Machine Man (serial)

“So there we were,” said Lola. “Me with an expensive new heart and my parents wiped out again. This time I took down my grandparents as well. I mean, I didn’t know that at the time. I found all this out later. The retirement plans that had been shelved, the homes and heirlooms that had been sold. All so I could have my stop-gap heart. And maybe five years at the outside until I needed a new one.

“A few weeks later, I’m on the sofa watching TV and my mom gets this call. Her face, it goes tight, and she grabs at the wall, like somebody’s pushing her over. Because it’s my dad’s work on the phone. He’s been in an accident. Dad worked in an auto assembly plant. Not on the floor. He was an engineer. But this day he’d been down there and one of the robots caught his hand. You know. The robots that make the cars. Somehow this one welded his hand to a car door. The foreman, when he visited us, he kept saying he couldn’t understand how it happened. There were all kinds of safeties. They were actually one of the things Dad was in charge of. So it was a little ironic. I mean, it seemed ironic. Before we found out it wasn’t.

“They amputated Dad’s hand at the wrist. When he came home, he had a check for fifty thousand dollars. The auto workers union, they’d negotiated a standard payment schedule with the company for injury—a set amount you got if you were permanently disabled on the job, regardless of fault. You lose your left hand, like Dad, you automatically get fifty thousand. A thumb on the dominant hand, that’s twenty grand. Big toes are ten each. The little ones, three grand a pop. Loss of hearing is worth ten grand, forty if it’s total. Each foot, forty thousand dollars.

“Ask me how I know this,” Lola said. “How I know all these amounts.”

53.