Runaway Robot

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  How cool is/are your new body part/s?

  How good is the story of how you lost your original body part/s?

  Bottom of the league is probably Tyler.

  Tyler lost a few fingers when he went over to take a closer look at a lit firework that hadn’t gone off. He picked it up and gave it a shake. It went off then, and it took three of his fingers with it. Why is he even in the Limb Lab? He should be in a ‘Don’t Mess With Fireworks’ class. He sometimes refers to himself as ‘The Tyler’. He walks with his head down, like he’s looking for something he recently dropped.

  In the middle of the league table, we have D’Arcy.

  D’Arcy lost the lower half of both her legs, and now she has blades instead. There are quite a few people with blades in and out of the lab, but she lost her legs in a famous incident when a funfair zip wire came unzipped. So her story was in all the papers. Twice. Once when it happened, and then again when she was the ‘brave little girl who everyone thought would never walk again’. Having your story in the papers is impressive.

  Top of the table, no question, is Shatila Mars (otherwise known as Shatter).

  You can’t even tell that Shatter has a new body part, unless you know where to look. It’s a new foot, by the way. A more than averagely impressive foot. But what makes Shatter top of the table is that she lost her foot when it was blown off as she stepped on a landmine back home in Bosnia, where she’s from.

  She’s a victim of war, which is more impressive than being in the papers, and massively more impressive than being stupid around fireworks.

  Shatter’s foot arrived by 3D printer too. It was made of resin in exactly the same colour as Shatter’s deep-brown skin. Except for the toes which were shiny metal.

  ‘Shatila is going to help us test and refine it,’ said Dr Shilling, ‘and when we’ve got it just right we can send hundreds of them by printer to other disabled children in her home country, and she can go and be an inspiration to them all.’

  Shatter not only says whatever she feels like saying; she says it with as many full stops as she wants, and she puts them wherever she wants. It’s as though life has given her an excessive amount of punctuation, and she’s trying to get rid of it.

  For instance, the first time she met me, she said, ‘Who are. You? And what are. You for?’

  What am I for? What is anyone for? I still wake up thinking about that.

  Apparently she talks like that because that’s the way she was taught to speak English. I once asked her who taught her to speak like that, with all the unexpected full. Stops.

  ‘No one. I. Taught. Myself,’ she said.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I asked Alexa. Questions in. English and. Copied the. Answers.’

  So she basically learned English from a robot, and now she talks like one.

  After Dr Shilling said that about her being an inspiration, Shatter said, ‘My foot is. Itchy.’

  ‘Gross,’ said D’Arcy.

  ‘Are you. Calling my. Foot gross?’

  ‘The itching is probably caused by sweat,’ said Dr Shilling.

  ‘Double gross,’ said D’Arcy.

  ‘Are you. Calling my. Foot double. Gross?’ Shatter threw a karate kick, her brand-new foot stopping just a quivering breath away from D’Arcy’s nose. ‘This. Foot?’ said Shatter.

  ‘Yes,’ said D’Arcy. ‘But close up it’s not gross at all. Close up it’s a lovely foot.’

  ‘Lovely. Foot,’ said Shatter. ‘Don’t for. Get it.’

  Settling discussions by means of fear is her great talent.

  Her other talent is knowing where an aeroplane is coming from or going to, just by looking up when it flies past. Honestly, you can be sitting in the Tranquillity Garden and a plane will go by and she will look up and say, ‘KLM mid-morning flight. From Zurich.’ Amazing.

  ‘Of course,’ said D’Arcy one time, ‘we don’t know if she’s always right or not. About those planes.’

  ‘If you really wanted to be sure,’ said Tyler, ‘you could ask her to prove it.’

  We all agreed that we would prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  A few days after my hand arrived, Dr Shilling brought a visitor into the classroom.

  ‘This is Mo,’ she said. ‘He’s a student of engineering at university. He wanted to meet you. And I think you wanted to show the children something, Mo – is that right?’

  ‘A card trick.’ Mo smiled. ‘Just for you. Here’s my pack of cards.’

  He pulled open the pack and shuffled the cards. I mean really shuffled them, like a proper magician, fanning them out, letting them cascade from hand to hand, spreading them out, flicking them over. Then he looked up at us. We sat waiting for him to say ‘pick a card’, or whatever.

  ‘Are you. Going to do this. Magic trick. Ever?’ asked Shatter.

  ‘Done already,’ said Mo, smiling broadly.

  Everyone looked around, wondering if a rabbit had appeared in the room or something.

  ‘I shuffled those cards,’ said Mo, ‘with this.’ He rolled up his sleeve.

  We all saw that the bottom part of his arm was made of some kind of transparent plastic. You could see that it didn’t have muscles and bones, but wires.

  Even Shatter was mildly impressed.

  ‘I am mildly. Impressed,’ she said.

  Everyone who had two hands clapped. Everyone who had a foot to stamp stamped. It looked like real magic.

  ‘This is not magic,’ said Dr Shilling. ‘You will all learn to do this. Mo was a student here at the Limb Lab. Just like you. He lost his hand during the rebellion in Sierra Leone. His new hand has a bluetooth connection chipped into his upper arm.’

  ‘I’m moving this hand with my mind,’ explained Mo. ‘Just like I did with my old flesh job hand. Alfie, when you first lost your hand, could you feel a ghost hand where it used to be?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can you still feel it sometimes?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Can you still feel it when you have your new hand on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘Like a ghost trapped in a box.’

  ‘That’s how it was for me too,’ said Mo.

  ‘The truth is,’ explained Dr Shilling, ‘we all have a ghost hand. It’s just that usually it’s in the same place as our flesh hand. Your ghost hand wore your flesh hand like a glove. It was the ghost that made the flesh hand work. All you have to do is let your ghost hand make your new hand work. Just let yourself feel your ghost hand for a while. Then, when I tell you to, put your Osprey Grip back on.’

  I did as she said.

  Don’t get me wrong, the Osprey Grip hand is amazing. You can get it to do all kinds of stuff. But you can’t get it to feel anything. You can’t use it to tell if a thing is wet or dry or hard or soft or hot or cold.

  The moment I take it off, I can feel again. Even though my hand’s not there, I can feel the breeze on its non-existent back, and the hard wood of the chair on its non-existent knuckles.

  ‘Ready? OK. Keep your ghost hand in mind and now put your Osprey back on.’

  Once again, I did as she said.

  ‘Right. Now try to use your ghost hand to lift your Osprey hand. Don’t use any of the muscle tricks that you’ve learned here at the Limb Lab – just try to imagine your ghost hand lifting it.’

  I tried. Nothing happened. The ghost hand was in there, moving around, but it just wasn’t strong enough to move the Osprey hand.

  ‘Come on. Give it a go.’

  ‘I’m . . . giving . . . it . . . a . . . go.’

  The Osprey hand just hung down at my side, heavy as a really heavy hammer.

  ‘Look at my. Foot,’ said Shatter. She stuck her foot out. ‘Twiddling my. Toes.’

  I swear she really was twiddling her toes.

  ‘She’s twiddling her toes,’ said Tyler, who seemed to have decided that it was his job to translate everything Shatter said.

&n
bsp; Ten seconds later, Shatter was doing keepy-ups with the lab practice ball.

  ‘Doing keepy. Ups,’ she said.

  ‘Shatter is doing keepy-ups,’ explained Tyler.

  Do you know what it was like? Remember in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when they’re learning the levitation charm, trying to make a feather take off. And no one can do it. Then Hermione just goes, ‘Wingardium Leviosa,’ and her feather takes off round the room? Well, it was just like that. Shatter was Hermione, and I was Ron.

  I tried again. This time, something happened.

  Like a spirit walking through a door, my ghost hand just passed through the side of the Osprey hand. Just straight through it. And then it just smoked off into the air. Just evaporated. For the first time since I lost my hand, I couldn’t feel anything at the end of my arm. Just an empty space with a plastic thing strapped to it.

  I may be good with machines generally, but there’s one machine I haven’t mastered yet. And that’s the Osprey Grip.

  ‘Don’t worry, Alfie. Not everyone gets it first time.’ Dr Shilling patted my shoulder. ‘When you go home, get a big pile of Lego and start building with it. We often find that when people are playing Lego they get so absorbed in what they’re building they forget to think about what the hand is doing. And that’s when it starts to really work – when you’re not thinking about it.’

  There’s a little table at home that usually has a plant pot and a lamp on it. When I got home, Mum cleared it, then emptied a tub of Lego out on to it.

  ‘When you can build a little house out of Lego, we’ll know you’re on your way,’ she said, smiling encouragingly.

  I did try. Playing with Lego was supposed to make you forget about your hand. Instead it just made me think about my hand even more and forget about the Lego. It also made me think about what Shatter had said: ‘What are you FOR?’

  Apparently I was not for building Lego.

  What was I for, then? Everyone else in the Limb Lab was really getting into being slightly bionic. I thought about jacking in the lab and going back to my old school. But school was full of people like Thursday Wells, who would happily flush your head down the toilet if you were wearing the wrong deodorant. Imagine what they’d do if you had the wrong type of hand. The truth is, I was too bionic for school. Not bionic enough for the Limb Lab, though. I was a prisoner of the hand.

  So when the woman from the Many Happy Returns cafe grabbed it in the airport arrivals hall I unfastened it and ran.

  I ran off into departures. If you’ve got a ticket and a passport, you could run into departures and end up in Miami. Me, I ended up running slap bang into the chest of a security guard. Not quite into his chest, to be honest – more into his beard. It was very long and so thick and vast that he seemed more beard than person. A beard in uniform. A talking beard.

  ‘No running in the airport,’ the beard said.

  ‘Sorry – I just . . .’

  ‘Where are your parents?’

  I could see the face behind the beard now.

  ‘They’re not here.’

  ‘Are you an unaccompanied minor?’

  I wasn’t sure what that was, but it didn’t sound good.

  He tutted. ‘You’d better come with me.’

  I really didn’t want to do that, so I lifted up my arm and said, ‘I lost my hand!’

  The security guard jumped back in a flurry of beard, his head swivelling as if he was looking for my hand, except he was looking at the ceiling. If there was a disembodied hand bleeding all over the floor, he really didn’t want to see it.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a doctor.’

  ‘No. No. It’s a special hand. Made of plastic.’

  ‘A toy hand?’

  ‘No. My hand that I use. It goes here. Look . . .’ I pushed back my sleeve so he could see where it was missing.

  ‘You’ve got a false hand?’

  ‘It’s not false. It’s a real hand, but plastic. Prosthetic. An Osprey Grip MM hand.’

  He was so relieved that he started being actually helpful. ‘Let me see if I can . . . I mean, I’ll ask if anyone’s seen . . . I mean . . . What does it look like?’

  ‘A hand.’

  ‘Yes. Of course it does.’

  ‘But more Lego-ish than most hands.’

  ‘Right. Follow me.’

  And he led me through the forbidden door.

  I mean he led me through the big doors marked ‘Arrivals’. You can normally only walk through them from the other side – when you’re arriving. I’d never seen anyone walk through them from this side.

  There were rows of conveyor belts with suitcases toddling along them. Crowds of people stood around waiting to collect them, like grown-ups waiting for their kids at the school gates. We walked past the conveyor belts into a corridor that was so narrow it felt more like a tube. Beardy Security kept checking over his shoulder, making sure I was following him. We finally came to a metal door. He opened it with a code, and then we were in an area signed ‘Lost Property’.

  The first time I walked into the airport, I thought it was a magic kingdom. But Lost Property – well, Lost Property is an Aladdin’s cave.

  There’s a desk, and behind the desk sat a woman in a crisp red uniform, with the biggest Afro you’ve ever seen. She had a badge on her lapel that said ‘Happy to Help’. This must have been her actual name because it definitely wasn’t a description of her mood. Her Afro looked like her own personal thundercloud. She kept looking at her tablet the way the wicked queen in Snow White kept looking in her mirror.

  ‘He’s lost a hand,’ said the security guard.

  ‘Lost hand,’ muttered the thundercloud in a voice that implied people were constantly losing their hands, and she was bored of it. ‘Left or right?’

  I held up my right arm so she could see my hand was missing, but she didn’t look up from her tablet.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ she said to her computer.

  ‘Right,’ replied her tablet in a voice that sounded a bit like the snowman in Frozen. ‘Is the owner losing blood?’

  ‘Are you losing blood?’ said Happy to Help. ‘Do you need medical attention?’

  ‘No. It’s a detachable hand. It came off in someone else’s hand. In arrivals. By the cafe.’

  Now the woman looked up at me. ‘Are you saying it’s been stolen? Because if it’s been stolen that’s a police matter.’

  ‘She wasn’t stealing it. It was an accident. The lady didn’t know the hand was detachable.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Happy to Help.

  ‘Size?’ said the computer.

  ‘Size?’ repeated Happy to Help.

  ‘She was about average height,’ I said.

  ‘Size,’ sneered Happy to Help, ‘of the hand. This is Lost Property, not Scotland Yard.’

  I held up my left hand for her to see and said, ‘Same size as this one.’

  She peered at my hand for a second and said, ‘Child-sized. How many fingers?’

  ‘Normal number. Five including a thumb.’

  ‘Any distinguishing features – wedding rings or such?’

  ‘I’m not married. I’m twelve.’

  ‘Right.’ She swiped the screen and waited. ‘It seems we have had a number of hands HANDED in.’

  I waited for her to tell me more, but she paused and stared at me, like her mind was buffering.

  ‘Hands. Handed in? Hello? Joke.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Very funny.’

  ‘We have a pair of hands in aisle eleven, which are tartan with little bobbles on the back. The fingers are like little Loch Ness Monsters and . . .’

  ‘I think they’re probably gloves.’

  She peered at me. Then she peered at her tablet. ‘You may well be right,’ she said. ‘Blue leather hand with pearl buttons at the wrist and . . . That’s a glove too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Think so.’

  ‘So much for image recognition.’ She swiped the screen
a few times, muttering. ‘Glove . . . Another glove . . . That’s a doll . . . That’s not even a hand – that’s hand cream . . . What is wrong with you!’ she yelled at the screen.

  ‘Sorry, guys,’ said her tablet in a frightened voice. ‘Searches seem to be fuzzier than usual today.’

  Happy to Help swiped the screen, but quickly, like a slap.

  The tablet said, ‘You are exhibiting signs of stress. Why not try taking a few deep breaths. Be mindful. Aisle fourteen. One hand.’

  ‘Come with me,’ said Happy to Help.

  Arrivals is a properly noisy place. People are cheering and crying. Phones are going. There are announcements every couple of minutes. Lost Property, on the other hand, is seriously quiet. The only sound was of Happy to Help’s heels on the tiles. Tut tut tut, they went, as though they were disgusted with the whole idea of walking.

  I followed her down a corridor of shelves – long shelves, stretching miles into the distance and high over our heads. Shelves crowded with plastic boxes labelled with words like ‘Umbrellas’, ‘Phones’ and ‘Teeth’. Sometimes, through a gap, I could see that there were other shelves. Shelves beyond shelves. Shelves stretching to the left and right – like lanes in an infinite bowling alley.

  Everything here had been forgotten. Pushchairs, wheelchairs, luggage and laptops. Metre upon metre of lost dolls and teddy bears. Their brown eyes seemed to follow us as we passed, like they were saying, Come and stay with us in the Land of Forgotten Toys. Forever.

  ‘Stick close to me,’ said Happy to Help over her shoulder. ‘The lights are activated by my presence. It can get very dark in the shelves when I’m not here. People have been known to get lost in Lost Property. I’ve got an app that takes me to the selected item. See?’

  I chased after the pool of light that swirled out around her tutting feet.

  There was a coffin on one of the shelves we passed. I hoped that it was empty. Two aisles over, something that looked like the helmet from a suit of armour was lying on its side. She just breezed past it. I swear the head shifted on the shelf, watching us go by. OK, that could just have been the light moving.

  Her phone said, ‘Your selected item is on the left.’

  Happy to Help stopped and looked.

  ‘One hand,’ said the phone. ‘Happy to have helped.’