Machine Man - Max Barry [0]
MACHINE MAN
“When we first encounter Dr. Charles Neumann, the hero of Max Barry’s wickedly entertaining new novel, he’s human in body, but sadly machinelike in spirit. Then Barry begins the long process of inverting this equation, whittling away at poor Charlie’s flesh while he simultaneously prods his soul into a hesitant, wavering sort of life. It’s a brilliant book: caustically funny, and—by its closing chapter—surprisingly moving.”
—Scott Smith, author of The Ruins
“Don’t open this one unless you’re prepared to keep reading until the last page is done. Once again, Barry delivers.”
—Seth Godin, author of Linchpin
“Fast-paced.… Barry is helping to reinvent publishing.”
—io9.com
MAX BARRY
MACHINE MAN
Max Barry began removing parts at an early age. In 1999, he successfully excised a steady job at tech giant HP in order to upgrade to the more compatible alternative of manufacturing fiction. While producing three novels, he developed the online nation simulation game NationStates, as well as contributing to various open source software projects and developing religious views on operating systems. He did not leave the house much. For Machine Man, Max wrote a website to deliver pages of fiction to readers via e-mail and RSS. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters, and is thirty-eight years old. He uses vi.
www.maxbarry.com
ALSO BY MAX BARRY
Company
Jennifer Government
Syrup
A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Max Barry
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblace to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This entire work was serialized in somewhat different form from March 2009 to December 2009 on www.maxbarry.com/machineman.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barry, Max, 1973–
Machine man : a novel / by Max Barry.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74322-0
1. Mechanical engineers—Fiction. 2. Artificial limbs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A7424M33 2011
813′.54—dc22
2011004724
www.vintagebooks.com
Cover design by Matt Roeser
v3.1
FINE, IT’S FOR MINTER.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 0
Acknowledgments
AS A boy, I wanted to be a train. I didn’t realize this was unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them. They liked to build tracks and have trains not fall off them. Watch them go through tunnels. I didn’t understand that. What I liked was pretending my body was two hundred tons of unstoppable steel. Imagining I was pistons and valves and hydraulic compressors.
“You mean robots,” said my best friend, Jeremy. “You want to play robots.” I had never thought of it like that. Robots had square eyes and jerky limbs and usually wanted to destroy the Earth. Instead of doing one thing right, they did everything badly. They were general purpose. I was not a fan of robots. They were bad machines.
I WOKE and reached for my phone and it was not there. I groped around my bedside table, fingers sneaking between novels I didn’t read anymore because once you start e-reading you can’t go back. But no phone. I sat up and turned on my lamp. I crawled underneath the bed, in case my phone had somehow fallen in the night and bounced oddly. My eyes were blurry from sleep so I swept my arms across the carpet in hopeful arcs. This disturbed dust and I coughed. But I kept sweeping. I thought: Have I been burgled? I felt like