Machine Man (7 page)

Finally Lola emerged, doing up her top button. “They swabbed me,” she said. “They swabbed my mouth.”

The guard handed her a tag. “Please wear this at all times. If you lose it, you can’t get out.”

Lola looked at me, amused, and I shook my head to tell her no, seriously. She clipped the tag to her polo shirt.

“Was there a problem?”

“Oh. No. I just have trouble with metal detectors.” She adjusted her glasses. “Forget that. Show me your leg.”

“ONE OF
the problems with biological legs,” I said in the elevator, “is they can’t survive on their own. They’re not modular. This creates isolated points of failure and dependency issues. All of which go away if you make the leg self-sufficient.”

Lola looked up from fiddling with her access badge. “Self-sufficient?”

“As in, it works by itself. It doesn’t need a warm body for fuel.”

“The Exegesis doesn’t need fuel.”

“Yes, it does. Look, I’m giving it kinetic energy right now.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Without me, it just
sits
there.” I glanced at her. “I mean, it’s better than nothing.”

“That’s a really good leg, Charlie.”

“For what it is—”

“Go to a public hospital. See what they’re making kids walk around in down there.” Her eyes glistened.

“Um,” I said.

“Sticks,” said Lola. “Buckets on sticks.”

“The Exegesis is also a bucket on a stick. That’s my point. It’s a terrible design. Why has nobody built a prosthesis that can walk by itself? That’s what I want to know.”

“A what?”

“It’s obvious.” I gestured with my free hand. “You put a motor in the leg.”

Lola stopped walking. “
Have
you put a motor in a leg?”

“Yes. No. Not
a
motor. Several motors. You need multiple
motors to redundantly articulate the toes.” I was nervous. I hadn’t shown anybody the leg. Not complete. I had even hidden it from my lab assistants. “It’s experimental. There’s a lot I need to do. But I want your feedback. As a professional.”

Lola studied me. Then she looked around. “Where is it?”

I took her to Lab 4. It was unlikely we’d bump into my assistants; Katherine spent most of her time these days with the rats, and Jason was glued to his terminal in the Glass Room. Given the opportunity, Jason would probably stay there forever. We had much in common.

“How far down are we?” She was looking at the steel buttresses lining the walls.

“About sixty feet.” I swiped my ID tag on the door reader. The door clicked. “You need to swipe your thing here, too.”

“Why are we down sixty feet?”

“In case something goes wrong.” She followed me into Lab 4. The leg was beneath a white sheet on an insulated floor mat. It was surrounded by workbenches and lights. The sheet was because I didn’t want anyone looking at it from the Glass Room and giving suggestions.

Lola looked at me. I nodded and she approached it. I looked up: no sign of Jason. Good. Lola touched the sheet. “Can I …?”

I pulled off the sheet. Lola inhaled. I looked at her face to see if this was a good inhalation or a bad one. It was hard to tell. How did the leg appear to someone who hadn’t seen it before? Kind of spiderlike, I guessed. The upper section was a black lattice of interlocking steel. From there two silver pistons fed into a splayed eight-toed foot. I had been very proud of this but suddenly it looked creepy.

Lola walked around it three times. She stopped near the Clamp. It was still there. You didn’t decommission machinery
of that caliber just because some idiot managed to lose a limb in it. “You built this?”

“Yes.”

“How did you … how did you build this?”

“You know.” I shrugged. “A little at a time.”

“It looks heavy.”

“It’s about two hundred pounds.” I pointed at dents in the floor. “It made those.”

“How do you lift it?”

“I don’t. It walks by itself.”

Lola looked at me.

“It’s not ideal. It has to remain in contact with the ground. But it can handle stairs. Those toes can get up to ten inches long. And you can’t see it, but underneath are two orbital wheels on a shifting multidimensional axis. It alternates between toes and wheels depending on the terrain.”

She walked around the leg. “What’s this?” She gestured to a series of black aluminum cases welded up near the socket.

“The processor housing. I’m not really happy with the positioning.”

“What’s it for?”

“Systems control. Data storage, GPS, wi-fi, et cetera.”

“Your leg has wi-fi?”

“It has to. Otherwise it couldn’t interface with the online path-finding API.”

Lola’s eyebrows rose.

“You shouldn’t need to tell your leg where to step. You should tell it where you want to go and let it figure out how to get there. That’s basic encapsulation.”

Lola looked back at the leg. I don’t think she really understood encapsulation. She knelt beside the leg and ran her fingers over the metal.

“I’ll put it on.” I pulled over an office chair and began
unstrapping the Exegesis. It clanked to the floor and I flicked the latch that caused the new leg to ease down into a bent position. The hydraulics hissed. I positioned my stump against the socket and slid in. That was nothing special. It was just somewhere to stick my thigh.

“There are no straps?”

I shook my head. “I basically rest in it.” I steadied myself, then stood up in the leg. “Ready?” She nodded. I pressed for power. The servomagnetics started near silently. There was a line of crude buttons for simple functions and I pressed one for a short forward journey. The leg flexed in three places and glided forward. I leaned into it and performed a matching step with my biological leg. This was the clunkiest part of the whole procedure. I wasn’t happy with that. The entire time Lola was silent.

I cleared my throat. “What do you think?”

“Oh, Charlie. It’s beautiful. It’s completely beautiful.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Oh. Thank you.”

AFTER I
escorted Lola back aboveground, I returned to Lab 4 and sat on the floor beside my leg. I had thought Lola might like my leg, but you never knew. Her reaction exceeded all my expectations.

Then I felt depressed. It was the opposite of a logical reaction but there it was. I always felt like this at the end of a project. I would be frantic and determined and excited then sad because it was over and there was nothing left to improve. I stared at the leg. It occurred to me that I hadn’t escaped my bottlenecks. I had only pushed them back. I had made a leg that could walk by itself, which was okay, but I could see now that this was about as far as it could go. All improvement from here would be incremental, because the bottleneck was my body.

It was late. My lab assistants had left. I looked at my leg, the good one. Well. I don’t mean “good.” I mean the one I’d had since birth. I rolled up my pants and turned it this way and that. It was fat and weak and ordinary. The more I looked at it, the more it bugged me.

I PULLED
my prosthetic leg apart. I didn’t mean to but once I got started I kept seeing more things I could make better. When I saw it lying in pieces I panicked about what I had done, but it was okay. I could rebuild this.

I scavenged parts from adjoining labs. I sent my assistants out for hard-to-get materials. I didn’t tell them what they were for. But they probably knew. You didn’t become a scientist if you could resist the urge to check what was under a white sheet in a spotlit laboratory. I stopped answering e-mail and performing paid duties. I did not shave. I built the leg into a new configuration that increased its mobility by half but immediately saw a better solution and stripped it down again. Some time passed. I am not sure how much. Sometimes I fell asleep in the lab and awoke in a cold puddle of drool. When I visited the vending machine, I carted away as many snacks as my arms could bear and piled them in the corner, so I could work for longer periods. The worst thing was going to the bathroom, which was all the way at the end of the corridor, near the elevators. The best part was making it there, because then I had a six- to eight-hour uninterrupted window ahead of me, and while leaning back on the toilet with my eyes closed, I would have ideas.

Messages from Lola accumulated in my voice mail. On the nights I made it to my bunk I listened to them before falling asleep. I put her on speaker and it was like she was in the room. Her messages urged me to call her, turning
increasingly anxious. It was good to feel wanted. But I did not call her back, because my legs weren’t quite ready.

JASON BROUGHT
me a set of thirty-inch coil springs. I had the leg pieces spread across my workbench. I wasn’t hiding what I was doing anymore. We had passed that point.

I realized he wasn’t leaving, and pushed up my goggles. “Yes?”

Jason’s eyes flicked across the components. “You wanted two springs.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“It looks … it looks like you’re building
two
legs.”

I looked at my pieces. It was hard to deny.

“I don’t really …” said Jason. “I don’t understand why you want two.”

“Backup.”

“Oh.” He did not look convinced. Still he hung there. “Is there anything I can do for you, Dr. Neumann? Anything at all?”

I thought about this. “I would like some more snacks.”

He brought them.

I FINISHED
my new legs. Well. I reached a point at which I no longer felt an urgent, clawing need to change things. I tried to stay calm but I was trembling inside. I swallowed over and over. I felt scared to look at them. It was silly. But everything about this moment seemed fragile.

I couldn’t wear them, of course. They were a set; I didn’t fit. But I could sit beside them and enjoy their presence. It was quiet, just me and them.

WHEN I
was fifteen, I was almost killed by a shirtless man in a Dodge Viper. I was crossing a suburban street on my way home from school and he roared around the corner. I think he expected me to scurry out of the way, but I didn’t, because I was fifteen and valued appearing tough to strangers over remaining alive. The shirtless man clearly shared this philosophy, because his car jagged toward me. I realized I was going to die, or at least be hurt a lot. But at the last second—too late, in a car less well engineered—the Viper slid to a smoking halt.

The driver leaned out the window and screamed abuse. This was when I saw he was shirtless. He wore mirror shades and chunky jewelry, which flew around as he gesticulated. I tensed, in case he was about to get out and beat me up, but he only stabbed fingers in my direction, punctuating insults I couldn’t hear over the torrent of high-fidelity music pouring from his stereo.

Finally he put the car in gear and drove off. I watched him slingshot around the next corner, already up to forty or fifty miles per hour. I walked on. I felt vaguely outraged that such a bad person had such a good car. Because the car was the culmination of a thousand-odd years of scientific advancement. But the guy was a dick. I wondered when that had happened; that we had started making better machines than people.

MY ASSISTANTS
arrived in the Glass Room holding coffees and talking about something they seemed to find funny. They saw me and froze.

“Dr. Neumann?” said Katherine. I inferred this from her lip movements. I was on the other side of the polymer glass and she hadn’t toggled the intercom. I waited for her to realize this. “Dr. Neumann … what’s in the syringe?”

“Morphine.” This came out muffled because I was holding my shirtsleeve in my teeth. But I think she understood. I completed the injection and let my sleeve drop. “For the pain.”

Katherine and Jason shared a glance. Jason leaned toward the microphone. “What pain is that, Dr. Neumann?”

I felt disappointed. These guys were supposed to be the brightest minds of their generation. Yet here I was in the Clamp with a syringe of morphine and they couldn’t figure it out. “I think that will become obvious.”

On one wall of the Glass Room was the Big Red Button. If you flipped up its clear plastic panel and pressed it, everything lost power. A sign said
EMERGENCIES ONLY
. A while ago somebody had taped beside it:
DO! NOT!!! PUSH!
, because lab assistants are curious. Jason’s eyes flicked at the button.

“Please call Medical,” I said.

To his credit, Jason made it look like he was going for the phone. He leaned in that direction and picked up the handset. Then lunged at the Big Red Button.

But my button was closer. It was in my hand. The Clamp was powered up, humming on standby. Its steel plates were positioned about—well, a foot apart. I was sitting on one edge. My left leg, the biological one, dangled.

It was just as well I took care of this in advance, because the morphine was already seeping into my neurons, fogging my synapses. If I hadn’t been prepared, Jason would have reached the Big Red Button before I could activate the Clamp and crush my leg. But I was, and he didn’t, and I did.

I WOKE
but not in the hospital. It took me a while to figure this out because I couldn’t focus my eyes and because I really, really should have been in the hospital.