Machine Man (32 page)

“You’re talking, Charlie. Here …” She swiveled my camera until I could see the monitor:
LOLA CAN YOU HEAR ME I CANNOT TALK
. “See? You’re talking.”

AM I IN THERE IS MY BRAIN IN THERE

“No. Well … yes. But not your
brain
. You’re solid state now.”

HOW AM I SOLID STATE

“I can’t believe this.” She wiped her eyes. “It’s been so long.”

HOW LONG LOLA

“It’s been six years, Charlie.”

SIX YEARS HOW IS IT SIX YEARS

“It feels like six minutes.” She laughed. “Oh, God, Charlie, it’s really you.”

I AM A ROBOT
, wrote the screen.
I AM A BOX A DEAD BOX
.

“No, Charlie. You’re not a box. The box is your body. That’s all.”

DO NOT WANT TO BE A BOX LOLA

She stroked my camera. I couldn’t feel it. But it felt comforting. “They said you were gone. But I wouldn’t let them turn you off. I had to yell at a lot of people over the last six years, because they kept wanting to give up.” She straightened and unbuttoned her shirt. There was a white scar across her chest, thin and faded. “Look. I got your heart.”

LOLA I MISS YOU

She covered her mouth and looked away. When she looked back, her eyes gleamed. “Well, you don’t have to miss me anymore, Charlie. Because let me tell you about the box. The box is special. The box has ports.”

PORTS

“Yes. You can plug things in.”

THINGS WHAT THINGS

“That’s a good question. The answer is up to you. Because it’s just an interface, Charlie. It can be configured whichever way we want. But … while I was waiting, I kind of went ahead and … it’s nothing special. You can do better. But I wanted to give you something. Like you gave me the heart. I wanted you to have something I built for you myself. So I made you an arm.”

AN ARM LOLA

“I’m kind of stupidly proud of it. I mean, it’s so basic. But it’s a start.”

A START

“Yeah.” She lay her head on her arm, her free hand continuing to stroke my camera. “That’s what it is.”

It was odd, seeing her through a lens. But not as odd as I would have thought. Perhaps people could adapt to anything. Now I thought about it, it was pretty strange that human beings felt comfortable walking around in bodies mostly made of juice. That was actually bizarre.

CAN YOU SHOW ME THE ARM
, I said.

One day a guy on my website took me to task for dawdling between books:

I had been working hard, I felt. I had written lots of things. Novel openings that never went anywhere. Screenplays that were never made. Manuscripts that needed twelve months in the desk drawer before I could stand to look at them again.

I decided to prove I wasn’t sitting around on my ass. Wasn’t
just
sitting on my ass. I had a few pages of a story that wasn’t going anywhere in long format, and wondered how it might work in lots of little parts. On March 18, 2009, I posted the first section, 200 words, to my site. This was
Machine Man
, page 1. The next day I posted another hundred; the day after, 150 more. Then the weekend. I took a break. On Monday I continued. In the early days I had a dozen or so pages up my sleeve, but pretty soon the live feed caught up to me, and I wrote most pages in the twenty-four hours before posting them. Each day I read comments from readers and pondered their feedback. By December I finished, with a story 54,000 words long.

This novel is much longer than the serial and departs
from it in several ways. That’s partly because the serial was a first draft, and therefore terrible, but also because the formats are so different. The serial was a collection of cliffhangers; the novel I hope is deeper and less tricksy. But this book couldn’t have existed without the serial, so I’m indebted to everyone who spent nine months reading it, one freaking page per day. Thank you to those who stuck with it despite the fact that I was sending out a first draft, which is a kind of crime for a writer, or should be. Thank you for the comments, which turned the website into a meta-work (
The Annotated Machine Man
) with ideas, predictions, and explanations. And enhanced, artificially augmented, thanks to those who contributed many, many comments, the most prolific of whom were Pev (still interesting), gStein, CrystalR, Toby O, Electrichead, David, Ben, fredzfrog, Stygian Emperor, Mapuche, coolpillows, Chemical Rascal (puns and haiku on demand), Alex, Ian Manka, Felix, C Leffelman, SilverKnight, Yannick, dabbeljuh, Abgrund, Alan Westbrook, SexCpotatoes, regtiangha, Neville, Adam Speicher (a.k.a. meta-Adam), tim, Katie Ellert (“Where’s Lola?
Where’s Lola?
”), Ajna, Isaac, Joe M., Justin, towr, Morlok8k, Ballotonia, Sander, Ted, and Robert Bissonnette. Many times I clicked through to the previous day’s page with dread, sure everybody must have hated it, but found cheers and jokes and spin-off ideas that buoyed me forward. Before I began, I had considered a warning on the comments page, something like: “Being critical of this thing while I’m still writing it may cause me to lock up creatively.” I didn’t do that and didn’t have to. Readers were far nicer to me than I deserved.

I used many reader ideas. I wasn’t sure I should admit that in print, but my legal advice is that you can’t copyright ideas, so thanks a lot, suckers. Wait. You didn’t type that, did you? Good. Because people would kill for your job, you know.

Thank you to everyone who tossed me an idea. Even the ones I didn’t use helped clarify the boundaries of my story’s world. My favorite was from Meredith Course, who educated me about brain plasticity and free-roaming neurons. Carl’s “Fiber Shield” is from an idea by Kragen Sitaker. Even the first edition cover was chosen with online help, particularly from Reddit: thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts.

Thank you to Mike Taylor for allowing me to pilfer the heart and soul of his wonderful blog post, “A brief, yet helpful, lesson on elementary resource-locking strategy,” which so perfectly depicts why programmers should not be allowed to mix with regular humans that I couldn’t do better than to ape it.

Michael Ian Minter is responsible for the original comment quoted above. I don’t want to encourage people to go around goading authors. Particularly when the author is me. But Minter essentially convinced me to do this, and I would have blamed him had it gone badly, so I guess I should give him credit now.

Thank you to Jen for her patience on the days I struggled with my daily deadline (“I’m not happy with my page. I have to rewrite my
paaaaage
”), and for telling me it sounded like a good idea to begin with. Ditto to my agent, Luke Janklow, who also made sure this fun experiment in real-time fiction didn’t break me financially, by finding enthusiastic fans in Zachary Wagman and Tim O’Connell of Vintage Books, Aviva Tuffield and Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe Publications, and, with Brian Siberell, Cathy Schulman of Mandalay Pictures.