Chapter 16 – A Leg to Dance On (Part I)

« Chapter 15 – It Takes More Than Two to Tango (Part III)      Chapter 16 – A Leg to Dance On (Part II) »

With the welding visor down, Elaine couldn’t see anything except for an augmented reality interface and the subject of her work: a miniaturized servo-actuator designed to add extra mechanical strength to some myofiber muscles inside of a prosthetic leg. The new myofibers involved a torsional nanotube carbon yarn awash in electrolytic fluid to bear away heat and transfer electrical currents through the twirling nanotube. The tightly packed cables themselves provided thirty-time more tension than the standard model that she’d used previously to make a similar prosthetic limb. With an extra actuator to help taut or relax the fibers themselves, she could add a level of control to how much that strength would translate into agility in the limb response.

She’d modeled the design after some of the components recently fitted for Hadaly’s most humanlike chassis—that doll-like armature rested nearby, dead-to-the-world on a metal table (the personality who would operate it someplace far away in cyberspace going about her own ends.) The leg lay open with several computer-controlled fiber-optic cameras. The work could be painstaking and took a lot of concentration, thus why she had retreated into the machine room, where everyone who might bother her were currently out of state or watching the movie.

Well, almost everyone.

Elaine paused while addressing a circuit junction when she noticed an indicator that the access door to the machine bay had been opened.

“Frog thought I could find you here.”

Roger Powers. A naïve, but kind student she’d run into during her previous case involving some supernatural weirdness the last semester when an intelligent meme tried to direct the entire ASU campus into voting for Emily Early as class president—of course after the meme had been disarmed, she still won the presidency by a wide margin. He managed to deal with the more uncanny nature of her work without blinking too much, so she decided to keep him around. She didn’t need to turn to see him. He had a classic sense of dress—a light button-down shirt, dark pants, and belt—and he kept his short brown hair clipped with a cheap haircut that made him look as if he had eternal hat hair.

Elaine raised a hand to motion him to silence and he didn’t speak another word for several minutes while she carefully closed the connections and junctions and backed out of her work with the care of a surgeon sewing up a patient. The channels of the microservo lay very near the various elements of myofiber that would tense and relax very similarly to normal muscles to provide fluid movement to the prosthetic and her soldering tools were hot and sharp and could easily sever one of the fibers. The fibers in this leg were several grades weaker than those that propelled Hadaly’s chassis (those had to withstand the energies produced by the dynamos in her joints) as these only needed to hold up a human weight.

When she finished she double-checked her work with the augmented reality overlay and diagnostics; then, satisfied with her work, she removed the welder’s mask and looked over at Roger.

“If Frog sent you because—” Elaine began.

“She didn’t send me,” Roger said. “I came because I heard what happened at the movie. And, if the last time this sort of thing happened is any indication, this is exactly what I expected you to do.”

“Nice to know I’m that predictable,” Elaine said.

She set the welding mask next to the leg and carefully and looked at it for a moment. The limb wasn’t fully covered in its silicone false-skin yet and the internal workings were visible, much like how Hadaly’s first chassis looked during the initial stages. A gentle sense of nostalgia washed over her as she recalled the hours she spend in computer modeling programs guiding Hadaly through deciding on every element of her own eventual morphology. The AI, having been raised on a steady diet of American comic books, Japanese manga, and animé had some strange notions as to what made the essential human—of course, in the end, she chose a model that looked more or less like an analog of Elaine’s physique with some of Frog’s characteristics (such as larger breasts and square shoulders, mostly at Frog’s urging.)

In the beginning, most of Hadaly’s decisions either mimicked Elaine or embraced the weirder attitudes of comic creators with wild abandon. The AI could have fit in nicely at any Comic-Con without turning a head, in fact, each succession of her chassis designs would have been the perfect platform for flawless cosplay designs (after all, she could have it built to spec.) It flattered Elaine deeply that in the end, Hadaly chose a morphology that made her look like the sister she never had.

“Is this your charity case?” Roger said, he stopped himself uncomfortably and shook his head as if he’d tasted something he didn’t like. He nodded his head in the direction of the artificial limb on the workbench. “Er, I mean, is this the work you’re doing for the arson victims’ foundation? It’s a work of art.”

“It should be,” Elaine said, “I designed it. This is for a young woman, she lost both her arms and a leg in a terrible fire when she was much younger—she’s just about to graduate high school and I’m hoping to have this done in time for her to wear to her prom.” She paused a moment and looked over her handiwork. “Here,” she said. She grabbed Roger’s hand and drew him over to the workbench; once alongside, she placed his hand on the portion of the ankle currently covered with silicone polypastic skin analog.

Roger snatched his hand back in surprise. “It’s warm to the touch!”

“This is a polymer developed by some students at MIT and enhanced by researchers at NASA that simulates skin texture and heat receptivity. In fact, it was initially designed for skin-tight suits that could breathe body temperature—but I’ve remodeled it so that it will act as a heat sink for the internal components of the limb, allowing it to dissipate its own heat similar to how the body would.

« Chapter 15 – It Takes More Than Two to Tango (Part III)      Chapter 16 – A Leg to Dance On (Part II) »