Machine Man

by Max Barry

  “He’s out. Go.”

  I heard a click, then an electrical noise, like someone was testing it: vnnnnnn … vnnnn. A man said, “How much are we doing?”

  “Everything,” said Cassandra Cautery.

  I BECAME aware of smoke. I felt alarmed, in a small, sectioned-off part of my brain. In my line of work, smoke means someone made a mistake. Somebody forgot to check a tolerance. Convert from imperial. This smoke curled along the ceiling above me. I wasn’t sure whose mistake it was. But it was pretty.

  Get up, said the part that was worried about the smoke. Another part said, Lie here a little longer, and that felt more persuasive. I was doped. I was relaxed. I would never feel this peaceful again, not without chemical assistance.

  Something slooshed. Something went sssssss, like an old man easing into a favorite chair. I felt wet. But also safe, and warm, and protected. I closed my eyes.

  Someone coughed. I opened my eyes, because that was disconcerting. I waited, hoping it might go away. Cark. Cark. It sounded perfunctory. Like the owner didn’t expect it to do much good.

  I pondered its implications. Or I floated along on its implications. I let its implications surround me without penetrating. I might have done this for a while, but water began falling on my body. I thought maybe rain but then probably not because I could see the ceiling. I felt my dream state dissolving, and was sad. But it was also good, because I could feel myself coming back. My thoughts began to organize themselves. I raised my head.

  I was in an operating theater. Of course I was: I had been brought here for surgery. But things lay scattered and overturned: a gurney, drip stands, equipment that looked like somebody should be keeping it sterile. Surgical blades glimmered from the floor tiles in rapidly pooling water like coins in a wishing well. A long crack ran up the wall. I thought, Earthquake?

  Cark.

  I saw a man slumped against the wall. His green scrubs were speckled dark down the front. His lips were red. He stared dully at his legs, which jutted out on the tiles. His eyes rose to mine and he blinked once, slowly.

  “Help,” I said. He didn’t react. I felt a little bad, because obviously this guy needed some help, too. I planted my right hand on the table and levered myself up on my left elbow, or tried to. It didn’t work. I looked down to see what the problem was.

  A tide of blood washed from a gash in my left shoulder. Or not a gash: the opposite of that. Gash implied a cut in something otherwise whole. I had ropy strings of skin and muscle connecting me to an arm that was otherwise severed. On the tiles, discarded, was something I first mistook for a drill. But it wasn’t. It had a long, flat blade. Liquid red ribbons threaded the water around it. It was an electric saw. I looked at the guy on the tiles. “Did you …” I said. Because this guy looked like a surgeon. I thought maybe he had started to amputate my arm but not finished. “Can you …” My voice was a croak. My throat felt abused. The man stared at me without expression. His head bobbed with each beat of his heart. “Why …”

  Cark, went the surgeon, and he made a fresh dark spatter down his scrubs. He was not going to help. He was going to lie there and die. Or lie there and watch me die and then die himself. I felt panic. It was not a good time to panic. It was time for objective, clinical assessment. But an ocean of blood was draining out of a canyon in my flesh and my brain gibbered, That’s fatal, you’re going to lose consciousness. I lifted my right arm—I had a right arm—without any real plan and saw bright red. I was lying in a red bath. Blood ran over the sides of the table and pattered on the tiles below. I was a bloody water feature. There was too much blood here. I should be dead.

  My legs looked odd. As in, I had some. Beneath the saturated green surgical cloth was a definite leg shape. Tubes ran between layers of the cloth to nearby devices: a black box on a trolley, four different drips. The box was making the slooshing sounds. With each sloosh, the tubes connected to it bucked, dark fluid moving through them. I decided this was keeping me alive. At this moment, the box stopped slooshing and started slurping like an enthusiastic child chasing the last of a milk shake. Beige spots appeared where the tube was connected to the box and raced toward my body.

  I grabbed at my mostly severed arm and tried to mash it back on. It was like handling a steak. The sounds—it wasn’t the squishing that got me. The sucking or squelching. It was the rasping. I almost couldn’t do it. But I didn’t want to die. So I did.

  Blood squirted. I couldn’t seal it properly. “Help!” I said. Before I’d been prepared to cut the dying guy some slack, but now I really needed him. “Help me, you shit!” I flopped to the edge of the table so I could see him while holding my arm. His eyes were empty. He had died. The fucking guy had died. I felt rage. I wanted to go over there and cut off his arm and die in front of him and see how he liked it. I felt terror and dizziness and regret. I so very much didn’t want to die. I felt cheated and angry at someone or something. I whipped my head around, in case there was something useful nearby I hadn’t noticed, like maybe a surgeon who wasn’t dead. My eyes fell on the electric saw.

  It was a long way away. I didn’t know if I could reach it. And maybe this was just as well, because was it such a bad thing to lie back, close my eyes, and not saw off my arm? No one would blame me for that. But it would mean dying and I did not want to die, I was more sure of that the closer I got to it. So I strained and stretched and looped my fingers around the saw’s cord. I put the cord in my mouth to change my grip and pulled again. It was a long cord. I pulled and bit and pulled and got the idea that maybe this cord had no end, because wouldn’t that be hilarious. It could be like string theory. I could be quantumly entangled. The saw clanked onto the metal table. I remembered what I was doing and groped for the power button.

  One time in a mall I saw a guy demonstrating an electric carving knife. He was showing a silver-haired couple how easily the knife could whir through a roast chicken, slicing off strips of steaming meat with a noise like vrrrreeeee.

  For some reason I expected this to sound different.

  WITH MY excess arm out of the way, I clamped shut the artery. I’ll spare you the specifics. Let’s just say it was a temporary solution involving my fingers. I needed to buy enough time to get off the table and find medical assistance. I didn’t even care that those assholes had sawed off my arm. I would forgive them that if they helped me live. I leaned forward and took the green surgical cloth in my teeth. I pulled it back, then leaned forward for another bite. Each time I dragged the cloth a few inches closer. I was hoping to reveal a set of Contour Threes down there, because otherwise I was essentially stuck on this table. I tugged the cloth and it bunched up around my face. I tried to nose it aside. I was tempted to take my hand off my artery, because that would be so much quicker, but I didn’t, because it would also be fatal. I caught a glimpse of black titanium and thought, Oh, thank God. The cloth’s center of gravity passed the edge of the table and began to slide to the floor by itself. I saw more metal, and more, and as the cloth passed my thighs I thought, What is that? because there was metal where my thighs should be. And there was metal instead of hips and a metal stomach and my belly button was a logo, a circular design that even upside down I recognized as Better Future’s, and still the cloth slid and I was metal all the way up, a titanium landscape. Tubes led from a gap somewhere beneath my chin, carrying fluids to and from the metal, and I was connected to the metal by tubes and nothing else. I sucked in breath to scream and two of the tubes rose slightly, feeding me air, and I lost it all in a sound like a deflating tire. I had an arm. I had a shoulder. I had a head. I wasn’t sure what else.

  A face appeared. Its hair was matted with blood. It belonged to a boy. One of his eyes was the deepest brown and the other was regular brown. He said, “Dr. Neumann. Oh. Dr. Neumann.” He disappeared. “He’s alive!” He returned. Water fell into his hair and down his nose. His mismatched eyes swam with concern. “It’s going to be all right. Everything’s going to be all right.” He touched my hair, hesitant
, then with confidence. “You can do it. Hold on. Hold on.”

  The room filled with noise. Someone took hold of my head from behind and people in green scrubs moved in to mess with my tubes. No one looked at my face. Something clicked. I heard a high-pitched whine and a deep hum. I felt a sharp pain in my neck and spreading warmth and I twisted to see who was doing that. The hands on my head tightened. “Blood,” someone said, and someone else said, “Got it.” Hands pried my fingers away. I resisted but they were firm. I began to feel heavy. Someone said, “He’s alive?” in a tone that suggested she did not really want to hear the answer. Cassandra Cautery’s face hovered. She held a hand towel to her ear, stained red. Her hair was the color of ash. Her jaw muscles reminded me of insects that could bear food many times their own weight. But she had no expression. “Charlie? You woke in the middle of a bad dream, is all.” I tried to hold my eyelids open. “Back to sleep, now. We’ll finish up here and everything will be fine.” I began to cry a little, because now I was going to live.

  I REGAINED consciousness all at once, like turning on. I was standing. I was surrounded by light. The operating theater was clean. It was not raining. It was full of cats and people in green scrubs and all of them were looking at me.

  “Got him.” Jason had a small laptop balanced on one hand and poked at it with the other. A cord came out of the laptop and ran into a mess of other cords going in all directions. Something was wrapped around my head. Something hummed.

  A young woman stepped in front of me. Elaine, I remembered. Her eyes were orange. “Dr. Neumann, can you hear me?”

  I nodded. I tried to touch my neck to see what was there and something went whnn-hnn, whnn-hnn.

  “He’s trying to move his arm.”

  “Leg now.”

  “Lots of motion requests.”

  I looked down. My legs were Contour Threes, black titanium. My hips were conjoined ring sections. Metal crawled up my chest. I had arms. They hung from insulated chains from the ceiling. One was silver and ended in a three-pronged claw, each prong a long, multiarticulated digit. The other was black with a thin, tubular biceps with a bulbous forearm. It had no hand I could see. I gagged. I did not feel sick. Not physically. I felt strong and alert and a little cold. But my brain vomited, Wrong wrong wrong.

  “Dr. Neumann?” Jason slid closer. “You’re probably feeling strange right now but when you calm down you’re going to realize this is really cool.”

  “Bringing up tactile.”

  A lightning storm of pins and needles ran through my body. My metal parts stopped being objects and started being me. I had been able to feel before but not like this. Nothing like this. I remembered their bumped surface, which I’d felt in Lab 2. Help me, I said.

  “Enhanced sensory feedback. It’s like a million times better, isn’t it? We use it ourselves. Because the point at which Better Feelings could reproduce the full spectrum and fidelity of biology-based sensation, we passed that a while ago.”

  “Registering with core,” said Mirka.

  “Seeing that.”

  “We’re talking out loud,” said Jason, “so you can follow along.”

  Hunger roared through me, as an idea rather than a feeling: I was suddenly very sure I needed food. “Whoa,” said a girl with yellow eyes.

  “Dampen that.”

  “We’ll hook you into Better Voice in a minute,” said Jason. “You can initiate chats and save contacts in an address book and everything.”

  I thought, Lola, Lola. Tears splashed on my chest with a sound like punk, punk.

  “You’re making him cry,” said Mirka.

  “Correcting.”

  “Bridging waveforms.”

  Mirka said, “He’s still crying.”

  “Levels look okay, though.”

  “Maybe he’s really sad.”

  Jason went away and came back with a tissue. He wiped one of my cheeks, then the other. “Dr. Neumann?”

  I opened my mouth but there was no air. I manually inhaled in a gasp. “Where. Is. My. Body.”

  “You mean … do you mean your old organic parts? Well … incinerated. There’s not really … there’s not really anything else you can do with them.”

  “Still really sad,” said Mirka.

  “Active correction?”

  “Yes.”

  Stars burst inside my head, wild and brilliant, full of suggestion.

  Jason said, “Do you remember when I asked you about ethics? You wanted to suppress your guilt and I said maybe we shouldn’t and you said there was no such thing as shouldn’t. Actually, you didn’t even understand the question. Well, I get that now. I totally get it. Because sometimes you feel a kind of biological revulsion against an idea but it’s only because you’re not used to it, right? It’s just a matter of baselines.”

  “Improving. Approaching sync.”

  “I mean, it’s not like there’s any fundamental integrity of emotions, am I right? Everything’s chemicals, when you get down to it.”

  My teeth chattered. Elaine said, “That’s a sawtooth, can we do anything about that?” Two cats, male, approached with power drills and positioned themselves against my abdomen. The drills went whreeeee.

  “So, the thing is,” Jason said, “while you were away, we made a lot of military parts. I mean, a lot. And management has been really, really anxious to get them into testing. Only we figured out that sticking them into random volunteers and seeing what happened, that wasn’t such a great idea. So we’ve been waiting. For you. And once we got you … I don’t think management was ever going to wait around until you were, you know, completely comfortable. Because, like I mentioned, there’s an awful lot of stuff bottlenecked. Very valuable stuff. Also, the government seems to have been probing this area a little more closely than they like lately. So management is super-focused on getting some results of labs ASAP. And that’s why, uh … why you’re a little more advanced along the whole body replacement path than you might have anticipated.” He swallowed. “But there’s good news. You get to go out.”

  “What,” I said.

  “I’ll be honest. What they were planning was pretty bad. They wanted you attached to the parts but not able to control them. We’d move them for you and read your sensory feedback. They said it was the quickest way to test. Which, you know, I guess it is. But still. That’s a little inhumane, in our opinion. Being connected to tech but not able to control what it does. That’s like the ultimate user. Anyway, Carl ruined everyone’s plans. So now they let us activate you. It’s actually a great opportunity, because if you show them you can be trusted, they might let you stay active.”

  “Little angry, now,” said Mirka.

  “Uh,” said Jason. “Let me explain the Carl situation. Do you know Carl? Of course you do. I forgot, because we weren’t allowed to tell you about him. But we were working with Carl. Before he went crazy. So what happened was Carl came back. He turned up on the front lawn. Which was a surprise to security, because, well, they expected him, but not at the front door. There are plenty of entrances and a guard knows them all. Of course, they had people in the lobby. They put snipers on the roof, guys in mounted Hummers, prototype weaponry from Speculative Military Products. There was a sonics gun in the garage, the back lawn was sown with EMP mines, and the lobby guys had … well, an electroshock cannon. Like a Taser, firing a couple hundred darts a minute. And the problem was no one asked our opinion. If they had, things would have been different. But you know users. They never spend the time to properly understand the technology. They only want to learn the bare minimum. Enough to make it work. And that’s just not viable when the technology is this powerful. We’re really at the point where users in that sense are becoming obsolete, I think. I don’t think the world can be adequately navigated by someone who doesn’t understand tech anymore. But anyway. So Carl turns up. I don’t know if anyone told you, but when he left, Carl took some stuff. He took a Fiber Shield. Did you go to the Fiber Shield presentation? It’s a bomb, but it thr
ows out tiny fiber strips, a fog of microribbons. They float in the air, tens of millions of them, and their ends are sticky. They’re harmless, but a high-speed projectile moving through that fog hits a ribbon and gets pulled off course. Gets unbalanced. It might go left, right, who knows. The point is it diverts. In the presentation, they set up a target behind the fog and did a bunch of test shots and every one missed. By a lot. It was kind of awesome. It’s not exactly guaranteed protection, you know, like I wouldn’t want to stake my life on it, because the amount of diversion depends on how many ribbons the bullet hits, the angle at each collision, all these random variables. The project leader, that’s Abeline Knudsen, who did that paper on disruptive resonances in inner ear fluid … well, she said, fire enough bullets and eventually one will go straight. Or straight enough. So, actually thinking about it now, maybe the security guys knew that. Maybe that was their plan: if he uses the Fiber Shield, pour bullets into it.

  “Well, Carl appeared on the lawn. We were in the labs, watching on CCTV. Carl—and you know, we liked Carl. We liked him a lot. We were sad he ran off. Anyway, Carl sets off the Fiber Shield, and boom, disappears in fog. Everyone starts shooting. So much gunfire, we could actually feel it. And you know how far down we were.

  “The guys in the lobby with their electroshock cannon, they open fire. They spray these million-volt darts, which are a lot lighter than bullets, of course, and when they hit the fog they go everywhere. Left, right, up in the air, back at the security guys. They hit guards, they land on the roof, they spam the lobby, and everywhere they’re sparking and starting fires. It’s already chaos and then a Hummer takes one in the fuel tank. Then it’s nothing but fire and smoke and people screaming, and Carl comes in and does what he likes.

  “So now everyone’s really keen to recapture Carl,” said Jason. He frowned at something on my chest, tapped it, and looked at another cat, who approached. “Since public exposure at this point would not be good for the company. Of course they sent security guys off after him, and of course that didn’t work, because Carl is, well, Better. So now it’s your turn to go. After Carl.”