Machine Man (serial)

Then Cassandra Cautery arrived. She sloshed into the operating theater with a blood-stained towel pressed to her face and two orbiting assistants who implored her to please sit down, let someone attend to that head. I had never seen Cassandra Cautery mad before, or rather, I’d thought I had, but I hadn’t. Her jaw muscles reminded me of insects that had to bear food several times their own weight back to the nest.

I was trying to stand still while men wrestled an arm onto me. It was an odd-looking arm, not a model I’d seen before, with a thin, tubular bicep and a bulbous black forearm. From the way these guys were grunting and sweating, attaching this thing to me would dislocate my collarbone, so I was looking forward to discovering how this was going to work.

“What happened?” I asked Cassandra Cautery. I was feeling focused now. Every few minutes, the woman with the syringe jacked a device into a flip-up port on my groin, studied the readout, and injected me with something new. I had a diagnostic crotch. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

“Carl happened.” Cassandra Cautery leaned forward and spat something into the water. I felt a little shocked. Things must be serious, if Cassandra Cautery was doing that. “He busted in and kicked the snot out of us, that’s what happened.”

“Was he looking for me?”

“My God,” she said, staring at the cord dangling from my groin. “Whose idea was it to put that there?”

“Uh,” said Jason.

“I have to sell these things,” she said, “and you put a port in the dick?”

“The nerve routing transport—”

“I’ll tell you what you can do with the nerve routing transport.” Cassandra Cautery’s chest hitched. Her one eye that wasn’t covered by a bloody towel watered.

“Oh, God,” said Jason. The assistants shuffled back.

Cassandra Cautery’s eye fixed on me. “I went to Yale.” Her voice shook. “You know that? One time after Advanced Antitrust, the lecturer took me aside and said out of all the students, I was the most likely to succeed, because while they were good on theory, I had a relentless desire to organize. Her words. She told me she was going to follow my career with interest.” She squeezed closed her eye. A tear slipped down her cheek. Her eye popped open. “And look at this shit!”

The room fell silent but for the labored breathing of green-swathed men struggling to connect me to an artificial arm.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s… under control.” But I didn’t think it was.

152.