Machine Man (serial)

Page 18.

After Lola left, I sat alone in the lab, thinking. I remembered how her hands had run over the prototype’s metal; how they had caressed it. I was very pleased that Lola liked my new leg, but I felt unsettled, too. For a while I thought it was just that I was almost finished, because I always get a little despondantdespondent when a project is coming to a close. I tend to look around for ways to tinker, add a few last-minute features. To draw it out.

But that wasn’t it. What gnawed at me was how Lola’s eyes had fixed on the prototype. She had practically forgotten I was in the room. And you couldn’t expect any different, I guess, from someone confronted with a 180-pound nuclear-powered polycarbonate prosthetic. But still. She had looked at it like a device. Like a product, to be fitted to whoever needed it. But that’s not how I had intended it. I had built it to be part of me.

It was getting late. I was probably the only person still in the labs. But I didn’t feel tired. I looked down at my right leg, the one I’d had since birth. I rolled up my pant leg, and turned it this way and that. The more I studied it, the more it bugged me.

18.