Machine Man (16 page)

I was used to gazing around a lab and seeing acne and dark-ringed eyes and skin the color of a corpse dragged from a lake. Hair all over the place, or strangled in ponytails. These were signs of a good lab. Now it was like a laboratory in a TV commercial for skin-care products. Not quite. They were still awkward and poorly dressed and overweight or deathly thin. But still. It didn’t look right.

CASSANDRA CAUTERY
left a message. When I didn’t respond she left three more and eventually a young guy in a neat suit with thin glasses came into the Glass Room and knocked. Everyone looked at him because nobody knocked in the Glass Room. You came in, did what you had to, and left. He looked from one assistant to the next and finally his eyes landed on me. “Dr. Neumann?” I stared at him, because come on, I had titanium legs. The suits were like that, at pains to not notice me below the waist. It made me yearn for engineers, who stared and pointed and stopped me for questions. Although then that made me miss the suits. “Cassandra Cautery is wondering if you have a moment.” I looked through the green glass at my assistants running through remote-control tests on a pair of robot arms. The second I left, they would start dueling with them, I knew. “If not, I’m happy to wait.” He looked around for a chair.

When we reached Cassandra Cautery’s office, he knocked, smiled once, and walked away. “Enter,” said Cassandra Cautery. I opened the door and
thunk-thunked
inside. Her desk was piled high with sky-blue folders. “Charlie.” She came around her desk and peered into my eyes. “Are you good?”

“Yes.”

She closed the door. When I turned around, she was staring at my hooves. I had torn up some carpet.

“Sorry.”

“You’re just walking around in those now?”

“Yes.”

“We should discuss that. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to take them outside the labs. From a product-testing point of view.”

“I need to spend time in them to refine the nerve interface.” This was kind of true.

She waved this away. “That’s not why I brought you
here.” I waited for her to say why she had brought me here. She walked to her desk, shuffled some papers, turned back, rested her butt against the desk, and folded her arms. It was a very comfortable pose. Like from a catalog. “There’s a lot of excitement about the products coming out of your area.”

“Okay.”

“In particular, the Better Eyes and Better Skin.”

“You mean the, uh, Z-lenses and the hormone-regulating—”

“I’m using their marketing names. It’s what …” She fluttered her hands. “This is all coming down from on high.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t actually expect you to go cosmetic, Charlie. I thought this was going to be more, you know, hard-core medical.” The skin between her eyes sharpened. “Are you wearing Better Eyes?”

“No.”

“I haven’t tried them.” She shrugged lightly. Her eyes were a light blue. Attractive. But not neon. “A few of the senior managers have. They were a big hit. These are the colored ones I’m talking about. No one was really in love with them before that. We thought they were a strictly scientific product. Because, obviously, you wouldn’t want to walk around with white eyes. Now they’re functional
and
cosmetic. It’s … well, it’s a dream.” Silence. “I went down to your lab yesterday. You were locked away. But I saw your assistants. Using the, uh, the Eyes and the Skin. It’s … well, it’s amazing. They look great. I couldn’t believe it. I literally could not believe they were the same people. Because I’ve been down many times, Charlie, and it used to be, no offense, but they were not an attractive bunch. Which is fine. That’s how we expect our scientific people to be. I don’t mean
expect
. I mean that’s how it usually is. The
people with technical smarts go into the labs and those of us with, you know, social skills, if you like, we go into management. I’m not saying we’re better looking. I’m just saying, there’s usually that division. If all of a sudden someone like me suddenly, I don’t know, put a metal patch on my head that made me supergood with computers, you lab people would freak right out. Wouldn’t you? You’d think, ‘Wait, who’s this chick with the cheekbones taking over?’ You’d think, ‘Hold on, I spent my whole life figuring out how to be good with computers. I work out every day on computers. Now somebody can have that from a patch? That’s not fair.’ ” She nodded. “It’s like worlds colliding. It’s a little like that. And I’m not saying stop. Absolutely not. This is what they hoped you’d do, times a thousand. It’s a success, but so much of a success it almost becomes something else entirely. Do you see what I mean?” She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. As her hand came down, it stroked her jawline. “Do you know how often I go to the gym, Charlie? Every single day.” She laughed. “I don’t know why I told you that. That has nothing to do with anything. So where do you think you’ll go next?” She placed her palms on the edge of the desk. “Tell me.”

“Um … well … arms.”

Her eyes flicked to my metal fingers. “I’m up to speed on the arms. They like where you’re going there. How about teeth?”

“Teeth?”

“I’m just throwing ideas out there. Spitballing. Are you thinking of doing anything with teeth?”

“No.”

She stared at me.

“If you’re talking about … some kind of solution to your …” I gestured toward my jaw.

“No. Of course not.”

“Because if a dentist said your teeth were too close to nerves to move, that’s probably right.”

“I don’t care about the diastema, Charlie. Okay? Let’s be clear. This is not about me. This is about you wanting to chop off your goddamn arms.” I blinked. “And let me tell you right now we are going to have a serious conversation about that, because I’m still pissed about the fingers. You didn’t go through proper channels. You took it upon yourself to crush your hand and I didn’t know until afterward. I took care of it. I did what had to be done. But I did not appreciate being cut out of the loop. You want to do destructive testing, you come to me first. Is that clear? I can be reasonable.” She spread her arms. “I’m here to help. But keep me in the loop, Charlie. Keep me in the loop.”

I coughed. “Okay.”

“Here’s the thing. Imagine we’re building a body.” I opened my mouth to say I
was
building a body, but she held up a finger. “And it’s a wonderful body, one everyone is very interested in getting right. The ideas for how to build this body, they mostly come from one particular brain. That brain is important, wouldn’t you say? Crucial. While we’re building this body, the one thing we must do, the absolute top priority, is to keep the brain safe. Well, to me, Charlie, the body isn’t those Better Legs you’re wearing. It’s not the parts. The prostheses. It’s the capacity to produce them. The body I’m supposed to be building, Charlie, is a department with the ability to create bio-enhancement products. Do you see?” She nodded. “I think you do. And you’re the brain. You’re the one part I must keep safe.” Her brow furrowed. “What are you doing?”

I looked down. I was rubbing the heel of one hand against my titanium thigh. I guess I had been trying to knead it, to restore blood flow to a part that ached. “Nothing.”

“Don’t say ‘nothing.’ ”

“It’s phantom pain. Nothing serious.”

“Phantom …?”

“It’s common. It’s nothing. A glitch. A technical hiccup.”

Her jaw set. “This is precisely what I’m talking about. When I hear things like this, do you know how I feel? These …” She gestured at my legs. “These technical phantoms? They make me feel like plucking the brain right out of the body and putting it in a jar. That’s what I want to do. Put the brain somewhere safe, so no matter what happens to the body, what mistakes may be made, it will be okay. Do you understand? The need to separate the brain from the body?”

“But I’m the body. I’m the brain and the body. They can’t be separated.”

“Imagine they could,” she said.

Silence. “I’m interested in making parts for me,” I said. “Not just other people.”

She stared. Then she smiled. “Well, I think we understand each other. Tell you what. You keep doing what you’re doing, I’ll see what I can do from this end. To mesh your reality with that of the company’s.”

“Okay.”

“What about a tooth with a phone in it?” she said. “I think I saw that on TV one time.”

“Um.”

“That would be functional. That would be very functional. Not that you should cancel the cosmetic stuff. Everyone loves the cosmetics. But if you felt the urge to, I don’t know, put phones in teeth, I think that would be your call. Because you’re the scientist. You’re the ideas man. You know?” She laughed.

“Yes,” I said, although I didn’t think I did.

“I’m glad we had this chat. I really am. Thanks for making time, Charlie.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And keep me in the loop.”

“Okay.” When I reached the door, I looked back. Her cheek was bulging, her tongue in there, exploring.

LOLA’S SUITE
had a balcony. The season was turning but if she wrapped up in a blanket we could still sit and watch the flitting of car headlights and streetlamps. She leaned over the railing and shivered. “If you close one eye, the cars look like toys,” she said. “Like you could flick them with your finger.”

I put my arm around her waist. Or where her waist must be. It was a thick blanket. She looked up. Her lips parted. Then we both turned to look inside, at the nurse moving around Lola’s bed, collecting crumpled tissues from Lola’s bedside table and dropping them into the trash. “She always turns up right before you,” said Lola.

“Really?”

“When you’re not here, I hardly ever see her.”

The nurse caught my eye and smiled through the glass.

“I would like to leave.” Lola put her arms around me and squeezed. “I would like to go somewhere nobody is watching.”

It was a good idea. I hesitated.

“When you’ve finished your work, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t mean you should stop your work.”

“There could be a recuperative stage coming,” I said. “To do with the arms.”

“Really,” Lola said. She touched my sleeve. Every one of
my hairs stood up. There was nothing like biology for sensory feedback. I hadn’t been able to get close to it. “I like your arms.” Her hand kept moving. It reached my metal fingers. “But I like these, too.” She rested her head against me. “The ones you made yourself.”

HEADING BACK
to my bunk, I decided to swipe a potted plant. Lola’s floor had dozens, and those cheerful splashes of green really made a difference. I wished I could put some in the labs, but couldn’t, because of contamination. I could brighten up my room, though. I carried the plant and set it in the corner.

The next day I got serious about feedback. The surprising thing was how little research there was. Papers were speculative, describing experiments that might be useful if other people filled in other great gaping voids. They opened with statements like:
To date there has been little interest in the problem of replacing sensory function lost in amputation
.

It irritated me. You could walk into an electronics store and for three hundred dollars take home a game console with a gyroscope-equipped dual-feedback resistance controller that shook and pushed to emulate in eighteen different ways the sensation of driving a tank across a battlefield. But restoring touch to someone who’d lost an arm, that wasn’t of interest. Those people got a claw from the 1970s. That was problem solved. We had the technology but in the wrong places. It wasn’t the morality that bothered me so much as the inefficiency. It was a misallocation of resources. And I knew that logically companies should spend a hundred million dollars on a game controller rather than a prosthesis that let a man feel again. But every time I read that,
lack of interest
, I wanted to kick someone.

I pulled the entire team onto it. Alpha, Beta, Gamma,
and Omega: about a hundred people. By the end of the day they had self-organized into hierarchical structures for task delegation and reporting. I didn’t care about this. I just told them what I wanted done and let them figure it out. In this sense they were like a subroutine. Like the path-finding tech in my legs. I could see the sense of Cassandra Cautery’s body analogy. On the third day, Omega hooked a girl into a nerve grid and made her taste colors. Alpha built a skin-like alloy that seemed promising until it put three thousand volts through one of them and they had to deal with Human Resources. But despite setbacks, we made progress. By the end of the week the nerve interface was two-way, capable of transmitting gross sensation. It was indistinct, every touch wrapped in cotton wool, but I could close my eyes and know when an assistant poked a mesh array. Everyone was very proud. But this wasn’t because of our brilliance. It was because nobody else had tried.

I went back to the arms. They were titanium and servomagnetic and could rotate 360 degrees on three independent axes. One night I sat there staring at them and realized there was nothing else to do. They were the smartest things I had ever built. And, not wanting to boast, I had built some smart things. Once I created a microbe that ate garbage. You could open your trash can, throw in your scraps, and an hour later they would be gone. The microbe ate them. It didn’t get through QA because if the microbe got out, it would eat everything. There were concerns about a trashcan-eats-man scenario. Which was not the fault of the microbe, in my opinion. My feeling was that someone should come up with a safe receptacle. But anyway. There were no such problems with the arms, because the only person whose opinion mattered was me.

I retired to my bunk and retracted the Contours. The plant I’d stolen the week before was slumped over, brown
and shriveled. I hadn’t watered it. The lack of natural light may have been a problem, too. I felt annoyed. There was something pathetic about an organism that couldn’t even live if you left it alone. This was maybe a little hard on the plant, which had been removed to a hostile environment, but still, it reminded me why I was doing this.