Machine Man - Max Barry [20]
Lola looked at me. I nodded and she approached it. I looked up: no sign of Jason. Good. Lola touched the sheet. “Can I …?”
I pulled off the sheet. Lola inhaled. I looked at her face to see if this was a good inhalation or a bad one. It was hard to tell. How did the leg appear to someone who hadn’t seen it before? Kind of spiderlike, I guessed. The upper section was a black lattice of interlocking steel. From there two silver pistons fed into a splayed eight-toed foot. I had been very proud of this but suddenly it looked creepy.
Lola walked around it three times. She stopped near the Clamp. It was still there. You didn’t decommission machinery of that caliber just because some idiot managed to lose a limb in it. “You built this?”
“Yes.”
“How did you … how did you build this?”
“You know.” I shrugged. “A little at a time.”
“It looks heavy.”
“It’s about two hundred pounds.” I pointed at dents in the floor. “It made those.”
“How do you lift it?”
“I don’t. It walks by itself.”
Lola looked at me.
“It’s not ideal. It has to remain in contact with the ground. But it can handle stairs. Those toes can get up to ten inches long. And you can’t see it, but underneath are two orbital wheels on a shifting multidimensional axis. It alternates between toes and wheels depending on the terrain.”
She walked around the leg. “What’s this?” She gestured to a series of black aluminum cases welded up near the socket.
“The processor housing. I’m not really happy with the positioning.”
“What’s it for?”
“Systems control. Data storage, GPS, wi-fi, et cetera.”
“Your leg has wi-fi?”
“It has to. Otherwise it couldn’t interface with the online path-finding API.”
Lola’s eyebrows rose.
“You shouldn’t need to tell your leg where to step. You should tell it where you want to go and let it figure out how to get there. That’s basic encapsulation.”
Lola looked back at the leg. I don’t think she really understood encapsulation. She knelt beside the leg and ran her fingers over the metal.
“I’ll put it on.” I pulled over an office chair and began unstrapping the Exegesis. It clanked to the floor and I flicked the latch that caused the new leg to ease down into a bent position. The hydraulics hissed. I positioned my stump against the socket and slid in. That was nothing special. It was just somewhere to stick my thigh.
“There are no straps?”
I shook my head. “I basically rest in it.” I steadied myself, then stood up in the leg. “Ready?” She nodded. I pressed for power. The servomagnetics started near silently. There was a line of crude buttons for simple functions and I pressed one for a short forward journey. The leg flexed in three places and glided forward. I leaned into it and performed a matching step with my biological leg. This was the clunkiest part of the whole procedure. I wasn’t happy with that. The entire time Lola was silent.
I cleared my throat. “What do you think?”
“Oh, Charlie. It’s beautiful. It’s completely beautiful.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Oh. Thank you.”
AFTER I escorted Lola back aboveground, I returned to Lab 4 and sat on the floor beside my leg. I had thought Lola might like my leg, but you never knew. Her reaction exceeded all my expectations.
Then I felt depressed. It was the opposite of a logical reaction but there it was. I always felt like this at the end of a project. I would be frantic and determined and excited then sad because it was over and there was nothing left to improve. I stared at the leg. It occurred to me that I hadn’t escaped my bottlenecks. I had only pushed them back. I had made a leg that could walk by itself, which was okay, but I could see now that this was about as far as it could go. All improvement from here would be incremental, because the bottleneck was my body.
It was late. My lab assistants had left. I looked at my leg, the good one. Well. I don’t mean “good.” I mean the one I’d had since birth. I rolled up my pants and turned it