Machine Man by Max Barry

are you?”
    TO MEET Lola Shanks I had to go to the lobby. I hadn’t been aboveground since I discovered the bunk rooms. But sheneeded to be authorized. So I rode the elevator and walked the corridors. This was harder than it sounds because I was wearing the Exegesis and had never gotten around to fixing the knee. It tended to get away from me. I stuck close to walls. But I limped past hardened engineers without a single question. This puzzled me until I realized I had become pathetic.
    I reached the lobby and fell into a black sofa. I pulled out my phone and looked up every few seconds to see if she was coming through the doors. I was early. I leaned forward and peered at a scale model of a mobile weapons platform that sat in a glass case on the low coffee table. Its little plaque said, CIVIL PEACEMAKER VO. 5-111 . It was essentially a caravan with guns. I had been to a presentation; the idea was you towed it somewhere like a recently captured city and left it there, making peace.
    “Hey!”
    I jumped. Lola Shanks was coming toward me, wearing a white polo shirt, white pants, and white sneakers. Her hair was held back with a thin white headband. My first thought was she had come directly from exercising or perhaps some sort of religious event but I think it was extremely uniform fashion choices. She held out her arms. I got off the sofa, which required rocking. My unregulated ski foot flew out. Lola grabbed my hands. “Whoa! What’s wrong with the leg? It shouldn’t do that.” Before I could explain, she rolled up my pants. “What’s this?” She tapped the tin.
    “I modified it.”
    “You what?” By now she had exposed the knee. What was left of it. It was a half-melted empty casing. “Where’s the knee?”
    “I broke it.” I felt uncomfortable. People were watching. Lola got to her feet, her brown eyes flicking between mine. “I didn’t get to say good-bye at the hospital.”
    “That wasn’t supposed to be good-bye. You were supposed to come in for sessions.”
    “Oh.”
    “Why did you break your knee?”
    “I was trying to improve it. But then I got the idea to build a new one.”
    “A new knee?”
    “A new leg.”
    “You … what?”
    “I built a prosthesis. Well. I’m still tinkering. It can be better.”
    “You built a leg?”
    “I’ll show you.”
    “Yes,” she said. “Please.”
    LOLA WAS escorted into an interview room by a guard and I returned to the sofa. While she answered questions about everyone she had ever met, everywhere she had ever been, and her Facebook profile, I flipped through the company glossy,
Looking Forward
. We were immunizing children in Nigeria, apparently. Lola took so long I went looking for her, and was told she was in the multiscanner. This was like a metal detector, for an advanced definition of metal. I was surprised because that should have been the fastest part of the process. You just had to stand there.
    Finally Lola emerged, doing up her top button. “They swabbed me,” she said. “They swabbed my mouth.”
    The guard handed her a tag. “Please wear this at all times. If you lose it, you can’t get out.”
    Lola looked at me, amused, and I shook my head to tell her no, seriously. She clipped the tag to her polo shirt.
    “Was there a problem?”
    “Oh. No. I just have trouble with metal detectors.” She adjusted her glasses. “Forget that. Show me your leg.”
    “ONE OF the problems with biological legs,” I said in the elevator, “is they can’t survive on their own. They’re not modular. This creates isolated points of failure and dependency issues. All of which go away if you make the leg self-sufficient.”
    Lola looked up from fiddling with her access badge. “Self-sufficient?”
    “As in, it works by itself. It doesn’t need a warm body for fuel.”
    “The Exegesis doesn’t need fuel.”
    “Yes, it does. Look, I’m giving it kinetic energy right now.”
    “Oh. I see.”
    “Without me, it just
sits
there.” I glanced at