Machine Man by Max Barry

It was the only way to keep them manageable. They worked in competition: I wheeled among them and anything I liked sparked grins and furious development. Beta came up with a whole new wheel-based leg design, almost a chariot, which I liked so much I took it over myself. Then Alpha and Gamma also got into wheels and Beta accused them of intellectual plagiarism. It was a whole thing. There were tears. I told Gamma to go build some fingers or something. They liked this. They wound up deploying four hands’ worth and using them to make obscene gestures at Beta. It was like being back at college, only I was respected. Sometimes I wheeled past bodies in the corridors: assistants who had literally lain down and slept because they were too tired to make it home. Everywhere were sodas.
    EVERYONE THOUGHT Beta was going to reach testing on a new prototype first but the wheels were a dead end. They couldn’t get good traction on uneven ground, not even in rotating sets on independent suspension with ground-sensing sticky locks. We did a lot of stairwell damage before figuring that out. We left gouges in the walls, broken steps, and a section of railing that bowed inward. But failure was just a method of learning what worked.
    Then Alpha declared they had something. They were based out of Lab 2, where Katherine’s rats had lived, before they’d been moved off to another lab somewhere. Katherine had followed. I imagined they’d offered her the choice to stay with me or go with the rats. I still thought I could smell them every time I came in—the rats, that is—although that couldn’t be right, because when we cleaned these rooms we did it by sucking out all the air.
    Alpha’s legs were similar to my previous prototype, only taller, sleeker, and titanium. There was less electrical tape and more custom carbon-polymer molding. I wheeled myself around them for an inspection. I wasn’t going to do anything special today, just check fit and balance. There were too many wired connections to walk. No nerve interface yet. But still, when my assistants helped me out of the chair and lowered me into the sockets, my heart thumped. I buckled in. “Okay.”
    Jason held the control box. He pushed for power. Nothing happened. Smoke began to pour from the legs. People shouted. Hands grabbed at me and hauled me out. They broke out the extinguishers and drenched the legs in foam. When all that was taken care of, we started over.
    I DIALED reception and asked for a third-party directory assistance service. “If there’s a number you’d like to look up, Ican do that for you,” said the receptionist. I declined. When she put me through, I asked the directory robot for the hospital. It offered to connect me directly and I said yes. It rang. The hospital picked up. I opened my mouth to request Lola Shanks in Prosthetics and the line went
click
.
    I lowered the phone and looked at it. Then I put it back on the cradle. Clearly it was pointless to redial reception. But at least I understood the problem now. I could apply myself to a solution.
    I SPENT a lot of time being jabbed with needles. Not syringes. Tiny steel slivers with embedded electrodes. The idea was to insert these into my truncated thighs so they could read signals from my brain, and translate them into motorized movement. We created a fourth team for this, using people transferred from other projects. Initially it was called Delta but it was confusing whenever someone said
delta
meaning “change,” which was often, so they renamed themselves Omega. We converted a lab into a medical room and I lay back on the table while a tall, high-cheekboned lab assistant named Mirka punctured me. This was excruciating during the first session but not so bad once we realized the equipment could read me just as well while I was hocked to the eyeballs. So I injected myself with analgesics and let my consciousness swim away while Mirka maneuvered metal slivers around, seeking the best reception for the