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By Root 281 0

and for a second I thought I was about to fall out. I took my hands off the controls and clutched at the seat. It was okay. I could adapt to it. It was like riding a horse. Or how I imagined riding a horse. I had never actually done that. I adjusted my balance and took another step. Another. Crack. Crack. People moved out of my way. Two held camcorders. I needed to clear this room. I couldn’t work with them here. Now I thought about it, I had no idea how I was supposed to manage twenty lab assistants. I had struggled with three. Maybe I could get Cassandra Cautery to take them away again. I looked for her in the crowd and realized she was in the Glass Room, a watery green version of herself. She was watching from a safe distance. Down here it was just me and the ocean of lab assistants. I stopped walking. Nobody spoke. Shoes shuffled. There were a lot of pairs of glasses in this room.

“Well,” I said. “What do you think?”

An incredibly thin guy with nightmarish skin cleared his throat. “The interface is crude. Ideally you want to do something with nerve impulses, I think.”

“Krankman’s working with nerves,” said a girl. “I was on his project before this. Splicing.”

They drew closer. A few dropped down to inspect the legs up close. I could almost feel their fingers. “There’s a lot of weight in this metal.”

“You could drop that down by hollowing these columns out.”

“What about titanium?”

“What about impact absorbency? I worry what happens when he steps off something.”

“Hmm,” the skinny boy said. And I relaxed, because this was going to work out.

OF COURSE the Curies died. They identified ionizing radiation while bathing in it. There were risks involved in being your own guinea pig. But there was a long tradition of scientists doing just that: of paying for the expansion of human knowledge with their lives. I didn’t deserve to be categorized with them, because honestly, I wasn’t interested in the greater good. I just wanted to make myself better legs. I didn’t mind other people benefiting in some longer-term indirect way but it wasn’t what motivated me. I felt guilty about this for a while. Every time a lab assistant looked at me with starstruck eyes, I felt I should confess: Look, I’m not being heroic. I’m just interested in seeing what I can do. Then it occurred to me that maybe they all felt this way. All these great scientists who risked themselves to bring light to darkness, maybe they weren’t especially altruistic either. Maybe they were like me, seeing what they could do.

I TRIED to call Lola. I didn’t have my phone, so I wheeled myself to my desk in the Glass Room. I had to dial through reception, and it took a long time to start ringing, and that was all it did. It seemed odd that the hospital would not answer its phone so I dialed reception again and asked them to check the number. “This is the number you want,” she said. So I tried again but again it rang out.

I DIVIDED my assistants into teams: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. It was the only way to keep them manageable. They worked in competition: I wheeled among them and anything I liked sparked grins and furious development. Beta came up with a whole new wheel-based leg design, almost a chariot, which I liked so much I took it over myself. Then Alpha and Gamma also got into wheels and Beta accused them of intellectual plagiarism. It was a whole thing. There were tears. I told Gamma to go build some fingers or something. They liked this. They wound up deploying four hands’ worth and using them to make obscene gestures at Beta. It was like being back at college, only I was respected. Sometimes I wheeled past bodies in the corridors: assistants who had literally lain down and slept because they were too tired to make it home. Everywhere were sodas.

EVERYONE THOUGHT Beta was going to reach testing on a new prototype first but the wheels were a dead end. They couldn’t get good traction on uneven ground, not even in rotating sets on independent suspension with ground-sensing sticky locks. We did a lot of stairwell damage before figuring that out. We left gouges