Machine Man - Max Barry [66]
Behind me, someone gasped. The Manager’s beautiful assistant stood with one hand on the door handle, the other flying to her mouth, her eyes shocked wide. What would happen next became clear: the alarm call, the security guards. My legs were right, I realized. They had figured this out before I had. I looked at the drop, took a breath, and jumped.
AS I fell through the air, the Contours extended to their full length. The hooves splayed into three toes, maximizing their surface area. The Better Future lawn rushed at me and I closed my eyes. My spine tried to impale my skull. When I could see again, the Contours were three feet long and had no hooves. I thought they had snapped. Then they began to reextend, and I remembered this was what they did on impact: retracted, to soak up deceleration. The hooves had sunk into the earth. I pulled one free, then the other, and shook off clods of soil.
The Manager lay a few yards away. He didn’t look any better up close. I felt sick, then angry, because if the Manager had had some Better Parts, he would be fine right now. He would be walking around on machine legs and I would not be in this situation. What kind of CEO organized a project to manufacture artificial parts and had none himself? It was ridiculous. I stared at his biological mess and was furious. It was not my finest moment.
Ahead of me, the lobby doors slid open. I thought, Maybe it won’t be guards, and was wrong. Then I thought, Maybe they don’t know this was me, and they drew their guns, and I thought, They won’t shoot unless I run, and was wrong again.
THE FIRST shot thumped into my left biceps. I felt it not so much as physical pain as an insult. I hadn’t realized how deeply offensive it was to have someone deliberately injure you. I shouted, “Hey!” My voice was thick with outrage. I was going to march up to this guard and explain I was a human being, dammit, with a brain and rights and an ID card, and you can’t just shoot people. You can’t just kill them. Which was a little hypocritical, given I was standing next to the Manager’s folded-up body, but that didn’t occur to me. I was indignant about my violated biceps. The only thing that drove this plan from my mind was the realization that this bullet was not the last of today’s insults: that more insults were heading my way unless I got out of there.
So I did. My legs fired. My neck snapped back. Something passed by my head so close it sucked hair into its wake. I grabbed at the sides of the bucket seat, afraid of falling out, which was more or less impossible but that’s not what it felt like. With each step my legs stretched out before me and my hooves drove into the lawn. They slipped on a slick patch of grass, then we reached the sidewalk and I felt them settle. They liked concrete. We both did. I clung on and cars and trees blurred past me until the security guards were far, far behind and I was safe and I realized I had left behind something important.
I DON’T play the lottery. I don’t care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if people thought more about what they’re doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don’t understand why bridges aren’t art. It seems to me they’re penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that’s a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it’s infrastructure. That makes no sense.
I mention this because what I did next was not completely logical. And I know if I heard about this from somebody else, I would lose a little respect for that person. I would think, Well, that’s just stupid. But I would be failing to appreciate the difficulty of performing an emergency situational assessment from the middle of one. When someone shoots at you, your hypothalamus sends a lightning bolt into your neuroendocrine cells,