fawns over the box like it was a newborn baby.
‘Underline this word in your notebook,’ he says. ‘Electromyography.’
I scribble the word in my notepad. I don’t underline it because I’m too busy underlining the words, ‘Smack empire funds science?’ Four-word story. Can tell it in three words. Drugs fund research. Drugs buy . . .
‘Breakthrough!’ Tytus says. ‘This is only a prototype. High definition anatomically shaped silicone-based exterior. Revolutionary. Transformative. Conspicuously inconspicuous. A genuinely discreet exterior harmoniously integrated into a mechanical interior using electromyography – EMG – signals from existing contracted muscles within the amputee’s residual limbs to control the movement of the artificial limb. Electrodes attached to the skin’s surface record the EMG signals and these beautiful and informative human signals are amplified and processed by motors we have built into several points along our limb. Real movement. Real life. That’s how we change the world.’
The room is silent for a moment.
‘It’s remarkable,’ I say. ‘I imagine there are no limits to where you could take this.’
He beams and laughs, looking over at Hanna behind us.
‘Life without limbs, Hanna?’ he says.
‘Life without limits,’ she says back.
He bangs his fist triumphantly on the table.
‘Life without limits, exactly!’ he says.
He turns around again to that vast cloudless blue sky hanging over his endless green lawn.
‘I have seen the future,’ he says.
‘You have?’ I say.
‘I have.’
Beyond the glass wall of the reading room there is a lone bird in the sky over Tytus Broz’s manicured gardens. Against the backdrop of the eternal blue sky, this small bird zips and whirls and whips through air and the bird’s frantic and electric flight show captures Tytus’s gaze.
‘It’s a world without limits,’ he says. ‘It’s a world where kids born the way Hanna was born can control their prosthetic limbs directly through the brain. Real-life limbs controlled by neural feedback that can reach out and shake your hand or pat a dog in the park or throw a frisbee or bowl a cricket ball or wrap their arms around their mum and dad.’ He breathes deep. ‘That’s a beautiful world.’
The bird outside his glass wall windows dips like a Spitfire fighter plane and then darts unexpectedly upward like a rollercoaster and makes a full loop before changing its flight path dramatically and speeding, unexpectedly, towards us. The bird is flying straight to us, to us three here around this office desk, to me and the girl of my dreams, and the man of my nightmares. I know it can’t see the glass wall. I know it only sees itself. I know it sees a friend. I see the colour of the bird as it nears the glass. Flashes of vivid and electrifying blue on its forehead and tail. Like the blue in the storm lightning I see from the front window of Lancelot Street. Like the blue in my eyes. That kind of blue. Not just azure blue. Magic blue. Alchemy blue.
And the blue bird slams headfirst and hard into the glass wall.
‘Oh my,’ says Tytus, shifting back in his seat.
The bird hovers, stunned by the impact against the glass, flaps its wings and flutters its tail furiously, then flies back from whence it came in a darting left turn that zigs into a right turn that zags into a left and whips into a right again and the bird is bouncing on air like a split atom and it knows not where it’s going until it finds its purpose and that purpose is itself, the other bird it sees in the glass wall, and it flies hard and fast to meet itself once more, zooming into itself, the Spitfire plane, the kamikaze bomber descending from the blue sky. The flashes of an unprecedented blue again on its forehead and tail. And it slams once more into itself. Into the impenetrable glass wall. It hovers, stunned, and flies away again, determined to find itself once more and it does. It zooms around in an arching left turn that seems to never end until it does because the bird rights itself and zips into an air stream that sharpens its blinding velocity.
Caitlyn Spies cares for it, of course, because her heart can accommodate the sky and everything flying therein.
‘Stop it, little birdy,’ she whispers. ‘Stop it.’
But the bird can’t stop. Faster than ever now. Slam. And from that horrid impact, this time it does not hover stunned. It simply drops to the ground. Falls with a soft thud on the gravel outside Tytus Broz’s glass reading