Machine Man (serial)

“Well that doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.

“Charlie.” There was pain in her voice. “Look at me. Tell me you’re in control of your body.”

“I’m in total control.” My parts tried to add: Kill Carl, but I stopped them. Or stopped myself, if what Lola said about free-roaming neurons in the subconscious was true. I wasn’t sure about that theory. It sounded plausible. It sounded a lot more plausible than the idea of my titanium parts spontaneously developing consciousness on their own. But it did not feel plausible. Because that would mean that there was no other entity here: that I was alone in this body, talking to myself.

“Over time, Charlie, we can re-train your brain. With the right physical therapy, your neurons will move elsewhere. We can replace these parts with more standard prosthetics that—”

“Let me stop you there.” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “I know you have my best interests in mind, Lola, but I’m not sure you really appreciate the fact that at this point I am essentially a head.”

“Charlie—”

“There is no getting rid of the parts. I am the parts. Look at me. You think this little fleshy bit at the top can survive on its own any more? No. I passed that point. And I sawed my own arm off, Lola, I sawed it off, and that can’t be for nothing. It can’t. So let’s, let’s calm down, and forget about crazy solutions that involve things that can never happen.” I went to wipe the sweat from my brow with my gun-arm and nearly knocked my head off. I tried that again. I was trembling, and not just in my biology: it was coming from deep within my parts. They were angry.

“The id is the part of your mind devoted to raw impulses. It’s not supposed to be in charge. You’ll feel—”

“The id. This is psychology! A soft science!”

“You changed,” she said. “You used to be thoughtful. Now you walk around with a gun.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the gun. Don’t insult the gun.”

“You didn’t just change your body. You’ve changed you.”

“Changed. Improved.” Words spilled out of me, tripping over each other. “The thing is, Lola, the person I used to be, nobody liked him. I didn’t date. I didn’t talk to people. I worked. But when I started doing this, people paid attention. People got interested. People like you. So maybe I have changed, maybe there has been a little personality rewiring here, but is that such a bad thing? Isn’t that just self-improvement? Because I think I’m better now, Lola. I do. Yes, I’m a little jittery, and the parts are talking all the time, but that’s okay. I can live with that. To be honest, it’s not that bad to have a little company for once. And nothing works perfectly the first time. You don’t scrap the whole project every time there’s a hitch. You keep what you’ve got and look for iterative improvement. The point is, on balance, isn’t this a step forward?” I could see from Lola’s expression that none of this was very persuasive. “Okay, forget that. The fact is, I need the parts. To live. There’s nothing I can do. My hands are tied.”

Lola’s mouth opened. “It’s possible that—”

“I don’t care! Even if I could survive on some kind of shitty life support system in a hospital room somewhere, I don’t want to! Do you know what this body can do? We have—we have inbuilt GPS, Lola! What are we supposed to do, go back to maps?” I forced myself to calm. “That’s just an example. Because what you’re talking about, Lola, it’s like asking me to move out of my apartment and go live in a cave. A cave in the jungle.”

“Who’s ‘we?’”

“The parts and…” I didn’t finish this sentence. I had realized it was pointless. Shoot, said the parts; they had been saying this a while, increasingly insistent. My eyes moved to Carl. He was the source of this trouble. He had been since day one. Shooting him would solve everything, or maybe not, maybe the logic of that wasn’t quite there, but the part of me that wanted to shoot didn’t care so much about that. It just wanted him dead. And Lola: Lola would understand. Maybe not right away. But eventually. She would come around. Because let’s not kid ourselves, Lola wasn’t going to stick around for a head. I didn’t care what she thought now, that was not a recipe for a successful long-term relationship. It was best for everyone if I shot Carl now shot him shot him dead.

I brushed Lola aside. It was as easy as walking through a curtain. As I walked up to Carl, raising the gun-arm, my body flooded with joy, and I felt in my heart, wherever that was, that I was doing the right thing.

172.