Machine Man (21 page)

“Diablo!”

“Quiet,” I said, because that was making it hard to think. My wounded biceps began transiting from comfortably numb to distractingly sore with hints of impending agony. I tried to concentrate. My legs shivered. That was weird. I hadn’t known they could do that. I wished Lola was here. She would know what to do. It was my weakness: I could not predict people. Lola could. Maybe there was a back entrance. A way into Better Future not protected by security guards with guns they weren’t shy about using. I mentally scanned floor plans. There wasn’t.

“Diablo!”
the woman shrieked. She dropped her groceries and clapped her hands to her cheeks.
“Diablo!”

“Then why am I going back?” I shouted. I wasn’t angry with her. I was just emotional about my own likely death. The Contours began to hammer the sidewalk, bearing me back toward Lola.

I WASN’T
an idiot. I didn’t approach from the front. Adjacent to Better Future was a small industrial plant, and I positioned one hoof on its chain-link fence and pushed. The metal jangled and shrieked and tore from its frame. I ran between building-sized vats and emerged to discover not one but two fences between me and Better Future, because neither company trusted the other. The Better Future fence was higher, stronger, and more likely to automatically notify
somebody upon being breached. I raised a hoof and tore down the first fence, crossed eight feet of no-man’s-land, and positioned a hoof against Better Future’s fence. Every muscle in my body contracted. My teeth gouged my tongue.
“Farg!”
I said. I backed up, my nerves trembling. I didn’t know why I hadn’t realized it would be electrified. It was lucky my electronics were insulated or this would have been a humiliating ending. I looked around for something helpful, like maybe a tall tree I could push over, but saw only struts and scaffolding and other excellent electrical conductors. I looked at the fence again. Maybe twelve feet high. I could possibly jump that. I had never gotten around to testing the Contours’ vertical leap capability under controlled conditions but that one time they had leaped sixty feet in the air. I looked at the Better Future building. I concentrated on a patch of perfect grass on the other side of the fence. I thought,
Take me there
.

The legs settled. I tensed, as if there were anything my muscles could do, and the legs sprang. My torso compressed like an accordion. I bit my tongue again. As I passed over the fence I let go of the seat and flailed my arms in the air, because my body still couldn’t come to grips with the fact that it was attached to two tons of titanium. The Contours thumped into soil. I rocked forward in the seat. I breathed. I was okay. That was actually not so bad. That was the least terrifying and physically damaging leap I had performed in the Contours so far. I thought,
I’m getting the hang of this
, and looked at the Better Future building, and thought,
Oh, shit
. The Contours were not good on stairs. I wouldn’t be able to run between floors. Why hadn’t I fixed that? Why hadn’t this occurred to me before I was standing on the lawn? I could see what I thought was Lola’s balcony and thought,
Jump
, and,
Are you crazy, that’s like fifty feet
. I began to walk toward the building but without enthusiasm.
I didn’t know if I could do this. I couldn’t think of any logical reason why not but it was incredibly high and would kill me if I got it wrong. I thought,
Is that even the right balcony?
I thought,
I don’t even know if she’s in there
. I stopped. I felt relief, then shame. I thought,
Fuck it, I’ll do it
, and changed my mind again. Sweat tickled my ribs. My biceps throbbed. I thought,
That needs medical attention. I should have it seen to before I do anything to make it worse
. Lola’s balcony was high. It was really high.

A Better Future Hummer skidded around the corner, its engine screaming. Its tires tore up chunks of turf and spat them across the grass. It fishtailed one way, then the other. Its grille centered on me. I stood frozen. Then I put up my hands. I did not want to get shot. The Hummer accelerated and a part of my brain informed me that it was doing so well beyond its need to reach me in a hurry. I ignored this information because surely that couldn’t be right, until it was incontrovertible and too late to address.

There is an expression:
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
. I had a hammer. I had a servomagnetic lithium-powered titanium hammer. So when the Hummer fell upon me, I kicked it. It went up on two wheels. The other two passed over my head. It sailed a drunken twenty meters, teetering on the brink of tipping over, like it was in a circus. As it wobbled toward the Better Future building I realized the driver faced two mutually exclusive objectives: to bring the car down onto four wheels or to not ram a ground-floor meeting room. This was really an either/or decision but the driver tried to accomplish both and the Hummer hit the building at a thirty-degree angle and disappeared halfway inside. Glass and brick dust burst across the lawn.

Arguably, I deserve no credit for this. My input was limited to being very sure that I did not want to be run over.
The Contours took care of the rest: bracing of one leg against the ground, timing of the swing, delivery of the correct amount of force. But then again, that was my code. I had written it without this particular situation in mind, but the fact remained, they were my instructions. From this perspective, I deserved plenty of credit, even more than someone whose body was grown for them. So I looked up. I located Lola’s balcony. I jumped.

Glass flashed past my face. Wind pulled at my clothes. I squeezed shut my eyes and gritted my teeth and tried not to die. It felt like I might. The g-force eased and I opened my eyes to see whether I was anywhere near where I needed to be to survive and saw my hooves clear a balcony railing by two inches. I landed as gently as if I had just stepped off the lowest rung of a ladder. I understood the physics, but still. I sucked in air. I was alive. I looked at my Contours and had never felt so much love for an object.

The balcony door slid back. “Charlie!” Lola came out of the suite. I was on the right balcony. Spatial skills: I had them. She threw herself at me. Inside, through the glass, I saw cats in lab coats everywhere. Jason and Mirka among them. I saw the nurse. They began to hastily empty the room. “Did you feel that? I think it was an earthquake!”

“That was me.”

Lola leaned over the balcony. “How did you get here? Did you jump? Did you
jump
?”

“We need to get out.”

“What’s that smoke?”

“Lola. It’s important we get out of here as fast as possible.”

“Okay.” She took my hand, the biological one. “I knew you’d come back. I knew it.”

I threw a glance at the suite. It had cleared out. Those damn cats. Then I realized I couldn’t jump out of here. Not
with Lola. The moment my legs touched the ground and I began to decelerate, Lola would weigh the equivalent of two thousand pounds. “Oh. We have a problem.”

“What? Let’s go.”

“I can’t hold you.”

“Sure you can.” She held out her arms. “I’m little.”

“When we land, you’ll weigh as much as a car.” To her expression, I added, “That’s not me. That’s physics.” I looked at my metal fingers. If I’d had the arms, this might have been doable.

“Are you bleeding?”

“Oh. Yes.” I showed her my biceps. “I got damaged.”

“You mean injured.”

“What did I say?”

“You …” She shook her head. “What happened?”

“They shot me.”

“Who shot you?”

“The company. Guards.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“Why would they do that? Charlie?”

“I kicked the CEO.”

Lola’s eyebrows leaped. “Oh, no.”

“It was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“How badly hurt is he?”

“Um …”

“They have really good doctors here. Maybe—”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh, Charlie.”

“I’m sorry.” I meant for upsetting Lola. The Manager I was still mad at.

“And now they want to kill you?”

“I don’t know. They shot at me.”

“They must think you’re dangerous. It’s a misunderstanding.”

“Should I try to talk to them?”

Lola frowned. “What did you mean before, ‘That was me’? How did you make that smoke?”

“I kicked a car. It tried to run me over. I had to kick it. Into the building.”

“Oh. Oh.”

“That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“I think that’s really bad.”

“They’re putting parts in people. Military parts. They gave you a military heart.”

“A what?”

“A military—”

“What does that mean? What the fuck is a
military heart
?”

“I don’t—” Something went
dink
. “Was that the elevator?”

“We have to get out of here,” said Lola.

“Yes.”

“Pick me up and run. We can go down the stairs.”

“The Contours aren’t good on stairs.”

“What does that mean?”

“A bug, I guess. I haven’t had a chance to go through the software—”

“What does that mean for
us
?”

“It means we can’t take the stairs.”

“Okay. We can … let’s try to sneak down in the elevators.”

“The elevators won’t work unless …” Footsteps. Lola squeezed my hand. I felt that strange attractive force stir, trying to pull my fingers toward her chest.

“Charlie …”

It was a puzzle, I realized. Like having a bag of corn, a chicken, a fox, and a boat that could bear only one object across the river at a time. I could jump out of here, but Lola couldn’t. She couldn’t open the stairwell doors, assuming security had locked everything down, but she could walk down stairs, which I couldn’t.

“Can you stomp through the floor?”

“What? It’s reinforced concrete.”

“Is that a no?”

“Obviously it’s a no!”

“Don’t look at me like that!”

“I just …” I had it. It was simple. I would accompany Lola to a stairwell. Kick open the door. Jump down to ground level. Reenter the building. Kick open the door at ground level. Grab her. Run away. It was a good plan. Simple. It made a few assumptions about my likelihood of being shot. But it was a solution. I took her hand and entered the suite.

A man appeared in the doorway. A guard. And I stood there, my plan forgotten, because the guard was Carl.

HE LOOKED
different. At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was distracted by other thoughts, like why he was here. I had thought he was gone. Terminated, one way or another. But here he was, blocking the only exit that didn’t require falling eighty feet.

“Hi, Carl.” The light from the corridor made it hard to see his face. “How are you?”

He didn’t move. Lola peeked around me.

Still nothing. He was wearing his security uniform, although that looked different, too. “There has been a strange series of events,” I said. “I don’t know which side of the story you heard, but …”

Carl stepped into the room. What was different about him became clear. I hadn’t clicked earlier because Carl had always been big. But not this big. Not so big he had to turn sideways to fit through a door.

His arms were concealed beneath his uniform. But where his hands protruded from his sleeves they were thick blocks of gray metal. They looked like sledgehammers. I had never seen these before.

“Miss Shanks,” Carl said. “You were always very kind to me.”

His eyes moved to mine. In that moment it was clear to me that Carl knew I had asked Cassandra Cautery to get rid of him.

“In appreciation of that,” he said, “I will give you a head start.”

CARL’S PANT
legs jutted in odd places. When he stepped, steel gleamed between his pants and boots. He did not have metal legs. But he had something on his legs. A kind of exoskeleton, like scaffolding. It made sense. You couldn’t weld titanium to a man’s shoulders. It would crush him. But this annoyed me. An exoskeleton was a hack. It was layering technology on top of a broken system. It was a failure to address the root problem.

Carl stopped at a service elevator and swiped his ID card. This was interesting because a moment ago Carl’s hands had been blocks of stone. Now they had split into fingers supple enough to grasp the tag. It seemed they could separate into at least four digits, then come together to deliver a punching force. That wasn’t a bad idea, for security guard hands.

“This will open in the garage. Then you’re on your own. I advise you to run.”

Lola and I shuffled inside. Lola said, “Thank you, Carl.”

“I’m not doing you a favor. I’m repaying a debt.”

Lola looked at me. “Um,” I said. “Thank you. And I’m sorry.”

The elevator doors began to close. Carl raised a hand to block them. His fist was a block again. “Pardon me?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For asking them to get rid of me? Is that what you mean? For having them take away my arms because you didn’t want to share your parts? Is that what you’re talking about? The time I spent in a bed with a button to push with my foot when I needed someone to help me go to the bathroom? That?”

He lowered his arm. I heard the thin whine of servomagnetics. The elevator door began to close.

“Don’t apologize,” Carl said. “I have my own parts now.”

LOLA WAS
silent as the elevator descended. I risked a glance at her: she stared straight ahead, her arms stiff. I said, “Do you think this elevator really takes us to the garage, or is it a trap?”

“Did you take Carl’s arms away?”

“I don’t think it’s the best time to discuss this.”

“Did you make them take away his arms?”

“They weren’t
his
arms,” I said, but Lola’s lips thinned to a dramatic slash and I decided to drop this argument. “Let’s talk later.”

“I’m disappointed, Charlie.”

I felt bad. My tetrodotoxin had worn off. I knew it wasn’t my top priority but I wished Lola wouldn’t be disappointed. The elevator thumped to a stop. The doors seemed to take a long time to open. I held out my arms. “Come here.” Her eyebrows dived like submarines. “I need to carry you.”