Machine Man (6 page)

“Okay.”

She smiled. “I just want you to know you’re not alone.”

CASSANDRA CAUTERY
escorted me as far as the Glass Room. Inside, my lab assistants Jason and Elaine were at their desks. Katherine I could see down in Lab 2, doing something to rats. Katherine was always messing with those rats. She’d made them little houses and ramps out of sheet fiber. One had a kind of swing. I had been meaning to take her
aside and tell her she would regret this kind of thing when it came time for destructive testing.

Jason’s and Elaine’s eyes followed me across the floor. I landed in my office chair. Elaine said, “Welcome back, Dr. Neumann.”

“Thank you.”

Elaine looked at Jason. Jason said nothing. Elaine said, “We’re glad you’re okay.”

I turned on my computer. This thing took forever to boot. I fingered my pants pocket, seeking my phone.

“We had counseling.”

I looked at her. “Why?”

“To deal with it. The accident. It was pretty gruesome. Very gruesome. I have nightmares.” She hesitated. Across Elaine’s forehead marched a parade of acne. She had violent skin. She wore her hair in thick bangs but you could still see it. “It was good. The counseling. They encouraged us to talk. They said we should share our feelings with you, if you were comfortable with that.”

I looked at Jason. He was very upright, his face stiff. His head moved left, right, left, very slightly. I felt grateful to Jason. If everybody were like him we could just move on and pretend nothing ever happened.

Elaine said, “So I don’t know if … if you are comfortable. With talking about it. If not—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh. Okay. No problem.” She turned away. Her shoulders hunched. I had consigned her to nightmares, I guess. But I wasn’t responsible for her brain. I didn’t control what she thought. She was a human being. She should take ownership of what occurred between her ears.

“Welcome back, Dr. Neumann,” said Jason. He had visibly relaxed. He swiveled back to his desk and we got to work.

I LEFT
the Glass Room for lunch. The corridors were busy and my ski foot attracted attention. People stared without shame. We were a company of engineers: they were interested in how things worked. I kept moving, but when I reached the Building A cafeteria there was a line. The man ahead of me turned and saw my leg. “Hey. Are you that guy?”

“Which …” I said. “Yes.”

“You chopped off your leg?” He bent down and peered at it. “In the lab?”

“Crushed.”

“Do you mind if I touch?”

“Uh …” Two more people in the line turned. A bearded guy got up from his table and headed toward me, trailing lab assistants. “Okay.”

“Interesting shape,” said a woman behind me.

“Let me just roll up the pants here.” The man glanced up. “Is that okay? I can’t see.”

“I’ll do it.” I pulled up the pant leg. There was a murmur of appreciation. I flushed.

“Look at the knee,” said the beard.

“It’s moving with the piston here,” said the man, now on his hands and knees, peering up. “That, what, makes it more comfortable to walk?”

“And his leg fits into that plastic bit.”

“The socket.”

“What holds that on?”

“Straps,” I said. “Just cloth straps.”

There was silence. The blue-shirt guy peered around for another few moments, but didn’t see anything else that caught his attention. “Well, that’s really amazing.”

“Incredible,” said the beard. “Just fantastic, what they’re doing.”

“Very smart,” said the woman.

These people’s ID tags said
AERONAUTICAL DEVELOPMENT
and
MOLECULAR REENGINEERING
and
BIOMATERIALS
. To the average scientist,
stupid
was failing to account for behavioral changes exhibited by magnetohydrodynamics when accelerated to supersonic speeds. It was being uncomfortable with Gödel numbering. A few months ago I had attended a presentation on living gels, and when a man in the audience said something was
smart
, he was referring to a process for tricking living cells into fusing with carbon molecules for the first time in human history. And he said it grudgingly. We did not use the word
smart
lightly. We did not use it about a hinge.

“Very nice.” Someone patted me lightly on the shoulder. “Very nice.” I rolled down my pants, ashamed.

I CARRIED
my lunch to a bathroom and locked myself in a stall. As I picked my sandwich out of the plastic wrap, I remembered what Lola Shanks had said: that things would be tough, and that would make me a better person. She said it was about
how you respond to the challenge
. I was glad she wasn’t here to see this.

I RECEIVED
an e-mail from Cassandra Cautery informing me that a car would take me home whenever I wanted. I just had to call a number. I recorded this in my phone and kept working. After everybody left, I caught the elevator to the AV Center, where vending machines offered energy bars, fruit, and cola outside darkened presentation rooms. It was free, so that engineers wouldn’t wander around trying to find the most efficient sources of calories per dollar. I chose some snack bars and apples and returned to the Glass
Room. I had nothing to do. Most of my work had been reassigned while I was away, the remainder had no deadline. I ate my snacks and played with some programs but was not inspired. I read a sensationalist article about the future of embedded operating systems. Around ten, I picked up my phone. The driver said he would be ten minutes. I waited five, pulled on my jacket, and left the Glass Room. When I stepped out on the ground floor, the corridor lights glowed a dim yellow and the lobby was empty. My footsteps echoed, a soft scuff from my shoe followed by a scrape of carbon polymer, like some kind of machine process.

I DISCOVERED
Building A had bunks. They were small, featureless rooms with barely enough space for a bed, but anyone could use them. If you had two hours before the catalytic cracker finished, you could get some downtime. There were also showers and a twenty-four-hour kitchen. I half-expected to find it populated by a loud, jokey community of scientists, like island shipwreck survivors, but it was empty. I called my driver and asked if he could collect some things from my house. That night I microwaved a shrink-wrapped meal and slept in a bunk. When I woke, I showered and dressed and caught the elevator back and this entire time I didn’t see a single other person. I wished I had thought of this earlier.

IT BECAME
annoying to sit. To transit, from standing. The Exegesis was good for movement but gave me nothing when I went to lower myself into a chair. It was all up to my biological leg, which was thin and weak and complained at the effort. At the hospital, when I’d been doing physical therapy, it had bulked up a little, but since then it had shrunk
back to default size. So now I accelerated into chairs, making a
whoof
upon impact. It wasn’t a huge problem. But it was not ideal.

When the assistants left, I removed my leg, clamped it to a workbench, and swung over some lighting. I studied the knee. Then I disassembled it. By midnight I had built a governor. It looked like a tin of peaches, affixed below the knee. When I flicked a little metal switch on the side, it limited the speed at which the knee could flex. I strapped it on and tried sitting. It worked. I could lower myself into a chair at normal speed with no effort. But I felt unsatisfied. Now that I thought about it, it was very primitive to have to flick a switch. The knee should figure out when to engage itself.

At three in the morning I gave up on the governor idea and connected the knee’s microprocessor to a computer so I could unpick its code. I figured I could modify this and flash new instructions. This took eight hours. In the meantime Jason and Katherine arrived and asked through the speaker if I needed help. I had them bring me snacks. Finally I loaded new code onto the chip and powered it on. The capacitor popped and died.

I stared at it. I needed sleep. With a clear head I could figure this out. I pulled on the leg, smelling stale sweat, and hobbled out. Without a functional microprocessor, the leg swung like a garden gate. The ski foot flew out in front. I made my way to the elevators with one hand touching the wall. When I reached my bunk, I pulled off the straps and threw the whole thing on the floor.

I WANTED
Elaine to fetch me a cadmium battery but she was nowhere to be found. “Have you seen Elaine?” I asked Jason.

He swiveled to face me. His glasses reflected my halogen workbench light. “I thought …” He looked at Elaine’s desk. It was very clean. “Didn’t you get an e-mail?”

I rolled to my keyboard. I had lots of e-mails. I read few. I looked at the forty-character previews, and when they began, “Season’s Greetings from everyone here at …” or, “Seminars are now open for bookings on a …” it was obvious they were just noise. E-mails I needed to read began, “Didn’t you see this? You must …” or, “Your department has again failed to …” or something like that. I scrolled through my in-box. I had to sift through a lot of useless information about who wasn’t allowed to park where and why the air conditioners would be off from four to five but then I found it. It was from Human Resources. Elaine had transferred out. The e-mail didn’t say why. It just said it was
thought best
.

“Oh,” I said.

THAT NIGHT
the cadmium battery fried the microprocessor. I had known this was a possibility but still it was disappointing. I sat at my workbench and stared at the thin wisp of smoke twisting out of the plastic knee. It was fixable. I could replace the chip. But then I would be limited by the transistors. Every time I upgraded something, something new became a bottleneck.

I pushed myself away from the bench. It was late. My problem was I was tinkering around the edges. Trying to improve it beyond the capability of its fundamental design. I was thinking like everyone else: that the goal of a prosthesis was to mimic biology.

I closed my eyes. I felt warm. I opened them, found a pad and pen, and began to write. I sketched. I filled four pages and took the leg off the table and put it on the floor
to make room. I had been going about this all wrong. Biology was not ideal. When you thought about it, biological legs couldn’t do anything except convey a small mass from A to B, so long as A and B were not particularly far apart and you were in no hurry. That wasn’t great. The only reason it was even notable was that legs did it using raw materials they grew themselves. If you were designing something within that limitation, then okay, good job. But if you weren’t, it seemed to me you could build in a lot more features.

THREE WEEKS
later I called the hospital. I was very excited. I had been putting this off, waiting until I was calm, but that never happened so finally I just did it. I closed the door to my bunk room and faced the wall so nothing could distract me.

“Lola Shanks, Prosthetics.”

“Hi, it’s Charles Neumann, I was in there a few—”

“Charlie! Where have you been?”

I was supposed to visit the hospital for follow-up sessions. They were mandatory, but the kind with no penalties for noncompliance. “Busy. Can I see you?”

“Yes! That would be good! I hope you’ve been keeping up your physical therapy. You’re in trouble if you haven’t. When can you come in?”

“Can you come here?” I was tapping the floor with my ski toes:
tick tick tick
. I made myself stop that. “I have something to show you. I want your professional opinion.”

“Um. Okay. Why not? Where are you?”

TO MEET
Lola Shanks I had to go to the lobby. I hadn’t been aboveground since I discovered the bunk rooms. But she
needed to be authorized. So I rode the elevator and walked the corridors. This was harder than it sounds because I was wearing the Exegesis and had never gotten around to fixing the knee. It tended to get away from me. I stuck close to walls. But I limped past hardened engineers without a single question. This puzzled me until I realized I had become pathetic.

I reached the lobby and fell into a black sofa. I pulled out my phone and looked up every few seconds to see if she was coming through the doors. I was early. I leaned forward and peered at a scale model of a mobile weapons platform that sat in a glass case on the low coffee table. Its little plaque said,
CIVIL PEACEMAKER VO. 5-111
. It was essentially a caravan with guns. I had been to a presentation; the idea was you towed it somewhere like a recently captured city and left it there, making peace.

“Hey!”

I jumped. Lola Shanks was coming toward me, wearing a white polo shirt, white pants, and white sneakers. Her hair was held back with a thin white headband. My first thought was she had come directly from exercising or perhaps some sort of religious event but I think it was extremely uniform fashion choices. She held out her arms. I got off the sofa, which required rocking. My unregulated ski foot flew out. Lola grabbed my hands. “Whoa! What’s wrong with the leg? It shouldn’t do that.” Before I could explain, she rolled up my pants. “What’s this?” She tapped the tin.

“I modified it.”

“You what?” By now she had exposed the knee. What was left of it. It was a half-melted empty casing. “Where’s the knee?”

“I broke it.” I felt uncomfortable. People were watching. Lola got to her feet, her brown eyes flicking between mine. “I didn’t get to say good-bye at the hospital.”

“That wasn’t supposed to be good-bye. You were supposed to come in for sessions.”

“Oh.”

“Why did you break your knee?”

“I was trying to improve it. But then I got the idea to build a new one.”

“A new knee?”

“A new leg.”

“You … what?”

“I built a prosthesis. Well. I’m still tinkering. It can be better.”

“You built a leg?”

“I’ll show you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Please.”

LOLA WAS
escorted into an interview room by a guard and I returned to the sofa. While she answered questions about everyone she had ever met, everywhere she had ever been, and her Facebook profile, I flipped through the company glossy,
Looking Forward
. We were immunizing children in Nigeria, apparently. Lola took so long I went looking for her, and was told she was in the multiscanner. This was like a metal detector, for an advanced definition of metal. I was surprised because that should have been the fastest part of the process. You just had to stand there.