Machine Man (serial)

The next weeks flew by. I spent my days in the lab and my nights sleeping in one of the private bunk rooms. Sometimes it was the other way around. I lost track of daylight for a while there. There wasn’t much of it, in the labs or bunk rooms. I learned to tell the time by the ebb and flow of lab assistants, the way they were quieter and more focused in the mornings, scattier and prone to risk-taking at nights. I had too many of them to remember, now. Occasionally their faces blended together, and I would refer to them by their function, like: “Waveform Damper, show that to Nerve Interfacer, please.” But they didn’t seem to mind. They were very deferential.

In between, I visited Lola. They had moved her to a live-in suite in an upper section of the building. It was a managerial level, I think, although I never saw any managers. I did see lots of potted plants. Those cheerful splashes of green made me wistful, and I felt like installing some plants in the lab, to brighten it up, although of course I couldn’t, because of contamination. But I did take one from beside the elevator and put it in the corner of my bunk room. I could do things like that, now I was important. The plant sat there a while and I kind of forgot about it until one day, or maybe night, I saw it slumped over the side of its pot, brown and limp. I hadn’t watered it. Also, the lack of natural light may have been a problem.

As I sat on my bunk and looked at that plant, I felt annoyed. There was something pathetic about an organism that couldn’t even live if you left it alone a while. This was maybe a little hard on the plant, which had after all been removed to a hostile environment, but still, it reminded me why I was doing this.

60.