Machine Man - Max Barry [35]
I CAUGHT the elevator to the fourth floor of Building C, where Cassandra Cautery worked. Cassandra Cautery had visited the labs several times but I was always drugged or busy with wireframes so we hadn’t spoken. I just knew she was escorting executives around.
I wheeled myself along carpet so thick it made my arms ache. Building C was nice. The entire Better Future complex was visually attractive, but in a utilitarian, engineering kind of way, where beauty meant simplicity. We favored straight lines and parabolic curves, no bleeding of anything into anything else. Here was free-flowing color. I was not a big fan of art but I think some part of me relaxed.
I found Cassandra Cautery’s office at an intersection of corridors. I had an appointment but was early. I wondered if I should do a lap. “Charlie!” Cassandra Cautery came around her desk and beckoned me inside. “Thank you so much for making time.” She closed the door behind me. The office was small and filled with thick books. It had a low sofa, a painting of a circle, and a computer that looked more interested in being pretty than working fast. There were no windows. “Can I get you a drink?”
“No. Thanks.”
She leaned her butt against her desk and folded her arms. Her blond hair glowed in the artificial light, picking up the UV. “I’m hearing nothing but great things about your work. Everyone is extremely, extremely excited. It’s a credit to you. As a manager.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Don’t be so modest. I know you don’t consider yourself that way. But your people don’t need a social boss. They need someone who inspires them on an intellectual level. Who forges within them a burning desire to invent. That’s you.”
I shifted in my wheelchair.
“Listen to me. Advancing within a company requires self-assessment. I should know. My first performance review, my boss said, ‘Cassandra, you are diligent, intelligent, motivated, and hardworking, but you need to learn how to settle for less than perfection.’ I argued at the time, but she was right. I had to train myself to accept that not everybody works as hard as me. That what I consider unacceptably sloppy is actually an okay result, and it’s counterproductive to get into a whole thing where someone starts crying and threatening to quit. And you know what? Learning that not only helped me grow as a manager. It helped me grow as a person. Because back then, I was actually, well, a little obsessive.” She smiled. “You haven’t told anyone about my diastema, have you?”
“What?” I remembered the gap between her back teeth. “No.”
“Thank you, Charlie. Because I told you that in confidence.”
“Um,” I said. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about fingers.”
She nodded. “Go on.”
“Gamma has been developing fingers. They got started by themselves. I only wanted them to stop fighting with Beta. But they did some interesting things and now we have a hand. It’s workable. We could replace somebody’s biological hand. It doesn’t work as well in all respects, mainly because of the loss of sensation, but it has advantages. It’s stronger. And multipurpose. You could fit a finger with a spectrograph, for example, so you could feel electromagnetic waves. That would be really useful in our line of work. And everything about it is upgradeable. So it opens up a lot of possibilities for future enhancement.”
“That sounds like exactly the kind of thing we’re interested in.”
“That’s what I thought. And it’s ready. For testing.”
“You want me to find someone who needs a prosthetic hand?”
I shook my head. “I can do it.”
“You can … you mean …”
“I can replace my own hand.”
Cassandra Cautery was silent. “That’s good of you, Charlie. But I think we’ll find a test subject for this one.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Well … thank you. But you can’t be the test case for every bionic you invent.” She smiled. “Can you?”
“Well,” I said.
“Charlie. You’re doing an amazing job. Upstairs could