Runaway Robot

My hand is detachable. State of the art. It came from a special factory in Hungary by 3D printer. It was given to me by Dr Shilling at the Limb Lab.

The Limb Lab is in a kind of glass bubble in the courtyard of a sprawling old house near Hangar Wood. The entrance hall has got swords and shields and coats of arms along its walls. It even has a propeller from an old-fashioned aeroplane, because the man who used to live here made his money building aeroplanes. There’s a fireplace the size of a tennis court with a Latin motto – Felix Culpa – carved over the mantelpiece.

I used to think Felix Culpa was the name of the man who lived there, but Dr Shilling explained that it was Latin for ‘Happy Accident’, which is annoying, because nearly everyone at the Limb Lab had had an accident, and none of them were happy.

Felix Culpa was the motto of her family, the Shillings. The man who built the aeroplanes was Dr Shilling’s grandfather. After a while, he switched from building planes to making artificial body parts. Back then, the old house was in the middle of a country estate with trees and lakes and cows and deer. The kind of place where ladies with big hats go horse riding, and men with big beards go on shooting parties.

That’s all gone now. They built the airport and the Skyways housing estate on it. But the old house is still there. That’s called Shilling House Bionics. It’s where they design all kinds of state-of-the-art bodily appendages: not just arms and legs, but hands, fingers, toes . . .

‘And I’m proud to say there’s still one Shilling working here – namely me,’ says Dr Shilling. ‘I am the last of the Shillings.’

The Limb Lab is the bit inside the glass bubble. That’s where kids like me go to learn to use their new legs, hands, fingers or whatever they’ve had replaced. From the outside, it looks like a goldfish bowl. From the inside, it also looks like a goldfish bowl – only this time, you are the goldfish. You can also have normal lessons in there until you’re ready to go back to school. There’s even a Limb Lab uniform: short-sleeved shirt with a pocket for pens and rulers like an actual scientist.

‘Because,’ says Dr Shilling, ‘here at the Limb Lab, we don’t have patients. We don’t have customers. We have co-researchers. This is a journey, and we travel together.’

The day my hand arrived, Dr Shilling let me watch it downloading. The whole hand just sort of happened, bit by bit, on a table in the Limb Lab, like it was beaming down from space. It took hours to materialize. Dr Shilling bent over it the whole time like a big Anglepoise lamp. She thinks Limb Lab’s replacement body parts are way, way better than ordinary human ones. She calls the ordinary ones ‘flesh jobs’. She calls the new ones by their model names. My right hand is an Osprey Grip MM.

‘Look at that Osprey Grip MM,’ she’d said with a sigh when it was finished. ‘Isn’t she the best?’

To be honest, it looked like something that had dropped off a shop dummy if the shop dummy was made of Lego. When I had to touch it, its coldness completely triggered me. It nearly made me remember the last time I saw my hand-hand, which is when it was flying through the air over my head before it splat-landed next to me. I was lying on my back on the ground. At the time, I couldn’t figure out how I’d ended up on the ground. Or how my hand had ended up in the air. Didn’t we usually stick together?

‘Did it land somewhere? Did someone pick it up? Did they try to put it back on?’

‘I mean questions about your new hand,’ said Dr Shilling. ‘Not your old one. Your old one is in the past. Most of your memory is stored in your brain, but some of it is stored in your muscles – that’s why you can do some things without thinking about them. You lost your hand. And some of your memory went with it. You’re getting a new hand. You’ll make new memories after a while. Maybe your old memories will be recovered. Maybe they won’t. Until then, enjoy your brand-new hand.’

Dr Shilling couldn’t understand it. ‘It’s a perfect copy,’ she said. ‘We did it with lasers.’

Like I said, because I’m part machine, I’m usually good at thinking about machines and how they work. ‘This is a perfect copy,’ I said, ‘of my left hand.’

‘An absolutely perfect copy,’ said Dr Shilling, ‘of . . . Oh. Ha! I see what you’re saying! Very good, Alfie! We’ve given you two left hands. We forgot to reverse the template.’

When the right version came a few days later, it fitted OK, but I couldn’t really work it.

As long I don’t look at my empty wrist, I can still feel my old hand there. I mean, I know it’s gone. I saw it flying off into the air. Fairly unforgettable sight. If I lift my arm and look at my wrist, I can see that it’s totally hand-free. But as long as I don’t look, I can still feel it. I mean, really feel it. I can wriggle fingers that aren’t there, clench an impossible fist, point, feel the cold, feel the heat . . .

‘What you’re feeling,’ explained Dr Shilling, ‘is not your hand. It’s the ghost of your hand. That is completely normal. Ask the others.’

I’d better tell you about the others. ‘The others’ refers to everyone who goes to the Limb Lab. Obviously they’ve all got state-of-the-art body parts. Some have got new hands, some new legs, some both. There’s actually a kind of league table. Your ranking depends on two things:

How cool is/are your new body part/s?

How good is the story of how you lost your original body part/s?

Tyler lost a few fingers when he went over to take a closer look at a lit firework that hadn’t gone off. He picked it up and gave it a shake. It went off then, and it took three of his fingers with it. Why is he even in the Limb Lab? He should be in a ‘Don’t Mess With Fireworks’ class. He sometimes refers to himself as ‘The Tyler’. He walks with his head down, like he’s looking for something he recently dropped.

D’Arcy lost the lower half of both her legs, and now she has blades instead. There are quite a few people with blades in and out of the lab, but she lost her legs in a famous incident when a funfair zip wire came unzipped. So her story was in all the papers. Twice. Once when it happened, and then again when she was the ‘brave little girl who everyone thought would never walk again’. Having your story in the papers is impressive.

You can’t even tell that Shatter has a new body part, unless you know where to look. It’s a new foot, by the way. A more than averagely impressive foot. But what makes Shatter top of the table is that she lost her foot when it was blown off as she stepped on a landmine back home in Bosnia, where she’s from.

She’s a victim of war, which is more impressive than being in the papers, and massively more impressive than being stupid around fireworks.

Shatter’s foot arrived by 3D printer too. It was made of resin in exactly the same colour as Shatter’s deep-brown skin. Except for the toes which were shiny metal.

‘Shatila is going to help us test and refine it,’ said Dr Shilling, ‘and when we’ve got it just right we can send hundreds of them by printer to other disabled children in her home country, and she can go and be an inspiration to them all.’

Shatter not only says whatever she feels like saying; she says it with as many full stops as she wants, and she puts them wherever she wants. It’s as though life has given her an excessive amount of punctuation, and she’s trying to get rid of it.

For instance, the first time she met me, she said, ‘Who are. You? And what are. You for?’

Apparently she talks like that because that’s the way she was taught to speak English. I once asked her who taught her to speak like that, with all the unexpected full. Stops.

After Dr Shilling said that about her being an inspiration, Shatter said, ‘My foot is. Itchy.’

‘Are you. Calling my. Foot double. Gross?’ Shatter threw a karate kick, her brand-new foot stopping just a quivering breath away from D’Arcy’s nose. ‘This. Foot?’ said Shatter.

‘Yes,’ said D’Arcy. ‘But close up it’s not gross at all. Close up it’s a lovely foot.’

Her other talent is knowing where an aeroplane is coming from or going to, just by looking up when it flies past. Honestly, you can be sitting in the Tranquillity Garden and a plane will go by and she will look up and say, ‘KLM mid-morning flight. From Zurich.’ Amazing.

‘Of course,’ said D’Arcy one time, ‘we don’t know if she’s always right or not. About those planes.’

‘If you really wanted to be sure,’ said Tyler, ‘you could ask her to prove it.’

A few days after my hand arrived, Dr Shilling brought a visitor into the classroom.

‘This is Mo,’ she said. ‘He’s a student of engineering at university. He wanted to meet you. And I think you wanted to show the children something, Mo – is that right?’

He pulled open the pack and shuffled the cards. I mean really shuffled them, like a proper magician, fanning them out, letting them cascade from hand to hand, spreading them out, flicking them over. Then he looked up at us. We sat waiting for him to say ‘pick a card’, or whatever.

Everyone looked around, wondering if a rabbit had appeared in the room or something.

‘I shuffled those cards,’ said Mo, ‘with this.’ He rolled up his sleeve.

We all saw that the bottom part of his arm was made of some kind of transparent plastic. You could see that it didn’t have muscles and bones, but wires.

Everyone who had two hands clapped. Everyone who had a foot to stamp stamped. It looked like real magic.

‘This is not magic,’ said Dr Shilling. ‘You will all learn to do this. Mo was a student here at the Limb Lab. Just like you. He lost his hand during the rebellion in Sierra Leone. His new hand has a bluetooth connection chipped into his upper arm.’

‘I’m moving this hand with my mind,’ explained Mo. ‘Just like I did with my old flesh job hand. Alfie, when you first lost your hand, could you feel a ghost hand where it used to be?’

‘The truth is,’ explained Dr Shilling, ‘we all have a ghost hand. It’s just that usually it’s in the same place as our flesh hand. Your ghost hand wore your flesh hand like a glove. It was the ghost that made the flesh hand work. All you have to do is let your ghost hand make your new hand work. Just let yourself feel your ghost hand for a while. Then, when I tell you to, put your Osprey Grip back on.’

Don’t get me wrong, the Osprey Grip hand is amazing. You can get it to do all kinds of stuff. But you can’t get it to feel anything. You can’t use it to tell if a thing is wet or dry or hard or soft or hot or cold.

The moment I take it off, I can feel again. Even though my hand’s not there, I can feel the breeze on its non-existent back, and the hard wood of the chair on its non-existent knuckles.

‘Right. Now try to use your ghost hand to lift your Osprey hand. Don’t use any of the muscle tricks that you’ve learned here at the Limb Lab – just try to imagine your ghost hand lifting it.’

I tried. Nothing happened. The ghost hand was in there, moving around, but it just wasn’t strong enough to move the Osprey hand.

‘Look at my. Foot,’ said Shatter. She stuck her foot out. ‘Twiddling my. Toes.’

‘She’s twiddling her toes,’ said Tyler, who seemed to have decided that it was his job to translate everything Shatter said.

Do you know what it was like? Remember in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when they’re learning the levitation charm, trying to make a feather take off. And no one can do it. Then Hermione just goes, ‘Wingardium Leviosa,’ and her feather takes off round the room? Well, it was just like that. Shatter was Hermione, and I was Ron.

Like a spirit walking through a door, my ghost hand just passed through the side of the Osprey hand. Just straight through it. And then it just smoked off into the air. Just evaporated. For the first time since I lost my hand, I couldn’t feel anything at the end of my arm. Just an empty space with a plastic thing strapped to it.

I may be good with machines generally, but there’s one machine I haven’t mastered yet. And that’s the Osprey Grip.

‘Don’t worry, Alfie. Not everyone gets it first time.’ Dr Shilling patted my shoulder. ‘When you go home, get a big pile of Lego and start building with it. We often find that when people are playing Lego they get so absorbed in what they’re building they forget to think about what the hand is doing. And that’s when it starts to really work – when you’re not thinking about it.’

There’s a little table at home that usually has a plant pot and a lamp on it. When I got home, Mum cleared it, then emptied a tub of Lego out on to it.

‘When you can build a little house out of Lego, we’ll know you’re on your way,’ she said, smiling encouragingly.

I did try. Playing with Lego was supposed to make you forget about your hand. Instead it just made me think about my hand even more and forget about the Lego. It also made me think about what Shatter had said: ‘What are you FOR?’

What was I for, then? Everyone else in the Limb Lab was really getting into being slightly bionic. I thought about jacking in the lab and going back to my old school. But school was full of people like Thursday Wells, who would happily flush your head down the toilet if you were wearing the wrong deodorant. Imagine what they’d do if you had the wrong type of hand. The truth is, I was too bionic for school. Not bionic enough for the Limb Lab, though. I was a prisoner of the hand.

So when the woman from the Many Happy Returns cafe grabbed it in the airport arrivals hall I unfastened it and ran.