If Carter was not, in fact, a human being—what was he?

Carter’s wooden head sat on wooden shoulders, which in turn supported articulated wooden arms and sat atop a wooden torso. Iona examined Carter’s hands, noting that—unlike the head—each was made up of at least twenty discrete moving wooden parts. It was a very fine piece of mechanical engineering.

Iona glanced around the room and suddenly became very aware of her open windows. Hoping nobody had seen anything untoward, she made a quick circuit and closed every shutter. Then she walked to the front door, locked it, went to the kitchen, retrieved the instruction manual, and returned to Carter. She had completed the first step and with some trepidation she supposed she should proceed with the rest. She walked around Carter’s chair again, leaned over, and peered at what lay inside the hatch: could it really be as the diagrams depicted?

It was. Carter’s body was occupied by machinery—all made of wood. Cogs, pistons, and dozens of tiny switches. The wood was warm with recent activity and gave off a rich smell but the workings lay still. There was a clockwork mechanism that presumably powered them. She reached a hand up to her own back but felt nothing similar there. Her skin was unbroken.

Iona consulted the instructions again. One of the diagrams was headed MOTION TEST and an arrow indicated one of the switches. Iona reached her hand inside, suppressing a churn of revulsion, and flicked the switch.

Carter jolted and Iona jumped back, grazing her hand on the edge of the hatchway as she pulled it clear of the workings. Carter rose from the chair, stepped clear of it, and turned a full circle on the spot. Iona panicked, her mind racing through apologies and cover stories, until she realized Carter wasn’t conscious. This was a purely mechanical operation with no intelligence guiding it. Carter flexed his arms, raised his legs high, and moved his head from side to side and up and down, performing what looked like an obscure military drill. Inside the cavity in Carter’s back the cogs and pistons were in motion. Then he sat back down and returned exactly to his starting position, his hand positioned as if still holding his jacket.

Startled, Iona waited a moment to ensure Carter had finished moving. Then she returned to the cavity in his back and consulted the instructions again. Another diagram was labeled VOICE TEST and an arrow indicated another switch. Iona operated it, noting how clean the switch felt under her fingers: these had rarely been used, if at all. Iona felt glad she didn’t have to look into Carter’s face while this happened: what she was doing felt sickeningly intimate, performed without consent.

A sound emitted from the slit in Carter’s face. Iona recognized the sound as his voice but, as with the face, she realized she’d perceived it inaccurately until now. It didn’t sound as smooth as she’d thought: it had a broken, slightly harsh quality. “Voice test in progress,” Carter said, then he recited the first few lines of Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a poem that was familiar to Iona even though she couldn’t think where she might have heard it before). As Iona listened to the texture of the voice she thought she detected something percussive. The diagram indicated a sliding switch labeled PITCH. Iona reached around, slid the switch downward, and listened as Carter’s voice deepened and slowed. Iona slowed it right down to the point where the voice was exposed as being made up from a series of incredibly rapid taps or clicks, the binary pattern of noise and silence building into more complex shapes.