“Let’s start with the iodine—put on your gloves.”
I put my gloves on. I’ll be honest: The realization that we were actually doing this, and what it could result in, never really struck me. We just did it. Like Andy said, we were falling into Carl’s gravity. I was making decisions, pretty stupid ones, but it didn’t feel like that for me in the moment.
“Is iodine dangerous?”
“No, it’s actually used as a nutritional supplement—they put it in salt to prevent goiters. It’s also used as a catalyst in organic chemical reactions, which is, if I had to guess, why Carl wants it.”
Miranda shook a tiny, silvery-looking flake out of a vial into my outstretched hand. I then held that hand out to Carl.
Andy pulled out into a wide shot to show me, barely breaking five feet, holding my latex-gloved hand out to this ten-foot-tall Transformer. I look pretty much exactly like a confused monkey trying to make peace with a superior life-form.
Nothing happened, of course.
“Try direct contact,” Miranda said.
“Cut,” Andy said, “I want to get in close on this.”
Andy moved in to film me pinching the flake of iodine out of the palm of my left hand, and then, without any visible sign of the fear and anticipation that was shooting through my body, I reached out to press it onto the back of Carl’s right hand.
Heat, I felt heat. And then suddenly I was light-headed and nauseated.
“Ohhhnnnnn . . .” I said, staggering slightly.
Suddenly, Robin appeared from nowhere at my side.
“April, are you OK?” Andy said from behind the camera. Everyone suddenly looked quite scared, maybe realizing that we in fact had no idea what we were doing.
But then the feeling passed.
“Yes,” I said, shaking my head. “Yeah, I think . . . I think I felt my finger get warm. And then I felt light-headed for a moment.” I looked down at my hand. The flake of iodine was gone.
Whether any of that had actually happened or I had just imagined it was immediately unclear to me. There were a lot of reasons for me to be feeling light-headed right then, and the sensation of warmth through a latex glove isn’t exactly a precise, measurable phenomenon. And it was a tiny flake—I might have just dropped it.
Miranda immediately attempted the same with her own flake of iodine and reported that nothing happened. Of course, we cut that from the video because . . . boring.
We talked for a little bit about whether we should continue. I felt totally normal by this point, and the fact that Miranda hadn’t felt anything made me think maybe I hadn’t either.
So the next line in the video is Miranda saying, “Well, I call those results inconclusive, April May. Would you like to try the americium?”
“Seems like the thing to do!”
“This little strip of metal”—Miranda held it up for the audience to see—“contains a tiny, tiny fraction of a gram of americium, a radioactive metal produced as part of the decay cycle of plutonium. April, would you like to see if Carl is interested in it?”
Again, I took the strip in my latex-gloved hand and pressed it firmly to the back of Carl’s hand.
“I think I feel a little warmth again, no dizziness.” I pulled my hand back, but the little strip of metal was still there.
“The strip didn’t disappear like the iodine did,” I reported more to Miranda than to the camera.
“The strip is not pure americium, so there was bound to be stuff left over.”
“I should have had someone else do it so you could have felt the warmth to make sure I wasn’t imagining it,” I said.
“That would have been a slightly better experimental design, yes,” Miranda replied. “But, honestly, this entire thing has been a travesty of science. Nothing about what we did today would even be considered for peer review.”
We stood there for another few seconds while nothing continued to happen. Finally, Andy lowered his camera and said to Robin, “OK, well, maybe time for you to go get the car so we . . . Holy fuck.” Andy froze, staring at the place where I had pressed the americium for a tiny moment before frantically grabbing at the DSLR and thumbing the record button. Just in time.
Soundlessly, smoothly, Carl’s hand had begun to move. Andy got about two seconds of that movement before the hand disconnected from the body with a soft click and dropped to the ground. Stunned silence became sounds of exclamation from the crowd, from me as well. My particular sound we could not include in the final video because we wanted it to be child-friendly.
Carl’s hand—as big as a dinner plate—hit the cement, flipped itself over so its fingers touched the ground, and then it ran.
* * *
—
I say it “ran” because that’s the closest word I have to what it did, which was that it pushed itself up on the tips of all five fingers and then skittered away, clicking rapidly down the sacred marble of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, causing yelps and leaps of surprise as tourists spotted it. The line behind us rapidly devolved as people rushed to see what was happening or began running in fear.
We spent a precious few seconds staring in absolute shock, which I think is understandable, before Miranda shot after it just a millisecond before Andy and I had the same idea.
We shoved our way through Los Angeles’s only busy sidewalk like perps in a crime movie. I pretty much bounced off a Chewbacca who was posing with a lovely middle-aged couple. I caught a glimpse of the hand as it hung a right on Orange and increased my speed to match my certainty that this was a thing that was actually happening, and also thanks to the complete lack of pedestrian traffic just three feet off the Walk of Fame.
I flew around the corner and saw it, just twenty or thirty feet ahead, but now somehow galloping? Instead of individual steps, it was moving in a leaping gait. Andy stopped as he turned on Orange to film me chasing after the hand a bit before following.
Miranda and I did not stop. We flew past the parking garages and hotels and apartment complexes on Orange. I was not and have never been an athlete. Miranda, on the other hand, showed no signs of slowing down, so I did everything I could to keep up with her.
Orange dead-ends into Franklin, but Miranda and I both distinctly saw Carl’s hand head straight across Franklin and then leap up over a small orange retaining wall. I followed a few strides behind Miranda, up a steep, curving driveway, and up to a . . . a frickin’ castle?
“What,” I said as I gasped for air, “the fuck.”
Though it was dark, the building was lit by a number of dramatic sources. It had weird, surprising architectural details like turrets and faux crenellations. After the apartment buildings and shopping centers we had just run past, I had the sudden disorienting feeling that maybe Carl had created a portal and we had been transported to some kind of kitschy Narnia. I looked behind us, and Franklin Avenue was still there, bustling with traffic.
I decided that this was still the real world and marched past the valet parking sign and up to a young man in a tuxedo.
“Did you see a large robotic hand run by here just now?” I said, having caught enough of my breath to speak.
“Hmm?” he said, as if he were just realizing we were talking to him. “Ah. Yes, it just went inside.”
“What?”
“Well, it walked up and looked as if it wanted to go inside, so I let it inside. It had not strictly obeyed the dress code, but while the rules are both specific and comprehensive, I thought it made sense to allow an exception in the case of an autonomous hand.” He did not seem to think this was all that weird.
Miranda attempted a response—“Um, well, we’re . . .”—and she failed in her attempt.
“We need to get in there,” I interrupted.
The man, maybe in his late twenties, dressed in a full tuxedo and white gloves, looked us up and down before saying, “Are you members?” as if he already very much knew the answer.