Authors: Max Barry
I WENT
to see Lola. Dawn was breaking, shedding soft yellow light along the corridor, and I had about four hours of near-zero capacity for guilt. When I knocked she cracked open the door and squinted at me with sleep-bleary eyes. “Charlie?”
“I know it’s early. Can I come in?”
“Um. Yeah.” She rubbed her hair. I had thought it was
out of control before. Overnight it staged a full-scale rebellion. She swung open the door and I clomped inside. She was wearing an oversized yellow sweater and no visible pants. The sweater said:
VISION + DARING = BETTER FUTURE
. Her legs were very beautiful. You had to give it to biology sometimes.
“I’ve been working. I wanted to see you.”
She dropped onto the sofa. “That’s nice.”
I looked around. “Where’s that nurse?”
Lola’s eyes widened. “Charlie. You broke the pattern.”
I couldn’t believe it. I had forced myself to stop thinking about how to get rid of the nurse, because it was consuming all my waking hours. Now she was gone. It was a miracle.
Lola rose from the sofa. My heart thumped. Her hand closed on my shirt and pulled me closer. A delicious feeling shot through my body. I thought:
I should map that for the helmet
.
“She could turn up any moment,” said Lola. She leaned upward. We kissed. We had kissed before. But not like this. Not without external observation. I felt anxious, because one thing that nurse had been good for was covering the fact that I was not a good kisser. I was enthusiastic. I was interested. But I had no technique. I was all over the place. I got hair in my mouth and Lola put a hand on my cheek and guided me back to her lips. She did not seem upset or exasperated. She was prepared to tolerate mistakes. She had realistic expectations. I relaxed. I grew more confident. Lola pressed against me. I was doing this. I was some kind of superman. I kissed her and her tongue touched my lips and I gulped audibly and she sniggered into my mouth. It was hotter than it sounds. Her hand found the back of my head and pushed me closer. I fell into her. She was a gravity well. An irresistible attractor. She took hold of my metal hand and guided it to her Better Future sweater, where
DARING
rose and fell across one breast. I felt softness and warmth
and violet harmonics around five gigahertz. “Not so hard,” she whispered. I opened my eyes because I wasn’t the one pressing there. She was. Except she wasn’t even touching my hand.
I tried to pull my hand off her chest. It resisted, then came away. Lola’s eyes popped open.
“Stop. Wait.” I backed away. “You’re attracting me.”
“It’s mutual.”
“Not like that.”
She looked confused. Then her eyes widened and she stepped back. As she did, I felt a slight release, as if I had been bracing myself against a force too subtle to notice until it was gone.
“Did you feel that?”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Charlie?”
“It’s okay,” I said, although I didn’t know if that was true. “There’s something … maybe some kind of magnetic field.”
“Field?”
“Wait here. I need to get a scanner.”
“It’s my heart,” she whispered. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find out.”
“What did they put in me?”
“Please,” I said. “Don’t cry, Lola, because I don’t think I can come any closer without damaging one of us.”
She nodded. “Please hurry.”
I EXITED
on the ground floor and headed for the elevators to take me to the labs. Halfway there a young woman fell into step alongside me. This was no mean feat because I was really moving. I glanced down. It was Elaine, my
ex-assistant who had had nightmares. She was shorter than I remembered. No, I was taller. She clutched a clipboard to her chest. Her white coat flapped around her legs. Her acne had not improved. “Dr. Neumann. Are you busy?”
“Yes.” We rounded a corner and passed the atrium. Inside, early-rising suits strategized over bowls of muesli.
“I’ve been trying to reach you. I sent e-mails.”
“I don’t read e-mails.”
“Well …” She broke into a run. “I’ve been following your work and, well, actually, I wasn’t at first because I wanted to make a clean break. Because of the trauma. But you’re using so many people and everyone’s talking about it and I saw projects going into limited testing. And of course you can’t get into them because everyone who knew has already signed up for slots and now the waiting list is a month long and there’s no way to get in. Is there?”
We reached the elevator bank. I pressed
DOWN
. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She came around in front of me. “I want to be a test subject for Better Skin.”
I tried not to look at the spots on her forehead but couldn’t help it. “I don’t actually select test subjects.”
“But you could. You could get me in.”
“Um …”
“I’d follow protocol. I would be an extremely good test subject.”
“I know you would, Elaine.” At last, the elevator arrived.
“I wash my face eight times a day. I use aloe vera. I use methylhydroxide. I sleep with a face mask. It wakes me up but I use it. Please.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I entered the elevator and pressed for the labs. Elaine stayed where she was, her hands pressed together.
“Thanks,” she said. “Thank you.”
I SWIPED
my way into Lab 5 and interrupted a bunch of lab assistants shaving off Mirka’s hair. The floor was littered with dark filaments. In a bald head, Mirka’s cat eyes looked enormous, like a Japanese cartoon. We all stared at one another and then I clomped across the lab and began searching for the hand scanner.
“We’re, ah …” said Jason. “I guess you’re wondering what we’re doing.”
“No.” Half-dissected electronics lay all over the workbench. “Where’s the scanner?”
“There,” said several cats at once. I couldn’t see where they meant until I followed their pointing fingers and shifted a schematic. A tiny part of it must have been poking out, too small for me to notice. A cat said, “Why aren’t you wearing your Eyes, Dr. Neumann?”
One of the assistants held a surgical drill, I noticed. That couldn’t be good. But I didn’t have time for this. “Don’t do anything stupid,” I said, and left.
I RODE
the elevator up to ground, turning the scanner over in my hands. It was very basic, with a narrow electromagnetic range. But that should be enough to tell what was happening inside Lola. Right now I couldn’t imagine why her heart would start emitting a magnetic field. It was a pump.
The elevator doors opened. For a second I expected Elaine. Can I have the Skin? But the area was empty. It was very empty. I thumped along the corridor and past the atrium and now its tables were empty, the muesli-eating suits vanished. When I reached the elevators for Building C and went to press the call button, it was dark. All the panels above the elevators were blank but one, which ticked
downward from 18. I waited. When it opened, it had Cassandra Cautery in it. “Charlie. We need to talk.”
“Something’s wrong with Lola.”
“It’s taken care of. Come here.”
I hesitated, then entered the elevator. Cassandra Cautery swiped her ID tag. The doors closed.
“We have a little situation.” She touched her palms together, as if praying, and put the fingers to her lips. “It’s all right. Everything is fine. But we do have a problem we need to deal with.”
“Is her heart malfunctioning?”
“Let me just lay something on the table. The company has made a significant investment in Lola Shanks. That life-saving operation, that did not come cheap.” This did not strike me as a very fair assessment, since the operation was life-saving only because she was shot by Carl, but I kept silent because I wanted to get to the part where Cassandra Cautery explained what was wrong with Lola. “You can debate whether the right decision was made. I know I had concerns. But that was not my call.” Her eyes flicked to the floor numbers ticking upward. “I’ve always tried to do the right thing, Charlie. You understand that, don’t you?”
I said nothing.
Her tone sharpened. “When you asked me to dispose of Carl, did I quibble? Did I say, ‘Gee, Charlie, that’s a little heartless, he’s a ten-year employee with no arms?’ No. I didn’t.”
“Fire.”
“What?”
“I asked you to
fire
Carl.”
“You said
get rid of.
”
“That’s the same thing.”
She hesitated. “Of course it is. The point is, I’ve tried to provide you with a supportive environment. I’ve sheltered
you from the harsher realities.” She stuck a thumb in her mouth and gnawed at it. Then she pulled it out and stared at it like it had betrayed her. “No one appreciates the middle manager. Upstairs, they’ve forgotten what it’s like. They think you tell employees to do something and they do it. But it’s not called
telling
. It’s called
managing
. The only reason this company functions is because people like me keep them and you apart.”
The elevator doors opened. We were not on Lola’s floor. We were somewhere else.
“But no, no, no,” said Cassandra Cautery. “You and Lola Shanks couldn’t keep your hands off each other, and everything’s gone to shit.”
I saw myself in a huge silver mirror hanging on the opposite wall. Beside it sat a little table with a lamp and a vase of white flowers. On the other side was a life-sized statue of a woman with an outstretched arm and blank eyes. Some kind of goddess. Cassandra Cautery exited the elevator.
A beautiful girl appeared, smiling like a sunburst. Beside her, the goddess seemed plain. “Hello! You must be Dr. Neumann. And Cassandra! How
are
you? What is that shirt, by the way? I always mean to ask.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, I love you in it.” The girl put her hands on her hips.
“Is he ready?”
The girl turned solemn. “He’ll be two minutes. But if you come with me, I will get you completely set up with whatever you need. Is that okay?”
The girl sashayed away down the corridor. Cassandra Cautery stared after her with loathing. I felt out of my depth, like a deep-sea fish hauled to the surface. I was not compatible with this environment. I did not possess the parts necessary to survive in it. “Where’s Lola?”
“Being looked after.” Her voice was flat. She didn’t look at me. “You need to stay away from her, Charlie. At this point you would do her more harm than good.” She walked after the girl.
I looked at the scanner in my hands. Then I put it on the carpet beside the elevator and followed.
THE GIRL
took us to a sitting room. I say this as someone who is not totally sure what a sitting room is. I mean something from an eighteenth-century mansion: drapes, busy wallpaper, chairs with curving, detailed legs.
Turned
, I think is the word. I straightened my posture. It just felt necessary.
“You know who we’re meeting,” said Cassandra Cautery, once the girl had closed the door on us. This was not posed as a question, although I didn’t know the answer. “The Manager.”
“Which manager?”
“
The
Manager.”
“Who?”
“The Manager,” she said. “The Manager. You know. The Manager.”
“That’s his title?”
Cassandra Cautery stared at me. “Of course not. He’s the chief executive officer. But everyone calls him the Manager. That’s what he does. He manages. You know when Congress wanted to shut us down after the Boston VL38s turned out to be not so nonlethal? Of course you don’t. Because he managed it. How can you not know the Manager?”
Now she mentioned it,
The Manager
did sound familiar. He might have signed off on a few company-wide e-mails that I skimmed through. There might have been a few inspirational quotes from him on the cafeteria notice board.
When people told stories about employees who vanished, projects that evaporated overnight, lab fires that were never officially reported and accidents that never happened, they might have said:
Then The Manager came
. “The Manager.”
“Exactly.” Her thumb slipped into her mouth again. “The Manager.”
THE DOOR
handle clacked open. I was disappointed. The way Cassandra Cautery had been acting, I expected lightning crackling around the shoulders of his tailored suit. And he was in a suit, and I guess it was tailored, but otherwise he looked normal. If I had been buying a car and this guy walked out of the salesroom, I would not have been surprised.
“Dr. Neumann.” He came at me with his hand outstretched and his teeth exposed. His hair was extremely neat. I wouldn’t have thought you could get hair to sit like that. Not with consumer-grade chemicals. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee? Something to eat?”
“No.” I shook his hand. This lasted a while and he smiled the whole time.
“Now.” He looked at my legs. “What’s protocol here? Do I offer you a seat?”
“I’m comfortable.”
“Of course you are. You know what? Let’s all stand.” Cassandra Cautery, who had popped out of her chair when the Manager walked in and was now in the process of lowering herself, arrested her descent. “Okay with you, Cassie?”
“Of course,” she said. Cassie. I would never look at her the same again.
The Manager walked to the window and drew back the drapes. I squinted against the glare. I could barely make out his face. “It’s a thrill to meet you, Dr. Neumann. I’m sincerely
disappointed it’s taken this long.” He did not look at Cassandra Cautery, but in my peripheral vision she tensed. This was some kind of silent, manager-level communication. “I’ve taken a personal interest in your project. We have our fingers in many pies, of course, a large number of speculative pies, but yours captures my imagination. So much of what we do, Dr. Neumann, is about incremental improvement. It’s about doing what we did the year before, only slightly better. Products that are a little lighter. A little cheaper. A little more reliable. You people in the labs, you come up with an incapacitating sound wave that’s like nothing anyone’s ever seen, but the police departments don’t want sound guns. They want Tasers. In fact, they want the Tasers they’re used to, which have been through committee and achieved sign-off from relevant stakeholders, only a little lighter, cheaper, and more reliable. So we take this wonderful innovation that comes from the labs and crush it down to incremental improvement. And I find that depressing. I really do. It’s less than we all deserve. Sometimes when I drive in to work, Dr. Neumann, and I see the buildings coming toward me, I think:
Why aren’t we doing more? Why aren’t we changing the game? Why aren’t we running the world?
” He chuckled. “That’s an expression. But you see my point. We have the brains. We have the production capacity. We have the network. Yet we’re a mere company. An extremely well-respected company with an unparalleled history of technical achievement. We should all be proud of that. But we should also strive to be more. More than just a company that builds what its customers want. What I’ve been thinking is:
What if we could tell them?
What if we could say, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re getting a fucking sound gun. Because it’s a seriously great technology, and you’ll figure that out if you just take it. You’ll get over the sonic leakage and the reverb and bone
damage and all that. Just take the fucking gun.’ And I truly believe, Dr. Neumann, if we do that, people will start to realize, Hey, these guys at Better Future know what they’re talking about. Hey, we don’t need to figure out our own requirements. We don’t need to write up a spec that says each Taser should come with a strap exactly twenty-eight-point-one inches long, and if it’s thirty, my God, there must be half a dozen meetings and phone calls and maybe the whole order should be canceled. They can just sit down with us and ask, ‘What can you give me?’ And we’ll tell them. We’ll tell them.” The Manager put a hand on my shoulder. It felt fatherly. “That’s what excites me about your project. It’s a game changer. We don’t need a demand analysis on Better Eyes. We don’t need to run around asking our customers what kind of quantity of Better Skin they might consider and under what specs. These products are self-marketing. They put us in the driver’s seat. And the best part, Dr. Neumann, the terrific irony, is that it happened because
you
changed
our
game. Did anybody ask you to do this? No. You took it upon yourself. I look at you, Dr. Neumann, and I see a man controlling his own destiny. A man who refuses to let others define him. Nature dealt you a hand, you tossed it back. You said, ‘
I’ll
decide who I am. I’ll choose the limit of my capabilities. I will be not what I was made, but what I make.’ ”