Machine Man - Max Barry [52]
I put my arm around her waist. Or where her waist must be. It was a thick blanket. She looked up. Her lips parted. Then we both turned to look inside, at the nurse moving around Lola’s bed, collecting crumpled tissues from Lola’s bedside table and dropping them into the trash. “She always turns up right before you,” said Lola.
“Really?”
“When you’re not here, I hardly ever see her.”
The nurse caught my eye and smiled through the glass.
“I would like to leave.” Lola put her arms around me and squeezed. “I would like to go somewhere nobody is watching.”
It was a good idea. I hesitated.
“When you’ve finished your work, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t mean you should stop your work.”
“There could be a recuperative stage coming,” I said. “To do with the arms.”
“Really,” Lola said. She touched my sleeve. Every one of my hairs stood up. There was nothing like biology for sensory feedback. I hadn’t been able to get close to it. “I like your arms.” Her hand kept moving. It reached my metal fingers. “But I like these, too.” She rested her head against me. “The ones you made yourself.”
HEADING BACK to my bunk, I decided to swipe a potted plant. Lola’s floor had dozens, and those cheerful splashes of green really made a difference. I wished I could put some in the labs, but couldn’t, because of contamination. I could brighten up my room, though. I carried the plant and set it in the corner.
The next day I got serious about feedback. The surprising thing was how little research there was. Papers were speculative, describing experiments that might be useful if other people filled in other great gaping voids. They opened with statements like: To date there has been little interest in the problem of replacing sensory function lost in amputation.
It irritated me. You could walk into an electronics store and for three hundred dollars take home a game console with a gyroscope-equipped dual-feedback resistance controller that shook and pushed to emulate in eighteen different ways the sensation of driving a tank across a battlefield. But restoring touch to someone who’d lost an arm, that wasn’t of interest. Those people got a claw from the 1970s. That was problem solved. We had the technology but in the wrong places. It wasn’t the morality that bothered me so much as the inefficiency. It was a misallocation of resources. And I knew that logically companies should spend a hundred million dollars on a game controller rather than a prosthesis that let a man feel again. But every time I read that, lack of interest, I wanted to kick someone.
I pulled the entire team onto it. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Omega: about a hundred people. By the end of the day they had self-organized into hierarchical structures for task delegation and reporting. I didn’t care about this. I just told them what I wanted done and let them figure it out. In this sense they were like a subroutine. Like the path-finding tech in my legs. I could see the sense of Cassandra Cautery’s body analogy. On the third day, Omega hooked a girl into a nerve grid and made her taste colors. Alpha built a skin-like alloy that seemed promising until it put three thousand volts through one of them and they had to deal with Human Resources. But despite setbacks, we made progress. By the end of the week the nerve interface was two-way, capable of transmitting gross sensation. It was indistinct, every touch wrapped in cotton wool, but I could close my eyes and know when an assistant poked a mesh array. Everyone was very proud. But this wasn’t because of our brilliance. It was because nobody else had tried.
I went back to the arms. They were titanium and servomagnetic and could rotate 360 degrees on three independent axes. One night I sat there staring at them and realized there was nothing else to do. They were the smartest things I had ever built. And, not wanting to boast, I had built some smart things. Once I created a microbe that ate garbage. You could open your trash can, throw in your scraps, and an hour later they would be gone.