Free Spares by Michael Marshall Smith

that way all the time, unless the alarm went off. I let the spares pretty much come and go as they pleased in the facility, distressing though that sometimes was it was never a relaxing experience to look under the table and find a naked man with no eyes or a girl with no legs lying underneath.
    I didn’t make any other changes for a few days, waiting to see if freedom of movement caused any of them distress. It didn’t appear to. The spares Ratchet and I were especially targeting soon seemed to prefer being outside the tunnels, though they usually went back there to sleep. The others reacted in a variety of ways: from occasional accidental excursions into the main facility, to never leaving at all.
    Then I started the classes. I could never have done what I did, or even a fraction of it, without Ratchet. I got through a year of college, but I studied history. I didn’t tangle with child psychology, language acquisition, or any kind of teaching practice. I was starting with kids in their teens, none of whom had received any human interaction in their lives. It ought to have been impossible to overcome that, and I think that had I been on my own it would have been pitifully little, far too late.
    But Ratchet was more than the cleaning drone I’d largely ignored until the night of the overdose. For a start, he did something to the medic droid. It was a company machine, designed and built to do what SafetyNet wanted. Yet at no point in the following five years did it ever show any sign of turning us in, or complain about having to chase the spares all over the compound in order to monitor and feed them.
    Second, and most importantly, it was Ratchet who did the teaching. Sure, I was the one who sat with the spares and hauled them upright, held their heads still so they could see the letters I waved in front of them and hear the words I repeated, over and over, in their ears. And yes, it was me who stood behind them, arms looped up under theirs forcing them to learn how to use their limbs properly. Their muscles were ludicrously underdeveloped, despite all the magic in the medic droid’s food preparations. The day-in, day-out hauling around of the spares was probably the only thing which kept my own body from wilting into oblivion.
    I did these things, and talked to them nonstop, and held them when they were unhappy, though such contact comes far from easily to me. But it was Ratchet who did the real work. He insisted I be the front man, on the grounds that the spares needed human nurturing, and I worked hard years of watchfulness and manufactured warmth. I tried to guess at the things they would need, and as they finally started to hold rudimentary conversations I did what I could to ensure that their intelligence gained some hold, and some independence. But without Ratchet’s apparent understanding of the ways in which a dormant human brain could be hot-wired into life, none of it would have passed step one. He planned the lessons, and I carried them out.
    After a while, the project—because in some ways I suppose that’s what it was—took on its own momentum. I became less dependent on Ratchet’s advice. I let the spares watch television and listen to music. I tried to explain the stuff that Ratchet couldn’t—like how the outside world really worked. But throughout, Ratchet was there every step of the way.
    I often wondered how Ratchet came by his knowledge, and never came to any real conclusion. Except one, which may or may not be relevant. I wondered if Ratchet was broken.
    I didn’t begin to suspect this for a long time—the droid was so capable in so many ways that the ideawould have seemed preposterous. But I began to notice things. Sudden changes of activity, occasional brief periods when he seemed to stall or slip into a quiet neutral. He had some weird theories too, about unifying the conscious and the unconscious, which I never understood. And then there was the coffee.
    Every day I was on the Farm,