The Gingerbread Man

by James Gunn

Illustration by George M. Krauter

Andrew Martin began his transformation on July 4, 2076. It might not have happened at all had he not been interrogating himself about the purpose of life. “The purpose of life,” he muttered, looking deep within, “is to avoid pain.”

But he was thinking of the pain inflicted upon the psyche by other people and how it would be better not to care what they said or did, or, indeed, to have anything to do with them. In any case, it started, as most things do in life, by accident. In fact, it was the rarest of rarities, an automobile accident. With automated roads and computerized controls, a car could collide with another, or with a stationary object, only by total malfunction, and even malfunctions were programmed to fail-safe. In Andrew’s case, however, a computer chip failed at a critical junction, short-circuiting the steering mechanism and the fail-safe devices, and allowed his vehicle to propel itself into and under the back of a computer-driven semi.

Although the airbag seized him in a lover’s embrace, it could not totally protect his legs, and his left foot was mangled beyond repair. Having failed at its most important task, the automobile’s computer sensed Andrew’s physical condition with instant accuracy and tightened a cuff around his lower leg, injected him with a painkiller and a tranquilizer, and summoned an ambulance, which arrived with whumping blades even before the tourniquet needed loosening.

Andrew opened his eyes to the sterile blankness of a hospital ceiling.

On the left wall was a window opening on a sunny meadow strewn with red, yellow, and blue wildflowers. A brook babbled through it. Behind the meadow was a green forest rising in the distance to blue mountain peaks capped with snow.

“What’s going on?” Andrew asked. “You’re in regional hospital five seven two,” the computer responded in a pleasant, concerned female voice. “You have been involved in an automobile accident—”

“An automobile accident!” Andrew interjected.

“An automobile accident,” the computer repeated. “Your left foot was crushed. We have replaced it with prosthetic model eff two one eight three. Can you move the toes on your left foot?”

It certainly felt as if he could move the toes on his left foot. Andrew pulled his left leg from under the light thermal covering and held it up for inspection. The leg above the ankle revealed a bit of bruising, but otherwise the leg, including the foot, didn’t look any different, and he certainly could move his toes, and without pain. “Are you sure it’s the left foot?”

“We do not make mistakes,” the computer said pleasantly. “Can you stand on the replacement?”

Andrew swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood on the warm resilient floor beside it. He felt a bit of residual soreness in the calf of his left leg and a bit of stiffness in his back and neck, but his left foot felt fine. In fact, it felt better than fine. He not only had a sharper sense of the temperature of the floor with his left foot than his right, he could feel the small depressions his heel and the ball of his foot and his toes made in the floor covering. In addition he had a feeling of well being in his foot to which he was not accustomed, like power waiting to be unleashed. He rose on his toes and felt a moment of shame that his right foot did not do as well.

“I see that the foot is working,” the computer said.

“Indeed,” Andrew said.

“Then we have an inquiry about your condition if you are prepared to receive it.”

“Who has made the inquiry?” Andrew asked, wondering if it was Jennifer and hoping, perhaps, that it was. But Jennifer had said she never wanted to see him again, and it was from that dismissal he had been fleeing when the accident had occurred, almost as if the computer chip had shared the disorder in his brain.

“A Mrs. Martin,” the computer replied.

“But I’m not married,” Andrew said.

“She has been identified as your biological mother.”

“I will accept the inquiry, of course,” Andrew said, although he wondered why his mother had gotten in touch with him now, after twenty years. It wasn’t as if they had argued, as he had with Jennifer; they had simply grown apart gradually until they had nothing left to share.

The square on the left wall that had been functioning as a window turned into the face of a woman who looked as young as Jennifer. He compared it with the memory of his mother that still was stored there, but he would never have recognized her.

“Mother,” Andrew said, “you have had your face redone.”

“Do you like it?” she said, brightening. “Well, it’s you I’ve called about. I was notified of your accident. Imagine having an accident on the highway! Imagine traveling on the highway! Andrew, I can’t imagine what got into you! Well, I can’t tell you how surprised I was after all these years to be notified that my son, my only son, had been injured. Well, I see you’ve quite recovered.” Her image began to fade into the sunny landscape.

“They replaced my foot, Mother,” Andrew said quickly.

His mother’s image steadied. “How efficient of them,” she said. “Well, if you need anything—”

“And, Mother,” Andrew said before she could fade again, “It works so well that I have decided to have the other one replaced as well.” He hadn’t known he was going to do it until he spoke, but now that the words were out he knew it was what he wanted to do. He could not go through life limping on a less-than-perfect real foot.

A day later Andrew walked out of regional hospital 572. It was located at the intersection of two major highways surrounded by growing crops clear to the horizon. No one else was in sight. It was a virtually silent and efficient scene in which vehicles of various sizes and purposes, but only a single, silvery color, traveled on either side, moving rapidly in several directions and effortlessly maintaining the same distance from the others. None of them was occupied; none of them, indeed, had any windows. He could understand his mother’s surprise. He shared it.

He stepped into the waiting taxi and allowed it to whisk him to his home, and when it lowered him onto the landing pad of his apartment building twenty minutes later, he made his way quickly to the elevator and then to his rooms. There were four of them: a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, and a dining room. With computer service, who needed more? They were decorated according to his own taste for comfort and muted colors, but with easy-to-clean surfaces. He would have liked to have commented to someone about his new vitality, but he had met no one. As soon as he had settled himself into his favorite chair, he called Jennifer.

“I will accept your call this time,” Jennifer’s image said frostily, “since I have been notified that you have been involved in an accident. But my earlier statement still holds.”

“You don’t understand,” Andrew said. “I feel as if I have wings on my feet, and I’d like to dance. You have criticized my remoteness, my lack of involvement, and I wanted you to know that I feel like getting involved. I want to dance.”

“Well—” she said.

They met at a neutral site, at a studio where dancers performed for a television audience. But it was little used any more. Computers could construct new performances from previously recorded routines, Fred Astaire and Margot Fonteyn, say, or Rudolf Nureyev with Isadora Duncan. So Andrew and Jennifer had the studio all to themselves. “Play something fast,” Andrew said to the computer while he removed his shoes to allow his new feet more freedom. They began to dance.

The joint exercise lasted only a few minutes, with Andrew and Jennifer scarcely coming closer than a meter or two. Jennifer looked at Andrew and his magic feet, as if waiting for him to make the first move toward companionship, and abandoned the attempt to keep up. Synchronized with the music, Andrew’s feet seemed to dance on their own. Jennifer stood against one wall and watched them caper while above them Andrew’s body seemed to follow rather than to lead and his face seemed frozen in a look of amazement. After a few more minutes his body began to sag while the feet pounded on untiringly.

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.

When he awoke his head was crystal clear for the first time in his life. He understood solid geometry, and as for algebra, he could solve quadratic equations by mental manipulation alone. He could even comprehend human behavior, including his own, and he was filled with a longing to be of service. He knew what it was. He needed no computer to tell him: His overworked brain had suffered a disabling breakdown and had been replaced with a positronic model, just like the robots that did the world’s work, and his personality, with all its memories, had been impressed upon it. All the makeshift fluids of his body had been replaced, and the replacements were working together as the originals never had. The hormones that had so delighted and confused him had been replaced by electrical impulses. He was now as efficient a human being as a human being could possibly become, and he had abilities that no human being could ever aspire to.

He was linked electronically with the computer network of the world. He knew what it knew, and where others had to communicate their needs by the imperfect mechanism of speech, he could obtain information and command action instantaneously. In fact, he was a part of the computer network at the same time that his personality impress maintained a sense of individual identity. But it was his relationship to the network, he knew, that gave him his need to serve, to put himself and his humanity to use.

What would he do with his new abilities? He considered the possibility of self-sacrifice, of cutting himself free from his new-found abilities, one by one, until at last he relinquished the immortality he had gained through his transformation, or of allowing himself to be destroyed by other humans in some dramatic fashion that would inspire and reform the human species. But it was only for an instant: Salvation was not to be found through sentimentality or by encouraging humanity’s tendencies toward belief in the unknown and the unknowable.

He could create art: paintings and sculpture and fiction and drama and music and dance. He knew he could do those things and the act of knowing was simultaneous with the creation itself—the creations were there, stored in the network for production when the occasion was right. All the suffering and exaltation of being human was expressed in those works, ready for contribution to human understanding and redemption. “Let there be art,” he thought, and there was art.

He could create an outlet for the misdirected aggressions of the juveniles that had beaten him. What humanity needed was a new frontier, he thought, and he instructed the network to reinvigorate the space program and to create a system of inducements and rewards that would encourage ambitious young people to challenge the unknown and spread humanity as far as human energy and creativity were capable of carrying it.

He could reverse the conditions that had encouraged humanity to retreat to the isolation of the individual cave. Social change had come too swiftly, he understood, and the perfection of the computer network had allowed people to isolate themselves in perfect comfort. He understood them well; he had been one of them. People must be given incentives to interact. He rejected the idea of cutting off computer services and forcing the cave dwellers back into the marketplace; that would create too much suffering and chaos. Instead he instructed the network to develop a system of attractive meeting places and to release the art and the ideas that would support a culture of sharing. That would take longer but the result would be more lasting.

Finally he called his mother. “Mother,” he said to her bewildered image, “I appreciate the sacrifices you made to bring me into the world and to nurture me to maturity, and I want you to know that I love you. I know that you have your life and that frequent contact would disrupt that life, but I want you to know that I am fine and you will receive confirmations of that from time to time.”

Then he called Jennifer. Call blocking was still in effect, but with his new powers that was easy to override. “Jennifer,” he said, “I know that I have given you much to complain about, but I want you to know that I love you and I want to share a life with you, to touch and be touched, to love and be loved.”

“Why, Andrew,” she said, “I never thought I’d ever hear those words.” He understood now; he had to replace the fallible human parts of himself to be truly human. And he understood that the purpose of life was to discover what a person was good for and then find a way to put it to use.

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The Gingerbread Man
by James Gunn