Finally Andrew stopped, breathless, his legs trembling but his feet still wiggling beneath him as if eager to continue.
“You dance divinely,” Jennifer said, “but you’re still the same remote jerk you always have been. I’m going home.”
“Wait,” Andrew said. “It’s my legs. They just can’t keep up.” But she was gone already, and Andrew dismissed his taxi. He walked his aching body back to his apartment. Scurrying streetsweepers kept the pavement neat, but Andrew met nobody except two police robots who asked politely if he were lost or in need of assistance.
It was then he decided to have his legs replaced.
Afterwards, however, Jennifer refused his calls, and his legs were so filled with energy he allowed them to take him out to run. A green, groomed park was nearby, bisected with paths paved with yielding synthetics, dotted with beds of colorful flowers, redolent with the scent of the outdoors. He seemed to have it all to himself, but as he went by an underpass a group of well-dressed teenagers, who had been hiding themselves from the watchful gaze of the park’s monitors, burst out upon him, and he took off with a burst of speed that startled the gang members and surprised Martin himself.
His skill and speed gave him a feeling of invulnerability, and he began to play games with his pursuers, slowing as if he were tiring to allow them to gain on him and then outrunning them once more. He felt exhilarated, with a sense of well being and high purpose even though his heart was pounding and his lungs were burning. Moving so swiftly made the air rush past his face; he could see bushes and trees and buildings zoom past and, when he turned his head, his pursuers dwindling.
He remembered a story his computer-generated nanny had told him when he was a child. “I’m the gingerbread boy, I am, I am, and I can run away from you, I can, I can.”
It was his own speed, and his hubris, that doomed him as he caught up with another group of hooligans. They grabbed him and began beating his head and body with sticks and fists. The world went dark as he thought he heard an approaching helicopter and the peremptory voice of a police robot.
He awoke to disorientation. The ceiling looked the same as the one he had stared at so intently when his foot was injured, and the room seemed identical down to the scene in the picture window. “What’s going on?” he asked.
The same woman’s voice said, “You are in regional hospital five one six. You received irreparable injuries to your chest and internal organs, and we have had to replace them all including your heart, which had gone into arrest. Do you feel all right?” Andrew thought about it. Except for his head, which ached abominably, he felt good, as if his entire body had the strength and vitality that he had felt before only in his feet and legs. “Yes,” he said. “I feel fine. Except for my head.”
“Just a moment,” the voice said, and he felt a slight pressure against the back of his neck. “Is that better?”
The pain in his head ebbed. “Yes. But my arms feel different.”
“They, too, have had to be replaced. It was too difficult to reattach your old ones to your new body.”
Andrew flexed them. They seemed as good as new—in fact, new seemed better. “What happened to me?” he asked.
“You were attacked in the park near your home by a group of lawless humans, all under the age of twenty, and the majority of them sixteen or younger.”
“And what has happened to them?” “They have all been sentenced to therapy from six months to two years, according to age. After a second offense, each will be administered daily injections of anti-testosterone.”
“Then the process is not effective.”
“Recidivism is likely.”
Andrew thought about it, although it hurt his head. People apparently had different concepts of the meaning of life: some thought that life meant excitement and were willing to risk punishment and pain, to themselves and to others, to experience it.
“Perhaps you could suggest some other method of treatment,” the computer said.
“I can’t even make sense of my own life,” Andrew said. When he was released, he returned to his apartment and tried to get in touch with Jennifer. His call was still blocked. He thought of going back to the park and, with his new body, wreaking vengeance on the gangs that hid there—or on their counterparts if the ones who had attacked him had been disrupted. But he discarded that as unworthy of his new vitality. Still, he needed to do something with this restlessness he felt inside.
He turned to the educational channel. It sprang to life immediately like a genie long imprisoned in a bottle.
Andrew went through the index and finally selected the origins of his society, beginning with the perfection of the computer and its ability to take over the work of the world, the endless services it was able to provide, and the retreat of humanity, with all its needs provided, into self-contained living units from which it seldom ventured. He had been happy enough with that life himself until he had become involved with Jennifer on a network bulletin board. They had corresponded incessantly and then talked image to image before, in what he had considered an incomprehensible fit of pique, she had broken off with him. He went back over their correspondence and conversations to discover what had happened, and the only thing he could find was a conversation in which she had suggested that they meet. He had hesitated. As nearly as he could remember, he had been considering how he might feel in her actual presence. And then he had taken that ill-advised trip to see her, and they had stood at opposite sides of the room while Jennifer yelled at him.
He turned to psychology, hoping to find there the answers to the questions of human behavior, particularly Jennifer’s, that had disrupted the comfort and efficiency of his existence. The computerized professors were responsive and well informed, but nothing they had explained why Jennifer had called him remote and unresponsive. The professors said he was normal—that is, he was like everybody else. And they gave many explanations for the behavior of the youth gangs and why they rejected the freedom from social friction that was everybody’s birthright and turned to violence, but none of them suggested an answer.
Finally he turned to areas for which there were answers, to physics and astronomy and chemistry and biology and particularly to mathematics. He was told why manned spaceflight had given way to unmanned flights, that the state of knowledge about physics and chemistry had not progressed beyond what was needed to serve known human needs, and about the development of biology to provide repairs to the human body and lengthen the lifespan. Andrew could understand the general outline of what the professors said, but a request for explanation of the details got him nowhere. He didn’t have the background necessary to understand. And mathematics left him baffled. What was the good of solid geometry, for instance, and of algebra, much less of calculus?
Eventually he decided to begin at the elementary level. He kept himself and his professors working day and night, scarcely pausing for rest or food. His body felt little need for either but his head began to ache and his eyes, to burn. He felt feverish. His thoughts were jumbled in his head until he could not distinguish what was outside and what was inside. Finally the light reddened in front of his eyes and he began to lose consciousness.