Machine Man - Max Barry [44]
“That was how it worked. The death payout was a hundred thousand dollars. But if you added up the individual body parts, they came to a lot more. Even the hand, if you lost it all at once it was fifty thousand, but each finger was between ten and fifteen, and the thumb was twenty. You could maximize the numbers.
“He said he’d been silly with the hand. Losing it all once. Now he knew what he was doing. He was getting me a new heart. He kissed me and said it would make everything okay forever.
“The company sent a man to the house. Asking questions like: Was my father depressed? Had he talked about killing himself? They couldn’t see that he was happy. I lied to them. I helped Dad plan his next accident. We had a notebook. We did sums and figured out which parts to lose. When he tucked me into bed, his eyes were full of joy, and I knew I had the best Dad in the world, because nobody else’s father loved them this much.
“Mom found the notebook. I woke and she was screaming. I came downstairs and she was wild, hitting him. The next day she kept me home and gave me a talk about how Dad was sick. In the head. She’d had him committed. I was so angry. She was trying to tell me he didn’t really love me. That he was just crazy. We yelled. I wished her dead. We were never the same after that.
“Dad came home after a while. They tried to keep him there but he outsmarted them. And his work couldn’t find a reason to fire him, so he went back. They had a guy follow him around, a tall man with a mustache. Even when Dad came to pick me up from school. Dad said they went to the bathroom together. The way he described it, it was funny. Like playing spies. We flipped through our notebook and added up the numbers and figured we were almost there. We knew how much we needed, with bank interest, for a new heart. Just a little more. Just a foot.
“It took him three weeks to find a moment when the man with the mustache wasn’t there. But something happened. Mom came to school and took me to the parking lot and said Dad had died. He’d been crushed under an engine block. I didn’t believe her. I ran home and dug out his notebook and it was right there. It was only supposed to be the foot.
“The company gave us a check for a hundred thousand dollars. The death payout. He would have been so annoyed. A hundred thousand for the whole, when the parts were worth so much more.
“We invested it. And it grew. When I turned eighteen there was almost six hundred thousand dollars.
“I told the doctor I wanted something to last forever. Something steel. Because it was all I had left of Dad and I wanted him to live in my heart for the rest of my life.”
Her face contorted. Her fingers dug into the cotton covering her chest. “And they took it out.”
ONCE LOLA had fallen asleep, I wheeled myself out into the corridor. Cassandra Cautery emerged from a door ten feet away. “Well,” she said. “That was some story.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m always curious about what motivates people to choose their careers. It’s never what you think.”
I said nothing.
“She can have the heart. We haven’t disposed of it. So if it has sentimental value … well, she can have it.”
“I’ll tell her.”
Silence fell.
I said, “I want to continue the project.”
“Yes,” said Cassandra Cautery. “I thought you might.”
THE NEXT day, Carl wheeled me through the corridors of Research to the labs. There was not much talking. While waiting for an elevator, he said, “I was very happy to hear Ms. Shanks is recovering,” and I didn’t say anything.
He took me to what used to be a lab in an adjoining project before we took it over. We stopped before the door. “I don’t have my pass,” I said. This was an accusation, because I’d had it before he shot Lola. They had taken it while I was sedated, along with my hand and legs.
Carl swiped his own ID. The lock’s display blinked green. I was surprised, because as far as I knew, we did not grant lab access to security guards. Inside was a large room with many shelves. On slabs of gleaming steel lay half a dozen sets of legs in various stages of completion. The Contours were among