Machine Man - Max Barry [39]
Below, a woman and her young son gaped up at me. They were standing at the exact point I was destined to intersect the sidewalk. It was a terrible coincidence. Then I realized it wasn’t. It was calculated. These people were cushioning. Physical objects that would help absorb the shock of impact. I had programmed the legs to avoid collisions on a horizontal plane but anything lower than they were was deemed to be ground. It had seemed a reasonable assumption in the lab.
THE MOTHER yanked her son’s arm. He was no toddler. I had seen women wrestling with children of this age before, in supermarket aisles and parking lots, and usually the kids didn’t budge. But apparently a man plummeting out of the sky triggered a major adrenaline boost, because this kid flew through the air like he was hollow. I impacted the sidewalk ten inches away. Concrete split beneath my hooves. Dust burst into the air. My spine bent in a way that felt very, very wrong. I lost my breath and sucked in a lungful of powdered concrete. I felt the Contours moving beneath me, preparing to run. I tried to tell them to wait a second, because I had to apologize to the mother, and make sure she and her son were okay, and so was I. But the legs didn’t care. Their world was defined by a location, a destination, and the optimum path between the two. Nothing else was relevant. They were definitely going to kill me.
THEY RAN for ten minutes. During this time I clung to them, begging them to stop. Apparently one of the things you couldn’t simulate in the lab was that mortal terror interfered with the ability of the nerve interface to interpret mental instructions. Either that or they were willful. I tore past pedestrians. When I finally closed my eyes and gave in to them, they stopped. I looked around and saw a busy intersection. I was somewhere downtown. Seconds passed. My legs did not move. I breathed. My tie hung over my shoulder like a tongue. My shirt was soaked with sweat. My jacket was gray with concrete dust. I looked like a hobo. A mechanical hobo. And I laughed, because that was a funny thing to be, and my legs had stopped, and I was alive, and that was the most out-of-control freaking ten minutes of my life.
I CONSIDERED heading back to Better Future. My chances of finding the café with Lola Shanks seemed slim. I should power down and wait for somebody to pull over and ask if I was okay and then I could ask them to please call my company. Now I thought about it, I should have built in a cell phone. That was a major oversight. Anyway, clearly the Contours had major functional issues and could not be trusted to bear me anywhere. Then I realized I was outside a café, and inside it, sipping coffee, was Lola.
I hesitated. The café had a green awning and iron furniture and people in nice clothes eating real food. I didn’t want to make a scene. But Lola was there. I thought, Maybe … and the legs took this as a green light. They strode across the road. I ducked beneath the doorway before it could hit me on the forehead. Heads turned. Pasta hung from forks. Lola’s eyes found mine. Her hair was in a ponytail. She wore a long yellow dress that billowed in the chest but gripped her like death around the arms. She smiled, like nothing mattered except that I was here, and I smiled, too, because I felt the same way.
The Contours picked a path between tables. They were behaving. “Hi,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling. Lola was right: I had been at the lab too long. I had forgotten what it felt like to interact with people for the pleasure of it.
“Hi.” She looked down, then back. We were the only people talking. We looked around and eyes shifted away. People cleared their throats and forced conversation. They were being polite. I was a little insulted, because I was not disabled. “Um. Have a seat.”
The Contours settled; pistons retracted. I still towered above the table, but not as much. Lola’s mouth formed an O.
“These … look different.”
“We’ve made a lot of progress.”
“Where are the controls?”
I tapped my head. “Nerve interface.”
Lola