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"  For more photos and video of Bryan Anderson&amp;#039;s rehabilitation, please click here. *** Bryan Anderson&amp;#039;s legs keep falling off. Thin and wiry, he started his second tour in Iraq weighing 135 pounds, carried on a five-foot-seven-inch frame. He came home from the yearlong deployment two months early, thirty-five pounds lighter and about two feet shorter, missing both legs across the thigh, his left arm below the elbow, and his right index fingertip. He learned to walk again, to live his life, one of roughly 750 amputees from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are young men in a hurry. They ride bicycles and run marathons and pick up their children, satisfying our desire for speedy results and neat resolutions. Their demands for artificial limbs that perform closer to the flesh and bone they lost are driving dollars into far-out technologies like robotic limbs that move by thought control. But normalcy remains elusive, which brings Anderson, twenty-six years old, to Oklahoma City on a cool fall day for an appointment with his pit crew at the Hanger Orthopedic Group. The legs keep falling off, he says. And he keeps getting these sores.  Anderson had been living on his prosthetic legs, hadn&amp;#039;t touched the wheelchair in months. But last summer a red spot the size of a pimple appeared on the tip of his left leg. The area grew more swollen and tender, so painful that he couldn&amp;#039;t wear his legs. The freedom he&amp;#039;d gained was gone. Emergency-room doctors drained fluid from the infected area and loaded him with antibiotics. The infection subsided, but other pains emerged as his legs rubbed against the sockets, causing the skin to break down. And pain aside, his stumps were slipping out of their sockets. The body changes every day -- salty food expands it, sweating shrinks it -- a problem made worse for Anderson. His left leg is about eight inches long, and his right leg half that, which makes a good fit difficult.  &amp;quot;You need to eat,&amp;quot; Randy Richardson tells him. &amp;quot;Put some weight on you.&amp;quot; Richardson teaches amputees how to navigate the real world, grocery stores and golf courses. A bigger limb would mean more soft tissue for the socket to grip, and Anderson&amp;#039;s legs are too skinny.  Chad Simpson, Hanger&amp;#039;s guru for fitting prostheses, squeezes Anderson&amp;#039;s right leg, working his thumbs into skin crisscrossed with pink and purple tracks. On his last visit to Hanger, Anderson started calling Simpson &amp;quot;Goose,&amp;quot; after Anthony Edwards&amp;#039;s character in Top Gun. The same lanky frame, sandy hair, and little mustache. Right now Goose is trying to find a pressure point Anderson has been feeling in the socket. Complicating this search, Anderson&amp;#039;s leg can play a sort of trick on him. When the trauma surgeons sewed the leg shut, they pulled skin from the back around to the front. So if he feels the pain on the back of his thigh, the pressure point might be in the front.  &amp;quot;Am I replicating it yet?&amp;quot; Simpson asks. &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot; Simpson squeezes again. Anderson yelps. &amp;quot;Yep,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s it.&amp;quot;  Blame some of the pain on small bone spurs pressing against the skin, a special problem of blast injuries. Explosions drive shrapnel and debris through the limbs, disintegrating bone and leaving small bone particles in the surrounding tissue. The bones still want to grow, leading -- through a process called heterotopic ossification -- to formations that look something like cauliflower, and though Anderson had bone growths removed while at Walter Reed, some remained. Adding to that pain, amputated nerves often go in search of their missing limb. They grow and curl in on themselves, forming neuromas, little knots of sensitivity, factories for white-hot pain. The nerve balls can be particularly bad if they cluster near the skin or become encased in scar tissue. Toughened, scarred skin, of which Anderson has plenty, would seem to be a convenient barrier between the socket and the sharp ends of chopped-off bone. But the tissue doesn&amp;#039;t give and stretch like the more supple, resilient skin surrounding the scars, so as Anderson flexes and twists his legs, the skin can shear and rip.  Anderson slides a black nylon sock over his left leg, then slips it into the socket. Simpson pulls the sock out through a hole in the bottom of the socket, which sucks in the limb. If Anderson just shoved his stump into the socket, the skin would pull, stretching against the side and driving the bone down. Using the sock gives a true fit, pulling the limb to the bottom. Simpson screws a small plastic plug into the hole, sealing it and creating the vacuum that will hold the leg on. They suck the right leg into the socket, and Anderson pushes himself to his feet, one good hand and one fake hand clutching the therapy-room parallel bars. An Army recruiting commercial plays on the TV mounted near the ceiling at the end of the room. A soldier, rifle at the ready, runs through a field. Anderson walks toward him. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re looking good, brother,&amp;quot; Simpson says. &amp;quot;You look like you&amp;#039;re about to run, you have so much momentum.&amp;quot; A quick, punchy farting noise interrupts the progress. The vacuum on the socket has given way, releasing the limb. Getting enough suction on the right leg has been difficult because it&amp;#039;s so short, with so little surface area to grip the socket. And his legs are sweating now from the exertion, making the socket too slick for a tight fit. Botox could fix this, paralyzing the nerves that stimulate the sweat glands. For now, Anderson smears Arrid antiperspirant on his leg and slides it back into the socket. He takes a few steps. Simpson and Richardson watch, expectant. Another fart.  &amp;quot;Prosthetics is an art-science,&amp;quot; Richardson says. &amp;quot;Each limb has a unique shape, and that shape has to be captured for it to be locked on and comfortable. You tighten down one place and it creates problems somewhere else. There&amp;#039;s always trade-offs between containment, comfort, and control. It&amp;#039;s not just walking. He&amp;#039;s got to be able to sit, stand, climb up into a car, step down off of a curb, and have the control and stability to do that. The socket is what&amp;#039;s going to dictate how much mobility he&amp;#039;s able to gain.&amp;quot; Anderson pulls off his legs, flops into his wheelchair, and rolls outside for a smoke with Tim Bialek, a buddy from home, who&amp;#039;s thick across the shoulders with a goatee and a flop of curly brown hair. Anderson calls him Sunshine, because he looks like a guy who&amp;#039;d launch a fist into your jaw at a bar for playing crap music on the jukebox, and because he really wouldn&amp;#039;t. Anderson usually travels with friends, needing someone to help him with the annoyances, from navigating airports to putting on his legs in the morning.  Time to make Bryan a new socket. Simpson carries the inner sockets into Hanger&amp;#039;s lab, an expanse of white workbenches crowded with vises, heat guns, grinders, and saws, where technicians craft arm and leg sockets. Nothing comes easy for bilateral amputees like Anderson. With just a few inches of leg, walking requires three to five times more energy. He&amp;#039;s missing the two dozen muscles of the lower leg and missing part of another nine in the upper leg, leaving him with little power or control. Even as we stand still, our leg muscles fire and relax continuously in a symphony of minor movement that keeps us balanced and upright. But missing muscles, our means of locomotion, are only part of the problem. Our nerves tell us how to move and give us constant feedback from tens of thousands of sensors inside our muscles, joints, and skin. The body&amp;#039;s understanding of its place in space, known as proprioception, enables us to perform a task without concentrating on the movement. We can walk without looking down and drive a car without watching the gas and brake pedals. We know where our feet are going. We can run down stairs with our eyes closed because our bodies can sense the rhythm, but miscalculate the last step and we either hit the floor too soon or step off into dead space. That sensation plays out for Anderson a couple dozen times a day, something akin to negotiating an obstacle course on stilts or with both legs asleep. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a big mindfuck,&amp;quot; he says.  With his new socket fitting snugly, Anderson rests his prosthetic hand on the railing and walks down the hill with awkward strides. He collapses to his knees, a slow-motion fall, but throws an arm across the railing and pulls himself to his feet. He walks down the hill and back up, then does it again.  &amp;quot;Wow. Very impressed. Very,&amp;quot; Richardson says.  &amp;quot;Now I can understand why you&amp;#039;re kind of pissed,&amp;quot; Simpson says. &amp;quot;You have all the potential, but the sockets were falling off.&amp;quot; When the legs stay on, Anderson moves into the rarefied air of normalcy, doing for himself instead of asking others. &amp;quot;I hate creating any extra work for anyone,&amp;quot; he says. He hates being singled out, made special. Anderson, Sunshine, and their friend Timmy are moving into a new condo soon, back home in Rolling Meadows, just outside Chicago, and the place won&amp;#039;t have a single handicap feature. &amp;quot;If I can learn to live my life without those,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;then I&amp;#039;ll be fine.&amp;quot; Simpson beams, like a dad whose kid just beat up the schoolyard bully. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s our whole mission,&amp;quot; he says. The Hanger guys break for lunch. Instead of eating, Anderson and Sunshine sift through the stack of brochures Sunshine picked up at the hotel, gifts for friends at home from his Oklahoma trip. The Cowboy Museum seems the obvious choice, until Anderson sees the brochure for the go-kart track. He&amp;#039;s drawn to speed, and the go-karts top thirty-five miles an hour. Too bad his wheelchair won&amp;#039;t go that fast. The chair used to do about eight miles per hour, until he told a technician that was way too slow, so he boosted it to nearly twelve. That made for a great night in Washington, D. C., last summer, as Anderson raced down empty sidewalks pulling Timmy on a skateboard, checking out all the monuments. But this is real speed, respectable speed, shooting across the slick concrete track and skidding through turns, hands tight on the wheel and neck muscles flexed in hard ropes. The girl at the cash register runs us through the basic requirements, which add up to one rule: If we hurt ourselves, we won&amp;#039;t sue. &amp;quot;Do you all have close-toed shoes?&amp;quot; she asks. Anderson is wearing sneakers, but he says it anyway: &amp;quot;Do I need them?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Everyone does,&amp;quot; she says, not looking up. &amp;quot;Even if I don&amp;#039;t have feet?&amp;quot; She peers over the counter and her face goes blank for a moment. &amp;quot;Oh,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re okay.&amp;quot; Anderson throws her a sweet smile, and now she doesn&amp;#039;t seem to mind the joke. Doing his odd wobble, he walks to the back of the building where the karts are parked. The two guys running the track bring out one of two karts outfitted with hand controls for the gas and brake. Anderson shakes his head. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t use handicapped stuff,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not my thing.&amp;quot; Instead he&amp;#039;ll use his artificial legs to work the gas and brake, and he&amp;#039;ll steer with his good hand.  Anderson and Sunshine smoke me in the first race, but by the second race I&amp;#039;m holding my own, cutting tight turns with the right balance of gas and brake. They battle it out behind me, bumping each other into the low walls. I see Anderson closing in as we pass each other on the hairpin turns, but with the white flag, one lap to go, I&amp;#039;m sure I can hold on. He moves closer, but I still have him by fifty feet. Just a couple more turns. And on the last turn he cuts me off, bumps me out of the way, and zips past for the checkered flag. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got one limb, you guys have four, and I&amp;#039;m in first place,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Gotta love it.&amp;quot; From the go-kart track, we drive the giant red pickup to the Hi-Lo Club, a bar near Hanger that Sunshine spotted that morning. We step into darkness, our eyes adjusting from the noontime sun. Navigating toward the bar poses particular problems for Anderson, unable to see variations in the floor, small rises or drops. He walks with his hand out, teetering a bit, more like a drunk loaded with beer than a thirsty man ordering his first. &amp;quot;Are you in town for the bowling tournament?&amp;quot; the bartender, Michael, asks us. &amp;quot;Bowling?&amp;quot; Sunshine says. &amp;quot;The International Gay Bowling tournament,&amp;quot; Michael says. Sunshine turns to Anderson smirking, his brow screwed up and his voice low. &amp;quot;This is a gay bar?&amp;quot; Anderson scans the room. The only other people in the room are two girls sitting at a corner table near the jukebox. &amp;quot;Dude,&amp;quot; Anderson says, &amp;quot;they must be lesbians.&amp;quot; Anderson finishes his beer, and Michael, who says the bar has a mixed clientele, asks if he&amp;#039;d like something stronger.  &amp;quot;Nah,&amp;quot; Anderson says, but pauses. &amp;quot;On second thought, I&amp;#039;ll do a shot.&amp;quot;  He calls over to the girls. &amp;quot;You want to do a shot with me?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah!&amp;quot; one calls back. They huddle at the end of the bar and lift their glasses. &amp;quot;So,&amp;quot; Anderson says, turning to the girls, &amp;quot;are you guys locals?&amp;quot; The girl with the shot glass nods. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re from around here.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I mean, uh, are you together?&amp;quot; The girls trade glances. They giggle. &amp;quot;Sometimes. It&amp;#039;s complicated.&amp;quot; Anderson loves this, sitting in a sometimes-straight, sometimes-gay bar in Oklahoma, having beers and shots for lunch and chatting up two sometimes-straight, sometimes-gay girls. But he hates it all the same. If I hadn&amp;#039;t already talked to him about moments like this, I&amp;#039;d never guess how uncomfortable this can make him. Plenty of wounded soldiers let their injuries overtake them; their injuries become them. Anderson&amp;#039;s oversized personality pushes past that, obscuring what&amp;#039;s been lost. Still, talking to girls isn&amp;#039;t what it used to be. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like it at all,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I feel like I&amp;#039;m half a person. I can&amp;#039;t get that out of my head. I know it will get better with time, it just hasn&amp;#039;t yet.&amp;quot; Walking starts in the hospital, once the surgeries have ended and the limbs are healed enough to support weight, with simple but impossible tasks: left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, don&amp;#039;t fall over. Amputees like Anderson come to Hanger, the world&amp;#039;s oldest prosthetics company, for high-end tweaking and tips on navigating the real world that can make a day much more bearable. The company&amp;#039;s namesake, James Edward Hanger, joined the Confederate Army in June of 1861, but found himself caught in the middle of a skirmish the day after he enlisted. A cannon-ball slammed into his left leg, which a Union surgeon later amputated above the knee, making the eighteen-year-old college sophomore the first amputee of the Civil War. Unhappy with the wooden peg leg he&amp;#039;d been given, Hanger used oak-barrel staves to whittle his own prosthesis. By the war&amp;#039;s end, he was making legs for Union and Confederate soldiers with articulating knees, ankles, and feet. Business was brisk. Fifty thousand men lost limbs in the war. During World War I, he opened offices in Paris and London, ready for the new war&amp;#039;s new customers. As America became more prosperous and battlefield medicine improved, the tide shifted from the traumatic to the mundane. A man missing a leg in Cambodia or Afghanistan today very likely stepped on a land mine. In America, he&amp;#039;s probably a diabetic. Fueled by unhealthy diets and too little exercise, diabetes now accounts for most amputations, followed closely by other vascular diseases, cancer, and birth defects. Traumatic amputations account for less than 10 percent of American amputees, but they make up in tragedy what they lack in number. Like the guy who stops to help a woman and her baby -- on his birthday -- and gets hit by a car, crushing his legs. Or the guy who climbs inside a giant auger to scrub it down, only someone flips the on switch. Or the guy whose fishing trip goes south when an alligator eats his arm. Or the kid who slips on wet grass and loses his feet under the lawn mower dad is driving. Or the power-line worker who cooks both arms into useless meat.  &amp;quot;Wiping your ass would be hard as hell,&amp;quot; Anderson says. &amp;quot;Well, there&amp;#039;s some tricks to that,&amp;quot; says Chuck Anderson, who specializes in arm prostheses. &amp;quot;Using your heel is one way. You put your foot on the toilet and put toilet paper on your heel. Sit on your heel, then let the paper drop into the toilet.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Life sucks,&amp;quot; Bryan Anderson says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a cruel, cruel world.&amp;quot; He says this with a wry smile. He knows how this joke goes, waking up in the hospital and remembering he&amp;#039;s lost his legs, thinking he&amp;#039;s lost only his legs. Moving his left hand to scratch his face and instead poking himself with a stump. Pondering the mangled mess of a right hand, still there but barely, pieced back together with metal pins that jut through the skin. Staring at the ceiling. Some joke. And yet he figures this was somehow meant to be. If it hadn&amp;#039;t been the bomb, it might have been a bus. Or that alligator. But spending a year in Iraq certainly ups the odds. War has a predictable way of taking limbs, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have kept pace. About 600 have lost an arm or a leg; 150 have lost some combination of both. And four, including Anderson, have the dark distinction of being triple amputees.  Anderson is young and strong, easygoing and hardworking, common traits among the war wounded and excellent traits in a patient. He gives accurate, detailed feedback on pain or shortcomings with his prostheses and has the drive and endurance to stick with his therapy regimens. He tries and falls and tries again. &amp;quot;I would ask my doctors what being in prosthetics was like before the war,&amp;quot; Anderson says. &amp;quot; &amp;#039;Mostly old people,&amp;#039; they said. Now you have all these young kids who are doing all these amazing things with prosthetics, telling them they have to step it up.&amp;quot; Since his injury, Anderson has been wakeboarding, jet-skiing, rock climbing, golfing, and snow skiing. He competed in an archery tournament and rode a bike 110 miles in a couple days using hand cranks. &amp;quot;And I skateboard now,&amp;quot; he says. He shows me a video on his phone from a local skate park. Anderson sits on the board, racing toward a ramp, Sunshine running behind with a hand planted on his back. Sunshine gives a final shove and Anderson shoots onto the ramp, catches a couple feet of air, then tumbles to the side on landing. On the next run, he lands upright. That&amp;#039;s how Anderson operates. Someone suggests something, he says okay and goes, balls to the wall. &amp;quot;The next thing you know, I&amp;#039;m flying through the air,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Bryan doesn&amp;#039;t give a fuck,&amp;quot; Sunshine says. &amp;quot;He does not care. He&amp;#039;ll do anything.&amp;quot; He just needs the limbs to make that possible, and performance lags far behind expectation. Battlefields have always been laboratories for testing and developing new medical techniques, and the war that took Anderson&amp;#039;s limbs is driving the quest for better replacements like never before. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s one of the nice things about the government. Every time there&amp;#039;s a war, they jump in with a lot of money and research that everyone benefits from,&amp;quot; Chuck Anderson says. Funding for prosthetics projects has swelled significantly over the past six years. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is bankrolling one of the most ambitious programs, the $85 million Revolutionizing Prosthetics project to build a prosthetic arm that matches the human arm in functionality by next year. Much of the technology making these new prostheses possible -- even feasible -- comes from advances feeding our appetite for better gadgets. More powerful motors, smaller batteries, and faster processors lead to stronger, lighter, and more agile prostheses. Technology superempowers us, helping us move farther and faster than we could on our own, crunch bigger numbers, reach more people, kill more people. But for amputees, the crazier the technology, the closer they move to normal. Anderson&amp;#039;s future will look more and more like it did the day before he blew up. The fusion of man and machine is upon us, the extraordinary enabling the everyday. Right now Anderson&amp;#039;s everyday looks something like this: He&amp;#039;s cruising through Rolling Meadows, a few hours before leaving for Oklahoma. His prosthetic hand is clamped onto a control just left of the steering wheel of his Chrysler minivan, a gift from the Wounded Heroes Foundation. Push in for the brake, down for the gas. His right hand grips a suicide ball clamped at twelve o&amp;#039;clock on the steering wheel. He could use the pedals, but he&amp;#039;s rolling sans legs today, waiting for the adjustments at Hanger. Anderson drives with a cool indifference to the task and none of the timidity I&amp;#039;d expected. He squirts out into traffic and punches past slow drivers. He cues up a Rise Against album on the iPod, then taps out a text message with his thumb while steering, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He says smoking saved him from being the war&amp;#039;s only quadruple amputee. If he hadn&amp;#039;t been taking a drag from his cigarette, the blast would have sliced off both arms.  When he talks about the explosion, Anderson sometimes says When I got blown up or When I was injured, but more often he says When I had my accident. Not that it was much of an accident. The bomb makers built the device with care, arranging five explosively formed penetrators at different angles, ensuring maximum coverage, then encasing the device in concrete and disguising it as a piece of curb. Had the patrol been driving faster, say forty miles an hour, the truck would have been in the perfect position to kill everyone in the Humvee. Instead the vehicles crawled down the road that morning. The front wheel tripped the infrared trigger and the curb exploded, ripping off the front of the truck and sending enough molten metal into the crew cab to take off Anderson&amp;#039;s legs and arm. The EFP had become the weapon of choice in the section of eastern Baghdad Anderson&amp;#039;s military-police company patrolled. The design is rather simple but obscenely effective: a canister-shaped charge capped with a concave copper disk. The heat and force of the explosion turns the copper into a near-liquid jet that slices holes through inches of armor. The effect on Anderson&amp;#039;s flesh and bone was akin to Darth Vader lopping off Luke&amp;#039;s arm with a light saber. He came home in November 2006, after a year in the hospital, to a huge welcome at the airport and a 150-motorcycle escort by the Patriot Guard. His family rode in a limousine. He rode in a motorcycle sidecar.  After picking up Sunshine, we hit the gas station. A Red Bull for Sunshine, a Pepsi and cigarettes for him. He tosses some coins into a plastic pretzel jug next to the driver&amp;#039;s seat that holds a few months&amp;#039; worth of mini-mart and drive-through change. &amp;quot;For the first year, I didn&amp;#039;t do change, period,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t feel it. I can&amp;#039;t dig it out of my pockets. I was like &amp;#039;Keep the change,&amp;#039; even if it was ninety-five cents. I didn&amp;#039;t want to deal with it. Then I thought, I&amp;#039;m probably wasting a lot of money.&amp;quot;  We hit Sears for a flat-screen TV for the new condo, then swing by the bank. Anderson flings himself from the driver&amp;#039;s seat into the wheelchair, races down the sidewalk, then shoots back up the van&amp;#039;s ramp a few minutes later. Sunshine, sitting on the back bench seat, pulls up his feet just in time. &amp;quot;Watch it, dude.&amp;quot; Sunshine has been whacked in the shins and had his feet run over more than once. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll tell you what,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It doesn&amp;#039;t feel good.&amp;quot; The wheelchair weighs 250 pounds and costs $25,000. Anderson now has three, part of a sponsorship deal with Quantum Rehab, the manufacturer. He travels to events around the country, signs some autographs, and makes suggestions for improvements. Make them more like a car, he told them. Add some convenience. Cup holders, maybe an iPod connection. The company is building a custom chair for him now, with a chrome Superman logo and red and blue lights. &amp;quot;People who are in wheelchairs basically live in them. But there&amp;#039;s no compartments or anything,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I told them the shit needs to start looking cooler. It looks so handicapped, it&amp;#039;s ridiculous. Make it look like it&amp;#039;s a privilege to ride around in an electric wheelchair.&amp;quot;  As jobs go, working with the wheelchair company has been pretty mellow. If he hadn&amp;#039;t been hurt, he&amp;#039;d be back at American Airlines in Chicago, running a ground crew loading luggage and moving planes. Most of his Army buddies are out now, too. Crenshaw guards nuclear weapons. Kenny, his old team leader, works construction. He called Kenny earlier today for his birthday, and talk turned to the Army, which it always will. They both miss the life, mostly for the friendships. They miss their little corner of the barracks, down at the end of the hallway, four rooms, eight buddies, doing everything together, working and drinking and planning their futures. &amp;quot;All of us thought there was so much more we could do with our lives outside the military,&amp;quot; Anderson says. &amp;quot;I knew that as soon as I got out of the military I was going to start running. When this happened to me, my life plan didn&amp;#039;t really change. Just because this happened to me doesn&amp;#039;t mean I don&amp;#039;t have the same goals.&amp;quot; The goal, essentially, is hanging out with his friends. &amp;quot;I plan on being rich,&amp;quot; he says, though he&amp;#039;s not yet sure how. &amp;quot;Publicity. Becoming a celebrity.&amp;quot; Anderson has already achieved a measure of fame, appearing on the cover of this magazine in January 2007 and being interviewed by actor James Gandolfini in the HBO documentary Alive Day Memories. He needs the money to build the compound, a more elaborate version of his corner of the barracks. &amp;quot;I think people who lead good lives deserve good things in return. So all my friends who I believe in, who I think are good-hearted people, I want to go to California and buy forty or fifty acres and build fifteen or twenty houses for them. My house is going to be like a theme park. Motocross, go-kart track, baseball field, party pavilion.  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what I want out of life,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Who gives a shit about anything else? Having friends and family and supporting that, what else is there?&amp;quot; Bill Dunham, a Hanger rep who lost his right leg during the American invasion of Panama, walks toward me in the hallway with powerful strides, each right step accompanied by a cartoonishly robotic-sounding whir. In place of his normal prosthetic leg, the same type Anderson uses, Dunham wears the Power Knee, the world&amp;#039;s first powered prosthetic leg. Instead of just giving resistance, the leg propels the user with mechanized muscles. Using this leg requires much less energy from the user, especially during demanding tasks like climbing stairs or a hill. Sure, it&amp;#039;s a bit of a hassle and still prone to mistakes. Before climbing stairs, Dunham calibrates the leg by walking down the hall, matching the motion of his real leg to the prosthesis, then rocking onto his heel to switch into climbing mode. As he stood in the hallway talking to colleagues not long ago, the knee misinterpreted a weight shift and switched modes, sending Dunham to the floor in a heap. &amp;quot;At least it&amp;#039;s here. We&amp;#039;re just hoping the second generation is quite a bit higher in amputees&amp;#039; expectations,&amp;quot; Dunham says. &amp;quot;You have to tell it what to do, which is not something amputees really want to deal with. I just want to live my life.&amp;quot;  The Power Knee is cool, if clumsy, a promise of better legs to come. But the real blow-your-mind work -- Terminator shit, as Anderson calls it -- is under way not far from his house, at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. In a conference room overlooking Lake Michigan, Jesse Sullivan leans against a stool flexing and curling the fingers of his left hand, absentminded, without concentration. &amp;quot;Most of my adult life, I talked with my hands to tell a joke. I always joke. You cut my hands off, I can&amp;#039;t say a word,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Maybe it&amp;#039;s because I&amp;#039;m hyper, but I like to move.&amp;quot; The sixty-one-year-old former power-company worker from Tennessee touched a live cable in 2001, sending seventy-two hundred volts through his arms. He lost both at the shoulder. He wears an old-school right arm, a system of rubber bands, cables, and basic joints with a metal pincer for a hand. To move the arm, he flexes his back, tightening rubber bands hooked to the limb. With his chin he can press three small levers mounted near his shoulder. Each locks one movement -- shoulder, elbow, and hand. If he locks the shoulder and flexes his back, the energy goes to the elbow and hand. This tedious series of locking, flexing, and unlocking has changed little over the past hundred years. But Sullivan&amp;#039;s left side is straight-up cyborg. A fountain of wires runs from the black-and-silver robotic arm to his chest, and a dozen more snake into three black boxes on his back holding batteries and processors.  He&amp;#039;s on display at the moment, performing for a roomful of prosthetics experts. &amp;quot;Give me a finger pinch,&amp;quot; says Dr. Todd Kuiken, director of RIC&amp;#039;s Neural Engineering Center for Bionic Medicine. Sullivan moves his forefinger and thumb together. &amp;quot;And my favorite,&amp;quot; Sullivan says, &amp;quot;the tool grip.&amp;quot; He closes into a fist, the thumb overlapping the fingers, with the index finger extended. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got a Makita power drill that&amp;#039;s been terribly neglected for a few years,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got things to do.&amp;quot;  He controls the arm just as you control yours -- with thought. Nerves act as the body&amp;#039;s telephone lines, delivering instructions. Cut off the limb and the messages get stuck, mid-transmission, so Kuiken gave them a new destination. A fan of The Six Million Dollar Man as a kid, he has spent much of his adult life developing a means of integrating prostheses into the nervous system. He calls the process targeted-muscle reinnervation. Surgeons sliced open Sullivan&amp;#039;s shoulder and fished out the four pencil-thick nerves that control movement in the arm and hand. They cut Sullivan&amp;#039;s pectoral muscle -- no longer of any use -- into four pieces and planted a nerve in each one. Within five months, the nerves had grown through the muscle. They had come back to life. When Sullivan thinks about making a fist, the brain fires its message through the median nerve and into the pectoral muscle, which acts as an amplifier, jacking up the electric-signal strength from a few millionths to a few thousandths of a volt. Small metal electrodes pressed against Sullivan&amp;#039;s chest send the signal to a processor, which tells the hand to close. Those faint electric signals control the most complex and capable prosthetic arms ever built. The arm Sullivan is wearing for the demonstration was built for the DARPA prosthetics project by DEKA Research and Development, the company started by Dean Kamen, maker of the Segway scooter. With 10 degrees of motion between the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand, the arm can replicate many human motions, meeting DARPA&amp;#039;s mandate to build a commercially viable arm by 2007. For the second prosthesis, to be delivered by 2009, DARPA wanted more durability and dexterity. If the Pentagon wanted to send amputee soldiers back into battle, this would be the warrior&amp;#039;s choice, built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory from hardened steel and aircraft aluminum. &amp;quot;You can punch a brick wall with it and you won&amp;#039;t break it. You will not break it,&amp;quot; says Steve Clark, a mechanical engineer in RIC&amp;#039;s Biomechatronics Development Laboratory who helped design the hand portion of the arm, called Proto 2. The elbow and shoulder can each curl fifty pounds. The hand houses fifteen motors, not much bigger than SweeTarts, and will be able to pinch with twenty pounds of force. The next generation will be dustproof, waterproof up to several feet, and better at dexterous manipulation -- playing a guitar, for example. This level of sophistication presents obvious hurdles -- the arms are overkill without a vehicle to deliver the users&amp;#039; intent. &amp;quot;You can have a fancy, fancy, fancy system, but how do you control it?&amp;quot; says Blair Lock, RIC&amp;#039;s lab manager. &amp;quot;How does the human control the machine? Bridging that gap is the big issue.&amp;quot; The left arm Sullivan uses at home has four electrode sites, which translate signals into four crude actions: elbow up, elbow down, hand open, hand closed. Anderson&amp;#039;s arm works the same way, with electrodes in the socket picking up signals from the remaining arm muscles. His wrist turns left and right. His hand opens and closes. This might be better than using rubber bands and cables, but the body is capable of much, much more. Nerves carry complex, subtle messages; it&amp;#039;s the difference between simply closing your hand and digging a quarter from a pocket full of loose change, car keys, and scraps of paper. The nuance is lost unless the signals can be translated into a useful set of instructions, so Kuiken&amp;#039;s team devised an answering machine to capture these impulses, covering Sullivan&amp;#039;s chest with a dozen electrodes.  This electrical noise then feeds into a pattern-recognition program that decodes the signals, translates them into algorithms, and stores them in a library of movement. Each unique burst of electricity equals a specific motion performed with a specific intensity. &amp;quot;This picks them all up and recognizes the patterns, the same way you might remember someone&amp;#039;s name, remember what their eyes look like, and their nose and their hair,&amp;quot; says Lock, who helped build the program. &amp;quot;I name those features that I recognize, and the computer does the same thing.&amp;quot; With the arm linked to a computer, Sullivan follows a series of twenty-two commands flashed across the screen. Tool grip. Pinch-closed grip. Elbow extension. Wrist pronation. He holds each movement for two seconds, syncing the arm to his brain signals. With the arm calibrated, Sullivan needs only to imagine a movement. The arm&amp;#039;s processor matches the nerve impulses to motions stored in the library, then orders the limb into action. Lock is still refining the interface. Sullivan must imagine the same motion each time, the exact movement of his hand when grasping and turning a doorknob, for example, or the computer can&amp;#039;t decipher the signal and match the movement. And if the electrodes shift on Sullivan&amp;#039;s chest, the signals can become muddled. Because Anderson still has most of the muscles that control his hand, he could sidestep some of these glitches. Down the hall in the biomechatronics lab, Richard Weir is building implantable myoelectric sensors that can be injected into muscles -- albeit with a very large needle -- to record and transmit nerve signals. With a 2mm-by-12mm implant in each of the eighteen muscles that control hand movement, the intensity and duration of the electrical impulses could be captured more accurately, meaning more subtle instructions for the hand. Weir, the lab director, also designed a different method for decoding these signals. Rather than using pattern recognition, he built a virtual arm -- with bone, muscle, tendons, and ligaments -- to re-create human motion. So instead of matching nerve signals to prescribed tasks, the model predicts how the human arm moves based on inputs from the sensors. How will the arm respond when one of the lower-arm muscles fires at 30 percent for three seconds? Now add the other seventeen muscles, firing and relaxing in myriad combinations. This reservoir of possibilities becomes the software that drives the arm and turns intent into action. All of this only solves half the movement problem for amputees. Even with that level of control, Anderson would still crush an egg trying to pick it up. Nerves work as a loop; they send instructions but also retrieve messages about pressure, heat, texture, pain. The lack of sensory capabilities in current prostheses leaves amputees with no feedback on their movements.  An unexpected consequence of Sullivan&amp;#039;s surgery is solving this problem. As his arm nerves grew into his chest muscle after the surgery, Sullivan started feeling his arm. These weren&amp;#039;t phantom pains. He felt his arm, his hand, his fingers. The sensory nerves had grown through the muscle. He can distinguish pressure and heat on specific fingers. After a long day of therapy, he wakes with sore arm muscles -- muscles that don&amp;#039;t exist. In the shower, he feels water running down his arm. The next DARPA arms will have fingertip sensors linked to tactors, small metal buttons, on the patient&amp;#039;s reinnervated patch of skin. Anderson could have his sensory nerves brought to the surface on his upper forearm, giving him renewed sensation in his hand. If he picked up an egg, a tactor would push softly against the skin, telling him how hard he&amp;#039;s squeezing. If he smoked a cigarette too close to the filter, a tactor would warm, relaying the heat. Anderson will benefit most when this technology moves into the legs. If he could feel himself stepping off a curb, feel his heel touch the ground, walking wouldn&amp;#039;t be quite the precarious guessing game it is now. Weir&amp;#039;s implants could give Anderson better control of his thigh muscles, while Kuiken&amp;#039;s nerve surgery would give him the potential to control robotic muscles in his calves and feet. Instead of the limbs making educated guesses, as they do now, Anderson could dictate and refine the motion. At this rate, amputees may someday have limbs like Will Smith&amp;#039;s arm in I, Robot, integrated into the body and covered in synthetic skin, capable of a larger range of motion and quite likely much stronger than a real arm or leg. But for every advance made in prosthetics design or the man-machine interface, huge and possibly insurmountable barriers remain. &amp;quot;Our current prostheses maybe give you, at best, 3 to 5 percent of function return. If we&amp;#039;ve improved that by two or three times, that&amp;#039;s great, you real-ly feel good about it. But that means you&amp;#039;re still at 10 percent of what the arm really can do, so we have to have humility here,&amp;quot; Kuiken says. &amp;quot;The Six Million Dollar Man is still science fiction. That was a superhuman, and right now we&amp;#039;re still just trying to replace a larger fraction of what&amp;#039;s missing.&amp;quot; Which brings us back to proprioception, that mysterious and ridiculously complicated process of motion and sensory feedback that tells us how our bodies move through space. Even slight changes -- never mind losing seventy thousand arm sensors to amputation -- can interrupt or wreck the feedback loop. Cops use this to nab drunk drivers with field sobriety tests. Close your eyes and touch your fingertip to your nose. Your finger just knows where to go. But drink too much and you&amp;#039;re likely to miss your face or jab yourself in the eye. &amp;quot;Proprioception is hugely important for getting true, refined function,&amp;quot; Kuiken says. &amp;quot;And that&amp;#039;s something I cannot provide. That&amp;#039;s a huge limitation to what we&amp;#039;re doing. We have to close the loop with limited information. The skin sensation will help, but there&amp;#039;s a whole lot of the internal feedback loop that we&amp;#039;re missing. Trying to tap into those seventy thousand nerves seems like a near-impossible task to me, where -- although not easy -- I can imagine regrowing a limb.&amp;quot; Starfish and salamanders can do it. Young children can regrow fingertips, and we&amp;#039;re already growing new organs in laboratories. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re only limitations until you figure them out,&amp;quot; Kuiken says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not expecting to see limb regeneration in my lifetime, but I wouldn&amp;#039;t say it&amp;#039;s impossible in my kid&amp;#039;s lifetime.&amp;quot; Anderson fully expects to have some of this craziness attached to him, or growing from him, in years to come. For now, he can have this: a great handshake.  One of the most basic physical interactions between two people, the handshake isn&amp;#039;t a terribly complex movement. The palms press together, muscles contract, the fingers curl, adding pressure, leading to a comfortable, reassuring squeeze, a quick human bond. But Anderson&amp;#039;s hand, like most prostheses today, opens and closes like a pair of pliers, so a handshake feels more like he&amp;#039;s searching for a pressure point in your hand. And that&amp;#039;s really the only move the hand makes. Troy Farnsworth, who is Hanger&amp;#039;s vice-president for upper extremities, sits in a back room of the Oklahoma City office holding a prosthetic arm, the same basic carbon-fiber socket Anderson wears. But attached to the end is something quite different from Anderson&amp;#039;s pincer hand. The off-white fingers, covered in soft, translucent silicone, make the hand look skeletal. Farnsworth extends the hand toward me, and I reach out, skin against rubber. Five motors drive the hand, one for each finger. The processor monitors the power supply, and when it sees a current spike -- the motor stalling because it has encountered resistance -- it channels power to the other fingers. The index finger stops, the others keep going, and one by one the fingers curl, wrapping around my hand. A reassuring squeeze. For now, the hand can only receive relatively simple instructions from the four sensors in the arm: open, close, rotate left, rotate right. But Hanger is working on a band of sensors that will pick up myriad electric signals as the muscles fire, similar to the implantable sensors being developed at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. This could allow for elaborate combinations of movement, like drumming fingers on a tabletop.  As simple as the current movements may be, the sophistication instantly makes Anderson&amp;#039;s current prosthesis primitive. Farnsworth has brought the hand to Oklahoma City to surprise Anderson, who&amp;#039;s sitting in a room down the hall bullshitting with Sunshine, Simpson, and Richards. Fewer than a hundred people around the world have these hands, made by Touch Bionics, which are the most advanced available. Together with a prosthetic arm, they cost about $90,000. But if Anderson wants one, he&amp;#039;ll get one. Lose an arm in a farm accident and you might be screwed. Get it blown off in war and you&amp;#039;ll do okay. The government has been good about giving amputee soldiers whatever they want. In a plastic bin beneath his bed in Rolling Meadows, Anderson has hands for swimming, playing baseball, shooting pool, and driving a motorcycle. But that&amp;#039;s always the problem with prostheses, no hand or leg is right for everything. Trade-offs abound. The fingers and joints on this hand are elaborate and made largely of plastic, making it somewhat delicate, a sacrifice of durability for dexterity. &amp;quot;Would he break something on this? I can almost guarantee it,&amp;quot; Farnsworth says. &amp;quot;They have no sensation in the fingers, so they have no idea how much torque they&amp;#039;re putting on something.&amp;quot; Such is the development process. Elements of high-end research projects -- like giving amputees the ability to sense pressure and heat and cold -- will trickle down into commercially available prostheses, continually improving performance. &amp;quot;This is the beginning,&amp;quot; Farns-worth says. Talking about this excites him, but the gizmos, in their very ability to induce oohs and ahhs, carry their own counterpoint. &amp;quot;All the new technology is cool, but it&amp;#039;s all about the person at the end of the day,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;And no matter how good a job we do, it&amp;#039;s never as good as what they had and lost.&amp;quot; Still, the hand kicks ass. Farnsworth knows this, and he knows the kid-on-Christmas look Anderson will have in about ten seconds. He slips the hand into his pocket, then steps into the therapy room. &amp;quot;The good news is you get to try it,&amp;quot; he tells Anderson. &amp;quot;The bad news is you don&amp;#039;t get to keep it.&amp;quot; Farnsworth pulls out the hand and Anderson&amp;#039;s eyes stretch wide. Gimme. He snaps on the hand and watches, amazed, as the fingers open then curl shut, open then curl shut. The last time he had this much motion in his left hand it was wrapped around the Humvee steering wheel.  Anderson extends the fingers, holds on to the middle finger then makes a fist, curling in the other four. He displays his accomplishment around the room. Farnsworth grins. He&amp;#039;s seen this many times. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s probably the most requested motion,&amp;quot; he says. Anderson plays with the hand, picking up his phone, holding a bottle. He imagines all he could do with the hand. Nothing crazy, just the simple but maddeningly difficult tasks, like holding on to the bottom of his jacket so he can work the zipper with his right hand. Yet as he watches the joints flex, accompanied by the soft whir of the motors, he&amp;#039;s already aware of its fragility. For a guy who often moves around like a gorilla, propelling himself with his fists when he&amp;#039;s not wearing his legs, a fancy hand like this wouldn&amp;#039;t last long. &amp;quot;If I get one of these, I&amp;#039;d need a lot of spare parts,&amp;quot; he says. Anderson pushes himself out of the chair, propping his hands on the chair arms, as he always does. Once he&amp;#039;s up, the thumb won&amp;#039;t move. He scans the room, his face expectant, a kid holding a broken family heirloom. But his eyes also say, I told you so. &amp;quot;Leave it to me to break the new shit,&amp;quot; he says.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m actually surprised it broke that quick,&amp;quot; Farnsworth says, with a scientist&amp;#039;s dispassionate appraisal of a failed experiment. But he seems almost pleased with the outcome. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s how we can fix it, make changes and make it better.&amp;quot; Anderson pops off the hand and passes it to Farnsworth, who heads into the lab and dissects it with a tiny screwdriver, searching for the failure. Anderson snaps his old hand back into the socket. Good enough for now. At lunch that day, as Anderson walks through the doors of the Deep Fork restaurant, the waiter standing at the hostess station slaps his hand down on a stack of menus. &amp;quot;Are you the guy who was on the cover of Esquire?&amp;quot; he shouts. &amp;quot;Holy cow! I&amp;#039;m a big admirer.&amp;quot; The waiter pours our waters and Anderson tells him he&amp;#039;s in town having his legs adjusted. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re walking really well,&amp;quot; he says, and turns toward Simpson and Richardson. &amp;quot;You guys must be good.&amp;quot; He leaves, and Simpson stares at Anderson, a bit stunned. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got goosebumps,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve had many, many people come up to me and say I&amp;#039;ve inspired them,&amp;quot; Anderson says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t see it as that big of a deal. I&amp;#039;m just living my life. I got hurt, I got better, and now I&amp;#039;m just moving on, doing what I want to do.&amp;quot; He pauses for a moment, then smirks. &amp;quot;It makes it easier that I don&amp;#039;t have to go to work every day.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Asshole,&amp;quot; Sunshine says. &amp;quot;I need to stop being so blunt,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Tell it like it is, brother,&amp;quot; Sunshine says. &amp;quot;Tell it like it is.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4257/bryan-anderson-0308/>