Machine Man - Max Barry [37]
A twenty-four-hour period passed in which nothing went wrong. I wore the legs outside the lab, up and down the corridor. We called them Contours, on account of their sweeping lines. They were a good-looking set of legs. I wanted to show Lola. But I still hadn’t been able to reach her. It had been five weeks.
One day I was fitting myself into the Contours and the legs began to retract. This was not supposed to happen. They should have been powered down. One of the assistants cried out in alarm. I looked at the pistons and the narrowing gap between them and reached out as if I could stop them.
There was a wrenching. A brilliant flash of pain. Someone screamed. Hands pulled at me. I saw Jason’s face, contorted in grief. He said, “I’m sorry,” over and over. I looked at my hand. It was sandwiched between the Contours’ knee and the retracted socket. There was a lot of blood. I felt dizzy. “I’m so sorry,” Jason said again. He was technically in charge of the Contours until I stood up. But we hadn’t been strict about that for a while because everything had been going so well. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I was about to faint but I wanted to tell him this. “It’s no problem.”
“CHARLIE!” SAID Lola. She sounded robotic, because my computer was untangling her audio from IP packets that to the corporate sniffer looked like a long joke e-mail. But there was unmistakable delight in her voice. I felt relief. It had been a long time and who knew what had changed. “I’ve been calling and calling!”
“You have?”
“Yes! They always tell me you’re busy and I have to leave a message. And I got your home number, but your answering machine filled up.”
“I haven’t been home.”
“Since when?”
I had to think about this. “March.”
“Charlie.” Her voice dropped. “I think you should get out of there.”
“Why?” I went to scratch my cheek and missed. I looked at my hand. I wasn’t wearing my index finger, that was why.
“I just think it would be a good idea.”
“Okay.”
“Meet me,” she said. “I’m going to give you an address.” I reached for a pen, with the hand that had fingers.
A FEW years before, a guy in Gels stabbed three people with a broken Schlenk flask. They had to use tear gas to get him out. He kicked and screamed that no one took his lab reports seriously. One of the stabbed people died. For days afterward people congregated in corridors and asked each other, “You just can’t understand it, can you?” They huddled in unusual social configurations, engineers with marketers and managers and people from accounts. Everyone wanted to make sure that everyone else agreed: you can’t understand it, can you? Like they needed to hear that no.
At first I shook my head along with everyone else. I didn’t want to seem disrespectful. But finally it got to me and I said well obviously he was frustrated. This was to Elaine, my lab assistant with the bad skin, who quit because of nightmares. Elaine looked at me like she was trying to find something. “Yes, but to get so frustrated you would do something like that …” I said that’s what people did when they got frustrated: they displayed violent behavior. Elaine said, “But you would never do something like that,” and I said probably not but in the same environment with the same stimulus it was fair to assume I’d have a similar response. I wasn’t a different species. It’s not anybody’s fault for feeling violent when their brain is flooded with vasopressin. That’s just what happens. You drop a glass, it falls toward the earth. Maybe that’s not the outcome you want, but don’t blame the glass. Don’t pass moral judgment because cause produced effect. We’re biological machines. We have chemically driven urges. You inject a nun with a particular chemical cocktail, she’s going to start swinging punches. That’s a fact.
This all seemed simple and self-evident to me but maybe I didn’t express it well because that afternoon I got a call from Human Resources. They said counseling