Machine Man - Max Barry [18]
“Oh,” I said.
THAT NIGHT the cadmium battery fried the microprocessor. I had known this was a possibility but still it was disappointing. I sat at my workbench and stared at the thin wisp of smoke twisting out of the plastic knee. It was fixable. I could replace the chip. But then I would be limited by the transistors. Every time I upgraded something, something new became a bottleneck.
I pushed myself away from the bench. It was late. My problem was I was tinkering around the edges. Trying to improve it beyond the capability of its fundamental design. I was thinking like everyone else: that the goal of a prosthesis was to mimic biology.
I closed my eyes. I felt warm. I opened them, found a pad and pen, and began to write. I sketched. I filled four pages and took the leg off the table and put it on the floor to make room. I had been going about this all wrong. Biology was not ideal. When you thought about it, biological legs couldn’t do anything except convey a small mass from A to B, so long as A and B were not particularly far apart and you were in no hurry. That wasn’t great. The only reason it was even notable was that legs did it using raw materials they grew themselves. If you were designing something within that limitation, then okay, good job. But if you weren’t, it seemed to me you could build in a lot more features.
THREE WEEKS later I called the hospital. I was very excited. I had been putting this off, waiting until I was calm, but that never happened so finally I just did it. I closed the door to my bunk room and faced the wall so nothing could distract me.
“Lola Shanks, Prosthetics.”
“Hi, it’s Charles Neumann, I was in there a few—”
“Charlie! Where have you been?”
I was supposed to visit the hospital for follow-up sessions. They were mandatory, but the kind with no penalties for noncompliance. “Busy. Can I see you?”
“Yes! That would be good! I hope you’ve been keeping up your physical therapy. You’re in trouble if you haven’t. When can you come in?”
“Can you come here?” I was tapping the floor with my ski toes: tick tick tick. I made myself stop that. “I have something to show you. I want your professional opinion.”
“Um. Okay. Why not? Where are you?”
TO MEET Lola Shanks I had to go to the lobby. I hadn’t been aboveground since I discovered the bunk rooms. But she needed to be authorized. So I rode the elevator and walked the corridors. This was harder than it sounds because I was wearing the Exegesis and had never gotten around to fixing the knee. It tended to get away from me. I stuck close to walls. But I limped past hardened engineers without a single question. This puzzled me until I realized I had become pathetic.
I reached the lobby and fell into a black sofa. I pulled out my phone and looked up every few seconds to see if she was coming through the doors. I was early. I leaned forward and peered at a scale model of a mobile weapons platform that sat in a glass case on the low coffee table. Its little plaque said, CIVIL PEACEMAKER VO. 5-111. It was essentially a caravan with guns. I had been to a presentation; the idea was you towed it somewhere like a recently captured city and left it there, making peace.
“Hey!”
I jumped. Lola Shanks was coming toward me, wearing a white polo shirt, white pants, and white sneakers. Her hair was held back with a thin white headband. My first thought was she had come directly from exercising or perhaps some sort of religious event but I think it was