Heart of Steel (18 page)

Mechanus’s blood went cold at the thought, and his gaze instinctively flicked to the thin scar he’d seen on her neck. She clearly saw the change in his gaze, because she nodded.

“Yeah,” she confirmed, reaching up to touch the scar. “That’s where that came from. I was kind of surprised that you hadn’t asked about it before—everyone does.”

He shrugged; he had plenty of his own scars, after all. “So what happened?” he urged.

She grimaced. “I don’t know who he was. Maybe he was a patient there. Either way, he was tweaked out of his mind and looking for drugs. I tried to stay calm, but he was so twitchy I didn’t know if he might kill me anyway.” She shook her head, disgusted. “I

froze. I’d faced down horrible injuries for a couple of years by then, and I always knew what to do—but this time I froze. He asked me again, and pushed the scalpel harder against me. I felt myself bleeding, and I panicked. I told him I didn’t have the key to the medication locker. I… begged him not to kill me. I was sure I was going to die right there no matter what I did.” She took a deep breath. “That’s when Jim saved me.”

Mechanus’s metal hand twitched. “What did he do?” he asked.

“He… brained the guy with a fire extinguisher.” She shook her head, her lip trembling. “I found out later that he’d caved in the guy’s skull. Killed him.” She swallowed hard. “At the time, though, I was so grateful to see him and to be out of danger that… I decided to stay with him a while longer.”

Mechanus watched the expressions on her face shift between horror, sadness, frustration, and exhaustion. He wanted desperately to comfort her, to say or do
something
that would assure her that everything was going to be all right, but under the circumstances such an assurance would ring dreadfully hollow. His detailed files offered him no advice on this matter whatsoever, forcing him to improvise.

“You’d been thinking of breaking up with him?” Mechanus asked.

She nodded. “For about six months by then.”

A bone-deep chill ran through Mechanus then. He could not call it intuition or instinct because by habit he dealt in facts and logic, but a part of him that still called itself  human  told  him with absolute cer-tainty that Jim had known that Julia wanted to break up with him. It wasn’t anything he could even come

close to proving—not right now and maybe not ever—but it coiled itself around his cardiac pump like a venomous snake.

Julia was an intelligent woman—why could she not see even this possibility?

The answer came to him instantly: Because she was a kind-hearted woman. Because she was the sort of person to give someone like Mechanus a chance, even if she was afraid of him. Because she cared for strangers, no matter what they might have done.

Because she didn’t know what obsession could do to a man.

The snake coiled tighter as Mechanus remembered what Jim had said to him after disabling Arthur.

I will kill her and I’ll make sure you’re watching, you freak.

Mechanus didn’t exactly consider himself the paragon of sanity, but anyone who made a statement like that just wasn’t right in the head. There was one question, though, that suddenly itched on his tongue, demanding to be asked.

“Did you ever tell him you wanted to break up?”

She was silent for a long time, and then shrugged. “It never seemed to be the right time. I don’t know. I was planning on telling him when we got back from Hawaii.” She made a face. “I feel like such a coward now.”

He gave her hands a gentle squeeze. “You’re not. You weren’t afraid when I got injured, or when I have flashbacks.”

She shook her head, more frustrated now. “I just kept waiting and waiting for the right time, and I’ve only just figured out that there would be no right time. He would be mad no matter what. And now…”

Between his hands, she started making the hand-washing gesture again. “Now he’s gone off the deep end anyway and it’s too late. It’s just like…” She shut her eyes and fell silent.

He cradled her hands, gently stopping the hand-washing motions. “Just like what?” he asked, tilting his head curiously.

She sighed heavily. “It’s just like… I was meaning to ask you about something you said during your last flashback, after you fought Jim.”

He sat forward attentively. “What… what did I say?”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t a whole lot, just a name. You called it over and over, like…” She looked up from their conjoined hands and met his gaze. “It sounded really important to you, and I wanted to ask, but you were so exhausted and I wanted to make sure you got your rest and—”

He released her hands and gently cupped her face. She stopped talking instantly, looking at him.

“What was the name?” he asked quietly.

“All you said was a first name,” she said. “Lauren.”

He froze at the name. The sound of it sent shockwaves through his damaged mind, coursing along neural pathways that he hadn’t used in… well, it had to have been ten years now.

Lauren.

Lauren.

Lauren.

LaurenLaurenLaurenLaurenLauren.

He felt his chest grow tight, and realized that the chain reaction made him temporarily forget how to breathe.

“Alistair?” he heard Julia ask, as though from hundreds of miles away, but for the time being she seemed irrelevant.

He had a face.

He had a first name.

And in the cascading domino effect, memories spilled open upon memories, unlocking hidden, forgotten secret chambers in his brain.

Lauren Ellen Mackenzie. The love of his life.

No. Not his life.

The life he had before.

The life he had forgotten.

The life of another man, the man he used to be.

His mind was flooded with uncountable new/old memories, and he clutched at the sides of his head, trying to scream, trying to make it stop, but only a thin, strangled noise escaped his constricted throat as the past crashed into his consciousness.

It was the past of a virtual stranger, but by instinct his mind and cybernetic augmentations started sorting out and filing the uncountable little snapshots into the appropriate categories.

Seconds later, another name and face came forward, that of a tall young man, a bit on the lean side, with a slightly shaggy mop of dark hair. The name of this young man, barely out of college, floated into view soon after.

Michael James Conroy.

“I…” he managed to whisper. “I… remember who I was now.”

His cardiac pump swelled with joy and delight and triumph, but then the rest of the memories came, as inexorable as the tide, and he started shaking.

“Oh… God…” he choked, and for the first time in ten years, his eye stung with tears.

Chapter

FOURTEEN

Julia could only watch as the mental dominoes fell. It was amazing what sort of stimulus could break a patient out of traumatic amnesia—especially after so long. Most people might have thought the blow to the head would suffice, but in truth any number of things could have done the trick.

In this case, it was a name from his past.

Then, as the last domino dropped, he looked like his mind was about to shatter all over again.

“Oh… God…” he choked, and his eye brimmed with tears for the first time since she’d met him. His mechanical eye was contracted down to a pinprick, backlit in blue.

“Breathe, Alistair,” she urged, resting her palm against the right side of his face. “Stay with me. Just breathe.”

He focused on her and took deep, gulping breaths, like a man who has nearly drowned.

“I… remember…” he choked out. “I remember… everything.”

“Tell me,” she said softly. “Talking about it might help you sort things out.”

He shook his head. “That’s not the problem. I…” His face was a rictus of remembered agony now; all she could do now was wait for him to either be ready, or not.

Finally his features smoothed, and he took a deep breath as he finally lowered his hands from his head.

“My name was… Michael Conroy,” he said quietly, with almost no metallic reverberation in his

voice. “I went to college at MIT. Even then I was a genius… taking a double major in Biology and Robotics.” His face twitched in a snapshot-quick smile. “I met her in my first Robotics class. Lauren MacKenzie—one of two women in that class and the only one who stayed on for the rest of the courses.” He glanced away with a smile, lost in the happy memories for now. “I… asked her out the second week of the course. I was… kind of shy back then, just an awkward nerd, but we’d hit it off so well in class.” He snorted softly. “She thought I was cute.” He looked back up at Julia. “Maybe I can find a picture of what I looked like then.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it turned out that we had so much in common—it was like we were soul mates or something.” He sighed. “Soul mates,” he said again, sounding bitter.

“What happened?” Julia asked.

“We dated all through college,” he said. “I loved her so much it hurt. I couldn’t imagine life without her. I dreamed of engineering bionic prosthetics for

amputees, so that my work would help people who had suffered horrible injuries to be able to walk and have a normal life. I just… wanted to make the world a better place.” He paused, glancing down at his metal hand. “I think that was why she loved me so much. And Lauren… she was… smart, and funny, and gentle, and kind, and beautiful, and…” He smiled again. “And at times she could be just a big of a dork as I was. We had debates over the usual things… Kirk vs. Picard, Borg cube vs. a Star Destroyer, that sort of thing. Not arguments, really, but bystanders learned not to get in the middle of things really quickly.” He chuckled quietly.

“Soon enough,” he continued, “we were in our senior year and making plans for the future. Planning what we would do after we graduated.” He sighed. “We each wanted the other to be our first. To make it special, once we were married. When I asked her to marry me I couldn’t afford to get a ring, so I made her a pendant out of wire, in the shape of a caffeine molecule.” He gave a shy grin. “She loved it. We started making plans, even before our graduation.” His grin faded, to be replaced by a haunted expression. “And that’s when things started to go horribly wrong.”

She leaned forward and took his hand. “Go on,” she said quietly.

He blinked several times, as though trying to get his thoughts in order once and for all, and then shivered. “We were on our way home from our graduation party,” he rasped. “It was raining so hard that the wipers could barely keep up, but we were both excited and talking about the wedding and what we would do after. I was… distracted a bit, maybe.” His expression turned pained. “Something ran into the

road. I think it might have been a dog. I just reacted. There was no time to brake. I jerked the wheel to try to swerve, and we spun out.”

His voice fell silent then, his face a mask of anguish, before licking his lips and continuing, in the tones of a man compelled to speak or else go insane. “I don’t know how many times the car spun. It felt like we were spinning forever. We came to a stop sitting across the road. I don’t think either of us was injured, just shaken.” He took a deep breath. “Then the truck came.”

Julia’s chest tightened, and she squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, a helpless expression forming on his face.

“I…” he choked, and then tried again. “The truck hit my side of the car. I don’t know how I survived, or even stayed awake. Lauren was knocked out cold. I was pinned in the car, and I smelled gasoline. I… I couldn’t move, but I figured at least I could make sure she got out. I… I tried and tried to wake her up so she could get out. The car caught on fire and I was just screaming for her to… to wake up, to get out, just… doing anything I could, but…” He took a long, shuddering breath.

Julia remained silent; all she could think about was the flashback he’d had just after lunch, the one that had him screaming for Lauren to wake up. A chill ran through her at the thought of what that must have been like.

“I don’t remember when the paramedics came. I don’t remember when they cut me out of the car. I just remember waking up in the hospital, missing three limbs and half my face, my vocal cords ruined from smoke inhalation and screaming. I was pretty much gone from the hips down. They told me it was a

miracle I was still alive. When I was able to ask about Lauren, they told me she was alive, but in a coma.”

He fell silent for a few seconds, staring off into space. Julia squeezed his hand gently, and he came back to the present with a shiver, focusing on her.

He set his jaw. “It was then that I resolved to recover from my injuries, so that when she woke up she would see me up and about and walking and we could go on with our plans. There was an insurance settlement from the trucking company, so I used that to get started. I… wasn’t impressed by the prosthetic

options I was offered, so I started to make my own. They said that there was damage to my heart from the car accident, so I started to make my own. They told me that I would be blind on the left side of my face even if I got a facial prosthetic to look normal, so I started to make my own cybernetic eye. They told me my vocal cords were ruined and that I would need a voice box to talk, so I started to make my own. I… worked hard, using the knowledge I’d gained from school to rebuild myself. I built robots to aid me, and I think I developed what would eventually become Arthur to help me design and produce what I needed.

“The first device I put in was my artificial heart,” he said, tapping the center of his chest, just over the cardiac scar. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it myself, and no surgeon would agree to install an untested device of this kind in any patient, so I designed and programmed the robots who would perform the surgery, and I put my life in their hands.” His eyes gleamed. “When I woke, I was so excited by my success that I leapt into the process of rebuilding myself, replacing every limb and organ that had been lost or damaged in the car accident.

“It took five years. Five long, busy years of designing, building, improving, replacing, engineering, grafting, and implanting, but at last I was up and about, more functional than the surgeons and prostheticians tried to tell me I would ever be. My new arm and legs were stronger than my own had been. I kept tinkering right up to the day I went to visit her, eager to show her how well I’d recovered. I’d dreamed of that moment for five years, sure that even if she was still in a coma, she’d know I was there, and maybe wake up.”

He stopped, the memory of tentative excitement reflected in his mismatched features as he regarded his current metal hand, flexing its fingers slowly and turning it over as though seeing it for the first time. The fingers of his other hand tightened around her own.

“I got to the hospital where she’d been staying, all ready to visit her, but… they said she wasn’t there anymore. I… I asked what had happened to her, to check again, that there had to be some sort of a mistake—but the receiving nurse said she was very sorry, there was no mistake.” He swallowed, and Julia heard a small click in his throat. “They’d taken her off life support the previous week. Her family couldn’t afford to pay for it anymore, even with insurance and the settlement. I… I was too late. I didn’t even know she’d died. Nobody told me. I never g-got to say g… g… goodbye.”

He looked up at her then, and the single tear that had been threatening to fall during his tale finally did. He inhaled once, a great wet ragged sob, and then broke down in tears, not even bothering to cover his face, which was contorted in a mask of pure anguish. Julia’s own throat closed in sympathy, and she shifted

herself over to sit next to him, gathering him into a gentle hug, and he leaned against her. All that work, all those dreams, all that hope, smashed on the floor like a glass plate in a single instant.

What was worse—this was ten-year-old grief, still raw because it hadn’t been properly processed in all this time. He’d regained his memories, his past, his humanity—but at the risk of his sanity.

She didn’t think it was pity that she felt for him—her experiences in the ER had put her beyond

pity—but rather a sort of sympathetic resonance, two broken souls leaning on each other for support.

After several long minutes, he finally fell still, his tears exhausted, though he still had his right arm firmly wrapped around her waist and every part of him that was still organic still shook.

“Alistair?” she whispered.

At first, his only answer was a thick, shuddering breath.

“Alistair, I’m… so sorry,” she said. It felt woefully inadequate—the English language simply didn’t possess the nuance she felt was needed to even start to make things better.

“I…” he choked out, “I think that was when I broke. I went into an empty room and just… smashed everything I could find. I remember I was screaming, though I couldn’t tell you what I was saying, even now. It took five people to wrestle me out of there, but I didn’t care. I was… I didn’t have anything left, not with her gone. I was nothing. All my plans, all my dreams, obliterated. I… I didn’t think it was fair, that she died because someone ran out of
money
.” He spat the word like a curse. “That her parents had to make that kind of decision because it was
too expensive
to keep her alive. In time I could have found a way to

wake her, but—” He shook his head, his grip on Julia easing slightly. “Even… after I lost my mind, I remember thinking that nobody should have to suffer like that. People shouldn’t be forced to make that sort of choice. With Lauren gone, I turned my back on the world and resolved to make it a better place… by force, if need be.”

His voice had cleared and leveled again, and now it resonated with metallic anger, a sort of globally-directed outrage that would drive other men

to, say, volunteer as a missionary in a third-world country, or join the military to fight warlords in distant countries.

“I left the United States and went searching for a new place to work—someplace far away from anyone else. I didn’t want to be interrupted before I was done. I soon found Shark Reef Isle… and started working.”

For someone like Alistair, though, his shattered mind had reformed into that of a mad scientist—but now it had broken again.

She had no way of knowing how it would reassemble itself this time around. All she could do now was hold him, and stroke his hairless, scarred scalp, and wait for him to recover himself.

After several long minutes, he finally stopped shaking, and simply leaned against Julia, staring blankly into space.

“Alistair?” she asked quietly.

He moved his head slightly, looking sideways at her.

“Are you okay?” she ventured cautiously. These next few moments would be critical.

He took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and then slowly let it out. He still looked pale and

shell-shocked, but this was entirely understandable, as far as Julia was concerned.

“I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “I’ll need to think about all this for a bit.” He unwound his arm from around her waist. “This is all quite a lot to absorb. I… think I need to be alone for a bit.”

She nodded, and then a biological need made itself known. “Is there a bathroom near here?”

He nodded absently. “Down the hall to your right, seventh door on the right.”

“Okay,” she said, and stood up carefully, watching him. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She eased her way past him, paused, and kissed him softly on the metal plates that covered his left temple. He didn’t react. After watching him for a few more moments, she picked up the Ionizer, slung its strap over her shoulder, turned, and left.

***

Alistair Mechanus felt utterly hollow. He’d reclaimed his memories, only to find despair and tragedy there. He’d been dreaming of this blonde woman—his soul mate from so long ago—for almost a week, only to find out that she was dead, and he’d been so absorbed in his work that he hadn’t even said goodbye. His past was in tatters. His psyche—and if it could be said that he had a soul, that, too—was in shards on the floor.