Machine Man

by Max Barry

  “Right.”

  “I should have thought this through. I blame myself for forgetting your feelings in all this.”

  “I wasn’t going to chop off my arms. Not today.”

  “Of course you weren’t. Right? Of course you weren’t. That was just me …” Her hand danced in the air. “Getting obsessive about control again. You have to understand this project is forcing me to go beyond my comfort zone in a lot of ways. Like I told the Manager, Charlie, I relish challenge. I relish it. But, wow, it’s hard for me to sit back and let things happen. I have to force myself to do that. And what happened today, Charlie, was I panicked and reacted on instinct.” She took a breath. “I promise to work on trusting you, Charlie. If I do that, can you trust me?”

  I hesitated. She seemed convincing. But then again, I was an extraordinarily poor judge of people.

  “You want the arms. I know that. I will fight to get you those arms. What can I do to make you feel comfortable, Charlie? Tell me.”

  A thought occurred. “Uh …”

  “Anything.”

  “Well …” I cleared my throat. “About Carl …” I paused, in case Cassandra Cautery wanted to leap ahead. “He says he had an accident.”

  “Not quite true. He volunteered. We needed someone to test arms and he came forward. Don’t ask me why. But he did.” She held up her palms. “I couldn’t tell you. I knew how you’d react. But there was a scheduling issue. Your department produces more prototype-stage products than you can field test. You were blocking the funnel. But forget that. That’s resolved. What’s the problem with Carl?”

  “I’m not comfortable with him.”

  Her eyes held mine. “Would you like me to do something about that?”

  “Can you?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  I did not feel proud of myself. But I remembered Lola’s eyes when she had said: He doesn’t have any arms. “Can you get rid of Carl?”

  “It’s done.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s done. Forget about it.”

  “I feel bad for him, but—”

  She waved a hand. “I get it. He’s a distraction. He impairs your ability to work.”

  “Yes. Exactly. He impairs.”

  “Don’t spare him another thought,” she said.

  THE ELEVATORS worked. I had renewed access. When I exited at the labs, I passed a closed, pristine stairwell door. It had been two hours and already they had erased everything I had done.

  I shouldn’t be here. I had been awake for twenty hours and could feel an adrenaline crash coming. But I didn’t want to lie in that bunk room with a dead potted plant. I didn’t want to stare at the ceiling and think about what I’d asked Cassandra Cautery to do.

  I swiped into Lab 3. The lights flared like supernovas. On the steel workbench gleamed tiny valves and switches. I closed the door and made my way to the bench. I retracted the Contours to a comfortable height, picked up my Z-specs, and began to work on Lola’s heart.

  I EMERGED so tired I could barely keep my head up. The Contours bore me along, not minding that I nodded off once or twice. They were good legs.

  Lola leaned against the wall outside my bunk room, fingering the hem of her polo shirt. Over the heart was stitched a Better Future logo. “Hi.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

  “I’m sorry about before. The argument.”

  “Okay.” Now she was here, I couldn’t even remember why we’d fought.

  “I’m a yeller. I should have warned you. It comes with growing up fighting with your mom. I was thinking that to you, maybe it came across more angry than I meant. Because you have a different baseline.”

  That made sense. I nodded.

  “So, Charlie, I’m kind of scared you don’t like me anymore.”

  “Oh,” I said. “No. That’s not true.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She held out her arms and we hugged. She turned her head and kissed my neck. “You’re the best. I don’t mean that like an expression.” She stepped back and kicked my Contours. They tingled, as if I were outside in a thunderstorm. “I should let you sleep. You look beat.”

  “Okay.”

  “What you said about making parts for Carl … I realize that’s a big thing. It’s really sweet. It’s like the best thing you could ever do for someone.”

  “Um.”

  “Sleep. I’ll talk to you when you can think straight.”

  “Okay.” I went inside and closed the door and stood there.

  I COULDN’T sleep. Not because of phantom pain. Because of Carl. He crawled into my mind and I couldn’t get him out. I woke sticky with sweat, from dreams of Carl following me. He stood in the Clamp, looking at me armlessly as the plates closed in. His eyes said: How could you do this? You know I need parts.

  I sat up. Carl was bad, wasn’t he? He had shot Lola and stolen my arms. Or if not stolen, at least used them. The point was he was a destroyer of relationships. He was dangerous to an important thing I had.

  But he had no arms. Without my help, he would get hospital prosthetics. He would live a terrible life.

  I woke the Contours and levered upright and headed to the Glass Room. I would call Cassandra Cautery. I didn’t know her home number but I would leave a message on her voice mail. Then I would be able to sleep.

  But with the dial tone in my ear I hesitated. My brain whispered new scenarios. Carl doing physical therapy with Lola. Her standing behind him, encircling his torso with her arms, showing him how to move. Her breath tickling his ear.

  I saw movement beyond the green glass. Jason, working late. I thought: Maybe there’s another way.

  I LAY still while the fMRI machine thrummed around me. It was unsettling, because I had to lie back and with my head poked into a small hole in a large machine. The issue was the hole looked like a mouth. It was also difficult to forget that the unit generated enough magnetic force to pull a pin clean through my body. I was glad I had thought of this. If things progressed like I planned, it would soon be difficult to MRI myself nonfatally. The whoomp-whoomp-whoomp was comfortingly rhythmic.

  “That’s good,” said Jason’s disembodied voice. “Now regret. Something you wish you could change.”

  “An uncle of mine died from colon cancer. I was twelve. I remember thinking how ridiculous that was, a failure in one small body part being fatal. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t give him a new colon.”

  “Sorry. I’m not seeing much. Can you try again? Something more … emotional?”

  “Well … once in junior high I didn’t go to a school dance, because I thought nobody would want to go with me. Then afterward I heard this girl I liked would have.” Isabella. She had been good at chess. Always underdeveloped her rooks, though.

  “Still not definitive.”

  I almost said, Let’s skip regret. Because, really, how important was that? It was a social emotion. Group survival was maximized if all members felt an emotional obligation to treat one another fairly. But you personally wanted to be able to cheat and steal without remorse. I’m not saying that’s a great set of values. I’m just saying logically.

  “I fell out of a tree as a kid,” I said. “I cut my leg open and had to get stitches. It left a scar. A little white line. Now it’s gone I kind of miss it. It was a physical connection to my past. Not an important part. But still. I’m disconnected in a way I didn’t anticipate. My body maps space to time. It has an embedded history.” Jason was silent. “Of course, human tissue completely regenerates every seven years. It’s unlikely that scar was composed of the same molecules. Do you think it’s really appropriate to consider people to be the same entity they were seven years earlier? Because, physically, they’re not. They’re connected but every part has changed. Like a renovated house. It seems like after seven years you shouldn’t be liable for things you did before. Why should a man be imprisoned for a crime committed by a different physical entity? Should we expect a c
ouple to stay married when they barely share a molecule with the people who said, ‘I do’? I don’t think so. I know it’s not that simple but that’s my feeling.”

  Silence. I had wandered off topic. “I think that’s as close as we’re going to get,” Jason said. “Let’s try longing.”

  “THERE.” JASON pointed to his monitor. We had been mapping my brain for six hours. In the darkened observation room, his eyes were pits. “Activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Highly localized.”

  I looked up from wiring myself into the Contours. It was the first time I had done this in a while. It hurt. But not in a completely bad way. “That’s guilt?”

  “Yes.” Jason paged down. “According to Krajbich et al., patients with damage to the VMPFC are quantifiably less sensitive to guilt. Regular people have a guilt quotient of two hundred. But VMPFC-impaired people average twenty-seven. That means they feel an amount of guilt that’s negligible compared to the norm.”

  I activated the Contours. Sensation spread down my metal legs. I wouldn’t say it was worth losing both legs just for this, but it was a good feeling. “Interesting.”

  “On every other measurable emotion, the two groups scored the same. Oh. Wait.” He peered at the screen. “Envy’s up.”

  “Envy?”

  “Actually, that’s within the margin of error. Probably meaningless.”

  “So if my VMPFC were suppressed, I’d feel less guilt, but otherwise be the same.”

  “A lot less guilt.”

  “Right. A lot less guilt.”

  “And/or regret. They both lit up the VMPFC.”

  I pondered this. “Is there a difference between guilt and regret?”

  Jason stared blankly. “I don’t … think … so.”

  “I guess one is …” I shook my head. “Lost it.”

  “Emotions aren’t really my … area of expertise.”

  “Let’s assume they’re the same.”

  “Okay.” He looked at the screen. “I’m not sure how you’d suppress the VMPFC, though. I mean … without actually … cutting it out.”

  An awkward silence descended. I had crushed my right leg in front of Jason. He had tried to stop me. Then I crushed my hand in front of him. He possibly had unresolved feelings. “I guess that would be kind of drastic.”

  “Kind of irreversible.”

  “Although I wouldn’t regret it.” This was a joke. Jason stared at me. “Because of the lack of a functioning ventromedial prefrontal cortex.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  I tried again. “It’s what people aspire to, isn’t it? A life lived without regret? That’s a saying.”

  “But doesn’t that mean you should be bold? Take risks? Not surgically excise the capacity for regret from your brain.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “I suppose so, yes.”

  “One thing that surprises me about this place,” said Jason. “No one ever says shouldn’t. As in, you shouldn’t do that. They’ll tell you something’s impossible, or too expensive. But never wrong. And I know we’re builders, not philosophers. I read the mission statement. But sometimes I wish we had some ethical documentation. I kind of want someone very wise to tell me there are some things I shouldn’t do even though they can be done. Is that stupid? It’s probably because my family, you know, they’re Chinese, and growing up they were very strict. Very moral. I fought them. But now I’m free, I’m floating, like I’ve lost my feet. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t worry about religion.”

  “It’s not necessarily—”

  “Anyway,” I said, because Jason was getting seriously off track, “what about a helmet. Fixed needles, each capable of delivering a measured dose of tetrodotoxin to various areas of the brain. Press a button: bam, take out the VMPFC.” I gestured to the screen. “Or whatever area needs suppressing for a few hours.”

  “Uh …”

  “And not just tetrodotoxin. Adenosine, for alertness. Any chemical, primed for delivery to the right spot at the right time. That’s interesting.”

  “I don’t know if … I mean, there’s a lot that could go wrong.”

  It was a fair point. I needed my brain. It was one of the few parts I couldn’t replace. I shouldn’t rush in. On the other hand, injecting localized neurodoses of tetrodotoxin for guilt suppression was a really good idea. “Let’s just do one.”

  “One?”

  “Injection. For testing.”

  “I’m not sure I should do that.”

  “Sure you should. I’m telling you to.”

  “Uh.”

  “Just position my hand in the right place and give me a little drill,” I said, because my machine fingers were steadier anyway.

  I HAD never been very interested in hacking my head before. You would think so, but no. I had tried things: coffee, energy drinks, alcohol, caffeine pills. But I had never been enthused. As I watched a screen showing myself sliding a needle through my skull, I thought I understood why. Swallowing something gave control to the pill. Drug addicts were called users, and now I realized how appropriate that was. Pills made you a passenger. To control your own experience, you needed to build it. You couldn’t ever truly own anything you couldn’t modify. I had always thought that.

  I retracted the needle. Jason taped a small cotton patch over the entry wound. It was on the top of my head; when I straighted in the Contours, it should be invisible. He stepped back. “Do you feel anything?”

  I opened my mouth to say no, then realized maybe yes. Because when I thought about Carl, that situation seemed pretty okay. Not great for Carl. It was a bad result for him, due to me. But those were just facts. They carried no emotional connotation. I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “Good.”

  I WENT to see Lola. Dawn was breaking, shedding soft yellow light along the corridor, and I had about four hours of near-zero capacity for guilt. When I knocked she cracked open the door and squinted at me with sleep-bleary eyes. “Charlie?”

  “I know it’s early. Can I come in?”

  “Um. Yeah.” She rubbed her hair. I had thought it was out of control before. Overnight it staged a full-scale rebellion. She swung open the door and I clomped inside. She was wearing an oversized yellow sweater and no visible pants. The sweater said: VISION + DARING = BETTER FUTURE. Her legs were very beautiful. You had to give it to biology sometimes.

  “I’ve been working. I wanted to see you.”

  She dropped onto the sofa. “That’s nice.”

  I looked around. “Where’s that nurse?”

  Lola’s eyes widened. “Charlie. You broke the pattern.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I had forced myself to stop thinking about how to get rid of the nurse, because it was consuming all my waking hours. Now she was gone. It was a miracle.

  Lola rose from the sofa. My heart thumped. Her hand closed on my shirt and pulled me closer. A delicious feeling shot through my body. I thought: I should map that for the helmet.

  “She could turn up any moment,” said Lola. She leaned upward. We kissed. We had kissed before. But not like this. Not without external observation. I felt anxious, because one thing that nurse had been good for was covering the fact that I was not a good kisser. I was enthusiastic. I was interested. But I had no technique. I was all over the place. I got hair in my mouth and Lola put a hand on my cheek and guided me back to her lips. She did not seem upset or exasperated. She was prepared to tolerate mistakes. She had realistic expectations. I relaxed. I grew more confident. Lola pressed against me. I was doing this. I was some kind of superman. I kissed her and her tongue touched my lips and I gulped audibly and she sniggered into my mouth. It was hotter than it sounds. Her hand found the back of my head and pushed me closer. I fell into her. She was a gravity well. An irresistible attractor. She took hold of my metal hand and guided it to her Better Future sweater, where DARING rose and fell across one breast. I felt softness and warmth and violet harmonics around five gigahertz.
“Not so hard,” she whispered. I opened my eyes because I wasn’t the one pressing there. She was. Except she wasn’t even touching my hand.

  I tried to pull my hand off her chest. It resisted, then came away. Lola’s eyes popped open.

  “Stop. Wait.” I backed away. “You’re attracting me.”

  “It’s mutual.”

  “Not like that.”

  She looked confused. Then her eyes widened and she stepped back. As she did, I felt a slight release, as if I had been bracing myself against a force too subtle to notice until it was gone.

  “Did you feel that?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Charlie?”

  “It’s okay,” I said, although I didn’t know if that was true. “There’s something … maybe some kind of magnetic field.”

  “Field?”

  “Wait here. I need to get a scanner.”

  “It’s my heart,” she whispered. “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out.”

  “What did they put in me?”

  “Please,” I said. “Don’t cry, Lola, because I don’t think I can come any closer without damaging one of us.”

  She nodded. “Please hurry.”

  I EXITED on the ground floor and headed for the elevators to take me to the labs. Halfway there a young woman fell into step alongside me. This was no mean feat because I was really moving. I glanced down. It was Elaine, my ex-assistant who had had nightmares. She was shorter than I remembered. No, I was taller. She clutched a clipboard to her chest. Her white coat flapped around her legs. Her acne had not improved. “Dr. Neumann. Are you busy?”

  “Yes.” We rounded a corner and passed the atrium. Inside, early-rising suits strategized over bowls of muesli.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you. I sent e-mails.”

  “I don’t read e-mails.”

  “Well …” She broke into a run. “I’ve been following your work and, well, actually, I wasn’t at first because I wanted to make a clean break. Because of the trauma. But you’re using so many people and everyone’s talking about it and I saw projects going into limited testing. And of course you can’t get into them because everyone who knew has already signed up for slots and now the waiting list is a month long and there’s no way to get in. Is there?”