Machine Man - Max Barry [47]
They offered to make me a pair of Z-lenses. I said I was busy. The truth was I didn’t like Z-lenses. I should have. They were marvels. I might have built these. But I hadn’t and that bothered me. I guess that sounds selfish. But I did not like technology I couldn’t modify. I was not a user.
In Lab 3 I tinkered with the Contours, sifting through software, tightening code. For fun I drafted some arms. I was just playing around. I didn’t plan on replacing my biological arms. Not right away. But the fact was I had artificial fingers and there was a limit to what you could do with those while they were attached to a biological arm. It was the bottleneck problem again. So I dabbled. It was the best way to work: with no particular goal in mind. It allowed me to explore the most intriguing ideas, not the ones most likely to meet spec.
One of those kinds of ideas came to me in the elevator after leaving Lola. I rode down to Lab 3 and locked myself inside. I took out my ideas notepad and began to doodle. It was just a thought. I didn’t know much about this area. I didn’t know what was possible. But still, I liked it. The idea was to make Lola a heart.
LOLA MOVED to a live-in suite in the upper section of Building C. It meant that to reach her I had to leave one elevator and circumnavigate the atrium, passing by the lobby. As I clomped along, Contours pistoning, hooves clump-clumping on the carpet, heads turned. Mouths dropped. People in suits backed out of my way and people in white coats edged closer. They wanted to ask questions and tell me about related projects and ask if I would pose with them for photos. I didn’t mind the attention but I was eager to see Lola and it slowed me down. So I found a back way, avoiding the high-traffic areas. Some of it was tiled and on my first step it splintered into a web of cracks. I hesitated. Then I continued.
“You should do a presentation,” said Cassandra Cautery, leaning against the wall outside Lola’s suite. She had been waiting for me. “Everyone’s asking about you.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” She laughed a little. I felt annoyed, because I didn’t want to do a presentation. “How is everything? Are you happy?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen a report on these, ah, these glasses.”
“Z-lenses.”
“They sound wonderful.” She smiled. “I’ve never needed glasses myself. I’ve always had twenty/twenty vision. Just lucky.”
“Z-lenses are better than twenty/twenty. They’re about twenty/two.” Cassandra Cautery looked confused. “Twenty/twenty vision doesn’t mean you have perfect eyesight. It’s not twenty out of twenty. That’s a misconception. It means you can see as well over twenty feet as an average human.”
“I did not know that.”
“If you have good eyesight, you might be twenty/eighteen. That is, you can see from twenty feet away what the average human can see from eighteen. Very good eyesight for a human is twenty/fifteen. Maybe twenty/twelve. But you’d need to be descended from a nomadic tribe.” I eyed her blond hair. “I don’t think you’d be twenty/twelve.”
“Oh.”
“Twenty/two is about the same as a hawk.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well.”
“I’d like to see Lola,” I said. “If that’s okay.”
Cassandra Cautery nodded. She seemed preoccupied. I left her in the corridor and went inside.
LOLA’S SUITE had a little table. At nights a nurse wheeled in a trolley and uncovered pasta or slices of unidentifiable meat. It was not particularly good food but it was the best part of my day. I cut things with a blade installed in my machine fingers and Lola watched me do it.
One night I reached for the salt but Lola had already moved it to her side of the table. I looked at her. She was drinking from her glass of water. “Salt,” I said, but she just nodded and kept drinking. She drained half the glass. When she set it down, she picked up a napkin and dabbed her lips. She tapped salt into her soup and handed it to me. I stared.