Machine Man - Max Barry [89]
I REGAINED consciousness all at once, like turning on. I was standing. I was surrounded by light. The operating theater was clean. It was not raining. It was full of cats and people in green scrubs and all of them were looking at me.
“Got him.” Jason had a small laptop balanced on one hand and poked at it with the other. A cord came out of the laptop and ran into a mess of other cords going in all directions. Something was wrapped around my head. Something hummed.
A young woman stepped in front of me. Elaine, I remembered. Her eyes were orange. “Dr. Neumann, can you hear me?”
I nodded. I tried to touch my neck to see what was there and something went whnn-hnn, whnn-hnn.
“He’s trying to move his arm.”
“Leg now.”
“Lots of motion requests.”
I looked down. My legs were Contour Threes, black titanium. My hips were conjoined ring sections. Metal crawled up my chest. I had arms. They hung from insulated chains from the ceiling. One was silver and ended in a three-pronged claw, each prong a long, multiarticulated digit. The other was black with a thin, tubular biceps with a bulbous forearm. It had no hand I could see. I gagged. I did not feel sick. Not physically. I felt strong and alert and a little cold. But my brain vomited, Wrong wrong wrong.
“Dr. Neumann?” Jason slid closer. “You’re probably feeling strange right now but when you calm down you’re going to realize this is really cool.”
“Bringing up tactile.”
A lightning storm of pins and needles ran through my body. My metal parts stopped being objects and started being me. I had been able to feel before but not like this. Nothing like this. I remembered their bumped surface, which I’d felt in Lab 2. Help me, I said.
“Enhanced sensory feedback. It’s like a million times better, isn’t it? We use it ourselves. Because the point at which Better Feelings could reproduce the full spectrum and fidelity of biology-based sensation, we passed that a while ago.”
“Registering with core,” said Mirka.
“Seeing that.”
“We’re talking out loud,” said Jason, “so you can follow along.”
Hunger roared through me, as an idea rather than a feeling: I was suddenly very sure I needed food. “Whoa,” said a girl with yellow eyes.
“Dampen that.”
“We’ll hook you into Better Voice in a minute,” said Jason. “You can initiate chats and save contacts in an address book and everything.”
I thought, Lola, Lola. Tears splashed on my chest with a sound like punk, punk.
“You’re making him cry,” said Mirka.
“Correcting.”
“Bridging waveforms.”
Mirka said, “He’s still crying.”
“Levels look okay, though.”
“Maybe he’s really sad.”
Jason went away and came back with a tissue. He wiped one of my cheeks, then the other. “Dr. Neumann?”
I opened my mouth but there was no air. I manually inhaled in a gasp. “Where. Is. My. Body.”
“You mean … do you mean your old organic parts? Well … incinerated. There’s not really … there’s not really anything else you can do with them.”
“Still really sad,” said Mirka.
“Active correction?”
“Yes.”
Stars burst inside my head, wild and brilliant, full of suggestion.
Jason said, “Do you remember when I asked you about ethics? You wanted to suppress your guilt and I said maybe we shouldn’t and you said there was no such thing as shouldn’t. Actually, you didn’t even understand the question. Well, I get that now. I totally get it. Because sometimes you feel a kind of biological revulsion against an idea but it’s only because you’re not used to it, right? It’s