Specimen Days

Katie Lane

Assignment #2

Specimen Days

I think that at the end of each of the stories it can be said that the characters go from being a “bionic human” into a human being. That is, while in the final story Simon was literally bionic, in the first two stories, both Lucas and Cat were, in their own way, metaphorically “bionic” or “engineered” human beings.

In “In the Machine” Lucas seemed to me, as did many of the characters in that story, to be an engineered human out of necessity. Poverty was an every day reality of life in the 1850’s and so many were forced not just to work machines but to act like machines. You wake up, you eat (maybe) you go and work behind your machine for 12 hours, you return home, sleep, and repeat. This is not how a human being should live. This is not a life filled with love or joy or grass or trees. This is a machine-like life where you are simply going through the motions to survive. Simon did this and lost his life. Catherine did this and lost her dignity. Simon and Lucas’ parents did this and lost their minds. And, finally, Lucas does this and shares a fate with his brother.

It wasn’t until the final pages of this story, when Lucas gives in to his machine to save Catherine, when we see him becoming human. We see his desperation, his pain, his questionable decision in the name of what he believes to be love. And we see Catherine, vulnerable, fighting for Lucas’ and finally watching the lives of so many she knew fall from the sky in flames, knowing she could have been by their side. We saw these characters transform from machines to humans, and sadly we saw some of them turn into grass.

In “The Children’s Crusade” we also see a machine-like human being in Cat. She is well educated, beautiful and stuck in a job she never imagined herself in. Though she was outwardly happy and had the things most people associate with happiness – decent boyfriend, decent job, decent apartment – it seems she hadn’t been fully human since her...