Machine Man

by Max Barry

  “My own product line of what?”

  “Of prosthetic devices.” She caught herself. “Of artificial enhancements. Of quality bio-augmentations. We haven’t settled on a name. But we want you to build them. We’re fully funding you to explore any and all possibilities that occur to your brilliant, brilliant mind.”

  “You want me to build prostheses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you want me to build prostheses?”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Yes. But … I’m not on the business side, but—”

  Cassandra Cautery laughed. “Right. You’re not on the business side. Leave that to us.”

  “But—”

  “I’m a middle manager,” she said. “Some people think that’s a pejorative, but I don’t. There are people above me who make business decisions and people below me who execute them and those people live in different realities. Very different. And my job is to bring them together. Mesh their realities. Sometimes they’re not completely compatible, and sometimes I don’t even completely understand how someone can live in the reality they do, but the point is I mesh them. I’m like a translator. Only more hands-on. And that’s what makes the company work. Middle managers, like me, meshing. So let me take a stab at meshing your reality, Charlie. Do you know how much money there is in medical? A lot. And more every year, because you invent a better heart and it doesn’t matter how much it costs, people want it. Because you’re selling them life.” She blinked. “You’re selling them life.” She patted her jacket pockets. “I need a pen. But what’s the problem with medical? The market is limited to sick people. Imagine: You sink thirty million into developing the world’s greatest artery valve and someone goes and cures heart disease. It would be a disaster. Not for the … not for the people, obviously. I mean for the company. Financially. I mean this is the kind of business risk that makes people upstairs nervous about signing off on major capital investment. But what you’re talking about, what you said at the hospital … it’s medical for healthy people. That’s what excites them. They’re imagining a device. Let’s say a spleen. They don’t know. I don’t know. It’s up to you. But say you come up with a spleen that works better than natural spleens. More reliable, safer, with, um, built-in monitoring of your blood pressure. I’m sure you can come up with better ideas. But that device we could sell to anybody. The market for that is every person in the world who wants their spleen to work better. And every customer is a customer for life. Literally. You mentioned upgrades at the hospital. Well, imagine you purchase a Better Spleen. And a few years later, wait a minute, here comes the Better Spleen Two. It’s the same, only it can check your e-mail.” She laughed. “I’m being silly. But you see the business model. There’s repeat business. I sat in on this meeting, Charlie, and a man there, he said people buy a new cell phone every thirteen months. Thirteen months. They throw out their old phone, which they loved, because there’s something newer. Sexier. That’s the other thing. They’ve seen your legs. They think there’s a certain … a certain aesthetic to them. You haven’t tried to imitate real legs. That’s the difference. You’ve made something else. Something that stands alone. Oh. I didn’t mean that. I mean it’s a little like art. It’s a paradigm shift. Because regular prosthetics, and I hope this isn’t offensive, but they look a little creepy. A little dead. So the thought is—and this is all long-term, but it’s the thinking—what if Better Parts can be fashion accessories? Is that impossible? Maybe someone would buy an artificial tooth just because it looked better. Or an artificial ear. If we sponsored some athletes, some of those … some Paralympians, they could become objects of desire. They’re fit, they’re functional, they’re here. They’re the future. Marketing pointed out that we already pierce our bodies in the name of fashion. We physically insert metal into our earlobes, and lips, now, and chins, and who knows what else. You’ve seen those kids. That’s the area they’re looking at. Wearable accessories. Higher-functioning, supersexy cyberbodies. What you’ve helped the company realize, Charlie, is that there’s a marketplace under our noses. Literally. Literally under and inside our noses. Inside us. And we as a company are uniquely placed to be first to market. That’s why you’re getting resourced. Does that help you understand?”

  I thought for a while. “A little.”

  She smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  CASSANDRA CAUTERY walked beside me as Carl wheeled me to the labs. I thought they would take me to the Glass Room but they turned left, for Lab 4. Several young people who I gathered were my new assistants lined the corridor. As Carl pushed past them, I discovered the reason they were outside Lab 4 was that there was no room inside. It was wall-to-wall white coats. Except in the center, where my legs stood under lights. They had been polished. They were beautiful. Cassandra Cautery had been right about that. I was a little surprised anyone else saw it, because they were beautiful only in a functional sense: beautiful because they worked. Bundles of plastic-wrapped wires as thick as my wrist snaked between bare steel struts and around oiled coil pistons. Black electrical tape strapped the computer housing on to the hip. The calves bent backward, like a gazelle’s. The feet were globe-encased rotary engines with one long toe pointing forward and two angled back.

  People were clapping. “You’re my idol,” said Jason. I hadn’t even noticed him.

  “What?” I said. I thought I must have misheard idol.

  “You and Isaac Newton. And Barry Marshall. And the Curies. You people who are prepared to put yourselves on the line for your science. To become your own test subjects. I salute you.”

  Carl wheeled me toward the legs.

  “Compared to you, Kevin Warwick is a pussy!” said Jason. “He should be embarrassed with himself!”

  Carl lifted me into the air as if I were a child. He carried me to the legs like he was rescuing me from a burning building. “This okay?” he said, and I said, “Yes,” and he lowered me into the sockets. I grimaced as my wounded left leg scraped plastic. Then my butt touched the seat and it was okay. I didn’t have to stand in these legs; I sat. I relaxed. My hands moved down to the hips. There were controls there. My thumbs found the ignition buttons and pressed. My motors were extremely quiet, for their power output. But that was not that quiet. My legs rose up on their toes, flexed, settled.

  My audience cheered and whooped. Cassandra Cautery’s eyes shone. I grinned. The applause went on and on. It was at once great and terrifying. I wanted them to leave so I could play with my legs in private but I also wanted them to stay forever.

  I THUMBED the left leg forward. It rose and extended and clomped down. The floor went crack. I hoped that was the floor. Either way could be an issue. I thumbed the right and took a matching step. The motion rocked my body back then forward and for a second I thought I was about to fall out. I took my hands off the controls and clutched at the seat. It was okay. I could adapt to it. It was like riding a horse. Or how I imagined riding a horse. I had never actually done that. I adjusted my balance and took another step. Another. Crack. Crack. People moved out of my way. Two held camcorders. I needed to clear this room. I couldn’t work with them here. Now I thought about it, I had no idea how I was supposed to manage twenty lab assistants. I had struggled with three. Maybe I could get Cassandra Cautery to take them away again. I looked for her in the crowd and realized she was in the Glass Room, a watery green version of herself. She was watching from a safe distance. Down here it was just me and the ocean of lab assistants. I stopped walking. Nobody spoke. Shoes shuffled. There were a lot of pairs of glasses in this room.

  “Well,” I said. “What do you think?”

  An incredibly thin guy with nightmarish skin cleared his throat. “The interface is crude. Ideally you want to do something with nerve impulses, I think.”

  “Krankman’s working with nerves,” said a girl. “I was on his project before this. Splicing.”

  They drew closer. A few dropped down to inspect the legs up close. I could almost feel their
fingers. “There’s a lot of weight in this metal.”

  “You could drop that down by hollowing these columns out.”

  “What about titanium?”

  “What about impact absorbency? I worry what happens when he steps off something.”

  “Hmm,” the skinny boy said. And I relaxed, because this was going to work out.

  OF COURSE the Curies died. They identified ionizing radiation while bathing in it. There were risks involved in being your own guinea pig. But there was a long tradition of scientists doing just that: of paying for the expansion of human knowledge with their lives. I didn’t deserve to be categorized with them, because honestly, I wasn’t interested in the greater good. I just wanted to make myself better legs. I didn’t mind other people benefiting in some longer-term indirect way but it wasn’t what motivated me. I felt guilty about this for a while. Every time a lab assistant looked at me with starstruck eyes, I felt I should confess: Look, I’m not being heroic. I’m just interested in seeing what I can do. Then it occurred to me that maybe they all felt this way. All these great scientists who risked themselves to bring light to darkness, maybe they weren’t especially altruistic either. Maybe they were like me, seeing what they could do.

  I TRIED to call Lola. I didn’t have my phone, so I wheeled myself to my desk in the Glass Room. I had to dial through reception, and it took a long time to start ringing, and that was all it did. It seemed odd that the hospital would not answer its phone so I dialed reception again and asked them to check the number. “This is the number you want,” she said. So I tried again but again it rang out.

  I DIVIDED my assistants into teams: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. It was the only way to keep them manageable. They worked in competition: I wheeled among them and anything I liked sparked grins and furious development. Beta came up with a whole new wheel-based leg design, almost a chariot, which I liked so much I took it over myself. Then Alpha and Gamma also got into wheels and Beta accused them of intellectual plagiarism. It was a whole thing. There were tears. I told Gamma to go build some fingers or something. They liked this. They wound up deploying four hands’ worth and using them to make obscene gestures at Beta. It was like being back at college, only I was respected. Sometimes I wheeled past bodies in the corridors: assistants who had literally lain down and slept because they were too tired to make it home. Everywhere were sodas.

  EVERYONE THOUGHT Beta was going to reach testing on a new prototype first but the wheels were a dead end. They couldn’t get good traction on uneven ground, not even in rotating sets on independent suspension with ground-sensing sticky locks. We did a lot of stairwell damage before figuring that out. We left gouges in the walls, broken steps, and a section of railing that bowed inward. But failure was just a method of learning what worked.

  Then Alpha declared they had something. They were based out of Lab 2, where Katherine’s rats had lived, before they’d been moved off to another lab somewhere. Katherine had followed. I imagined they’d offered her the choice to stay with me or go with the rats. I still thought I could smell them every time I came in—the rats, that is—although that couldn’t be right, because when we cleaned these rooms we did it by sucking out all the air.

  Alpha’s legs were similar to my previous prototype, only taller, sleeker, and titanium. There was less electrical tape and more custom carbon-polymer molding. I wheeled myself around them for an inspection. I wasn’t going to do anything special today, just check fit and balance. There were too many wired connections to walk. No nerve interface yet. But still, when my assistants helped me out of the chair and lowered me into the sockets, my heart thumped. I buckled in. “Okay.”

  Jason held the control box. He pushed for power. Nothing happened. Smoke began to pour from the legs. People shouted. Hands grabbed at me and hauled me out. They broke out the extinguishers and drenched the legs in foam. When all that was taken care of, we started over.

  I DIALED reception and asked for a third-party directory assistance service. “If there’s a number you’d like to look up, I can do that for you,” said the receptionist. I declined. When she put me through, I asked the directory robot for the hospital. It offered to connect me directly and I said yes. It rang. The hospital picked up. I opened my mouth to request Lola Shanks in Prosthetics and the line went click.

  I lowered the phone and looked at it. Then I put it back on the cradle. Clearly it was pointless to redial reception. But at least I understood the problem now. I could apply myself to a solution.

  I SPENT a lot of time being jabbed with needles. Not syringes. Tiny steel slivers with embedded electrodes. The idea was to insert these into my truncated thighs so they could read signals from my brain, and translate them into motorized movement. We created a fourth team for this, using people transferred from other projects. Initially it was called Delta but it was confusing whenever someone said delta meaning “change,” which was often, so they renamed themselves Omega. We converted a lab into a medical room and I lay back on the table while a tall, high-cheekboned lab assistant named Mirka punctured me. This was excruciating during the first session but not so bad once we realized the equipment could read me just as well while I was hocked to the eyeballs. So I injected myself with analgesics and let my consciousness swim away while Mirka maneuvered metal slivers around, seeking the best reception for the electric language of my brain.

  My legs hurt all the time. It seemed likely this was a side effect of jamming needles in there every day, but it had started before that. It was like phantom pain. I resisted this notion because it was so stupid. Physiological pain I could be on board for. Even something neurological. Neurology was the science of nerves. It was chemical reactions you could point to. Psychology, though, was the science of fairy tales. It was like explaining volcanoes with stories of angry gods and expelled half-sons and revenge and betrayal. I did not believe in psychological pain.

  But I needed sleep. So one night I took a pair of legs to bed. They were early, lightweight models, really just poles, which we’d used for prototyping and since discarded. I set them beside my bunk and turned out the light. Later, when I woke with my nonexistent muscles screaming, I dragged the legs onto the bed, shoved my thighs into the sockets, grabbed the feet, and manually flexed those crude blocks of plastic up and down. I got this idea from a paper on treating phantom pain by using mirrors to form optical illusions, which convinced the patient’s brain that the limb was still there. You see why I was skeptical of the whole area. As I flexed, I felt nonexistent muscles unlock and pseudo-blood begin to flow. I waggled the plastic. It was just as well no one could see this. “Ahhh,” I said.

  FINALLY ALPHA’S legs stopped catching fire. I sat in them and took a wary step. They moved smoothly, the whine of the servomagnetics almost inaudible. The floor did not break. Nothing popped or smoked. I walked to the wall. It was not a smooth ride but I was unfamiliar with the equipment. I rotated and walked back to the center. I raised a leg. I did not overbalance. I did not fall out. I flexed the foot. It was cloven. It actually looked more like a hoof. I lowered it and raised the other leg. Still upright. I looked around and saw a lot of happy faces. I smiled, too, because this was progress.

  NEXT CAME the nerve interface. I spent more time on this than anything else. When I had an idea for something mechanical, I could usually tell someone else to go make it happen. But reading nerves was personal. It was like trying to sift raindrops from a thunderstorm only I could see. I passed days in Lab 1 with thirty-eight wires dangling from my thighs, trying to read my thoughts. It was a funny way to get to know myself. For example, when I thought about wiggling my big toe, my waves spiked at 42.912 gigahertz, but so too if I imagined country music. I wouldn’t have thought those were similar. But then I thought about toe-tapping and maybe they were. Either way, it was important to figure this kind of thing out before I wore the legs outside and someone put on Kenny Rogers.

  Once we had a basic neurological landscape, I practiced moving in software. We loaded leg
wireframes into the computer and I tried to control them with my mind. At first they wouldn’t respond. Then they jerked and twitched and tried to walk in three directions at once. Mistake by mistake, I crawled toward something practical. By the end of each six-hour session, I felt dazed and unsure where I was. I wheeled along the corridor and saw the whole world as lines and vertices. I dreamed I was a wireframe, made of green light.

  MY ASSISTANTS began wearing chunky glasses. They looked ridiculous. The lenses were milky, like the opposite of sunglasses. By the end of the week, half of Gamma had them. I didn’t pay much attention because I assumed this was some kind of young-person fashion trend, but when I arrived in Lab 1 for a date with Mirka and her needles, she pulled on a pair, and I had to ask.

  “They are Z-specs,” said Mirka. She seemed surprised I didn’t know, although behind the glasses it was hard to tell. “You have not tried them?”

  I shook my head. Mirka pulled off her set. There was a component I hadn’t noticed before: two wires terminating in flat metal contacts. Mirka unpeeled these from her temples. I wasn’t sure about this but I followed her directions to adhere the contacts to my own skull and fit the glasses. Everything looked flat. Then Mirka’s face sprung to life. I had never known my eyes were so low-res.

  “The enhancement is nice,” said Mirka. “But the real benefit is the zoom. You pinch your eyebrows. Like this.”

  I mimicked her movement. Her face rushed toward me. I flailed my arms. Mirka laughed. “And the other way to zoom out.” She helped me upright. “You see?”

  I picked a corner of the lab and made it leap closer. There was a paper clip there, as big as if I were kneeling in front of it. I zoomed out and in, picking tiny objects in the room and blowing them up. I turned my head without zooming out and nausea bloomed. So that was not a good idea. Zoom out, turn, zoom in.