Max Barry - Machine Man

Praise for Max Barrys
MACHINE MAN

MAX BARRY
MACHINE MAN

Max Barry began removing parts at an early age. In 1999, he successfully excised a steady job at tech giant HP in order to upgrade to the more compatible alternative of manufacturing fiction. While producing three novels, he developed the online nation simulation game NationStates, as well as contributing to various open source software projects and developing religious views on operating systems. He did not leave the house much. For Machine Man, Max wrote a website to deliver pages of fiction to readers via e-mail and RSS. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters, and is thirty-eight years old. He uses vi.

www.maxbarry.com

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A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2011

Copyright 2011 by Max Barry

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblace to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This entire work was serialized in somewhat different form from March 2009 to December 2009 on www.maxbarry.com/machineman.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barry, Max, 1973
Machine man : a novel / by Max Barry.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74322-0
1. Mechanical engineersFiction. 2. Artificial limbsFiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A7424M33 2011
813.54dc22
2011004724

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design by Matt Roeser

v3.1

FINE, ITS FOR MINTER .

AS A boy, I wanted to be a train. I didnt realize this was unusualthat other kids played with trains, not as them. They liked to build tracks and have trains not fall off them. Watch them go through tunnels. I didnt understand that. What I liked was pretending my body was two hundred tons of unstoppable steel. Imagining I was pistons and valves and hydraulic compressors.

You mean robots, said my best friend, Jeremy. You want to play robots. I had never thought of it like that. Robots had square eyes and jerky limbs and usually wanted to destroy the Earth. Instead of doing one thing right, they did everything badly. They were general purpose. I was not a fan of robots. They were bad machines.

I WOKE and reached for my phone and it was not there. I groped around my bedside table, fingers sneaking between novels I didnt read anymore because once you start e-reading you cant go back. But no phone. I sat up and turned on my lamp. I crawled underneath the bed, in case my phone had somehow fallen in the night and bounced oddly. My eyes were blurry from sleep so I swept my arms across the carpet in hopeful arcs. This disturbed dust and I coughed. But I kept sweeping. I thought: Have I been burgled? I felt like I would have woken if someone had tried to swipe my phone. Some part of me would have realized.

I entered the kitchen. Kitchenette. It was not a big apartment. But it was clean, because I didnt cook. I would have spotted my phone. But I did not. I peered into the living room. Sometimes I sat on the sofa and watched TV while playing with my phone. Possibly the phone had slipped down between cushions. It could be there now, just out of sight. I shivered. I was naked. The living room curtains were open and the window looked onto the street. The street looked into the window. Sometimes there were dogwalkers, and school-going children. I shivered again. I should put on some clothes. My bedroom was six feet away. But my phone could be closer. It could be right there. I cupped my hands over my genitals and ran across the living room and pulled up sofa cushions. I saw black plastic and my heart leaped but it was only a remote. I got down on my hands and knees and felt around beneath the sofa. My ass tingled with the first touch of morning sun. I hoped nobody was outside that window.

The coffee table was bare on top but laden beneath with reference books I hadnt touched since Google. A phone book, for some reason. A phone book. Three million sheafs of dead tree stacked up as a monument to the inefficiency of paper as an information distribution platform. But no phone. I sat up. A dog barked. For the first time ever I wished I had a land line, so I could call my phone. I peered at the top of the TV and it was empty but maybe I had put my phone down there and it had been dislodged by minor seismic activity. As I crossed the room, my eyes met a joggers. Her face contorted. That might have been from exertion. Behind the TV was a cord-based civilization but no phone. It wasnt on the kitchen bench. It still wasnt on my bedside table or the carpet or any of the places I had already looked. My teeth chattered. I didnt know how warm it would be today. It might rain, it might be humid, I had no idea. I had a desktop but it took forever to boot, more than a minute. I would have to choose clothes without information on the environmental conditions. It was insane.

I showered. Sometimes to solve a problem you need to stop trying solutions. You need to step back. I stood under water and mentally retreaded the previous night. I had worked late. I had arrived home around two. I dont think I ate. I went to bed and fell asleep without even using my phone at all. I realized: Its in my car. It made perfect sense. I turned off the water. I had not used soap or washed my hair but from water was probably 80 percent clean. That was a pass. I wrapped a towel around my waist, grabbed keys from the kitchen, and padded out of the apartment. The stairwell was ice. I almost lost my towel trying to open the door to the underground garage. My car was in the sixth bay and already I could see the empty dock. I bwip-bwipped it open anyway and crawled inside to search between seats. I could not believe I had driven all the way home without docking my phone. Or maybe I could. Sometimes I left it in my pocket and realized only when I stopped the car and reached for it. That had happened. And last night I had been tired. It wasnt inconceivable. The phone could be anywhere. It could be anywhere.