Machine Man - Max Barry [100]
Motion flared behind us. We turned and saw Lola picking her way into the store. Her eyes found Carl. He had entered the visible spectrum. His metal structure was bent and broken. Beneath it, so was Carl. Some of his metal had gone into him. I didn’t want to gloat. But this was why you didn’t go hybrid. “Oh, God. You killed him.” Her hands flew to her mouth. Her eyes watered.
“He tried to take our parts. He ruined our arm.” We showed her. “Look.”
“This is wrong. This is so wrong.”
Outside, tires screeched. Doors slammed. “We should leave.”
Lola shook her head, looking at Carl. She wanted him to take our parts, we thought. It was a terrible shame because she was so very lovely. She was dear to us. But she had a bad idea, one incompatible with our existence.
Something went clunk within our gun arm. For a horrible second we thought it had died. Then we remembered this noise, from when Better Future had brought the gun online. We looked in our head, and on the other side of the window was Jason, watching.
WE HEARD a beeping. The main lobby doors banged open to reveal a second set of doors, industrial and flat-looking. These ratcheted open and we realized they belonged to a truck. A ramp clanged to the floor. Down the ramp came Cassandra Cautery and gray-uniformed security guards, who leaped off the sides, their flashlights illuminating glittering columns of dust. Behind them, the cats.
“Jeshus,” said Cassandra Cautery. “Look at this.” She stared at Carl without expression. If beauty really was permanence, Cassandra Cautery was more beautiful than ever.
“He wanted our parts.”
“You’ve done a good thing, Charlie. You have.” A forklift backed down the truck’s ramp, orange light swirling. It completed a turn and bumped toward Carl, its prongs like a forked tongue. Driving the forklift was a boy with tan skin and rippling muscles. “Now we can clean up.”
“Charlie needs help,” said Lola. “His parts are destroying him.”
“You calm down,” said Cassandra Cautery. “You’re enough trouble without working yourself up. Charlie, we have to go. Get in the truck.”
“No,” we said.
“No,” she echoed. She sounded disappointed but not surprised. “Why are you not getting in the truck, Charlie?”
“You wanted me. Passive. Testing parts with. No control.”
She pursed her lips. “Jason?” He came up behind her, gripping a tablet. “Did you tell Dr. Neumann we would be using him as a passive biological receptacle for rapid parts testing?”
“Um, it … kind of slipped out.”
“Did it,” she said. “Did it slip out.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” His eyes flicked at me.
She took a breath. “Charlie. I won’t lie to you. We were going to do passive testing, yes. But you need to see this from the company’s point of view. You’re an asset. We can’t have assets with feelings. We can’t have assets falling in love or kicking people through windows. The only way for us to manage this situation is with complete control over everything you do. I realize that’s not ideal for you. But that’s the situation. Now, once things have settled down, once we’ve got a nice production system going, that’s open for review. We can try letting you walk around by yourself for a while, in a controlled environment. You see? There’s a future for you. A good future. If you get in the truck.”
“Charlie,” said Lola. “Listen to me. You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met. But not because of your body. You’re more than that. You need to please remember that you never wanted to kill people. You never wanted to be controlled by your body.”
We looked away. We were not finding anyone here very compelling. Cassandra Cautery wanted to put us in a cage and Lola wanted to take us apart and what we wanted was to run away and find a place to tinker. But then we looked back at Lola and remembered she was a kind of part of us, too. Not a physical part. But a key one, in the sense that we had been a different person with her. We thought, Do we need Lola? We felt competing desires and none felt more Charlie-like than another. We thought, Maybe there is no core