Machine Man - Max Barry [92]
“Uh,” said Jason. The window closed. He turned to Mirka. They eyed each other silently.
“Fine,” said Mirka. She handed off a laptop and approached. “Dr. Neumann …” She brushed a hair from my forehead. “The thing Jason has not told you is that once Carl gained entry to the building he came here, to this room. He stood beside you. You were unconscious. Your arm was detached. It seems to us that Carl thought you dead. Or that your death was imminent. He left. He located your friend. Lola. And he took her. I am sorry.”
“It’s highly likely she’s still alive,” said Jason. “I mean, we don’t think he took her to cannibalize her parts. We think it’s more an affection thing. We spent time with Carl during recuperation and he talked about her a lot.” He looked at Mirka, then back at me. “Okay! Well … I think that’s everything. Do … do you have any questions?”
“Any,” I said. “Questions.”
“Yeah.”
My lips stretched. I exposed teeth. I felt dizzy. The Contour Threes bent and the hoof came forward and met the ground and fired locking pins into it: snack-snack. Jason and Mirka hopped back. I stared at my foot. The hoof. I raised it and swiveled it. I wiggled a flat metal toe and it did as I meant. I had not made this but still it was interesting. I watched the toe move back and forth. Jason cleared his throat. Mirka put her hand on his arm. I kept moving the toe. I lowered it and raised the other hoof and set it back down. I looked around at the cables and tubes coming out of my body. I swung my pronged claw arm in an arc and swept half a dozen cables off me. One sparked and I felt a temporary heaviness in my parts followed by a lifting warmth emanating from my abdomen. I stepped forward. Cords popped from my metal skin. Lab assistants yelped and scrambled out of the way. “Shut him down!” someone said, and Jason said, “No. Wait.”
In the steel finish of a cabinet I saw my reflection. I saw it with Better Eyes. My head was metal. Black bands ran across the bridge of my nose, my forehead, and my chin. These glimpses of skin were all I had. Everything else was metal.
I said, “Am. I. Wrong.”
Jason crept forward. “No, Dr. Neumann. You’re not wrong. You are not wrong.”
I nodded. Servos in my neck whispered. I felt scared. But okay. I said, “Where.”
I CLOMPED through the Better Future corridors escorted by cats and security guards. From the expressions of the guards, I was either an awe-inspiring technological miracle or the worst thing they had ever seen. I was not quite sure myself. They led me to stairs and I hesitated but the Threes took the steps easily, cantilevering to maintain a solid footing. There is something deeply satisfying about a system that works exactly like it’s supposed to. I’m not sure everyone feels this way. It might be an engineering thing. But by the time we reached the bottom of the stairs, I was kind of in love.
They led me to the underground garage. This was to avoid being seen by emergency services people who were crawling around aboveground. I didn’t understand how the garage was supposed to make any difference, since it exited in the same general area, but that wasn’t my problem. The garage had its own generator and halogen lights making everything blindingly bright or lost in impenetrable shadow. Better Future vans and Hummers idled in the dark, chrome reflecting like supernovas, tailpipes belching fumes. I blinked and the scene normalized, my Eyes adding information from infrared and ultraviolet, filling in fields and illuminating motion.
“Hold here a second,” said Jason. The cats swarmed. I was interfaced with. I felt impatient and my legs hiccuped forward. “Whoa,” said Jason. “Wait up.”
He thought it was me. But it wasn’t. I remembered Cassandra Cautery asking: Your legs didn’t start talking to you, did they? But that wasn’t anything to do with me. That was a software glitch. Maybe these Threes had the same software. It wouldn’t have been rewritten from scratch. The glitch could still