Machine Man - Max Barry [90]
“Improving. Approaching sync.”
“I mean, it’s not like there’s any fundamental integrity of emotions, am I right? Everything’s chemicals, when you get down to it.”
My teeth chattered. Elaine said, “That’s a sawtooth, can we do anything about that?” Two cats, male, approached with power drills and positioned themselves against my abdomen. The drills went whreeeee.
“So, the thing is,” Jason said, “while you were away, we made a lot of military parts. I mean, a lot. And management has been really, really anxious to get them into testing. Only we figured out that sticking them into random volunteers and seeing what happened, that wasn’t such a great idea. So we’ve been waiting. For you. And once we got you … I don’t think management was ever going to wait around until you were, you know, completely comfortable. Because, like I mentioned, there’s an awful lot of stuff bottlenecked. Very valuable stuff. Also, the government seems to have been probing this area a little more closely than they like lately. So management is super-focused on getting some results of labs ASAP. And that’s why, uh … why you’re a little more advanced along the whole body replacement path than you might have anticipated.” He swallowed. “But there’s good news. You get to go out.”
“What,” I said.
“I’ll be honest. What they were planning was pretty bad. They wanted you attached to the parts but not able to control them. We’d move them for you and read your sensory feedback. They said it was the quickest way to test. Which, you know, I guess it is. But still. That’s a little inhumane, in our opinion. Being connected to tech but not able to control what it does. That’s like the ultimate user. Anyway, Carl ruined everyone’s plans. So now they let us activate you. It’s actually a great opportunity, because if you show them you can be trusted, they might let you stay active.”
“Little angry, now,” said Mirka.
“Uh,” said Jason. “Let me explain the Carl situation. Do you know Carl? Of course you do. I forgot, because we weren’t allowed to tell you about him. But we were working with Carl. Before he went crazy. So what happened was Carl came back. He turned up on the front lawn. Which was a surprise to security, because, well, they expected him, but not at the front door. There are plenty of entrances and a guard knows them all. Of course, they had people in the lobby. They put snipers on the roof, guys in mounted Hummers, prototype weaponry from Speculative Military Products. There was a sonics gun in the garage, the back lawn was sown with EMP mines, and the lobby guys had … well, an electroshock cannon. Like a Taser, firing a couple hundred darts a minute. And the problem was no one asked our opinion. If they had, things would have been different. But you know users. They never spend the time to properly understand the technology. They only want to learn the bare minimum. Enough to make it work. And that’s just not viable when the technology is this powerful. We’re really at the point where users in that sense are becoming obsolete, I think. I don’t think the world can be adequately navigated by someone who doesn’t understand tech anymore. But anyway. So Carl turns up. I don’t know if anyone told you, but when he left, Carl took some stuff. He took a Fiber Shield. Did you go to the Fiber Shield presentation? It’s a bomb, but it throws out tiny fiber strips, a fog of microribbons. They float in the air, tens of millions of them, and their ends are sticky. They’re harmless, but a high-speed projectile moving through that fog hits a ribbon and gets pulled off course. Gets unbalanced. It might go left, right, who knows. The point is it diverts. In the presentation, they set up a target behind the fog and did a bunch of test shots and every one missed. By a lot. It was kind of awesome. It’s not exactly guaranteed protection, you know, like I wouldn’t want to stake my life on it, because the amount of diversion depends on how many ribbons the bullet hits, the angle at each collision, all these random variables. The project leader,