Machine Man (serial)

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I planned to lose my left arm on Friday. I didn’t tell Lola this. It would be a surprise. I had a robotic arm ready to snap in, plus two backups in case anything went wrong with the primary, which it wouldn’t, because the primary was a piece of art. It was by far the smartest thing I’d ever built, and, not wanting to boast, but I have built some pretty smart things. Once I created a microbe that ate garbage. The idea was you open your trash can, throw in your table scraps, and they’re gone within the hour. They were really hungry. But that project never got out of QA, because if the microbes ever got out of the trash can, well, they would eat everything. There were some PR concerns about a trash-can-eats-man scenario. Which was not really the fault of the microbes, in my opinion. I felt someone from one of the military departments should have come up with a safe receptacle. But anyway. There would be no such problem with the arm, because there was only one customer: me. And I loved it.

I was excited about being able to do this amputation properly: in a sterile environment, while unconscious. I imagined myself slipping gently off to sleep in Better Future’s brand new operating theater under the gaze of a green-masked anesthetist, waking to the new arm already attached. I could see myself swinging my legs off the table, saying, “I’ll get that,” when the nurse went to fix my gown, and my new arm swiveling behind me, knotting the cord with machine precision. I imagined opening the door to Lola’s suite with metal fingers, the desire on her face when she saw what I had become now. But none of that worked out.

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