Machine Man (serial)

“Carl came to us,” said Cassandra Cautery. “Let’s get that clear. We didn’t go around asking employees to chop off their arms. He knocked on my door one day and asked if we could make him like you.”

She folded her hands and rested them neatly on one knee. So far she was being very calm. There was no yelling or screaming, no rants about how much trouble I had caused by kicking their CEO out a window and running off. Clearly I was missing something.

“The problem, Charlie, is we’re an engineering-heavy company. I suggest cutting short a prototyping stage and everybody starts jumping up and down, telling me it’ll be a disaster. But a man volunteers to have his arms removed, nobody sees a problem. It’s a mentality you guys have, and I’m including you in this group, Charlie, that the whole world can be divided into hard science and hocus-pocus. That nothing’s significant until it can be quantified. We needed psychologists, but we got them far too late because we’re full of engineers, and engineers think psychologists are basically witch doctors.”

I didn’t say anything. She was right. Psychologists are witch doctors.

“Anyway, Carl went under the knife. And he came out of it fine. Happy, even. We gave him those, you know, little arms to practice on. He kept asking for bigger ones, but I knew you’d have a problem with that, Charlie, so I held off. Then, of course, you found him and hit the roof. Asked me to quote get rid of him unquote.”

“Fire him. I meant fire.”

“You didn’t look like you meant fire. You looked like you wanted him dead. But let’s not get into a thing, Charlie, because, to be perfectly honest, it’s pretty cold either way. I decided I couldn’t do that to Carl. Nor to the company, because the kind of legal liability that would have opened up, I don’t even want to think. So I hid him from you. But of course we had to take away his arms, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all. We made him a new pair as fast as we could—your team was pretty good at that by then—but… well, like I said, we were light on psychologists. You recall the Manager mentioning the problems we were having with the test subjects.”

“Um…” That wasn’t my standout memory from that meeting.

“Depression. Stress. Psychotic breaks.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Well, Carl’s nuts,” she said. “And we haven’t been able to contain him.”

135.