Machine Man (serial)

That night I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the phantom pain. It was Carl. He crawled into my mind and I couldn’t get him out. I woke every half-hour, sticky with sweat, trying to escape Carl as he chased me armlessly through the corridors. Once he stood in the Clamp, looking at me as the plates closed in. His eyes said: How could you do this, Charlie? You know I need some parts.

I sat up, shivering. Carl was a bad guy, wasn’t he? He had tried to kill Lola and steal my arms. Or if that wasn’t quite true, he was a destroyer of relationships. I had seen the look in Lola’s eyes, when she’d said: He doesn’t have any arms. Carl was poison.

I had asked Cassandra Cautery to fire him. That was what I’d said, in her office yesterday. She nodded once. I walked out of that room happy, thinking my problems were solved.

But now I was wracked with guilt. The guy had no arms. Without my help, he would get, what, hospital prosthetics? Those were awful. You might as well strap on flippers.

I groaned. I had to fix this. As logical as it was for me to get Carl fired, a part of me knew it was wrong. And that part was my brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It was the area responsible for guilt. Well, I was going to do something about that.

75.