“I am not in the business of creating supermen.” Louis Massina fixed his gaze on Chelsea Goodman, then shook his head. “No. We can’t go there.”
“You’re just going to let him die?” Chelsea touched his arm. “Lou—boss. You can save him.”
“I’m not Frankenstein. I don’t make supermen.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“It amounts to the same thing. And there’s no saying whether any of it will work. The drugs—we’ve only used them in simulations and on pigs. Pigs.”
“He dies if you do nothing. You can help him.”
“Giving him legs is one thing, even the heart, but the drugs—”
“Without the drugs, Lou, he dies.”
Louis Massina turned toward the window, gazing out at Boston Harbor. The wooden remains of a wharf sat in the distance to the right, a sharp contrast to the gleaming pink granite of the unfinished office building just beyond it. Massina liked the incongruity, the mix of old and new. The wharf had last been used close to fifty years before; Massina was sure he’d been on it around that time, a young man taken to work by his father, just a few days before he disappeared. In his lifetime, Massina had seen the white planks turn gray and grow splinters, then gaps. The slow-motion ruin of the wooden pier not only marked time for him; it reminded Massina that life was circumscribed by limits. There were only so many chances, so much time.
“Listen, boss, you have to do something. He was hurt helping us.”
“We were helping him,” Massina said softly, still gazing out the window. “We were helping the FBI. Not the other way around. This is their person. Their case. Not our problem. Not mine.”
“You’ve saved so many people.”
A new heart, two legs, and a batch of untested drugs to take him from the brink of death in a matter of days, if not hours: was Louis Massina a god, that he could give life like that?
Givens was already dead. Really. The doctors all agreed.
“He won’t survive the operation,” said Massina. “Even with the drug.”
“Now you do sound like you’re playing God. Or Satan.”
Louis Massina did not really think of himself as God. That was sacrilege. But his prosthetics, a sideline of his robotics company, did literally save lives. Was that sacrilege? Or a gift from God that by rights he had to share?
“I don’t understand why you’re hesitating,” added Chelsea.
Massina turned to face her. “The heart is experimental. The spinal attachments are still at a very primitive point. We don’t have FDA approval, among other things. And the drugs—”
“You can get all that waived. You know it.”
“Just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
Chelsea narrowed her green eyes. She was a pixie of a thing, barely five foot, with skin the color of light chocolate; her face glowed like a dusty rose in the fading sun of the late afternoon. He guessed she might weigh ninety pounds, and that was counting the ink on her tattoos and the piercings she occasionally wore in her lip.
“Boss, you know you can do this.”
“It may be too far,” said Massina, though he had made up his mind. “And we don’t know if he’d agree.”
“He wanted to be resuscitated,” said Chelsea. “His form says, I want to live. That’s the only agreement you’re going to get.”
He’s hardly old enough to understand what it will mean, thought Massina. Even Chelsea has no idea. Choosing to live—it’s a choice for more pain, more suffering. There will be no easy day.
Instead of saying that, he turned back to the window. Chelsea’s reflection was there, looming over the old pier. Two large construction cranes stood in the distance; if the light were better, they would have given the illusion of hoisting his employee’s face into the sky.
“Arrange it,” he told her. “Tell Sister Rose to keep me updated herself. The doctors tend to get lost in the details.”