Machine Man - Max Barry [21]
I PULLED my prosthetic leg apart. I didn’t mean to but once I got started I kept seeing more things I could make better. When I saw it lying in pieces I panicked about what I had done, but it was okay. I could rebuild this.
I scavenged parts from adjoining labs. I sent my assistants out for hard-to-get materials. I didn’t tell them what they were for. But they probably knew. You didn’t become a scientist if you could resist the urge to check what was under a white sheet in a spotlit laboratory. I stopped answering e-mail and performing paid duties. I did not shave. I built the leg into a new configuration that increased its mobility by half but immediately saw a better solution and stripped it down again. Some time passed. I am not sure how much. Sometimes I fell asleep in the lab and awoke in a cold puddle of drool. When I visited the vending machine, I carted away as many snacks as my arms could bear and piled them in the corner, so I could work for longer periods. The worst thing was going to the bathroom, which was all the way at the end of the corridor, near the elevators. The best part was making it there, because then I had a six- to eight-hour uninterrupted window ahead of me, and while leaning back on the toilet with my eyes closed, I would have ideas.
Messages from Lola accumulated in my voice mail. On the nights I made it to my bunk I listened to them before falling asleep. I put her on speaker and it was like she was in the room. Her messages urged me to call her, turning increasingly anxious. It was good to feel wanted. But I did not call her back, because my legs weren’t quite ready.
JASON BROUGHT me a set of thirty-inch coil springs. I had the leg pieces spread across my workbench. I wasn’t hiding what I was doing anymore. We had passed that point.
I realized he wasn’t leaving, and pushed up my goggles. “Yes?”
Jason’s eyes flicked across the components. “You wanted two springs.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“It looks … it looks like you’re building two legs.”
I looked at my pieces. It was hard to deny.
“I don’t really …” said Jason. “I don’t understand why you want two.”
“Backup.”
“Oh.” He did not look convinced. Still he hung there. “Is there anything I can do for you, Dr. Neumann? Anything at all?”
I thought about this. “I would like some more snacks.”
He brought them.
I FINISHED my new legs. Well. I reached a point at which I no longer felt an urgent, clawing need to change things. I tried to stay calm but I was trembling inside. I swallowed over and over. I felt scared to look at them. It was silly. But everything about this moment seemed fragile.
I couldn’t wear them, of course. They were a set; I didn’t fit. But I could sit beside them and enjoy their presence. It was quiet, just me and them.
WHEN I was fifteen, I was almost killed by a shirtless man in a Dodge Viper. I was crossing a suburban street on my way home from school and he roared around the corner. I think he expected me to scurry out of the way, but I didn’t, because I was fifteen and valued appearing tough to strangers over remaining alive. The shirtless man clearly shared this philosophy, because his car jagged toward me. I realized I was going to die, or at least be hurt a lot. But at the last second—too late, in a car less well engineered—the Viper slid to a smoking halt.
The driver leaned out the window and screamed abuse. This was when I saw he was shirtless. He wore mirror shades and chunky jewelry, which flew around as he gesticulated. I tensed, in case he was about to get out and beat me up, but he only stabbed fingers in my direction, punctuating insults I couldn’t hear over the torrent of high-fidelity music pouring from his stereo.
Finally he put the car in gear and drove off. I watched him slingshot around the next corner, already up to forty or fifty miles per hour. I walked on. I felt vaguely outraged that such a bad person had such a good car. Because the car was the culmination of a thousand-odd years of scientific