Machine Man (29 page)

A rectangle of light appeared. As the ramp broadened, Hummers slid up on either side. Fresh air slapped my face. I was outside. The cars turned onto the road and the Threes followed. I got too close to a Hummer and my gun arm clanged against its side. The Hummer rocked. Its tires squealed.

I thought,
Was that deliberate?
I was talking to my parts. They couldn’t hear me. They weren’t conscious. But it was the best model I had for this behavior, so I was going with it until I figured out something better.
Okay, then
.

I veered left. My gun arm kissed the Hummer’s door. I pushed, gentle but firm. The Hummer fought back. White smoke streamed from its tires. The Jason in my head radiated alarm, and I gently closed the window on him. I pushed the Hummer until it popped out of formation and spun in a smoking half-circle. Then I accelerated through the gap and left them behind. Wind blasted by, tearing at my eyes. For the first time since I had gained consciousness I felt glad to be alive.

ONCE AT
university I fed a dollar into a vending machine, pressed C and 4, and nothing happened. So I pressed the buttons again, with more authority, then cancel, then many buttons at the same time. I cursed and slapped it, because I was nineteen and someone was coming down the corridor, and I said, “Fuckin’ machine.”

Later I saw another guy staring at it. I opened my mouth to tell him it was busted, but before I could, he slapped its side, the exact place I had, and said, “Fuckin’ machine.”

I guess it’s always uncomfortable to discover you’re not as individual as you thought. But it really bothered me. From one perspective, I was an independent animal, exercising free will in order to elicit predictable reactions from an inert vending machine. But from another, the vending machine was choosing to withhold snacks in order to extract
predictable, mechanical reactions from young men. I couldn’t figure out any objective reason to consider one scenario more likely than the other.

I tried to raise this with a philosophy major at a floor party. She said, “Oh, you’re a determinist.” Her tone implied that this was naïve and funny. I knew what the word meant when applied to algorithms but not people. “You don’t believe in free will,” she said. “You think everything’s gears and levers.” She had a lollipop and at this point she sucked it. I didn’t think I disbelieved in free will but as we talked I learned she thought brains were magical consciousness fairylands so maybe I did. Before we got anywhere she went off and made out with a guy I didn’t know. I felt lonely and unsatisfied and went downstairs and sat on the floor in front of the vending machine. I didn’t know why, exactly. I just felt we had something in common.

THE STREET
turned to meet the main road and I followed it, moving between cars. A horn blared. A yellow sedan was in the lane ahead and I saw the driver’s eyes flick into the rearview mirror. Then the car leaped into the SUV beside it. Glass popped. I pounded past. I was supposed to be keeping a low profile, but that wasn’t my priority. My priority was finding Lola before her heart stopped.

Something went
clunk
in my gun arm. I thought,
Oh-oh
, because maybe this was how they remotely shut me down. Then I remembered what Jason had said about unlocking my ammunition. I felt an urge to test this hypothesis. I should wait. I shouldn’t start shooting things on a major roadway. But on the other hand, it was really tempting. The day I bought my phone, I had a major report due and tried hard to resist playing with it. I held out until nightfall but by six a.m. was still awake and discovering new features and
I had to call in sick. This was like that, only attached to me, and with bullets.
I should test it now
, I thought. I couldn’t wait to learn how it worked until Carl was running at me, swinging sledgehammer arms. That would be really poor planning. I looked around. Coming up on the right was a giant billboard. On it an attractive family in bright clothes laughed and draped themselves around a game console. I thought,
That
.

I raised my gun arm. I clenched my mental fist. The arm barked like a chain saw. It sounded angry. The billboard burst apart. Shell casings jingled across the asphalt beside me, jettisoning from my arm in a flume of white gas. Pieces of billboard fluttered to the ground. As I ran through them, I thought,
I am a Lola-rescuing machine
. And something inside me replied,
I am a Lola-rescuing machine
. I smiled, because if that wasn’t an echo, it was pretty clever.

ON OCCASION
Jason appeared at the window inside my head. Each time he imparted an impression of location and I accepted this and closed the window again. I didn’t need to plot a route. My legs could do that. It left me free to consider what I would do when I encountered Carl. Although, after the billboard, maybe I was overthinking it. The facts were I had speed, strength, smarts, and a gun. Carl had arms. What was he going to do, punch me in the head? Actually, maybe yes. I should be wary of that. But that was surely the extent of the danger. All I had to do was keep my distance.

The Contours left the roadway and leaped nimbly over the railing. I flinched, but they knew what they were doing. My hooves dug into a concrete embankment and I heard the locking pins fire. Twin jets of concrete dust spat by my face. I was damaging a lot of city infrastructure here. The
Threes tensed and sprang across a wide concrete storm drain. I braced but it was like landing on a sofa. We ran beneath a bridge. I heard a helicopter and wondered if it was for me. Ahead was a storm tunnel, big enough to drive a car through, but its face was protected by an iron grate. My legs slowed. They felt hesitant.
Oh
, I thought.
Sorry
. I raised my gun arm and clenched and the grate disintegrated. The Threes picked up speed. My abdomen rotated in three ringed sections and I passed through the remains of the grate sideways, then swiveled to face forward again.

My hooves slapped through low water. It was black in the tunnels but on the electromagnetic spectrum the walls were edged in fluorescent blue and the water flared motion white. The tunnel turned, forked, and forked again. Finally I stopped. I looked around. I didn’t see what was so special about this section of tunnel. Then I noticed a hatch twenty feet above my head. A ladder ran up the wall. But I wouldn’t be needing that. I raised my gun arm.

Then I reconsidered. Carl was close. I shouldn’t alert him. I lowered the gun arm and studied the other one, the one with the triple prong of claw fingers. I hadn’t tested this yet. I wondered what it could do. I pointed at the hatch and thought,
Remove that
.

The claw fired out of my arm, trailing metal cable. It popped the hatch out of its housing, bent it in two, and pulled it back down into the tunnel. The cable ratcheted back into my arm but before I could flinch at the sight of a folded metal hatch rocketing toward me I was holding it. I looked at it a moment. That was pretty good. I placed the hatch on the ground and looked up. The access hole was not wide. I wasn’t sure I could fit through there. But of course this wasn’t something I needed to figure out. At least, not with my brain. I had parts for that.

The Threes settled and sprang. My arms folded tight
against my body. We scraped against concrete and a constellation of sparks blossomed near my face. Then we were through. The Threes spread and my hooves locked on to solid concrete floor. The crack of the firing pins echoed like gunshots. That was a shame.

I was in a multilevel parking garage. Cars filled the bays. From my last contact with Jason, Carl was here somewhere, but I didn’t know where. I chose up. As I rounded the first level, I began to feel nervous. This was not a great environment for spotting Carl. The concrete shielded EM and infrared was polluted with recently active car engines. I slowed. I decided to abandon my surprise plan. I was feeling pretty unstoppable, at this point. I sucked in air and shouted:
“Lola!”

My voice bounced back at me. Nothing. I inhaled again.

“Charlie!”

I ran. Two levels up, a brown sedan backed out in front of me, its red brake lights steaming, and I pushed it aside with my gun arm. I didn’t mean to hit it hard but the Contours braced automatically and the sedan bounced into the wall. I rounded another corner and stopped because there was Carl.

He was bigger than I expected. He hadn’t grown. I had just forgotten. He was shirtless, which allowed me to see the metal support structure around his torso. His arms were huge, much larger than my own. He was built for strength. It was a moment before I realized he had Lola in front of him, his hands gripping her shoulders. She was so small by comparison that I had missed her. She stared at me with her mouth open. I looked different, of course.

“Hold it,” said Carl. “No closer.”

This was pretty stupid. Carl had clearly not thought through our relative strengths and weaknesses. If anything, he should be trying to lure me closer. This was why I was
going to beat him: the intelligence differential. I raised my arm. He didn’t even know I had a gun. This was going to end really quickly.

I thought,
Is Carl such a bad guy?
Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe I could talk him into releasing Lola and he could get the psychiatric help he needed. Now I had him at my mercy, I felt a little bad. He had only wanted new arms. You couldn’t blame him for that.

“Charlie,” said Lola. “Please listen to Carl.”

Her tone was odd. She didn’t sound terrified. And why would Lola say that? Was she confused? I realized the way Carl’s hands were hovering near Lola’s shoulders, that wasn’t to hold her. That was protective.

“Carl wants to help,” said Lola. “He didn’t kidnap me. He rescued me.”

I said, “What?”

Carl cleared his throat. “Dr. Neumann, this might be hard to hear.”

I thought,
Just shoot him
. A part answered,
Yes
.

“I thought I wanted to be strong. I knew I couldn’t go back. You know. For my fiancée. But I wanted to be prepared. In case I needed to be strong again. So I wanted the arms. You understand.”

Stockholm syndrome? That was when kidnap victims sympathized with their abductors. It was a psychological condition.

“The thing is, after I got the arms, they started talking. Took me a while to believe it. Thought I was going crazy.”

I hoped Lola was hearing this. And drawing the logical conclusion: that Carl was insane.

“They wanted to crush things. To smash. I tried to tell people. But no one would listen. Not management, not the scientists, those kids. They only cared about the arms. I started sleeping with them, because it hurt to take them off,
and one time I woke up and they were bending the bed in half. When I got irritated, they grabbed things. Then they threw a guy against a wall. I thought I’d killed him. That was when I knew I had to take off. I had to find you, and warn you.” His eyes moved to Lola. She tilted her head to look up at him. I did not like that. I didn’t like either of them. “Sorry about leaving you behind. I thought you were dead.”

“Lola,” I said. “Come. Here. A minute.”

“I hoped Lola could help me figure out what was going on. That’s why I saved her. I carried her right out through the flames. I was strong enough this time. And I was right. She’s helped a lot.”

“Lola,” I said. “Really. Come here.”

She said, “Charlie, can you talk to your parts?”

This was irrelevant. “Carl. This is a gun. This arm. It shoots. So let go. Of Lola.”

“Oh, Charlie,” said Lola. “Charlie, no.”

“It’s all right. Just. Ahead. Of schedule.”

“We have to get rid of your parts.”

I said, “Pardon?”

“You told me once you don’t need to think about where you step: that the legs figure it out. That’s clever, Charlie, that’s the kind of thing you do, but it created a problem. Because brains are plastic. They adapt. When you lose a limb, the parts of your brain in charge of it, the neurons, they don’t just sit there. They look for new jobs. There was a woman with a transtibial earlier this year, and I know how this sounds, but her eyesight improved. One man got better at math. We try to get people into prosthetics quickly so that we can capture those neurons for motor function before they wind up somewhere else. And what I think, Charlie, is your machine parts are too easy. They didn’t give your neurons anything to do. So they wound up all over.
Can you talk to your parts, Charlie? Do they have a mind of their own? Because I think that’s you. Your subconscious, being no longer so sub. But it’s okay. Over time, we can retrain your brain. With physical therapy, we can move your neurons elsewhere. We can—”

“Let me. Stop you. There.” I drew in breath for an entire sentence. “I’m not sure you appreciate that at this point I am a head.”

“Charlie—”

“There is no. Getting rid of. The parts. I
am
the parts. Look. I passed that point. I sawed off. My arm. Sawed it off. So let’s calm down. And forget crazy ideas that. Can never happen.”

“The id is supposed to stay underwater, Charlie. It’s not supposed to be conscious.”