Heart of Steel (3 page)

“Very good, Miss,” it said, the face flickering to a generic smile. “Right this way.”

The drone led her up two flights of stairs and into another, identical series of corridors, except that these were lined with viewing windows on both sides. Horizontal blinds had been drawn in front of many of them; of those that were not, many were empty save for some rather advanced-looking robotics, ranging from mechanical limbs to vaguely humanoid creations. In one of them she saw a shark-like humanoid sitting placidly while another creature, built on a pig-like theme, spoke animatedly to it, holding up a pair of mechanical pincers. Julia recognized the shark-creature as the monster who grabbed her, and a chill went down her spine. She hurried her steps and adjusted her path to hug the opposite wall.

“Is it much further?” she asked, rubbing her arms anxiously.

“No, Miss,” Arthur replied. “It’s right around the next corner.”

“Good. This place is giving me the creeps.”

Around the next corner she saw a tall man, apparently in his early thirties but completely bald, clad in a white lab coat with a high, stiff collar—the sort that she instantly associated with Dr. Frankenstein and other mentally-unstable scientific types—and black, elbow-length gloves. He also appeared to be wearing some sort of armored boots made of metal for no reason that she could determine. His handsome right profile was currently facing her as he studied something through an observation window, and as she approached she saw a continuous, slightly ragged border of scar tissue running from his brow, over the top of his hairless scalp, and down almost to the base of his skull.

She advanced cautiously, trying to get a look at the subject of his study in the next room. Before she could, however, the tall man in the hall with her spoke.

“Greetings, Julia,” he said in the baritone she’d heard from the speaker. She turned, and saw to her shock that a significant portion of the left half of his face, now revealed to her, was crafted of overlapping segments of unpolished metal, apparently riveted through the flesh and into the skull and jaw. His left eye was a mechanical lens that turned and focused in perfect coordination with its biological counterpart as he regarded her, its iris dilating as he offered her a welcoming smile. “I am, as you have probably guessed, Dr. Mechanus. I welcome you to my humble lair.” He sketched a bow to her, and she either heard or imagined the sound of countless motors whirring within him.

At first her thoughts were consumed by a single horrified thought—
what the hell
what the hell what the hell
—repeated over and over again until her mind filled with
what the hell
from top to bottom and side to side. She felt light-headed, and braced herself against the edge of the observation window to avoid falling, but some persistently reasonable corner of her mind gently informed her that now simply was not a good time for her to faint or throw up.

Stay frosty, Julia,
the voice advised her, in a familiar-sounding voice that Julia couldn’t immediately identify.
Think of this like your first car crash in the ER. Sure, it looks horrible, but you can get through this. Just breathe. Get through this, and find out what’s happened to Jim. You’re okay.

She breathed slowly, trying to mentally force her jackrabbitting heart to slow the hell down already. In the rest of her mind,
what the hell
soon faded into background noise.

Mechanus raised his remaining eyebrow. “You know,” he said gently, as though correcting a small child, “When someone introduces themselves to you, it’s considered polite to reciprocate.”

Oh. Right. Apparently she should act like this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It probably wasn’t for him, but
what the hell
all the same.

Stay frosty, Julia...

“I’m... Julia,” she choked out, still staring at the metal half of his face, “Julia Parker.” She was aware on some level that she was staring, but couldn’t quite tear her eyes away from what looked like nothing so much as a damaged cyborg. She forced herself to focus on the matter at hand. “You said that Jim was here?”

He smiled. “Yes, of course. Here he is.” He gestured to the window.

She looked—and clapped her hands over her mouth to stifle a scream when she saw what remained of her boyfriend. Her mind, well-practiced after years in the ER, slipped effortlessly into clinical mode.

Extensive contusions across the face, neck, and upper right quarter of the torso. Traumatic amputation of the left arm just above the elbow; tissue damage indicates the limb was torn off rather than severed. Multiple lacerations across the chest and ribs. Traumatic transection just above the pelvic bone.

A number of electrodes with trailing wires had been affixed to Jim’s chest and temples, and a few more wires had apparently been inserted into his chest cavity around his breastbone, sketching out a set of parentheses around his heart. She also saw a series of tubes and catheters threaded into strategic areas of the ruin, with fluids pumping in and out. The tubes threaded into the stump of his arm seemed to be circulating blood, while those coming from his torn lower half seemed to carry several types of bodily fluids. However, the items that brought the whole bizarre scene together lurked in the far corner: a tank of sickly green, transparent fluid containing Jim’s naked legs and pelvis. Nearby, a heart monitor and oxygen pump indicated that for all that had happened to him, Jim still lived. Correction—Jim was still being
kept
alive.

She found herself remembering when she’d first met Jim, who had landed in the emergency room with his leg broken in three places from a skiing accident. She’d been a resident at the time, but she’d been able to calm him down just by talking to him, even while

he was being triaged and checked for spinal injuries. He’d been surrounded by more machinery, and didn’t look half as horrifying as he did now.

Her clinical mind could only tolerate so much; the injuries alone would have been fine, but the measures being taken to keep him alive seemed cruel and unusual. Who the hell was this guy, some sort of mad surgeon? Granted, he did replace her leg with one that seemed to work just about as well, but did he use similar techniques to create that shark-thing that attacked her and Jim? And how—

She jumped with a squeak of surprise as Mechanus placed a hand on her shoulder.

“The human body is quite resilient,” he said, “It wants to live, no matter what.”

“That I’ll grant,” she said numbly, “But still, how… how the hell is he still alive?”

“Science,” Mechanus said brightly. “As you can see, I’ve mastered the techniques of tissue manipulation to improve upon nature. For his own sake, I’m keeping him in a medical coma, but he’s alive—and, if you like, I can repair him.”

“Repair him? How?” Julia turned to face her host, and took a step back when she saw how close he was standing. He didn’t seem to notice, smiling at her like they had just been introduced by a skilled matchmaker at a cocktail party.

“By replacing the damaged and missing parts, of course. It will be a very simple procedure. I can even improve upon nature.” His mechanical eye glittered with anticipation. “All you have to do is ask.”

Julia considered this offer. It sounded too good to be true, but she didn’t see many other options. “So you’ll fix him, and then we can go?”

The mechanical iris contracted as Mechanus’s smile faded. “I’m afraid that leaving won’t be possible for you.”

A chill went down Julia’s spine. “Why… why not?” she demanded.

“I enjoy my privacy, and I have projects in place that I do not wish interrupted. If I let you go, you’re likely to tell people about what goes on inside Shark Reef Isle, and that could get extremely messy. My research could be endangered. My assistants’ lives would be at risk. Everything I’ve worked for... gone.” He took her right hand in his left, and she felt unyielding metal under his glove. “Now, I promise you—I swear to you—that I intend no harm to befall you. However, you should put escape right out of your mind. We’re miles from the closest inhabited island, I have no boats to take you anywhere, and I have three packs of dire wolves that patrol this island. Beyond this, I will give you anything you wish—good food, comfortable accommodations, and I will even fix up your diving partner so that he’s good as new—no, better than new. How about it?”

Everything about his demeanor seemed to be generally
off
—more than the fact that he’d replaced her leg without batting an eyelash and was now keeping a bisected man alive by some means, for whatever purpose he’d originally had in mind. He acted like she expected a mad scientist in a movie to act, with an unsettling enthusiasm for whatever
science
was keeping Jim alive. His voice, though overall pleasant to listen to (honestly, she could have listened to him reading the phone book to her all day) had a slight metallic quality, probably due to other hardware that she hadn’t yet seen. Also, while he was speaking with her his voice remained largely neutral,

but there was a definite spark of fascination in his human eye.

If he put Jim back together, maybe she and Jim could figure out a way off the island. She got a twinge of guilt when she recalled that she wanted to break up with him, but at the same time it wasn’t like she could just leave him here in the hands of some madman who probably wanted to turn him into Frankenstein’s monster or something.

“Okay,” she said to Mechanus, hope starting to bloom for the first time that day, “Fix him. Can you make him good as new?”

He smiled, and his lens gleamed in anticipation. “I can do even better than that, my dear lady. I will make him better than he ever was.”

“O-okay,” she said, feeling uneasy at the look of glee in his eye. She didn’t want Jim
improved
, just back how he was. Then again, she wouldn’t say no to some personality improvements, maybe make him a bit more compromising...

No. Bad Julia. Having some mad scientist scramble Jim’s brain according to her own whims wouldn’t help anything.

“I’d... like to go back to my room now,” Julia said quietly.

Mechanus bowed deeply to her, sweeping his arm across his waist like a Victorian gentleman elaborately tipping his hat to a young lady he fancied. “Very well. Arthur, kindly show her the way.”

“Of course, sir. Miss?” The drone turned and flew away, and Julia followed, feeling numb.

***

“I’d say that went very well overall,” Mechanus said to Arthur after Julia had gone.

“Perhaps so, sir,” Arthur replied, “but she appears displeased by her current situation.”

“I don’t see why she would—I replaced her missing leg, I patched up all their injuries, and I’ve even managed to save her diving partner’s life.”
Her
fiancé’s
life,
he thought unhappily, recalling the note that the man had on his person. Well. He would
not
let this prevent him from being a gracious host. He would repair Jim and make him better than he ever was before—better than nature could achieve by itself—and then Julia would be happy and... and...

...and Mechanus would not have her. She would be with her handsome fiancé, and they would be happy together, leaving Mechanus himself alone.

He sank down into a chair, now troubled by the expression that had crossed her face when she looked upon him for the first time. She’d been staring at him—staring at his face in... horror? Yes. She found him horrifying, and he suspected he knew why.

He reached up and touched the metal plates on the left half of his face. What
had
happened to his face? It seemed things had always been this way. He could almost remember—but as he reached out for the memory it danced away, agonizingly close but still just out of reach. He had a brief flash of heat and agony, and someone—two people, he thought, a man and a woman—screaming, but then it was gone. He’d had the plates in his face for as long as he could remember, just like the other limbs and the metal plates that covered the lower two-thirds of his torso. The scars, too, come to think of it. So many scars...

He sighed. He had so many plans—after all, Earth wouldn’t be conquered in a day—but now all

he wanted was to see her smile. She was the first real human company he’d had in ten years, the first companionship that he hadn’t made with his own two hands. He hadn’t known how much he’d craved another human being until he’d laid eyes on her. It was a palpable physical ache originating in the region of his cardiac pump, caused as much by her presence as by the certainty that right now she wasn’t happy.

He would have to set a few things aside for now, but he was determined now to make her happy. He would fix her fiancé with all the skills he had available, and make him the perfect companion for her. Then she would stay, and be a light in his life as he set about with his other plans. Then when he was the world-emperor, he would quietly eliminate his rival, and marry her, and everything would be perfect. She would learn that he was no monster to be feared.

He had another flash then, an impression of—

—
a beautiful blonde woman brushes his cheek with her fingertips, followed by a gentle pressure on his lips—a soft kiss. He sees more this time—they are standing together in the shelter of a gazebo, while red and gold maple leaves swirl around them. She wears a close-fitting tee-shirt, black with a diagram of a caffeine molecule stretched gently across her breasts—he knows this is so, but she is too close for him to see it, wrapped in his arms while she twines her fingers through his hair—