In 2002, I started writing a short story called "The Hardyman." This story was inspired by the Hardiman, an exoskeletal suit created by GE in 1965. Intrigued, I decided to write a story about a man who finds an abandoned Hardiman, which I rechristened the Hardyman. While the original Hardiman never worked, the man in my story brings the Hardyman to life. The trouble starts when he meets a woman and the robot suit stands between them. In 2004, I wrote the end of the story. Since then, I sent the story out to many magazines, but it never found a publisher. Today, I read Cory Doctorow's introduction to Creative Commons licenses and decided to publish "The Hardyman" for the first time online under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. What does that mean? You may share the story (copy, distribute, transmit) or remix the story (turn it into a comic, create art inspired by or based upon it, make it into a mini-movie), but you must credit the original story and me--ideally with a link to this blog, i.e. "This robot comic was inspired by a story by Susannah Breslin"). The legal jargon is here. I'll keep a public record of Project Hardyman, so please let me know if you create a work inspired by "The Hardyman." I'll record this robot's evolution on this blog. I hope you'll enjoy "The Hardyman." It's the longest story I ever wrote. I thought about further restricting its use, but then I thought, Fuck it. Robots want to be free.
1
By the time darkness had fallen on his eleventh birthday, Jack Xavier Jingle Jr. was in bed and falling asleep. At his side lay two new Transformer toys, Optimus Prime and Megatron. Since zeroing in on the gift-wrapped boxes earlier in the day and tearing them open with a joy that had made his father suck scornfully in on his teeth, Jack had devoted all of his energies to engaging the Leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, and the Ruler of the Decepticons, Megatron, in a bloody civil war battle that had raged violently across every one of the family home’s wall-to-wall carpeted rooms. Jack’s mother had sat anxiously above him in her armchair, praying for his salvation. Now, Jack was finally surrendering himself to sleep.
As the first of his dreams began unfolding itself inside his drifting mind, Jack found he was trekking through a metallic landscape. Instantly, he knew this was Cybertron, where Transformers had first spawned, a place where future progress had dictated green mountains be supplanted with graying skyscrapers and flowing rivers be replaced by concrete highways. The rival Autobot and Decepticon factions had begun their never-ending intergalactic battle for robot supremacy here—that is, before bringing their struggle to Earth. Immediately, Jack knew his mission was to save Planet Earth—and himself—from becoming mere collateral damage in this war of the machines.
Yet Jack could feel doubt, like a shadow, creeping up alongside him. After all, there was no way he alone could bring an end to such a stellar struggle. He would fail to negotiate a strategic peace capable of preventing his world’s destruction. His body would betray him in the end, clinging desperately back onto itself rather than morphing into a fusion cannon powered by black holes or a combat-deck equipped with radiated weapons. Ultimately, Jack would prove no match for any mecha-overlord worth his servos that he might encounter in the bot battle.
In the reality of 1984, Jack couldn’t shape-shift in the same way that his newly acquired Transformers had morphed between his hands all day. He was simply an eleven-year old boy, who slept with his toys, struggling to grow up in the cool shade of his frustrated accountant of a father and his depressed housewife of a mother in a small house tucked into the curve of a suburban cul-de-sac. But in his dream, as Jack marched through the crunching steelscape, an exoskeleton began forming around him. A monstrous metal cage grew out around his head, a huge steel-barreled chest expanded from his mid-section, iron limbs outfitted with massive talons and giant boots extended from his limbs. Totally transformed, twenty-feet tall and armed to the teeth, Jack wondered, for the very first time, if he was, in fact, quite capable of anything.
With that, Jack’s dream world turned into a replica of his living room. There, Jack reached out to his mother and father sitting on the couch, and with his strong new mecha-hands, he lifted them both off the sofa by their thin and fragile necks. As his engines began to whir and to spin, he wondered what the kids at school would say if only they could see him now.
2
At thirteen, Jack’s long forgotten collection of Transformer toys had been stored in a dusty shoebox at the back of one of his closet’s higher shelves. Since his father had been felled by a heart attack a year earlier on a subway train in the middle of rush-hour traffic—surrounded by people who, fittingly, did not know him—the majority of Jack’s time had been spent alone in his bedroom, the door locked, the shades drawn. These days, Jack was engaged with the contents of quite a different box, hidden underneath his bed. In it sat a stack of magazines populated by women who wanted nothing more than to wile away their days reclining nude next to backyard swimming pools and sprawling naked atop unmade beds.
Over these women, Jack perched, studying the mysteries between their widespread legs as the women politely averted their eyes. Not long after his father’s sudden departure from this world, Jack’s body had commenced grumbling and spewing beyond his control. He had discovered his transformation could be summed up in one word, “puberty,” but navigating his way alone through its rocky terrain was far more complex. As the final school-bell rang inside the white box of his eighth-grade classroom, it was as if a railroad-sized nail in his pants was drawn towards the magnet of pornography hiding beneath his bed. If his mother knew the real reason Jack had no time to stop and say hello when he walked in the front door, she might have learned how to allow her needs, as Jack had, to be subjugated to the relentless demands of his undeniable penis.
Try as he might, stare as he would, Jack had found that he could not bring his furtive exercises to what other boys in his class had described with graphic enthusiasm to be the appropriately explosive conclusion. When almost there, his mind would set off on a different path than the road down which his body was pointing. The women on the pages would take on strange, disruptive metamorphoses. The leggy brunette grew a hand from behind her head that waved distractingly at him. The big bosomed blonde sprouted a third breast with a disarmingly winking eye for a nipple. Jack’s desires were an enigma to him.
It wasn’t until the school year had ended and the blistering summer had set in that Jack was driven from his sweaty seclusion. To the red velour seats dappled with chewed-up bubblegum and slick black floors coated in melted butter of the local movie theater he went. There, he looked into the dark movie-house sky hanging over him and saw on its towering screen a woman who was altogether unlike his silent mother, the incomprehensible girls of the eighth-grade, or the silent ladies of his X-rated magazines.
Atop her head a yellow beacon flashed and gyrated as if heralding her advent into Jack’s life. Her two enormous metal arms reached our to him as if in eager expectation of his lover’s embrace. Her robot legs pitched her forward in a gait not dissimilar to the manner by which Frankenstein’s monster had staggered towards its maker. In the recesses of his mind, Jack knew that this was a movie, that this was a made-up character, that this actress was simply playing a role. Regardless, Jack was paralyzed by her presence. She administered punishing left-hand and right-hand blows to her alien attacker, shooting her flame-throwers shamelessly into the air, revving her engines so her robot claws gnashed and snarled at the universe around her. When she fell into a full-body sprawl atop her quarry, grinding her hips down into it, it took everything Jack had not to fall into pieces. I have seen the mother lode, he realized.
On the movie screen, the male android, white internal fluids leaking, croaked at the woman, "Not bad—for a human." With that, young Jack promptly came in his pants.
3
Sixteen years of Jack’s life passed by him. He went to high school. He went to college. He received a bachelor’s degree. He became an engineer. He bought a medium-sized house. He purchased a mid-level car. He went to work in a tall steel tower. He came home to a small stucco house. That was his life.
As an administrative engineer employed by the train system of the city in which he lived, Jack had spent the last four years overseeing the endless reams of printed materials related to the city’s myriad train routes. Every day, he worked diligently at his desk, reminding himself what a privilege it was to be one of the many cogs in this well-oiled machine. Below him, and because of him, the city’s engines onward churned.
His friends were few and far between. His extracurricular interests were cursory. His relationship to the opposite sex was superficial. Women were like a fleet of automobiles, the model of which he could never quite make out. In his brief romantic relationships, the woman would invariably look to him for some kind of emotional connection that he could never parrot to her satisfaction. At those times, a vision of the mechanical woman would erect herself in his mind’s eye, and Jack would go drifting off with her, leaving the real woman’s distantly frowning face behind him.
As Jack’s life wore on, the number of unprocessed files atop his desk grew taller and the grip of his hand around his remote control grew tighter. It seemed to him that a man could engage in occasional acts of intercourse, speak politely to his mother on the phone every weekend, and jump out of an airplane along with several male co-workers one Labor Day weekend, but all the women would expect him to ejaculate at the drop of a hat, his mother would invariably sigh disappointedly just before hanging up, and if he did ever go skydiving with his coworkers again, he had the distinct impression that he would be the one coming back down to Earth with his parachute wrapped around him like a funereal shroud.
The aging bachelor who lived across the street from him had recently spent all of his free-time arranging ten marble statues of naked Greco-Roman male gods in a semi-circle on his front lawn, erected a fence around the perimeter of the compound, and, upon it, in curling metal letters, proclaimed the place YOUNGWOOD. Coming home to that sight every night was more than Jack could stand.
Until the wee hours of the morning, Jack would lie awake, sure that if he fell asleep, the man across the street would develop irreversible premature ejaculation problems, his mother would disappear with a quiet dial tone, and any man who dared parachute out of an airplane in the future would fall with a crumple to the ground.
For Jack, life was hard.
4
One day, it came to him. It was a sign. JUNK, it read. The word leapt out in front of him from around a curve on the freeway as if it had been lying in wait for him. Truly, it was a sign, in that it was a billboard, but to Jack it was as if the gray knuckle-haired finger of God had instructed him, Go! Here! Now! He had taken the next exit.
Even as the junkyard dog repeatedly attempted to remove his testicles with its teeth, Jack stood his ground, transfixed by how compelling the metaphorical hand of God in the sky had been to him. The dog kept twisting itself into the air, snapping its jaws shut over and over again near Jack’s groin. Finally, an elderly man in oil-stained coveralls appeared, called off the dog, and relieved Jack of five dollars. Jack made his way into the yard between stacks of sandwiched cars.
He could spend days here, he realized, wandering from piles of smashed up trucks to mountains of wrecked tractors to endless heaps of unidentifiable rusted factory parts. He wandered through the metal wreckage, marveling at the mechanical detritus Man had left behind. An hour later, in an overgrown corner of the lot, he tripped over a broken box spring. Sitting on it, bouncing lightly up and down, his eye alit on something within the metallic maze before him. At first he thought it was one more chunk of refrigerator innards. When he approached it, he saw that it was a splayed and wrecked apparatus, lying in the dirt in a position akin to a crucifix’s pose.
Years ago, in a college-level engineering textbook, he had read about something like this. It had been called the Hardyman. In 1965, as he recalled, the Army, Navy, and General Electric had undertaken a rare conjoined effort to build a mechanical man-amplifier for military purposes. Intended to advance American soldiers’ physical potential, it would be the first wearable, bipedal robotic exoskeleton. In the end, though, the line of super-soldier suits had failed. At the time, the suit had lacked a brain.
Today, Jack considered, things could be different. He began making his way back towards the junkyard office. What were the odds? he marveled. What were the odds?
5
The junkyard owner—whose nickname, Backhoe Bob, rightly indicated he knew a lot about backhoes and very little about possible prototypes for long-forgotten military projects—sold the find to Jack for $1,200. Pepe Delores, a large and benevolent fellow employee of the train system who worked in maintenance, was more than happy to boost one of their mutual employer’s flatbed trucks and a forklift for a midday joyride. At the junkyard, Pepe’s Herculean efforts with a crane enabled the men to extract the Hardyman from underneath the avalanche of parts beneath which it lay, half-buried. The Hardyman rode home behind them, flat on its back, hidden by a big black tarp.
On Jack’s quiet neighborhood street, the incessant beeping of Pepe’s truck reversing slowly along the driveway rang out alarmingly loud. Under the glaring midday sun, little around them stirred. As soon as Pepe finished lowering the haul to the garage floor, Jack pulled the garage door closed. To Jack’s relief, at no point did Pepe inquire as to exactly why Jack wanted to acquire this particular artifact. Instead, Pepe winked at him in the rear-view mirror as he drove away, waving one large hand out the window.
At last, Jack was alone with it. He approached its hulking shadow, silhouetted in a shaft of light seeping under the garage door. He laid his hands on it. It was cool to the touch. A thin layer of rust flaked off beneath his hands as he ran his palms across the places where the machine’s warped exteriors had pulled back to expose its interior maze of wires, servos, and plugs. Jack explored the Hardyman’s body, imagining what it had been when it had tried to stand for the first time.
On the computer in his home office, Jack found what appeared to be the only photo that had ever been publicly released of the Hardyman. In the photo, a thinly smiling man in a collared-shirt, a narrow black tie, a white hard-hat, and thick Buddy Holly glasses was suspended within the exoskeletal suit. He had one monstrous robot arm raised into the air, as if waving to someone out-of-frame. The other arm was held forward and out as if prepared for a motorized mano-a-mano with an invisible opponent. The man’s legs paralleled the robot’s legs and ended in twin steel platform shoes, upon which the man’s feet rested.
The man looked happy, Jack decided. The man may have looked a little nervous, too, Jack had to admit, but probably the man was mostly excited. Besides, the man was strapped in the Hardyman with two safety belts crisscrossed into a protective X over his chest and a seatbelt cinched around his waist. The Hardyman was a man-amplifier—not the other way around. The human operator in the machine’s power-frame was the ruler of this master-slave driving system, the framework’s joints, limbs, and tools driven by hydraulic sensors that increased a man’s muscle-power at a ratio of 25:1. The man in the picture could have picked up a 250-pound Russian soldier on the other side of the Cold War and tossed him halfway to China, if he had so wanted.
Although, Jack knew the image was a fake. The hydro mechanical servo-system in the Hardyman’s legs, he had learned, had required fine-tuned, non-stop coordination to maintain their balance. If the man in the hard-hat had attempted to move both legs simultaneously, the Hardyman, it had been reported, would begin lurching and jerking in what had been described ominously as a “violent and uncontrollable” manner. The man would have been torn to pieces as the enslaved robot roughly reclaimed its controls from its former master. But Jack also knew that in 1971, a former railway employee by the name of Ted Hoff had turned himself into the Jesus Christ of modern technology by creating the microprocessor and handing it over to the people of the world like some kind of consecrated techno-wafer.
Jack didn’t know everything about engineering, but what he didn’t know, he could learn. That night, Jack bent over the still body of the Hardyman and began to work.
6
Every night, Jack submerged himself to the elbows in the Hardyman’s guts. Amidst the labyrinth of hydraulic actuators and servo valves, swivel fittings and multi-pin connectors, input sensor sub-assemblies and potentiometers, his fingers crawled as the black tide-line of oil crept further up the length of his arms. Within the machine’s armature, Jack worked harder than Hephaestus, orchestrating complex feedback loops and fine ganglia into fluidly functioning systems with which the new microchip brain might be able to resuscitate the Hardyman. Reading in bed late into the night, his body stained black and blue with the fluids of engine workings, Jack read books like Build Your Own Robot! and Bill: The Galactic Hero on the Planet of Robot Slaves.
Several decades previous, it had taken the military 25,000 hours to get one arm on the Hardyman working. Jack had the whole thing twitching inside of six weeks. One day not long after, Jack stood in the garage, cranking a come-along that was connected to a pulley that was attached to a ceiling beam that led to a nylon noose that was slung under the Hardyman’s armpits. He was attempting to pull the machine to a standing position. He hoped, at the very least, the contraption and its load wouldn’t pull the garage down on his head.
Slowly, Jack maneuvered the Hardyman until it loomed before him. A hard hat from work atop his head, Jack turned his back to the machine. Cautiously, he placed his feet onto the metal boot-plates. Carefully, he leaned his torso against its steel spine. Gently, he raised his head inside its mechanical frame. He strapped the safety-harness across his chest. He unclipped the pulley from the mid-section. He slid his arms into the oversized sleeves. He found the power-switch at his right hand. He inhaled deeply. He flipped the switch.
Around him, the Hardyman hummed to life. Smiling to himself, Jack stretched his arms out to his sides. He lifted his right foot, and, wobbling a little, set it forward. He picked up his left foot, and, teetering somewhat, set it next to his right. Raising one arm, he inadvertently swiped the other arm across his workbench, sending a glue-gun flying out the window with a loud crash. In six giant steps, he had crossed the garage.
Later, Jack stood in the driveway. The Hardyman was tucked safely away in the garage, but he could still feel it reverberating through him. He felt bigger now, it seemed. Meanwhile, dusk had fallen. Across the street, he could see the aging bachelor standing in his driveway, his face pressed against the bars of his gate, his round eyes bulging out from behind the two O’s in YOUNGWOOD. The older man waved frantically at Jack, a desperate look on his face. Jack waved absentmindedly back at the other man, turned on his heel, and went inside.
7
After that day, Jack spent little time at his office focused on this work. Now, his job was a place where he went for eight hours to fantasize about his home project as his disembodied hands directing meaningless reams of paper from his desk to someone else’s. He could sit for hours with a single-page memo before him, his eyes gliding back and forth across the page as his mind rode around inside the Hardyman at home. Once, Jack’s supervisor, Brad MeCoy, had come upon Jack practicing walking like a robot between two rows of empty cubicles. Jack’s arms were sticking straight out, his legs as stiff as boards. Brad had looked quizzically at Jack. After that, Brad had not come back.
On a morning several weeks later, Jack awoke before sunrise. He had outgrown the confines of the garage, he had decided. He wanted to take a few exploratory steps into the driveway before the rest of the neighborhood woke up. Outside, he opened the garage door, and he began his now skilled donning of the Hardyman. With relative ease and a growing sense of automaton-like coordination, Jack stepped his way across the garage in the suit towards the already brightening square of the garage door. Finally, he was free.
Jack stood vibrating in the dawn. He could hear the birds chirping in the trees of his neighbor’s backyard. Other than that, no one appeared to have noticed what he was doing. He took a few shuffling steps down the driveway. He paused, savoring his new world-view from this position. Everything else seemed so much smaller from this place.
That was when he heard a distant grumbling. At the end of the driveway, Jack's garbage can stood waiting. He tried stepping backwards and got stuck mid-stride, rocking back and forth from robot leg to robot leg. The sound came closer. Jack was frozen. In horror, he watched as the garbage truck pulled into view before him. Then, from the side of the truck, a remote-controlled arm extended outward, grabbed the garbage can roughly at the waist, hauled it upwards, and dumped the entire contents of the pail unceremoniously into the hull. For a moment, its robot arm hung in the air as if waving back at Jack’s own suspended robot arm.
In the cab, the driver's head turned towards him.
In the driveway, Jack looked out from inside the Hardyman suit into the eyes of the person, who, it appeared, was the garbage truck driver. It was a woman.
8
If only, Jack considered, as the garbage truck zoomed away, he had used the blueprint for L.A. Rygg’s Mechanical Horse from 1893. He could have built a metal Trojan horse and ridden out astride it as if he was some sort of mechanically inclined prince from the future. Surely then, she would have leapt out from the truck and jumped up on its back so they could go pedaling its quadrupedal mechanism off into the sunset together. Or he could have cloned G.E.’s Walking Truck circa 1968 and, marching down the driveway atop those staggering steel legs, he could have blocked her way with it in the street. She wouldn’t have been able to resist cruising into the horizon sitting side-by-side with him inside it.
Making his way back up the driveway, Jack considered if it was the Hardyman from which she had fled—or if it had been him. From the comic books that he had read as a child, he knew that other men—say, for example, Doctor Victor Von Doom—would have handled the situation very differently. Doctor Doom would have been wearing a suit of Incredible Material Strength to protect himself from anything she might have done to him. Doctor Doom’s groin-area would have had Incredible Resistance to Energy Attacks he may have experienced due to her mere existence. Doctor Doom’s Maximum Radius of Self-Protection would have been eight feet, keeping her at a safe distance from him at all times. When she disappeared, Doctor Doom would have gone shooting straight into the air with Excellent Airspeed, care of the Twin Atomic Jets at his waistband, leaving the situation, returning to Castle Doom in Doomstadt, where he would spend the rest of his life running his robot factory and forgetting all about her. Other people would call him Dr. Evil behind his back, but all of this would be over, and the real Jack Junior would be long gone.
That afternoon, sitting at his desk, his head in his hands, his body situated between two listing towers of paperwork, Jack vowed that tomorrow he would wear the Hardyman suit to work. This time, when he boarded the morning train, his fellow passengers would scatter. This time, when he got to the office, the revolving door at the entrance would break free as he bulldozed through it. This time, when he arrived on the twenty-seventh floor in an elevator fairly bursting at its seams to contain him, he would careen down the hallway to Mr. Bigsby’s office where, much to his boss’s surprise, Jack would tear the door from its hinges, grab Bigsby by the clavicles, climb out the nearest window, and clamber up the side of the building until he had reached the antenna at its peak. There, Jack would swing from the skyscraper in the Hardyman suit like a newfangled animatronic King Kong, waving Mr. Bigsby around as his boss shrieked like Fay Wray. Eventually, a cadre of helicopters would shoot him down as the whole city watched it all play out live on their T.V. screens. The woman who drove the garbage truck would weep for him over her T.V. dinner as the credits rolled. She would be very sorry, indeed, that she had left him standing at the curb.
That night, Jack writhed and pitched in a dream, lost in a maze of hallways within his childhood home. He was a boy once again, and small, running from empty room to empty room, screaming at the top of his lungs. Something was chasing after him and, without ever looking back, by its monstrously thundering footsteps and its distant angry call, Jack knew what it was. It was his long dead father, steering for him at the helm of the great and terrible Hardyman. If his father ever caught him, Jack knew, he would pin Jack under the awful weight of his massive metal arms and breathe death into Jack’s face until he could no longer bear to inhale.
The next morning, Jack woke up and realized he was all alone.
9
That week, Jack took the train home, sandwiched between bodies crammed into swinging loads of sweat boxes. In a strange way, for the first time, it was a comfort to be a part of this teeming mass of people. When the train reached his stop, Jack didn’t disembark, instead using his employee status to ride deadheading trains as their drivers aired them out on return runs. The doors at either end of the trains stood wide-open, the wind sweeping in as the men barreled through the dark night, diving into black tunnel mouths, clattering across elevated tracks. Sometimes Jack sat up front, next to the driver in the railfan’s seat, peering out at the coming distance as they drove headlong into it.
Whether the system was filled to overflowing or solitarily empty, if the train was making stops or not, no matter the hour of the night or morning, Jack searched for the woman. Maybe she drove the garbage truck everywhere she went, picking people and cars out of the way with her robot arm. Maybe she was chauffeured at all times by a gigantic boyfriend from Herculaneum, Missouri, who punched people for a living. Maybe she was hiding from him, somewhere inside this cement and steel labyrinth of a city. No matter what he did, he could neither locate her nor expunge her from his consciousness.
It was not until almost a week had passed that, at the corner-store, an idea came to him. In the rows of greeting cards announcing, “You Have a Boy!” and “What a Friend You Can Find in Jesus!”, Jack found a card. On the cover was a drawing of two robots eating ice cream cones. Inside, the card was blank.
That night, Jack made his way out to the curb, dragging his garbage can behind him. Once there, he attached the envelope with the card inside it to the top of the can. Back inside, he looked out his bedroom window to make sure the card was still there. He could see the white square floating in the darkness. HELLO, he had written across the front.
The following morning, the sound of the garbage truck woke him like an alarm. Without turning on the light, Jack made his way hurriedly over to the window. He could see the shiny metal grill of the garbage truck plowing its way down the street. In the half-light, the truck came closer. It seemed to be slowing as it neared. By the time it reached his driveway, it was crawling. Finally, it stopped in front of his house. The truck sat there, as if it was debating.
With a sudden snap, the truck’s arm darted out towards the garbage can. For a moment, Jack thought it was going to grab the garbage can and chuck its contents and the card into its belly along with all the other rubbish. But it was reaching for the envelope, grasping and grabbing. She was trying to pick up the card with the truck’s arm, he realized. For what seemed like an eternity, Jack stood at the window, watching and waiting. It was not possible, he feared.
Abruptly, the truck’s arm retracted. Jack stared out at the scene from behind the slats of his Venetian blinds. He had no idea what would happen next. A small white hand floated out the truck window. It moved as unsure of its goal or purpose, sailing towards the envelope. Over the card, the hand paused. It lowered itself down. Gently, the fingers worked to free the envelope. In a flash, it was gone. The garbage truck roared back to life. Ignoring the overflowing garbage cans waiting for it, the truck made a U-turn.
He had asked her out on a date.
10
Sometimes, they would go to a movie theater, or a restaurant, or a park, and, as they were speaking to one another, the chair, or the recliner, or the bench upon which Jack was sitting would explode underneath the Hardyman’s great weight. Most of the time, they would act as if nothing had happened, even if other people around them gasped, or screamed, or pointed frantically in their direction. At other times, the Hardyman would experience a technological malfunction that would stop their interaction altogether. Once, Jack had turned his hand heavenward and cocked his head to emphasize a point he was making, and, for a moment, he had been stuck in suspended animation, waiting for his gears to free themselves. At the end of their evenings together, they would part ways at the bottom of Jack’s driveway. Later, he would stand in the backyard, still wearing the suit, listening to himself and the Hardyman humming in happy concert.
Her name, it turned out, was Betty Lane. She was the daughter of two scientists deeply involved in complicated laboratory projects consisting of carefully measured test tubes and calculatedly toxic substances inside labyrinth universities. At home, Betty’s parents had been interested in little but their own scientific theories. For the small, be-pigtailed girl sitting between them at the dinner table, their conversations had sounded like long strings of Bleeps! and Bloops! that she could never understand. At bedtime, her parents could not quite bring themselves to cradle the soft, fleshy Betty in their stiff, unwieldy arms. To them, Betty was like an experiment that had gone terribly awry, her emotions akin to gelatinously spilling pools of need and viscously over pouring vats of want. As a consequence, Betty had learned to curb her needs so as to avoid a world of robotic resistance.
As an adult, Betty had left her parents behind to tinker with their chemical compounds. Initially, she had decided to model her life after that of Wonder Woman and, left dog-paddling in the post feminist wake created by Madonna, along with her female peers, she had not been discouraged from claiming independence from everything around her. For a time, she had worn a golden lasso and hot pants, ignoring the fact that no one could see her inside the invisible plane in which she had insisted upon riding. More recently, she had found solace in waste management. Now, she drove a truck weighing the equivalent of five elephants, meeting life’s challenges where they waited for her. Left-over take-out, used kitty litter, partially-empty cans of pesticide—Betty took on the world’s rejects so others wouldn’t have to, stuffing them into her hopper and driving them to the dump, where she deposited them. Initially, she had felt a sense of relief at the end of each workday. Over time, the toll of 400 million pounds of refuse annually generated had begun to weigh upon her. The endless tide of garbage would never end, it seemed.
Lost in conversation, Jack would forget that he was wearing the Hardyman suit at all. At those times, he could feel something inside himself, a sensation of gears grinding against one another, of programmed systems breaking down, of aborted missions being reconsidered. It was hard to believe, he would think, looking at Betty, that he might one day have the opportunity to touch her. And, with that, he began to worry. She might not be falling in love with him, he feared, but with the Hardyman itself. He could not tell how well she could distinguish between the man and the machine. She might one day see beyond the monstrous armature surrounding him to discover who he really was.
What would happen then?
11
It was the Fourth of July. Jack was in the backyard with Betty. In each one of the Hardyman’s mechanical hands, he was holding a sparkler and rotating the arms of the suit around and around himself in flaming circles. Showering sparks left looping trails of pyrotechnic light in the darkness. In front of him, Betty was sitting in a folding chair, laughing. In the wide-opening inner-territory of himself, his heart was ablaze. There was, it seemed, a superhighway of senses inside himself of which he had not been heretofore aware. Because of this, he wanted to grab her hand, to lift her in his arms and carry her away, to lean in to her and kiss her. Would such a thing ever be possible for him?
Jack knew the Hardyman would drive itself between them, that it had the capacity to crush her completely, that it could break her in two if it so desired. And a part of him had grown used to its superhuman strength. Indeed, it was a dangerous system, created to control hazardous environments, and, once installed in it, one grew to rely on the way it fulfilled a certain human desire for personal amplification. That the relationship between the outer skeleton and the inner skeleton took the man out of the loop was what made it an impractical tool. There was no articulation of the self. The machine had the power, the man had the control, but a microprocessor did not have a soul. Jack could claim thirty degrees of freedom, but how many degrees of freedom could he feel?
Trapped in his reverie, Jack did not realize that Betty was standing before him now. Over her shoulder, he could see her garbage truck in the driveway, the arm hanging down, long forgotten. She reached out to him and put her hands on his face. Already, he could feel the error signals beginning. It was this type of intimate relationship that he had spent his whole life avoiding. It was this kind of close connection from which he had fled for so many years. In the face of it, Jack closed his eyes. The collection of programmed instructions he had amassed failed to tell him what to do. His assembly language could not translate this situation. On the mixed-up map of his mind, numbered dates and arranged letters, random bytes and disparate bits, lost ROM and amnesiac RAM took him nowhere. All around him, the Hardyman shuddered tectonically.
Jack turned from Betty and staggered towards the garage, his stride sputtering, his body heaving, the Hardyman’s knees buckling under the sway of transformation. Moments later, he stood over the prone suit lying at his feet. He held a socket wrench in his hand. Outside, Betty was waiting for him. With that, he fell upon the Hardyman. He threw himself at its massive hip and shoulder joints, roughly dismantling the suit from its foundations. He moved around it with a box wrench, violently tearing its sprawling hydraulic lines from their incestuous moorings. He brutally ripped its wiring harness from its connectors with his bare hands. Drops—of sweat? of tears? of something else?—fell from his face, wearing down the machine’s resolve to cling to itself. The Hardyman was collapsing below him.
It was not until late that night that Jack, for the very first time, felt his own heart beating. Right then and there, he realized that he had no idea whatsoever how his heart worked, and that in no way did that matter, that his heart would beat for as long as it could, for as long as he was alive. He could see Betty’s heart beating in her chest as she lay underneath him. That was enough for him, because this was more powerful than he was, and this was stronger than either of them, and he knew it would never tire, and he was sure it would not fail, this thing for which there were no odds, this thing for which there was no calculation, and that there could be no understanding beyond that this was real.
12
Years later, Jack stood on a hill overlooking a valley. A lifetime had transpired. They had married, and they had quit their jobs, and they had relocated entirely off the grid. Jack had devoted himself to a life of the mind—reading, thinking, and drawing no conclusions. Betty had spent her time in the garden—her hands in the dirt, her head in the flowers, refusing to experiment with anything but happiness. They had a son, Pitman, and a daughter, Maria. They were a family. Over the years, the things they had done and the people they had tried to become had faded from their memories. At night, lying in bed together, they listened to the sounds of their bodies living and dying at the same time. When they had grown old, and the children had gone to start their own lives, he had found her, and, once more, he was alone. He didn’t call the paramedics or summon the police. Instead, he made his way slowly, for he was fragile now, yet determined, to his shed. There, he uncovered the boxes that contained the Hardyman, the machine that, so many years ago, he had worked so hard to build and then dismantle. By the end of the day, the suit was resurrected. Inside it for what would surely be the last time, Jack picked up the great, sad weight of his dearly beloved wife and made his way with her to the plot where they had agreed they would spend eternity side-by-side. There, he leaned over the yawning chasm before him, and, with these arms, he set his wife into the earth. As he did so, he thought he felt a certain presence, as if he was being cradled by something outside himself, something larger than himself, something that was utterly beyond him.
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