

“You’ve never said it.”

I felt surprised. But she was right. I guess I assumed it was obvious. “Oh.”

“ ‘Oh’?”

“I mean, I love you.” It sounded bad, even to me. “You know.”

“How am I supposed to know that?”

“From observation!” I tried to spread my arms, but I was holding crutches. “I almost died trying to get you out of that building! What other hypothesis better fits available evidence? Schizophrenia?” I bit my lip, because that was workable.

Lola stared.

“We are going to walk past the welder and get in the car. Come see.”

“Then why—”

“Just come. Please. Now.”

THE CAR
was a hybrid, like me. Lola climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted the mirror. “I’m not sure we should be doing this.”

My pole legs snagged on the passenger door somehow. They were so ungainly. I had to do everything. In frustration I ripped off the straps and pulled at the sockets. They resisted, the plastic sucking on my skin, then popped off with a slurp. I threw them into the backseat.

“I don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Anywhere.” I pulled shut the car door. Through the window, I saw it: the arc welder. My breath caught. It was a gray refrigerator on wheels. That thing had to be 200 amps.

“I should leave a note …” She reached for the door.

“No! Stop!”

“Charlie, what the hell? You’re not making any—”

“Quiet.”

“What?”

“Shh.”

“What?”

“Stop talking.”

“You stop talking! Asshole!”

I hunted between the seats until I found a remote control. The garage door began to rattle upward. “You need to turn off your brain.”

“You want me to be a machine!” Her face flushed. This was not good. None of this was good. “You want to switch me on and off whenever you want!”

“Lola, you remember that EMP weapon in your chest.” The garage door retracted into the ceiling. Beyond lay a concrete driveway, flanked by garden beds and an inviting empty road. “The one that activates at high heart rates.”

“I remember, Charlie.”

“Well, the thing with that is you need to stay calm. You understand? You need to be isolated from stress.”

“Is something happening?”

“No. But please drive.”

Lola stared at me. Then she leaned forward and pressed a button. The car started, near silently.

“Thank you.” I began to relax. She put the car in gear. She seemed focused. She was being a machine. Then a white Better Future van jumped the curb, engine shrieking, and slewed across the driveway in front of us.

THE VAN’S
rear doors banged open. Carl was in there. I didn’t see him. But I knew. We would try to squeeze past and Carl’s metal arm would shoot out and grab our bumper. Our little hybrid wheels would smoke, the engine would scream, and I would turn to see vengeance burning in his eyes.

“Drive!”

I braced myself against the impending acceleration. But there was no acceleration. I looked at Lola. Her eyes were closed.

“Zero, one, one, two, three. Five. Eight. Thirteen.”

“What are you doing? Is that Fibonacci?”

“Twenty-one. Thirty-four. Fifty-five.” Guards emerged from the van, armed and grim-faced. “Eighty-nine. One hundred thirty-four.”

“One hundred
forty-four.
”

“Shut up!”
Her eyes opened, took in the guards, and squeezed shut again.
“Oh God!”

“It’s just, if you’re going to do Fibonacci …” I forced myself to stop. “Okay. You recite arbitrary numbers.” Five guards. But still no Carl. I had to figure out how to operate a motor vehicle when one of us couldn’t see and the other couldn’t reach the pedals.

“Tibialis anterior. Extensor hallucis longus. Extensor digitorum longus. Fibularis tertius.”

She was reciting muscles I didn’t have. But this gave me an idea. I shouldn’t think of us as two people. We were a collection of body parts. We had one pair of eyes, two feet, three hands, two brains; everything we needed. It was a matter of resource allocation.

I took hold of the steering wheel. “I’ll steer. You keep your eyes closed and work the pedals when I tell you.”

“Triceps surae.”

“Depress the accelerator as far as it will go.”

The guards began to close in. “Plantaris,” said Lola, and stepped on the gas. The car leaped forward. I aimed for a guard to the left of the van: an older guy with a mustache. He stepped professionally out of the way. He didn’t look scared, which was a little insulting. Although it was hard to tell. It was a bushy mustache. As we passed, he unloaded his
pistol into our tires. The car rang with flat impacts, as if we were being attacked by a baseball-bat-wielding gang. This would have been an improvement on reality, now I think about it, so maybe I should have tried to sell that to Lola. We bumped onto the road. I hauled on the wheel, which was not easy with one hand from the passenger seat. “Less acceleration!” I said, but not quickly enough, and we thumped against a parked wagon. I was thrown against Lola. Her head rebounded from the side window. She said something that sounded like
guk
but probably wasn’t. I got my hand back on the wheel. “More acceleration!”

We didn’t move. I looked at Lola and her eyes were wide open and fixed on me. She looked pale. “You’re … okay.”

“I’m fine.” I threw a glance out the rear window. Better Future guards jogged after us. Still no Carl! I couldn’t think where he could be. But we weren’t moving, and that was more urgent. “Let’s go.”

“Maybe that was a mistake. Closing my eyes.”

The car dash was dark. There was a smell in the air, sharp and hot.

Lola leaned forward until her forehead touched the steering wheel.

“Did you …” I couldn’t think of a word for it. “Discharge?”

“I thought we … hit something. I thought you might be hurt.”

“Put your hands on the dash! Do it now!”

Better Future guards encircled the car, pointing weapons at us.
“Let me see your hands!”
one yelled, and another said,
“Now! Do it!”
in case there was any confusion. They seemed more nervous than when I had been trying to drive a car through them. A guard pulled open my door and leaped back, as if I might bite.
“He’s moving!”

“No legs!” said the older guy with the mustache. “He’s not wearing the legs!”

“Confirm that! Subject has no legs!”

Guns disappeared into holsters.

“Get them into the van,” said Mustache. “Double time.”

Hands reached for me. “Go away,” I said, and was ignored. Two guys got me under the armpits and pulled me out of the car. “At least bring my legs!” I twisted around and caught a glimpse of guards dragging Lola out of the driver’s seat. Another was peering through the side window.

“Here … no, they’re not the legs! They’re just crutches!”

“Where are the Contours?” said a guard carrying me. He spoke with no strain.

A black town car drew to a halt in front of us. All its doors popped open at the same time. From the rear emerged Cassandra Cautery. Her gaze flicked over me and settled on Mustache. She seemed eerily calm, her face expressionless. It made me nervous because I had no idea what she was thinking. “The legs?”

“We haven’t—”

“Find them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And put him in the car. We have time, I think.”

“Yes, ma’am.” They carried me toward the town car. Then there was a noise, a kind of crunch from somewhere far away, and everybody stopped. A siren wailed; a car or a house alarm.

“Screw,” said Cassandra Cautery. “He’s coming.”

She looked at the guards and snapped her fingers. They bundled me into the backseat of the town car and slammed the door. I noticed it wasn’t locked, so I opened it again. A guard looked down at me and pushed it closed. This repeated twice more.

“Stop that,” the driver said. My door locked with a
thunk
. I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror: condescension, from a guy with one foot resting on the accelerator of a 200-horsepower vehicle.

The opposite door opened. Cassandra Cautery slid her gray-skirted butt onto the leather seat. “Go,” she told the driver. As the car pulled out, she turned to look out the rear window.

“Where’s Lola?” I got no reply, so twisted to see for myself. The white van doors were pushed closed by guards, then the vehicle peeled onto the road behind us. A few remaining gray uniforms scuttled toward Angelica’s open garage. “Who’s coming?”

Cassandra Cautery looked at my thighs. This whole time, she was yet to have an expression. “She toasted the Contours, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She glanced out the back window again. “Do you know what my life has been like the last five weeksh?”

I peered at her, because it sounded like she said
weeksh
.

“Oh, you want to see? Have a good old look.” She leaned toward me and pulled out her lip. Among her gleaming white teeth was a gap. Not like before. It was a chasm. She released her lip with a
plop
. “They said they could fix it. They ground the tooth all the way down and you know what? They were wrong. I can’t feel half my fache.
I can’t feel my fache.
” She stabbed her forehead with her finger. “It’s like
stone.
” She noticed the driver watching us in the rearview mirror. “What are you looking at?” His eyes flicked back to the road. “Science is bullshit, Charlie. It’s bullshit. You want super legs and lab assistants with eyes like headlights and
that’s
possible, oh sure, you can turn a lab technician who looks like a
horse
into a supermodel. But when it comes to a perfectly shimple thing like diastema you
paralyze her fache
. I’m married. Did you know that? He’s a litigator. And he
expects me to have
expresshions
. He expects
reshponses
. What’s going to happen when he notices this?” She stared at me. “I want to drop a bomb on your department. I don’t care about revenue projections. I don’t care about schtrategic vision. What
they
”—she jabbed a finger at the car ceiling—“never appreciate is that mesh breeds. It eatsh organization. And your department is nothing but mesh, creating more mesh, and so help me, it’s going to eat the company. No one gets it. You breathe a word of this and you’ll regret it.” This was directed at the driver, whose eyes were drifting to the rearview mirror again. “We have a new shee ee oh. You should appreciate this. You can’t kill a manager. They just replace that part and restart the machine. He even looks similar.
You’ll
never meet him.” She stabbed a finger at me. “You will never be in the same room as a listed corporate officer again. But they want to use you. Leverage the investment. But, Charlie, I’m dying to end this. I’m looking for an excuse. One twitsch in the wrong direction and I’m bringing down the curtain on this shorry enterprise. Understand?” Before I could answer, she waved her hand in my face. “Don’t answer. It doesn’t matter what you think.” She turned and stared out the window. She put her elbow on the sill and her hand on her forehead. Her fingers probed. It reminded me of how I massaged the Contours.

“Who’s coming?”

“Hmm?”

“You said—”

“Carl’s coming.” She turned back. “This is what I mean. Did I want to rush into expanded testing? No. Did I want to weaponize Lola Shanksh? No. But we’re an engineering company. I say, ‘Let’s stop and consolidate a minute before rushing into new products,’ everybody jumps up and down, bleating about processhesh. But a man wants his limbs removed and that’s fine. No one sees a problem. You
people have thish mentality that the world is all hard science or hocush-pocush. Nothing matters but numbers. Well, we needed psychologists. But we didn’t get any because we’re full of engineers, and engineers think psychologists are witch doctors.”