Machine Man - Max Barry [11]
“No.”
She sat back on her haunches. “You can’t make this an excuse to disappear. I’ve seen how that turns out. How you get through this depends on you, Charlie. On how you respond to the challenge.”
“Okay.” I didn’t mean this. It wasn’t that I wanted to cut myself off from the world. I just knew it would happen.
She backed away. “Stand up.”
I gripped the side of the wheelchair and levered myself into the air. The leg hung from my stump. It looked even less impressive from this angle. The ski-like prongs wobbled. They seemed flimsy. They looked like they might fall off.
“Put your weight on it.”
I leaned forward. The socket squeezed me in a way that felt very wrong.
“Trust the leg, Charlie.”
“The stitches—”
“I haven’t popped a stitch yet.”
I dragged my sleeve across my forehead. I put more weight on the leg and the toe prongs bent. I knew logically they must be rated to carry a running adult male but it seemed hard to believe. I wondered how thoroughly it had been checked.
Lola Shanks held out her arms. I took a breath and let the leg absorb my weight. The pressure was bad but not unbearable. I shuffled forward and did it again. By the time I reached Lola I was losing rivers of sweat. I had traveled four paces. “Good!” She grinned, as if this was genuinely exciting for her, and I was shaky and tired but also proud and I smiled, too.
I SAT in bed and inspected the Exegesis. I really needed tools. To take it apart. But I could figure out some things from observation. It wasn’t that complicated. It was essentially a bucket on a stick. I still found it surprising that this was as good as it got. It made me suspect that there were not a lot of amputees working in mechanical engineering. They seemed to have started from the premise that you should be grateful to be walking at all.
But Lola Shanks was right: I had grown to like it. Not because it let me walk. That I could take or leave. But I did like staggering toward Lola, her eyes growing with each step, and how when I reached her she squeezed my hands.
I WAS still shocked sometimes to see I was missing a leg. I had moments of paralyzing fear while my mind screamed, Where is it? Sometimes I dreamed I was missing something but couldn’t figure out what. It became annoying. I knew my brain had thirty-five years of conditioning to get over, but seriously, when was it going to realize this was real?
AT 10:45 a.m. I grew impatient and fidgety. I couldn’t concentrate on my phone. I felt thirsty. It was because of Lola Shanks. She visited at eleven. I slid to the edge of the bed and strapped on the leg. When she arrived I was up and hobbling. She stopped in the doorway, looking outraged, in a good way. “Charlie,” she said. She stuck out her elbow. “Let’s go for a walk.”
THE HOSPITAL was encircled by a wide concrete path, from the emergency bay to the rear garden. There patients stood attached to IV drips, sucking cigarettes. I was getting the hang of the Exegesis. But if I walked too confidently Lola Shanks took back her arm, so the temptation was there to feign incompetence.
“Tell me about your work,” said Lola. “What do you do?”
“I test things.” My ski-prong toes dragged: skrrrrch.
“What kind of things?”
“Things. Materials.”
“Is it interesting?”
I considered. It was interesting sometimes, like when you thought the copper valence was going to fall apart under particle bombardment but then it didn’t. This wasn’t what people meant by interesting, though. “No.”
“Oh,” said Lola.
“Sometimes I make things. If I have an idea, I can propose it as a project, and if they approve it I can build it.”
“What do you build?”
We descended a ramp. The ski toes tried to sail away from me and I let them. Lola’s arm tightened around mine. “Last year I built an oscillator. It moved a five-gram copper rod back and forth over a distance of twenty millimeters six hundred thousand times a second.”
Lola was silent. “How is that useful?”
“I’m not sure. I just proposed it and they said yes. They probably used it in some other project.”
“Oh.