Machine Man - Max Barry [83]
“Oh, you want to see? Have a good old look.” She leaned toward me and pulled out her lip. Among her gleaming white teeth was a gap. Not like before. It was a chasm. She released her lip with a plop. “They said they could fix it. They ground the tooth all the way down and you know what? They were wrong. I can’t feel half my fache. I can’t feel my fache.” She stabbed her forehead with her finger. “It’s like stone.” She noticed the driver watching us in the rearview mirror. “What are you looking at?” His eyes flicked back to the road. “Science is bullshit, Charlie. It’s bullshit. You want super legs and lab assistants with eyes like headlights and that’s possible, oh sure, you can turn a lab technician who looks like a horse into a supermodel. But when it comes to a perfectly shimple thing like diastema you paralyze her fache. I’m married. Did you know that? He’s a litigator. And he expects me to have expresshions. He expects reshponses. What’s going to happen when he notices this?” She stared at me. “I want to drop a bomb on your department. I don’t care about revenue projections. I don’t care about schtrategic vision. What they”—she jabbed a finger at the car ceiling—“never appreciate is that mesh breeds. It eatsh organization. And your department is nothing but mesh, creating more mesh, and so help me, it’s going to eat the company. No one gets it. You breathe a word of this and you’ll regret it.” This was directed at the driver, whose eyes were drifting to the rearview mirror again. “We have a new shee ee oh. You should appreciate this. You can’t kill a manager. They just replace that part and restart the machine. He even looks similar. You’ll never meet him.” She stabbed a finger at me. “You will never be in the same room as a listed corporate officer again. But they want to use you. Leverage the investment. But, Charlie, I’m dying to end this. I’m looking for an excuse. One twitsch in the wrong direction and I’m bringing down the curtain on this shorry enterprise. Understand?” Before I could answer, she waved her hand in my face. “Don’t answer. It doesn’t matter what you think.” She turned and stared out the window. She put her elbow on the sill and her hand on her forehead. Her fingers probed. It reminded me of how I massaged the Contours.
“Who’s coming?”
“Hmm?”
“You said—”
“Carl’s coming.” She turned back. “This is what I mean. Did I want to rush into expanded testing? No. Did I want to weaponize Lola Shanksh? No. But we’re an engineering company. I say, ‘Let’s stop and consolidate a minute before rushing into new products,’ everybody jumps up and down, bleating about processhesh. But a man wants his limbs removed and that’s fine. No one sees a problem. You people have thish mentality that the world is all hard science or hocush-pocush. Nothing matters but numbers. Well, we needed psychologists. But we didn’t get any because we’re full of engineers, and engineers think psychologists are witch doctors.”
I didn’t say anything. Psychologists are witch doctors.
“So Carl went under the knife. We gave him those, you know, little arms to practice on. Then you found him and hit the roof, asked me to dishpose of him—”
“I meant fire.”
“Let’s not get into a thing, Charlie, because it’s incredibly cold either way. I couldn’t do that to Carl. The kind of legal liability it would have opened up … so I hid him from you. But of course we had to take away his arms and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all. We made him a new pair as fast as we could—your team did—but, like I said, we had no psychologists. We didn’t see the cracksh. It seems obvious now. You look at the tapes. He’s talking about his arms like they’re alive. Like they’ve got a mind of their own. Then he split. Shtole some things. Now he’s trying to find you. He wants your partsh.” Behind her, the streetscape grew industrial: we were closing in on Better Future. “Some kind of revenge fantasy, I asshume.”
“He wants my parts? You mean he wants to kill me?”
“I don’t know what’s running through his head. But the way we get