The Hardyman | Page 3

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.
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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?
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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